Month: November 2017

Sometimes, you see or hear a person say something so dense that it seems like it could suck all the sentience in the universe into its black hole of stupidity. This is one of those times.

The irony of an ABC reporter (whose parent company Disney has profited nearly half a billion dollars on the movie “Pocahontas”) inferring that the name is “offensive” is truly staggering to me.

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 28, 2017

In Eric Trump’s universe, stupid and evil play the same role as matter and anti-matter in ours. We need to find the portal that allows this kind of nonsense to seep into our world, and we need to destroy that portal. Perhaps it is located in a darkened Trump Tower closet where the only sound is the hum of a repurposed hotel spam server.

Surely, multitudes will explain all the ways in which Eric Trump’s tweet misses the mark, but I consider that job beneath me. I obviously don’t assume that no one needs to be edified on these points, but there’s a certain minimal level of honest thought I require before I’ll deign to try to communicate with someone or change them in their opinion.

And I’m not really kidding about this. This kind of discourse is absolutely akin to an alien invasion. At some point, we can’t treat it as anything we can respond to or rebut. It’s too inane and morally vacuous for that. We must resolve to defeat the things that empower this kind of talk, and that means all hands at their stations, each doing their part.

We can’t wrestle with this pig. We have to take it down to the studs.

The media isn’t diverse – and this leads to appalling reporting | The Guardian |

The well-deserved outcry regarding the New York Times’ insufficiently critical profile [NYT] about a Nazi in the American heartland has exposed a commonly held myth about journalism: that our profession is objective. This is a lie.

When a reporter at the American “paper of record” can admit [NYT] that his story didn’t hold up and their editor chose to assign significant resources towards it and published it anyway, journalism is clearly not based on meritocracy or neutrality.

Rather, with journalism jobs going to white people 87% of the time in the US and a staggering 94% in Britain, journalism is practically a white-people-only club that will reward mediocre white journalists before it will advance excellent journalists of color who can bring needed perspectives.

Our racially monolithic mainstream press is particularly ill equipped to cover an increasingly non-white world when it declares itself to be “objective”. Like other parts of the society, journalism operates within an ideology which Bell Hooks Institute describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

Through different means, Breitbart and the New York Times can both reinforce this ideology when they write about Nazis. But all liberal media outlets (it’s not just the Times) are more dangerous in doing this work, because they refuse to wrestle with their own subjectivity.

[About the author: Steven William Thrasher, a contributing editor at BuzzFeed, is the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Journalist of the Year. Steven spent three years as a staff writer for the Village Voice, where he wrote long format features and investigative articles, including 20 cover stories. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Out, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, the Advocate, and Time Out New York.]  

Continued below the fold …

○ Calling Putin Anti-Semitic Is Pure BS

“The Schneerson Collection belongs to Russia,” Putin says | Reuters | Feb. 19, 2013 |

Dispute over the Jewish books and documents claimed by the Chabad-Lubavitch group adds to tensions between Moscow and Washington, which have seen ties deteriorate over human rights and security issues since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May.

“The Schneerson Collection belongs to Russia,” Putin said in a grand new Jewish museum in Moscow, in referring to texts held in Russian libraries and archives, some of them confiscated by the Soviet Union from Nazi forces during World War Two.

Chief Rabbis Yosef, Lau to meet Putin in Moscow

An excellent read in The Atlantic which I hope to cover later …

○ The Making of an American Nazi

An extraordinary journey across the globe by Andrew Anglin from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist.

On this journey reporter Luke O’Brien is himself targeted …

 « click for more info
After a year of terror, the Jews of Whitefish, Montana, look ahead (Photo credit: JTA)

Key words: Whitefish Montana – Jewish community Gersh – Richard Spencer – psychopath trolls – sex with under-age girls in Philippines – village of Duterte – Krasnodar Krai – Cossacks Nationalists – Ukraine and Weev – Alt-right useful idiots – death of Peter Smit

Back in October, Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale made an appearance on 60 Minutes where he gave his version of the events that led up to Trump’s shocking election night victory. In this first excerpt, he takes responsibility for moving late resources into Wisconsin and Michigan.

