True enough, Miriam. But from my ringside seat, it's all the same old
same old. One Party, Two Heads. And by God, it won't allow for any
Third or Fourth heads. I know things are really Dark with Trump in
power, but the Democrats wear their share of the blame, doing
everything to put an unpopular candidate in office. I became so
embarrassed over their failure to care for all Americans, that I
announced my disassociation from the Party. Not that they cared.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Except we can't actually blame this stuff in Trump. It began with the DNC
and the Democratic Leadership is certainly encouraging it. The Republicans,
however, have joined in, I suppose, because they have this history of witch
hunting from the bad old days in the 50's. One thing that all the
supporters of the Democrats seem to be ignoring, is the Steele file which
was all of this opposition research on Trump, purchased by the Clinton
Campaign, from a foreign national. Steele is English, I think, but the
material was supposed to come from Russian sources. Somehow, all these
Russia-Gate people, think that was perfectly acceptable while contacts by
people in the Trump entourage with Russians, was not. And what about Nixon's
deal with the North Vietnamese to put off peace talks until he was elected
with the promise of giving them a better deal than the Democrats would?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2017 10:48 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Jill Stein on the Senate Intelligence
Committee's Investigation of Her Campaign for Russian Collusion: 'There Is
No There There'
Randy Credico was on Flash Point this morning, adding substantially to the
claims by Jill Stein that the Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry is
evidence of a "new era of McCarthyism."
Poor old Lady Justice not only wears a blindfold these days, she is bound
and gagged, too.
Jill Stein was on Democracy Now last week, explaining the conference she
attended, the 2015 celebration of RT America's tenth anniversary, and the
fact that she paid her own way, and has the receipts to prove it. Stein
hobnobbed with "subversives" like former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura
and his family, and Lee Camp, a left-wing political comedian who hosts the
popular RT program, "Redacted Tonight."
But just as in the Golden Days of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee,
merely being mentioned is tantamount to being found guilty.
And so, my dear ones, a new and mighty leader has ascended to the Oval
Office, blessing Witch Hunts in all nooks and crannies of his
Empire...except when fingers point his direction. And only the names have
changed, to protect the Oligarchy.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/26/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jill Stein on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Investigation of Her
Campaign for Russian Collusion: 'There Is No There There'
The former Green Party candidate calls the inquiry evidence of a "new
McCarthyism."
By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet
December 20, 2017, 8:42 AM GMT
This late November, the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered a
request for internal communications and documents to Green Party
presidential nominee Jill Stein. According to former members of
Stein’s 2016 presidential campaign, the request arrived through
intellience commitee chairs Sen's Richard Burr and Mark Warner, who
are seeking information for the ongoing Russiagate investigation.
While the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to make the details of
its inquiry into Stein’s campaign public, Republican Sen. Richard Burr
told reporter Emma Loop that he is looking for evidence of Stein’s
“collusion with the Russians.”
In recent weeks, the bipartisan investigation into Russian meddling
has strayed from its focus on Trump and begun targeting left-wing
political figures. Last month, the House Intelligence Committee sent a
subpoena to Randy Credico, a retired comedian, noted prison reform
activist and local New York political gadfly, seeking information on
rumors that he had served as a go-between for right-wing operative
Roger Stone and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. And now, Senate
investigators have trained their sights on Stein, a veteran anti-war
activist and pediatrician despised by Hillary Clinton partisans, who blame
her for throwing the election to Trump.
I spoke to Stein immediately after the news from BuzzFeed leaked of
the Senate inquiry into her campaign. She characterized the demand for
Green Party documents as clear evidence of a "new McCarthyism, which
is the flip side of a military madness that is stronger than ever in this
country."
“This is the continuing focus of empire and austerity and the assault
on democracy that goes with it,” she continued. “The silver lining is
we will get a chance at the microphone. A lot of people will be
screaming at us but some people will hear us.”
Since news broke of the congressional inquiry into Stein’s campaign,
she has been a punching bag for hardcore Democrat partisans. Zac
Petnacas, the former rapid response director for Hillary Clinton’s
campaign, proclaimed, “Jill Stein is a Russian agent” eight times in
one tweet until he reached the maximum character limit.
The origins of allegations against Stein lay in the so-called Steele
Dossier, a collection of unverified claims cobbled together by a
former MI5 agent named Christopher Steele, who was paid by the DNC and
the Clinton campaign. According to journalist Howard Blum, Steele
relied on “an army of sources whose loyalty and information he had
bought and paid for over the years.” Under the watch of James Comey,
the FBI also made a deal to fund the dossier, but the arrangement fell
apart, leaving it to the Clinton camp to funnel fees to Steele through
the opposition research firm, Fusion GPS.
In addition to claiming that Putin held compromising footage of sex
workers urinating on Trump on camera in a VIP suite at the Moscow
Ritz, the dossier accused Stein of having been funded by the Russian
government to attend a gala hosted by the Russian-backed news network,
RT.
Stein told me this claim is false: “I paid my own way to Moscow. They
[the Russian government] did not pay for my hotel or expenses, and I
have the receipts to prove it.”
A gala dinner and collusion illusions
The RT gala was organized in November 2015 as a celebration of the
international network’s 10th anniversary. Dignitaries, diplomats,
politicians, media professionals, and activists from around the world
gathered in Moscow for the event. I was among those invited to attend
and I accepted. I wanted to interact with colleagues from around the
globe and had long considered RT a valuable space in a conformist
American media environment that is increasingly hostile to dissenting
opinions, particularly where Western foreign policy is concerned.
