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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDid Hur and GOP Collude -- CONSPIRE -- to smear President Biden?
Like taking a page out of The Josef Göbbels Propaganda Playbook, invoking the most painful memories during interrogation, special Counsel Hur then went way out of his official way to smear the President.
Now, the likes of Congresswoman Claudia Tunney (R-NY) are using the report to call for AG Merrick Garland to apply the 25th Amendment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/gop-lawmaker-asks-merrick-garland-invoke-25th-amendment-remove-biden-o-rcna138112
Asking for a friend not named Stefanik.
barbaraann
(9,163 posts)There's been a vast right-wing conspiracy at least since Gobeckli Tepe.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)The Kings and the Subjects.
The Haves and the Have-Nots.
The Wolf and the Sheep and May God protect the Good Shepherd.
RockRaven
(15,013 posts)Walleye
(31,062 posts)One of the things that is interesting about reading conspiracy theory is that much of what folks think is conspiracy is really many people acting in concert to make or protect their money. Catherine Austin Fitts
Walleye
(31,062 posts)And leaned on him with threats and promises to throw in as much as he could to smear the President. Based on past behavior I dont see any reason to believe that this isnt true. Remember this guy was first chosen by Jeff sessions I think
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)The rat bastard shoved the Supreme Court rightward and gave Florida to Bush in 2000. IMFO, Rehnquist also started the roll back of Civil Rights and as much progressive legislation as he could. His black heart lives on through the Federalist Society.
Irish_Dem
(47,453 posts)It will probably get worse.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)We have at least one sheriff in Michigan who thinks he's Jefferson Davis Jr. Like the Natural Guard, Sheriff Dar Leaf and the boys get together in the woods with their guns for who knows what. It's not loony bin material. They practice civil war, really their next insurrection.
Irish_Dem
(47,453 posts)Yet it is not enough for them. They want to tear apart the country.
To act out their hatred and violence.
Foolish foolish little boys.
budkin
(6,717 posts)He obviously gave direction.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)Last edited Sun Feb 11, 2024, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)
Ripping up the border deal, now in its fourth election, should have cost the GOP all its credibility.
If we had a free and fair press, that also would be made plain for the American people: TSF's actions only hurt We the People.
Fiendish Thingy
(15,659 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)Plus it's CIA-approved, one might say.
lapfog_1
(29,226 posts)He knew what was expected of him.
He couldn't very well publish a report saying "nothing criminal happened, no charges to file" ( the totality of his report from a functional standpoint ). If he wants to advance in the future MAGA dictatorship DOJ... he HAD to add the snark and bullshit about Biden's ability to remember details from things that happened 7 years ago. Never mind that anyone testifying in a deposition is told "if you can't remember the exact date or who all was in the room" say you can't remember. Any halfway competent lawyer tells his or her client to say that. Because a perjury charge is quite often more serious then whatever the crime is the prosecutor is investigating.
And the media failed to report that in the MANY trump depositions, he is said to have either stated "I don't recall" MORE TIMES than Biden or the hundreds of times Trump has invoked his 5th amendment rights... something Biden is not reported to have done at all. Shit, Trump is on record as looking at a photograph of himself with a woman and another couple and identifying the woman as his wife, when she was actually
E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually assaulted and later claimed to have never met her.
I was in a group meeting at my job...as a new member of the team... this was last Thursday... there were maybe 12 people on the video call. I can tell you that I can remember the names of exactly 3 of them. It might have been 12... it might have been 14. A year from now I would not be able to recall the exact date or time... and I will know all of them better but I still won't be able to say who was on the call with me.
Does that make me a elderly person who is losing my mind? Nope.
OTOH, when I was 17, I played 8 simultaneous games of chess blindfolded at an exhibition. I was both a bit of a chess prodigy and my memory was near perfect, I could mentally visualize each chess board. Couldn't possibly do anything like that today. My TV show hero was Laurence Luckinbill in The Delphi Bureau for obvious reasons. Think MacGyver with a photographic memory.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)However, Hur took advantage of his official position. Here's how Robert Reich put it:
Biden's brain, Trump's brain and this week's bombshell
EXCERPT...
But Hur also suggested that one reason Biden could not be prosecuted was because of his memory lapses thereby underscoring one of the biggest issues that the public is concerned about in reelecting Biden: His aging brain.
SNIP...
