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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mueller-team-questioned-viktor-vekselberg

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/...berg-mueller-investigation.html?smid=pl-share

Mueller Team Questioned Russian Oligarch Present At Trump Inauguration


Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team questioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg about two months ago at an airport in the New York area, the New York Times reported on Friday afternoon.

CNN had reported in April that Mueller’s team had questioned at least one Russian oligarch and searched his electronic devices, and the New York Times now names the oligarch confronted by investigators. The Times gave few details about investigators’ encounter with Vekselberg.

Vekselberg is one of the wealthy Russians subject to U.S. sanctions over Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The New York Times reported that there’s no indication Mueller’s team suspects Vekselberg of any wrongdoing, but instead framed the revelation as an indication that Mueller is looking closely at any ties between the Trump campaign and Russian oligarchs. Vekselberg also attended the 2015 RT dinner in Moscow also attended by former National Security adviser Michael Flynn.
 
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-r...himself-when-talking-to-steve-doocy-on-phone/

Trump Reportedly Booked Fox & Friends Interview Himself When Talking to Steve Doocy on Phone


President Donald Trump apparently made the deal to appear on Fox and Friends all by himself and chose what he dubbed “a very, very special day” to have his first television interview in months.

At the start of the freewheeling and far-reaching interview, Trump hinted that he had personally handled the booking, telling the hosts, “Well, good morning, and I picked a very, very special day, because it’s Melania’s birthday, so I said let’s do it on Melania’s birthday. So, happy birthday to Melania.”

Then on Friday, CBS confirmed, via two sources, that it was actually the president himself — not his staff — who got the ball rolling on the booking.

According to the CBS report, “A White House official confirmed that Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy invited the president to appear on his show over the phone and Mr. Trump accepted.”

Trump then handed the booking over to his staff to work the details out.

While Trump has been known to phone his Fox friends, it is not common for a sitting president to work out his own appearances.

Trump’s off-the-script remarks when he called into the morning show also raised eyebrows.

During the untamed Melania birthday interview the president spouted off on a number of issues, including saying this about James Comey:

[He] also leaked the memos, which are classified. Nobody unclassified them. And those memos were about me, and they’re phony memos. He didn’t write those memos accurately. He put a lot of phony stuff. For instance, I went to Russia for a day or so — a day or two because I own the Miss Universe pageant. So, I went there to watch it, because it was near Moscow. So I go to Russia — now, I did go there — everybody knows. The locks are there, the planes are there. He said I didn’t stay there a night. Of course, I stayed there. I stayed there a very short period of time, but, of course, I stayed. Well, his memo said I left immediately. I never said that. I never said I left immediately.

He also sounded off about “this crazy Stormy Daniels deal” and defended Ronny Jackson.

Trump, however, seemed pleased by the chance to vent on Fox and according to Kellyanne Conway said after the interview he booked himself that he’d like to come on Fox and Friends once a month.
 


https://www.mediaite.com/online/ale...gue-a-i-system-that-wants-to-wipe-out-humans/

Alex Jones Declares Trump Is Fighting a Rogue ‘A.I. System’ That Wants to Wipe Out Humans

Infowars host Alex Jones declared during his show on Friday that the only thing standing between a rogue computer program and the destruction of all humanity is President Donald Trump and a handful of non-global elite others, according to a video flagged by Right Wing Watch.

Jones, who is known for his far-right conspiracy theories and wild claims, lamented while speaking to a guest that humans are currently living in an “information apocalypse” where global elites are working hard to “keep you in-the-moment confused.”

“We’ve got the enemy battle map,” he then announced, voice raised and hands waving.

The Infowars host then blurted out this, seemingly out of the blue: “This is already an A.I. system that made the decision to have a post-human world and Trump has jumped in with others and are saying, ‘No, we’re not doing it,’ at the elite level.”

His guest then agreed that “none of this happens in a vacuum,” before the two moved on to talk of false flags and the Vegas attack.

“And they don’t want us to question the next false flag,” Jones claimed, provided no further details of the humanity-destroying computer program hell-bent on human destruction.

eLNfkb4.gif
 
sp basically....you can do what the hell you want as long as you have connections with a high ranking political figure?

hmmm

i now see why jprince aint ever get touched
 
https://www.mediaite.com/online/fbi...-and-lisa-page-reportedly-leaving-the-bureau/

FBI Officials James Baker and Lisa Page Reportedly Leaving the Bureau


Two senior officials at the FBI reportedly resigned earlier Friday.

According to The New York Times, the two officials leaving are James Baker––who was the FBI general counsel until last December––and Lisa Page. Both of them worked closely with James Comey when he was director.

Page you may recognize as the FBI official who infamously exchanged text messages with Peter Strzok that came under scrutiny after some anti-Trump ones were uncovered months ago.

Baker, meanwhile, came under scrutiny for potentially “sharing classified information with reporters.”

The Times says they’re both leaving for unrelated reasons:

Mr. Baker said in a telephone interview that he would be joining the Brookings Institution to write for Lawfare, its blog focused on national security law.

“I love the F.B.I.,” he said. “I have tremendous respect for the bureau — the F.B.I. was great, is great and will be great.”
 
https://www.mediaite.com/online/tru...giuliani-and-hannity-over-that-big-interview/

Trump Reportedly Unhappy with Both Giuliani and Hannity Over That Big Interview

One of the little details contained in tonight’s big New York Times report about President Trump‘s knowledge of the Stormy Daniels payment is the revelation of what POTUS thought about Rudy Giuliani‘s interview.

Giuliani’s disclosure about Michael Cohen‘s now-infamous $130,000 set off a firestorm, and Giuliani has had to clarify his remarks more than once since then.

But per the Times, even though the President hasn’t been that publicly critical of Giuliani––save for a cursory “he’ll get his facts straight” comment––he was actually not happy with how the interview went.

And apparently that includes Sean Hannity:

While some White House officials had insisted that Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Giuliani’s performance on Fox News in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, two people close to the president painted a different picture. They said that Mr. Trump was displeased with how Mr. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, conducted himself, and that he was also unhappy with Mr. Hannity, a commentator whose advice the president often seeks, in terms of the language he used to describe the payments to Ms. Clifford.

Damn.. I bet Sean Klannity is somewhere curled up in the fetal position crying.. at the thought that his dear leader Trump is mad him...
 
Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran

Mark Townsend and Julian Borger in Washington
Published:21:00 Sat 5 May 2018

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.

Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”

A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”

Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.

However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.

On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.

It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Iran never develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...am-hired-spy-firm-dirty-ops-iran-nuclear-deal
 
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