LESLEY STAHL: When did you realize he was gonna win?

BRAD PARSCALE: When I really knew?

LESLEY STAHL: Yeah?

BRAD PARSCALE: The Wednesday before. I knew the Republican Party was outperforming anything in history.

BRAD PARSCALE: I started–

LESLEY STAHL: Did they say you were crazy?

BRAD PARSCALE: It was stronger in Michigan. But I was, like, “We can go in and get this,” and I changed all the budgets around.

STUDIO/LESLEY STAHL: He says that he was the one who decided to take resources away from Virginia, which he realized they were losing, and Ohio, they realized they had in the pocket, and put the money and the resources up into Michigan and Wisconsin– which everybody thinks made the difference in the campaign.

BRAD PARSCALE: I took every nickel and dime I could out of anywhere else. And I moved it to Michigan and Wisconsin. And I started buying advertising, digital, TV.

In July, McClatchy reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon wrote a piece called Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation. The article focused on both Mueller’s probe and the various congressional investigations, but only the Congress members were willing to talk on the record. Senator Mark Warner is the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee and probably the most knowledgable Democrat in Congress about facts that have been uncovered but not publicly disclosed. At that time, he had this to say about the Russians’ late advertising campaign:

“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner told Pod Save America recently. “Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware (of) really raises some questions … How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

The Russians appear to have targeted women and African-Americans in two of the three decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan, “where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play,” Warner said.

Twitter’s and Facebook’s search engines in those states were overwhelmed, he said, meaning they couldn’t discern fake news from real news.

“On your news feed, you suddenly got … ‘Hillary Clinton’s sick’ or ‘Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department,’” said Warner.

According to Parscale, he tried to tell people, including the news networks, that Trump was closing strong and would win, but no one would take him seriously. Even Trump didn’t take him seriously, but he did agree to change his schedule and make late visits to Michigan and Wisconsin.

Now, if look at Brad Parscale’s Wikipedia page, you’ll see that he didn’t have much support in the primaries:

In terms of digital advertising, Parscale utilized Facebook heavily for the campaign advertisements & staffed Facebook employees to help them navigate the Facebook platform to utilize all of the platform’s capabilities. Parscale did not have data scientists or any digital team during the Republican Primary and did much of the social media advertising from his home. He would also stage competitions between tech companies to drive the lowest cost of buying on Facebook (programmatic) as well as other platforms.

If this is true, and I have no real reason to doubt it, Parscale had no data scientists during the primary. On the other hand, Ted Cruz was armed to the teeth with data scientists, including from a firm called Cambridge Analytica.

Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the ­burgeoning practice of “psycho­graphic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits.

Here are a couple of notable examples of how Cruz’s team was operating in late 2015.

Another emerging tactic that the campaign has employed is “geo-fencing,” a technique that allows people to send messages to digital devices in narrow areas, such as a city block or a single building.

When the Republican Jewish Coalition was meeting at the Venetian in Las Vegas in May, for instance, the Cruz campaign unleashed a series of Web-based advertisements visible only inside the hotel complex that emphasized Cruz’s devotion to Israel and its security.

Cruz has also applied ­geo-fencing to wooing National Rifle Association members at a recent annual meeting and to similar gatherings elsewhere.

More typical was the utilization of personality and political scores (psychometrics). In September 2016, Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, gave a presentation at the Concordia Summit in the Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan where he explained that his firm had been “able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.”

The strategy that had been used effectively for Cruz was put to use for Trump after he hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016. Here’s how that looked:

“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us.

How do you approach a conservative voter? That depends on their psychological profile:

Nix shows how psychographically categorized voters can be differently addressed, based on the example of gun rights, the 2nd Amendment: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience the threat of a burglary—and the insurance policy of a gun.” An image on the left shows the hand of an intruder smashing a window. The right side shows a man and a child standing in a field at sunset, both holding guns, clearly shooting ducks: “Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience. People who care about tradition, and habits, and family.”

