Bezos, the National Enquirer, the Saudis, Trump, and the blackmailing of U.S. democracy

[muriel_volestrangler]

What the public didn’t know in the early months of Trump’s presidency was that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly met in Trump Tower in early August 2016 with a longtime emissary for the Saudis and its closest ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), George Nader, and two figures from the world of intelligence: Erik Prince, founder of the notorious firm known as Blackwater, and an ex-Israeli intelligence agent named Joel Zamel.
...
In December, a Saudi dissident who lives in Canada and was close friends with the murdered Khashoggi filed a lawsuit alleging that an Israeli software company called the NSO Group — which according to reports sold its spyware program called Pegasus to Saudi Arabia for $55 million — had used its technology to hack into his smartphone and his communications with Khashoggi. Other dissidents have made similar allegations — that the Saudis have used phone hacking to spy on them. (Meanwhile, the Saudis’s close friends in UAE have allegedly used a different program called Karma to spy on the iPhones of dissidents.)
...
One thing that’s become increasingly clear since the summer of 2016 is how unprepared we were for a world in which our beloved devices like our iPhones or our laptops have become tools to control us — whether it’s the manipulation of fake news and dark ads on Facebook that helped Trump get elected, or the growing ability of both governments and big corporations to invade our privacy and spy on our activities. We know that what we’re experiencing now is not true democracy. And with the Bezos and Khashoggi revelations, it’s totally fair to ask: Are we increasingly ruled by blackmail and extortion?

It would certainly explain a lot of things. For example, is Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller getting $15,000 a month from the Republican National Committee for his do-little-or-do-nothing job, or because he knows too many secrets? What are we to make of the fact that Michael Cohen and Roger Stone knew all about a hidden sex-abuse scandal involving then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — and that the New York AG’s office didn’t investigate the Trump Foundation until after Schneiderman was forced out? Why do so many GOP senators who once brutally criticized Trump now support him?

https://www.philly.com/opinion/commentary/jeff-bezos-national-enquirer-donald-trump-blackmail-saudi-arabia-20190210.html

[empedocles]

1. I hope the anti trumps have formal systems to gather, index, and share all this incriminating

data. Anybody know of such works?