Yet let me point out five things:
1. Special counsel Hur has no professional background or experience diagnosing age-related memory loss. In fact, he has no medical background at all. His conclusion that Biden has a poor memory is entirely subjective, based on Hurs own guess about how a jury would respond to Biden.
SNIP...
4. Hur is a former Trump Justice Department official. I dont know about you, but I cant help wonder why Hur thought it useful to predict that a jury would likely find Biden to be an elderly man with a poor memory unless, perhaps, Hur thought it politically useful. Could it possibly be that Hur whom Trump appointed to the Justice Department, who was a top adviser to Trumps then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and whom Trump then nominated to be U.S. attorney for Maryland might have known he would set off a political bombshell? How could he not have known?
5. Clearly, the reason Biden should not be indicted for stealing government documents is that he had no intention of doing so. In sharp contrast to Trump who refused to turn over documents that had been subpoenaed and undertook other efforts to thwart investigators Biden did not willfully retain papers; he cooperated with investigators the moment the documents were found.
SOURCE: https://www.alternet.org/bidens-brain/
For the fascists out there, "Politically Useful" means rallying around one idiot. Thus, Hur carried water for his Herr Drumpf, and it was all legal-like.
moondust
(20,006 posts)for a promotion should they manage to steal it in November?
Ask Stefanik.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)Coach Fraud held sway over Pentagon personnel for almost a year. The Marine general running the corps had to work literally 16-hour days for 10 months before suffering a heart attack. And even then, Tuberville did all he could to keep the services from operating normally. IMFO, he was hoping to have a pee-resident SF2 deciding who and what gets ahead at the Pentagon.
Can you imagine Gen. Flynn running national defense? It's as frightening as Hur running Justice. Stefanik as VP is frightening for the USA, but more so for SF. She's reeeeeally ambitious.
republianmushroom
(13,704 posts)Washington Post: FBI slowed investigation into Trumps role in January 6 for fear of appearing political
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/politics/fbi-doj-trump-investigation-january-6/index.html
A.G. Merrick Garland Resisted Investigating Trumps Connection to January 6: Washington Post
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/garland-doj-resisted-investigating-trump-january-6
'Washington Post' journalist on FBI's delayed investigation of Trump's role in Jan. 6
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/19/1183098037/washington-post-journalist-on-fbis-delayed-investigation-of-trumps-role-in-jan-6
The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/fbi-trump-mar-a-lago-raid-prosecution/673251/
Inside the Mar-a-Lago Raid: Prosecutors and FBI Feuded Over Trump Search, According to Washington Post Deep-Dive
https://www.mediaite.com/print/inside-the-mar-a-lago-raid-prosecutors-and-fbi-feuded-over-trump-search-according-to-washington-post-deep-dive/
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)Over cautiously super non-partisan forgive and forget should have no place at DoJ when fighting fascists. And yet crimes of the national security state are, em, overlooked.
So, for whom do these secret agencies work? AG Garland may want to ask Oleg Deripaska:
The Specter of 2016:
McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America
Timothy Snyder
January 26, 2023
SNIP...
On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigals 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trumps historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.
Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trumps behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscows goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.
For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying.
The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations. (If you find that you do not remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to vulnerabilities.) The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions. This is what I was working on in 2016, when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.
SOURCE:
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016
In addition to knowing who to bribe and program, the KGB is really good at the dividing and conquering side of their craft.
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)Thanks!
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)Response to republianmushroom (Reply #13)
B.See This message was self-deleted by its author.
UTUSN
(70,744 posts)* Yes, HUR is a wingnut, yet with his minimal amount of caution, self-preservation, yes-even CONVICTION as not to attempt to trump up indefensible charges.
* How about, that GARLAND knew NO/ZERO charges would result *BUT* that if he didn't appoint a Special Council it would nuclear-fuel the Wingnuts to allege "cover-up, rigged, political weaponizing, etc." So he pro forma named a SC, and as further vaccine picked a Wingnut.
* So the Wingnut SC could not justify bringing charges.
The wingnuts would never be satisfied without THEIR very real political-weaponization-retribution, but have it harder to put forward since one of their own (tools) made the official decision not to do so. It doesn't seem necessary for there to be overt collusion, as posters have said, since his own wingnut-DNA determined what to do, or even - GASP - from wingnut-CONVICTION. If the effect is smearing, yes on one level.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)So, when the law isn't on their side?