And how do you dissuade a potential Clinton voter?

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

So, all this was going on in the late stages of the campaign, but you don’t see much evidence of it in Brad Parscale’s retelling on 60 Minutes. More importantly, though, what we now know is that Russians were buying highly targeted Facebook and other social media ads in specific precincts and aimed as specific profiles of voters in Michigan and Wisconsin.  Some people have noted that the absolute expenditures were not high, but that’s part of the service Facebook provides. You can save a lot of advertising money by narrowing down your target audience.

So, here’s the point where I revisit my post A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight. Putin propagandist and notorious Moscow digital pimp Konstantin Rykov claimed in a pair of Facebook posts dated November 12th and November 16th, that he had colluded with Trump and Cambridge Analytica, and that their collusion had been decisive in winning the election.

What was our [i.e., the Russians’] idea with Donald Trump?

For four years and two days .. it was necessary to get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality. Ensure the victory of Donald in the election of the US President. Then create a political alliance between the United States, France, Russia (and a number of other states) and establish a new world order.

Our idea was insane, but realizable.

In order to understand everything for the beginning, it was necessary to “digitize” all possible types of modern man.

Donald decided to invite for this task — the special scientific department of the “Cambridge University.”

British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes — the “ideal image” of a possible Trump supporter. Then .. put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone.

Then it was only necessary to upload this data to information flows and social networks. And we began to look for those who would have coped with this task better than others.

At the very beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev.

The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.

Obviously, the timeline there is fuzzy. Cambridge Analytica didn’t work with Trump for four years and two days. They worked with Trump beginning in June 2016, the same month that the Russians came to Trump Tower offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the same month that all of these things happened:

6/3/16 WikiLeaks creates the torrent for the insurance file which includes the DNC hack.
6/3/16 Rob Goldstone contacts Donald Trump Jr. by email, offers assistance from Russian government.
6/7/16 At a speech in Moscow, Carter Page criticized the United States and other Western democracies.
6/7/16 Rob Goldstone reveals that Russian government contact will be Natalia Veselnitskaya
6/7/16 Donald J Trump gives speech in which he promises a major speech about Hillary Clinton’s crimes on June 13th.
6/8/16 First tweet posted to “DCLeaks” Twitter account.
6/9/16 Natalia Veselnitskaya meets with Trump Jr., Manafort, Kushner in Trump Tower
6/12/16 Assange announces he has documents relating to Clinton that would be “enough evidence” to indict her.
6/12/16 According to Guccifer 2.0, the DNC resets their network, kicking “him” out of it.
6/14/16 Washington Post reports that the DNC was hacked by Russians
6/14/16 DNC makes public announcement that it has been hacked
6/15/16 Guccifer 2.0 appears, contacts The Smoking Gun
6/15/16 Crowdstrike releases a detailed statement about Russian hacking of the DNC.
6/15/16 Kevin McCarthy says ““There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
6/15/16 Trump’s team issues a statement claiming the DNC hacked itself
6/16/16 WikiLeaks uploads the torrent containing their insurance file to their website.
6/17/16 The United States expels two Russian diplomats in retaliation for an attack on an American diplomat in Moscow.
6/17/16 WikiLeaks publicly releases their insurance file.
6/19/16 Papadopolous offers to make”off the record” trip to Russia
6/20/16 Date of first Christopher Steele memo in dossier, asserting Kremlin had been helping Trump for at least 5 years.
6/20/16 Guccifer 2.0 first appears on Twitter, restates that the “DNC’s servers hacked by a lone hacker” and releases the DNC’s oppo on Trump.
6/21/16 Guccifer 2.0 interview with Vice News published. Outed as NOT Romanian
6/21/16 Guccifer 2.0 posts documents stolen from the DNC on Clinton’s vulnerabilities as well as potential responses to lines of attack.
6/22/16 WikiLeaks publishes the first in a series of hacked emails taken from the DNC.
6/27/16 First hacked DNC emails posted to “DCLeaks” website.