During the two-day affair, I participated in a public panel discussion
with former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, historian Peter
Kuznick and the Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent, Fred
Weir, among others.
I
did not have a chance to collude with any Russian officials, though I
did attempt a selfie with Mikhail Gorbachev as he brushed by me in a
hallway.
As
far as I know, the only person who received a fee to attend the RT
gala was former Gen. Michael Flynn, who was previously unknown to
guests and was referred to dismissively as the "Obama general.”
Flynn’s one-on-one with RT host Sophie Shevardzadze went over poorly;
he was regarded as inarticulate and uninformed by a range of audience
members I spoke to (I did not attend).
The event culminated with a catered dinner featuring live music and a
video mash-up of RT’s greatest hits over the years. I spent much of
the time at a table chatting with former Minnesota governor Jesse
Ventura and his family, and Lee Camp, a left-wing political comedian
who hosts the popular RT program, "Redacted Tonight." None of us had
any inkling that the festivities would come to be seen as a de facto
crime scene by packs of Beltway reporters and congressional
investigators. It would be months before Flynn emerged as a wild-eyed
Trump surrogate and a full year before the Russiagate narrative was
spun out of the ashes of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
At a table immediately in front of the stage, Stein was seated beside
Willy Wimmer, the former foreign minister of Germany. Also at the
table was Czech former Deputy Prime Minister Cyril Svoboda, a Serbian
filmmaker named Emir Kusturica and Flynn. Stein said her only
substantive conversation was with Wimmer, and it lasted about two
minutes. In the middle of the event, Russian President Vladimir Putin
strode into the room alongside his chief of staff and spokesman. They
briefly seated themselves at the dignitaries’ table before Putin
appeared on stage for a few remarks, then shuffled toward the exit.
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I asked Stein what took place when Putin arrived at her table. “Putin
briefly ran around the table and shook everyone’s hand. No names were
exchanged, it was an impersonal greeting,” she recalled. “There was
nothing about that table that facilitated any communication of any
sorts. The one person there who spoke English and Russian fluently was
sitting next to Michael Flynn and translated what he said was the
conversation between Flynn and Putin. It amounted to something to the
effect of, 'How are you? I’m fine.'"
Stein told me she had requested a moment with Putin or Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss US-Russian cooperation on nuclear
non-proliferation and de-escalating the conflict in Syria. “Hillary
Clinton was promoting a no-fly zone in Syria, which would have put us
in the position of shooting down Russian planes when we have 2,000
nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. So communication with your
adversaries was important and we were in a crisis at the time. Our
[Green Party] communications were exemplary,” she asserted. “They were
content-focused, not about quid pro quo or any backroom deals. They
were on target and in the words of JFK, I believe we should never
negotiate out of fear, and never fear to negotiate.”
In the end, Stein was able to meet only with the foreign affairs chair
of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament. A statement
posted on Stein’s campaign website outlined her agenda for the
meeting: “a new commitment to collaborative dialogue between our
governments to avert disastrous wars for geopolitical domination,
destruction of the climate, and cascading injustices that promote
violence and terrorism.”
Stein’s visit to Moscow was part of a wider itinerary that brought her
in contact with like-minded political figures across the Atlantic. She
had just visited Paris, where she participated in a conference on
climate change and rubbed shoulders with Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader
of the UK Labour Party.
“Corbyn had pretty much the same stance on the need for a peace
offensive in the Middle East, a weapons embargo in the region, the
dangers of a no-fly zone in Syria and on the need for nuclear non
proliferation,” she recalled.
“These aren’t fringe ideas and most of the world sees them as
absolutely critical.”
Picture of a pseudo-scandal
In the weeks after Hillary Clinton’s election loss, a photograph of
Stein seated at the table with Putin and Flynn began making the
rounds. For many frustrated Democrats, the image was clear evidence of
a nefarious conspiracy between a fringe third-party candidate, a Trump
aide and Putin to deprive Hillary of her historic destiny. In their
minds, Stein was not just a spoiler, but a spy.
“The fact that they got a photo out of this allowed them to launch a
baseless smear campaign,” Stein said. “And they distorted the event
itself.
It was practically a who’s who of the peace community on hand.”
In July, Stein’s name was added to a Senate Judiciary Committee letter
demanding communications between Donald Trump Jr., Russian officials
and members of Trump’s presidential campaign. There was no indication
that Stein had ever interacted with Trump Jr., and she denounced the
letter as “an obvious smear designed to generate a fake news feeding
frenzy.”
So far, no material has turned up to validate the committee’s unusual
line of inquiry. In the face of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s
request, Stein pledged cooperation. “We intend to provide any
documents that are relevant,” she maintained, “but we had very little
communications with Russia other than through RT for our appearances
and limited logistics around the RT conference.”
But in the frenetic atmosphere of Russiagate, even Stein’s interviews
with RT America have become grounds for suspicion. An error-laden
report released by the Director of National Intelligence this January
cast RT as a key aspect of Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential
election. Among the transgressions the DNI accused RT of committing
was hosting a third-party debate that gave a platform to candidates
like Stein. The report also complained that RT was guilty of promoting
"radical discontent.”
Despite the storm of accusations, Stein remains confident that her
name will eventually be cleared. “Real people are not buying this
effort to demonize us and [the investigation has] lost the thread.
There is simply no there there,” she stated. “But there will be a lot
of damage done before it comes out on the other end.”
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet,
and the award-winning author of Goliath, Republican Gomorrah, and The
51 Day War. He is the co-host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels. Follow
him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal.
.
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