Argue the facts.
When the facts aren't on their side?
Argue the law.
When neither the facts or the law on their side?
Pound the table and send in the disinformationists.
That is professional-grade spycraft.
==============================
Who is Putin's best friend in the world?
Robert Reich
February 12, 2024
The mainstream media doesnt seem to want to talk about this, but its important that America and the world face what seems increasingly clear: Vladimir Putins best friend in the world the person prepared to allow Putin to mount additional wars of aggression in Europe is the leading Republican contender for president of the United States, Donald Trump.
SNIP...
Trump is also promising that if reelected president, hell resolve Putins war against Ukraine within 24 hours. Putin says he cannot help but feel happy about Trumps promise. Of course Putin is happy. Trump has indicated hed trade away Ukrainian territory,
Trump, in turn, is pleased by Putins happy response. I got along with Putin. Let me tell you, I got along with him really well, Trump said. And thats a good thing, not a bad thing.
Its a love affair made in hell: a vicious Russian dictator who detests democracy and a would-be American dictator who detests democracy. And the logic is inescapable: Putin rules Trump, and Trump rules the Republican Party; hence, Putin rules the Republican Party.
CONTINUES...
https://www.alternet.org/who-is-putin-s-best-friend-in-the-world/
UTUSN
(70,744 posts)What I'm reacting to is the ripping of GARLAND, whose decisions (appointing SC, appointing wingnut, releasing Report) I see as at least a possibility of vaccinating against probable wingnut propaganda reactions if NONE of those activities were taken. It won't stop them anyway but he went through some steps. And he's getting it from *our* side.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)Answering for myself.
Kid Berwyn
(14,971 posts)Sorry for the sports metaphor. But, when the game changed to democracy vs. fascism, the old rules no longer applied. While Garland may be an honest, fair and neutral arbiter, Hur called out President Biden on strikes before he got to the plate. We need an umpire best suited to today's no-holds-barred game.
A light at Kos sums up the competition:
=========
Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe exposes Hur
notkaysanymore
Kos.com, February 11, 2024
Excerpt...
What McCabe said last year:
* Hur was part of the Trump DOJ leadership team.
* Hur was Rod Rosensteins point man for the Mueller investigation and as such he and Rosenstein presumably very carefully and quietly curtailed the investigation. He was involved in keeping the investigation in a lane.
* There was a lot of questionable or uncomfortable bleed over between White House politics and DOJ operations.
SNIP...
McCabes current points about the Hur investigation:
SNIP...
* The conclusions Hur draws were not related to the facts contained in the report.
* The real reason Biden wasnt indicted isnt because he is old and cute but because of the lack evidence and also that Biden would likely have successful defenses.
* The appointment of Hur seems like a misstep by Merrick Garland. If Garland wanted to seem non-partisan he should have chosen a Republican who didnt serve in the Trump administration.
Source: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/2/11/2222891/-Former-Acting-FBI-Director-Andrew-McCabe-exposes-Hur?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Beausoleil
(2,845 posts)It was a mistake to appoint one.
By now we know what they are going to do.
Anyone who is a Trump appointee is a loyalist by definition. There are others, who when identified, should be regarded as such. Lindsey Graham comes to mind. And Rubio.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)important cases and his obvious inaction.
AllaN01Bear
(18,443 posts)edbermac
(15,947 posts)As soon as they announced a Trump stoolie was appointed, you just knew it was going to be a hit job
awesomerwb1
(4,268 posts)A major f-up by G**land whom I'm not a big fan of.
gab13by13
(21,408 posts)a Trump nominee, to investigate Hunter Biden.
Hur- Weiss are GQP. Garland had to have an idea when he brought in 2 freezing rattlesnakes and warmed them up that they were going to bite him, it's what rattlesnakes do.
If Garland had appointed a special counsel to investigate Pence I might have a different opinion of him.
It was Biden's lawyers who found the documents and turned them back in. When the FBI investigated Pence's home it found another classified document that Pence neglected to turn in. Did Garland give Pence the benefit of the doubt that Pence wasn't aware he had another classified document, but not give Biden the benefit of the doubt for his turning in all of his documents.
What bugs the hell out of me, if what I read is true, that one of the documents found in Joe's garage was the route the Secret Service was going to take to take Joe to his son's funeral.