As I pointed out in the original piece, the facts seem to line up. We now know that Cambridge Analytica sought to work with WikiLeaks in obtaining and releasing illegally hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s server. In Rykov’s telling, the initial conspiracy also involved “a pair of hacker groups” (presumably Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear). As for developing “a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it,” that could be a reference to the server connecting Alfa Bank to Trump Tower.

It seems to me like the Russians were privy to the same information that Parscale was seeing that allowed him to move resources out of Virginia and Ohio and into Wisconsin and Michigan. And that would make sense if the Russians were working with Trump and Cambridge Analytica all along.

Some people have suggested that Konstantin Rykov is a troll who shouldn’t be believed. But I see no reason why he would have wanted to incriminate Russia four days after Trump’s victory when they had high hopes of getting sanctions relief and other benefits. It appears that he was taking an ill-advised victory lap.

I’ve burned myself out on the #TrumpRussia issue for today. I’ve got a lot more fascinating stuff in the pipeline but each one of these pieces is exhausting to write. There’s a temptation to try to explain everything and tie it all together with a bow, but the blog format and length won’t allow that.

For my second piece today I will focus on something else instead. You’ve probably seen the headlines today about the dispute over who is going to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now that director Richard Cordray has resigned to run for office in Ohio.

Is Mick Mulvaney the acting director or does that honor go to Cordray’s deputy, Leandra English?

That’ll all get hashed out in fairly quick order.

Personally, I think Greg Sargent captured the nature of the controversy with this headline: Trump wants to destroy Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. In other words, erstwhile OMB Director Mick Mulvaney has been tapped to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Leandra English is trying to fight back. Sargent managed to get Senator Warren to comment on the matter:

In her first interview on this standoff since it erupted, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the agency’s creator — predicted that if Trump installs his own director, its mission could be hollowed out, emboldening further financial elite defrauding of consumers. Warren suggested that this is part of a pattern in which Trump has embraced conventional GOP plutocracy in betrayal of his campaign posture as a kind of working-class avenger delivering tough justice to predatory financial elites.

“This is about whose side President Trump is on — big banks, or working families,” Warren told me. “So far in his administration, he has chosen the big banks time after time. Is he going to stand up for the working families who helped elect him?”

The president decided he couldn’t let any of those accusations stand. So, this happened:

President Trump on Monday referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas” at an event honoring Native American Code Talkers who served in World War II.

“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said, standing beneath a portrait of former President Andrew Jackson. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”

Turning to the veterans, Trump said “but do you know what? I like you.”

The president made the remark in the Oval Office standing beside three Navajos who helped the U.S. Marine Corps develop a secret code during WWII.

The three Code Talkers did not react to Trump’s remark.

I can’t really muster the appropriate amount of outrage here, probably due to my aforementioned exhaustion. Just the portrait of Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson alone is enough to make my blood boil. But to make these elderly war heroes listen to a U.S. president make stupid jokes about Pocahontas is something beyond all forgiveness.

Three days before the presidential election, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump visited the Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and, according to The Times of Israel, they prayed for Donald Trump’s victory.

Schneerson, who died in 1994, is an interesting character. Although he never claimed it himself, some of his followers consider him the Messiah and others believe he is still alive.

Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to many as the Rebbe, was a Russian Empire-born American Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.

As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in world Jewry, with an international network of over 3,000 educational and social centers. The institutions he established include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care-homes for the disabled and synagogues.

The Kushner family is Modern Orthodox and of course Ivanka converted to Judaism prior to her marriage to Jared. Still, according to Ben Schreckinger of Politico Magazine, Kushner was affiliated with the Chabad house at Harvard when he was a student there. Since settling in DC, the couple has reportedly been attending services at a Chabad synagogue.

