Too funny.
Politico reports here.
Before His Killing, Tech Executive Bob Lee Led an Underground Life of Sex and Drugs:
Mr.
Lee remained close to his wife, Krista Lee, even though they were
separated. He recently moved to Miami with his father, a widower, but
regularly returned to San Francisco to visit his two teenage children,
Dagny and Scout, named after characters in “Atlas Shrugged” and “To Kill
A Mockingbird.” The family had planned a trip together to Japan in
August.
In the 1990s, she taught Russian history at Vassar. According to an online profile, she went on to work as an "independent contractor doing research and translation projects on topics in Russian science and technology," dates unknown. There is not much more public information about her career until she pops up in 2010 as a CIA analyst in an Expert Working Group (including her DOJ husband and future Fusion boss Simpson) on international organized crime; then, finally, in 2016, at the center of the Fusion GPS/DOJ/FBI anti-Trump web.
All part of The Red Thread.
See here for the EWG.
See here for Nellie Ohr's self-identified employer, Open Source Works, an in-house CIA operation:
Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.
Expert Working Group Report, 2010 |
Nellie Ohr is an ex-CIA contractor.
She wrote her first
Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as
a supposed former “spy” and "Russian insider" on the dossier.
"This
report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by
[Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research
on Trump,” the Durham Report states, "and prior to Steele being retained
by Fusion GPS."
Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.
In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr, an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian — 12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was circular reporting. ...
In other words, Steele was not the catalyst behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton's contractor Fusion GPS -- but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating "Crown reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his dossier.
The Durham report shows that the FBI had the dossier reports in July 2016, two months before the time in September insisted upon by the FBI.
The Ohrs are ground zero for the Trump-Russia-collusion disinformation operation.
More.
ABC News, here.
Previously the whistleblower has alleged that the investigation of Hunter Biden is being mishandled.
Why anyone remains indignant about this, like Goodwin, is beyond me.
A presidential campaign in the US is normally a war, between the two parties. Turning it into a multi-front war, however, as Trump did, was pure hubris on his part.
His catastrophic record of appointments simply amplifies the point.
Trump didn't bring with him into government his own army, let alone get the loyalty of the GOP army he had attacked relentlessly for 18 months. NeverTrump didn't materialize out of thin air. Getting anything accomplished in Washington with your side on your side is hard enough. Trump didn't have even that.
Trump narrowly won the battle of 2016, but utterly lost the war, because he was unprepared.
Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.
His name is Warren Hern. His conscience used to bother him in the early days, but he got over it.
Christianity, he told me, not for the first time, “is now the face of fascism in America.” ... Hern sent me a copy of his poetry collection and his new book on global ecology. In the latter, titled Homo Ecophagus, he compares mankind to a cancer on the planet, writing that our unrelenting population growth will ultimately lead to the demise of every species on Earth.
The story is here:
Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other circumstances. Many of the clinic’s teenage patients receive later abortions because they had no idea they were pregnant. Some sexual-assault victims ignore their pregnancies or feel too ashamed to see a doctor. Once, a staffer named Catherine told me, a patient opted for a later abortion because her husband had killed himself and she was suddenly broke. “There isn’t a single woman who has ever written on her bucket list that she wants to have a late abortion,” Catherine said. “There is always a reason.”
It wasn't against Trump early on. It was to determine whether or not
there was Russian interference with the presidential campaign. He slips
into this too conveniently. "It was against Trump." Early on it was just
about hey, have the Russians colluded or intervened in this campaign?
And as you accurately pointed out they did. There are two dozen Russians
charged with indictments under the Mueller inquiry, six of them at
least were card-carrying Russian intelligence officers from the GRU. You
can't say there was no collusion found here.
Here.
Frank slips from interference to collusion too conveniently.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Politics is legal in America. That's precisely the problem. Only the communists have figured out the solution: staff the institutions with your own cadres.
A nation of laws is powerless against them.
From the story, here:
Durham goes further in his criticism, however, arguing that the FBI rushed to investigate Trump in a case known as Crossfire Hurricane, even as it proceeded cautiously on allegations related to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In particular, the report notes that while the FBI warned Clinton’s team when agents learned of possible evidence by a foreign actor to garner influence with her, agents did not give a similar defensive briefing to the Trump campaign before quickly launching an investigation.
The FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case was “seriously deficient,” Durham wrote, causing the agency “severe reputational harm.” That failure could have been prevented if FBI employees hadn’t embraced “seriously flawed information” and instead followed their “own principles regarding objectivity and integrity,” the report said.
As examples of confirmation bias by the FBI, Durham cites: the FBI decision to go forward with the probe despite “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was predicated”; agents ignoring information that exonerated key suspects in the case; and the FBI being unable to corroborate “a single substantive allegation” in a dossier of Trump allegations compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele.
“From a historical standpoint, we’ve never seen a presidential family receive these sums of money from adversaries around the world,” said House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican.
The web of Biden family LLCs was uncovered by scouring four Biden family bank accounts. The companies were used in what investigators say was a complex money laundering scheme that filtered money from foreign companies, through Biden LLCs and eventually into the bank accounts of nine Biden family members, including one of the president’s grandchildren.
Republicans said a web of foreign transactions generated 170 suspicious activity reports by the banks where Biden family members and business associates deposited money.
The findings also contradict statements from the president, who said his family did not receive any money from China.
“That was a lie,” Mr. Comer said. “And he continues to lie to the American people now. The Bidens have received millions of dollars from China. It is inconceivable that the president did not know it.” ...
The FBI told the panel Wednesday that it would not comply after Mr. Comer asked FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to turn over a Biden-related whistleblower complaint by noon. The complaint says Mr. Biden took bribes from a foreign national while serving as vice president. The whistleblower is credible, Republicans said.
More.
'Hoffman's money has made some waves in the Carroll case because, in her October 2022 deposition, Carroll denied that anyone was paying her legal fees. Here is what Carroll said:
Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?
A: This is a contingency case.
Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date. Is that correct?
A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
Q: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
A: No.
'As the trial approached, Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, wrote to the Trump legal team to admit that what Carroll said was not true. ...
'In addition, advocates for the Adult Survivors Act wanted to address the tremendous suffering that victims of sexual abuse experience. The lawsuit says Carroll endured "significant pain and suffering" and uses some form of the word "suffer" 11 times. Yet in a June 24, 2019 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, part of the book promotion, Carroll declined to refer to what happened to her as a "rape" and offered this statement: "I just have trouble with the word. I just have trouble. I write an advice column for 25 years and women write to me with these devastating stories and they have been violently, you know, disposed of by men. And I just — I feel too much respect for their suffering. I didn't suffer, Anderson. I did not suffer. I did not lose my job. I wasn't beaten."'