What Jared and Ivanka want to do in their spiritual lives is their business, and I have no intention of casting any aspersions on the Chabad-Lubavitch movement or Rabbi Schneerson. I do however want to explore some things that may circle back to this pre-election pilgrimage to Schneerson’s grave.

Let’s begin here:

Starting in 1999, [Vladimir] Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”

There’s a good chance that if you know of Roman Abramovich, you know him as the owner of the Chelsea football club of the English Premier League. You may not know that he was a victor (along with Paul Manafort’s patron Oleg Deripaska) in the bloody aluminum wars of the 1990’s or that he was reportedly the person who convinced Boris Yeltsin that Putin would be a proper successor. You probably are not aware that Ivanka Trump is very close friends with Abramovich’s wife Dasha Zhukova, with whom she recently attended the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens. Zhukova reportedly attended the inauguration as Ivanka’s personal guest.

It takes a little more doing to understand the Trump family’s connections to Lev Leviev. To begin with, we need to go back to Bayrock, the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors in that enterprise. One was convicted mob associate and murky FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was Tevfik Arif, a shady man with likely Russian intelligence connections who was once was arrested by the Turks on Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s yacht and “charged with running an international underage prostitution ring.” The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence. If you’re interested in this aspect of the story, I refer you to my Trump’s Soho Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence article and also Mike Lofgren’s piece: Mobbed Up, both written in late February.

Interestingly, all these men have connections to the Chabad movement. Felix Sater was honored as Man of the Year in 2014 by the Port Washington Chabad house. The same Chabad house’s website lists Tevfik Arif, who is not Jewish, “among its top 13 benefactors.”

But it’s Tamir Sapir who links Trump back directly to Lev Leviev.

Pay close attention to this:

…the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.

Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.

Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.

The man I want to focus on is Rotem Rosen. He is described here as the CEO of Leviev’s American holding company and his “right hand man.” Now, remember that Leviev was described at the top as one of two oligarch’s who Putin tapped to establish the “Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as ‘Putin’s rabbi.’”

Now, let’s flash ahead to Trump’s trip to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

After the contest, Trump attended a vodka-infused 1 a.m. afterparty at which ticket holders were promised a meeting with the New Yorker, along with the pageant contestants.

He also met with the Agalarovs to talk business…

…Joining Trump’s November 2013 meeting with the Agalarovs were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, a pair of New York-based Russian developers who helped to develop the Trump Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan.

You should know the Agalarovs because they initiated the undisclosed June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Kushner, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. and a brood of Kremlin-connected conspirators offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in return for sanctions relief.

Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir, brother of Zina, and brother-in-law of Rotem Rosen.

Just so we’re clear, Trump hosted the wedding of Lev Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago. Lev Leviev is so close to Putin that he was one of two oligarchs tapped to help him gain control of the leadership of the Russian Jewish community back when he assumed power.

Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him…

…In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.

At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.

These are extraordinarily close ties between Putin and Trump and that also connect Trump’s business discussions in 2013 about Moscow real estate projects with the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that has become one of the strongest pieces of evidence of collusion in the election.

Seen in this light, Jared and Ivanka’s pre-election pilgrimage to Rabbi Schneerson’s grave takes on a different tone.

And then there’s this:

In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.

I’m not sure if it was actually a majority stake or just a really expensive condo, but Mueller is looking into it and it may tie into the firing of Preet Bharara:

As special prosecutor Robert Mueller and Congress both continue to search for ties between the Trumps, Kushner and Russia, Kushner’s acquisition of a commercial condo in the New York Times building has become one of many targets. In 2015, Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the building from Russian real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, The Guardian reports. The transaction first came up due to the $285M Kushner borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the transaction. Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and Prevezon, have all recently been the subject of money laundering investigations. A laundering case against Prevezon led by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara abruptly ended in May, two months after Trump fired Bharara, with a $6M settlement that raised eyebrows.

But, remember, Trump told us he has absolutely nothing to do with Russia and no business interests there.

Stop Listening to Seth Abramson’s Hack Trump-Russia Theories   By Jacob Weindling

Seth Abramson is a writer, poet, attorney, editor and assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, but he is most well-known for his unhinged Twitter account. To begin understanding the fraudulent narrative that he spreads across the web like a virus, we’ll start with a little anecdote …

From an earlier comment @Booman … WhoIs Seth Abramson

The Kremlin’s Man: How Donald Trump’s Own Words Connect him to Russia By Jacob Weindling

There is no original reporting and there will be no “smoking gun” here. As history has shown us, unless a Nixonian-type tape comes out, there likely will not be a “smoking gun” on this issue. Undeniable proof is a difficult thing to ascertain.

This series will not take on the certainty of a mass conspiracy that many Democratic operatives are currently engaging in–who have been writing their own John Grisham novels in order to avoid the unassailable fact that it was theirs and their candidate’s failure which handed the 2016 election to the most unqualified president in our nation’s history. Roughly 100,000 votes in a few states determined this election–enough for Russian meddling to swing it–but the fact that it was that close in the first place had nothing to do with the Kremlin and everything to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton promised more of the same neoliberal policies which have laid waste to middle classes across the Western world, all without providing much of a comprehensive solution for the millions of Americans currently stuck underneath the boot of crony capitalism.

We’ve sourced the British dodgy dossier or Steele Papers and the novelty writing by Louise Mensch from Fox News own Rupert Murdoch.

The Resistance is fine, but phony research or pure propagation of lies is beyond good reporting.

Why Bogus News Stories Are So Hard to Stop | The Atlantic |

On the other hand, that argument is not incorrect! As my colleague McKay Coppins outlined last week, there’s a growing group of outlets and journalis–well, media personalities catering to progressives. This constellation offers everything from improbable stories (Palmer Report) to bizarre conspiracy theories (Seth Abramson) to outlets that aspire to be “the Breitbart of the left” (Shareblue). The lesson that they all seem to have taken from the 2016 election is that fake news works.

Continued below the fold …

On September 28, 2017, Artem Klyushin tweeted, "Без моего вмешательства Трамп бы не победил."

Put that in Google Translate, and you get this: "Without my intervention, Trump would not have won."

So both Artem Klyushin and his pal Konstantin Rykov have confessed–when will Trump? pic.twitter.com/nXXUdALQR4

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) 26 november 2017

<sub>Michael Collins in London during treaty negotiations in October 1921. Collins, the first and
last Irish politician to sign up to a hard border. Photograph: Hulton Archive</sub&gt

I wrote last week that a Crunch time is coming soon… in the Brexit negotiations. Well that crunch time may just have become a whole lot crunchier. A domestic political scandal may cause the Irish Fine Gael minority government to lose a vote of confidence this week resulting in a snap general election as soon as Dec 19th., just after the crunch meeting of the European Council to decide whether the Brexit talks can move on to stage two.

Should a general election be called, Varadker will lose any flexibility he may have had in determining whether “sufficient progress” has been made in Phase one of the talks on the Irish/UK border to allow the Brexit talks move on to phase two. He might as well hand the reins of Government on to Fianna Fail/Sinn Fein if he doesn’t hold the line on this issue.

Theresa May may be concerned about losing power if she losses the support of arch Brexiteers or Remainiers within her party, or indeed the support of the DUP, but Varadker’s problems are much more acute: His Government is only sustained in office by Fianna Fail abstention and they can cut his lifeline at any time. Neither Fianna Fail nor Sinn Fein will tolerate any softening of the Government’s line against a hard border, so an election cannot but result in a hardening of the Irish Government’s opposition to UK government double speak on the issue.
The details of the domestic scandal need not concern us overly here. They concern an alleged attempt to smear a whistle blower within the Gardai (Irish police) in order to undermine his credibility before a judicial tribunal of enquiry into his allegations against the Gardai. It turns out that the then Minister for Justice was informed of “an aggressive legal strategy” to question the whistle blower’s motivation and credibility before the enquiry one year before she said she was so informed.

However the same e-mail which informed her of this was couched in very ambiguous terms and said she had no function in the matter: It was a matter for the tribunal. So it is perhaps understandable that she forgot about an email which was for information only and not actionable by her. The same scandal has already brought about the resignation of the Head of the Police service, a previous minister for Justice, and led, indirectly, to the retirement of previous Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, from office, so the opposition scent blood.

But it is the political context that may be more important. With Gerry Adams’ retirement from the leadership of Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein may have become a whole lot more electable in many people’s eyes, threatening Fianna Fail’s position as the main opposition party. This could be Fianna Fail leader, Micheál Martin’s last chance of achieving office: The sole survivor of the disastrous Fianna Fail led government that led Ireland into the financial crisis and banking bail-out, Martin is on his last chance as leader of the opposition.

However an election now could not come at a worse time for the country at a whole. Winter elections are rare in Ireland because darkness descends at 4.30 PM and leaves no time for daylight after work door to door canvassing by party activists which has been the mainstay of the electoral process in Ireland for generations. Householders may be reluctant to open their doors to canvassers they do not know after dark and in very adverse weather conditions.

In addition the Brexit negotiations are entering a crucial phase as far as Ireland is concerned, and Ministers should otherwise be engaged in a non-stop diplomatic offensive to ensure Ireland is not isolated or marginalised in the talks process. Whoever is deemed responsible for causing the election could face a considerable backlash from a disgruntled electorate worried about Brexit and unhappy at an election being called now.

Chris Johns, a Welshman who has worked most of his life in financial services in England and who is now living in Ireland has an interesting piece entitled Ignorance of Irish history means Brexit talks will not end well about British delusions about the EU in general, and Ireland in particular:

An awareness of Irish history – even a nodding acquaintance – would help British politicians appreciate what happened to Collins, the first and last Irish politician to sign up to a hard border. The idea that Leo Varadkar, or anybody else in this State, would under any circumstances sign up to another hard border displays so much ignorance, so much arrogance, so much stupidity that I am left wondering about all those stereotypes of my fellow Brits – stereotypes that I have wearily tried to reject and counter over the past 30 years.

Despite being perhaps the main war of Independence hero Michael Collins was shot and killed by anti-Treaty forces in the ensuing civil war after signing a Treaty with the British that sanctioned the partition of Ireland…

But we should be clear: Relations between Dublin and London have not been so strained for years

The Spectator this week described mounting anger within the British government over Ireland’s position, quoting one cabinet minister warning that Varadkar was “playing with fire”.

And the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, reported a conspiracy theory doing the rounds in Whitehall and Westminster. According to the theory, Ireland and the EU are over-egging their fears about the Border so they can use the issue later in the negotiations to Britain’s disadvantage.

The analysis of Ireland’s position may be misleading and the surprise unjustified, but the anger in London is real because the stakes are so high. If the EU does not agree to move to the second phase of negotiations next month, the consequences for May could be enormous.

“What the hell does your government think it’s doing?” a former Conservative minister asked me this week. “Do they not know the pressure she’ll come under to just walk away?”

And that is the delicate tight-rope walking act which the Irish government must perform: Ensure there is no return to a hard border between Ireland and N. Ireland, and at the same time avoid pushing the UK over the cliff of a no deal Brexit which will involve not only a hard border but economically disastrous swingeing tariffs on trade between Ireland and the UK.

But Irish political concerns are perhaps the opposite to those posited by Laura Kuenssberg above: The border is an existential issue for any Irish government and it is the UK who may be trying to use that issue as a means of weakening the EU’s united negotiating position in phase two of the Brexit negotiations. There is no way the Canada style trade agreement the EU may be willing to offer the UK could prevent the emergence of a hard border between Ireland and N. Ireland and if the EU doesn’t want to be blamed for causing that outcome, it had better put that issue to bed in phase 1 of the talks.

The deeper long term strategic concern is that should Brexit end up causing the return of a hard border there will be considerable pressure on future Irish governments to restore free movement across the border by joining the UK outside the EU. The secret hope and agenda of Brexiteers has always been to encourage the break-up of the EU by fomenting division within the EU and “pealing off” it’s most peripheral members – in this case Ireland. Nigel Farage has been quite open in advocating “Irexit” as an almost inevitable precursor of the break-up of the EU as a whole.

So what may be an existential issue for any Irish government now could end up becoming an existential issue for the EU as a whole. Never before has it been more important for Ireland and the EU to stay united on resisting the re-imposition of a hard border in Ireland, come what may. And if this leads to an economically disastrous “no deal” Brexit, then so be it.

I concluded ‘The President and the People’ wins Outstanding News Special by telling my readers here to “Stay tuned for John Oliver asking “how is voting on Tuesday still a thing?”  Here is the still relevant part of the entry, which was posted on Election Day earlier this month.

Today, I join Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in asking Voting On Tuesday – How Is This Still A Thing?

Tuesday voting is highly inconvenient, so why do we still do it?

I’ve had to answer questions from my immigrant friends about why Americans hold elections on Tuesdays before, and I’m relieved to see that I gave them the right answer.  As for what to do about Tuesday elections, I favor the Puerto Rican solution; declare election day a holiday.  I even have an image for that.

Modified from the original at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.

If you saw the piece I did yesterday on Konstantin Rykov and you have any interest in Donald Trump, prostitutes and pee tapes, you might want to take a look at this:

Dosug (досуг, translated as Leisure) is a Russian online brothel centered in Moscow but with operations all around Europe. It can be found on both the anonymous dark net as well as the normal internet, where the website is always trying to stay two steps ahead of Russia’s notoriously vigorous cyber censors.

At over a decade old, Dosug serves as Russia’s biggest catalog of sex workers. Its existence means buying anything from a massage to sex is nearly as easy as ordering up a taxi on your phone. Dosug’s map of nearby available prostitutes looks an awful lot like Uber‘s map of available drivers.

Okay, so there’s an Uber for prostitutes in Moscow. Who created this thing?

Dosug was created by Konstantin Rykov, a 37-year-old Russian internet entrepreneur and politician who, until 2011, served as a legislative deputy in President Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia party and worked in the Duma Committee on Science and High Technologies.

What are the chances?

Starting in the 1990s, Rykov built a kingdom of popular websites beginning with fuck.ru, an obscenity-laced website that flaunted Russia’s rules while he operated under the psuedonym Jason Foris. He expanded into website design, advertising networks, book publishing, television, and eventually hundreds of other internet projects, according to his own count.

Among other news websites, Rykov runs Взгляд (Sight), referred to around the Western world as a mouthpiece of Putin’s Kremlin. He dubbed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as the “Russian Spring.”

Yeah, Russia is weird. You can simultaneously be Putin’s best friend and key online propagandist and yet have to take your prostitution ring to the dark net to avoid having it shut down by the government.

This is the same guy who got in touch with Trump on election night in 2012, a year before the supposed pee tapes were made during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. He’s the same guy who says he worked with Trump tirelessly for “four years and two days” to “get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality” so Trump could be elected president.

By the way, it looks like someone tried to figure out how many women are available on Dosung in Moscow who will pee on command (rather than allow someone to pee on them) and came up with the number one hundred and eighty six. So, no shortage, in other words.

It also looks like others have been on this trail long before me, tying Konstantin Rykov and Artem Klyushin together as Twitter buddies for example, and then quite obviously noting disturbing connections between Klyushin, Trump, and the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.

I’m sure this is all just fake news, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

Am I seriously supposed to care who runs Goldman Sachs?