Liberal Forum

Misty » 09 Jul 2017 6:07 pm » wrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/p ... afort.html

Richard Painter who was George W. Bush's WH ethics lawyer said, we don't get opposition research from foreign adversaries.

Misty » 15 Jun 2017 9:30 pm » wrote:
These people were aware of a spike in the number of cases of Legionnaires’ disease and kept it a secret for a year.

Court documents show that Nick Lyon said that, “he can’t save everyone” and that “everyone has to die of something.”

Misty » 30 Jun 2017 5:31 pm » wrote:
This seems like a clear violation of the 10th Amendment, which gives the states the right to run their own elections and voter registration.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Misty » 30 Jun 2017 7:50 pm » wrote: I can't figure out what you and Huey are always so angry about.
Your party controls everything.
You should be as happy as two pigs in ****, yet you're two of the angriest people I've ever come across.
Go figure.

roadkill » 09 Jul 2017 8:04 pm » wrote:OMG...you're citing David Corn?
Please put down the pipe.

Misty » 30 Jun 2017 9:40 pm » wrote: You waste a whole lot of time in my threads, but I'm the moron.

Misty » 06 Jul 2017 6:53 pm » wrote:Cheeto the Tweeto is overseas in Poland whining about the FAKE News media saying that what he wants is a 'fair' press.

Misty » 06 Jul 2017 7:52 pm » wrote:

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 8:39 pm » wrote:Speaking of passing the smell test, what ever happened to that huge Russia-Trump-collaboration-conspiracy you babbled about for months, Dim?

Misty » 09 Jul 2017 5:58 pm » wrote:Riddle me this Puss.....
Why have so many Trump associates had contacts with Russians that they lied about and failed to disclose?
Can you answer that question?

Misty » 07 Jul 2017 8:35 pm » wrote:Bret Stephens rips Hannity over Buckley award.

Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens on Thursday tore into Fox News host Sean Hannity, saying that his receipt of a conservative media award marks the entrance of the conservative movement into an "idiot stage."

Channeling billionaire Warren Buffett's theory that history cycles through "'the innovators, the imitators and the idiots,'" Stephens wrote in a Times op-ed that the conservative Media Research Center's decision to award Hannity the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence signaled the decline of the conservative movement.

Hannity fired back in a series of tweets, waving off his criticism and saying that the conservative columnist hasn't authored anything "memorable."



In his column, Stephens wrote that neither the organization nor the award "is particularly noteworthy."

But he wrote that it was significant an award named after a conservative of Buckley's stature would be given to Hannity, for whom Stephens has a low opinion.

"But sometimes symbolism is more potent than fact," Stephens writes.

"If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there's a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade.

And maybe Sean Spicer can receive the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent for his role in exposing 'fake news.'

The floor's the limit."

Or, for Hannity, Stephens added, "the crawl space beneath it."

Hannity, an ultraconservative television and radio host, has become known for his bombastic style and fierce on-air support for President Trump.

Stephens lambasted the Fox News personality, however, as a drastically different conservative than Buckley, who helped pioneer the modern conservative movement in the U.S.

"And so we reach the Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off," he writes.

"The award itself is trivial, but it's a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think."

Besides mocking Stephens and the Times, Hannity tweeted that it has never been his intention to emulate Buckley or any other conservative thinker.

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 8:49 pm » wrote:10:1 the details are either a lie, Fake News or a set up by Democrat groups.
I smell sweat and desperation.

In his statement, Trump Jr. said he was approached about the meeting by an acquaintance he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.

He did not name the acquaintance, but in an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who is friendly with Trump Jr., told The Washington Post that he had arranged the meeting at the request of a Russian client and had attended it along with Veselnitskaya.

Goldstone has been active with the Miss Universe pageant and works as a manager for Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose father is a wealthy Moscow developer who sponsored the pageant in the Russian capital in 2013.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/ ... story.html

In an exclusive interview with FORBES, Emin Agalarov—a Russian pop singer, real estate mogul and son of one of the country’s richest people—described an ongoing relationship with the Trump family, including post-election contact with the president himself.

Among Agalarov’s most striking claims: that he and his billionaire developer father, Aras, had plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia that would now likely be under construction had Trump not run for office; that he has maintained contact with the Trump family since the election, and has exchanged messages with Donald Trump Jr. as recently as January; and that President Trump himself sent a handwritten note to the Agalarovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch ... going/amp/

Misty » 09 Jul 2017 10:53 pm » wrote: Well so far we have Peter Smith who was trying to get Hillary's hacked emails from the Russians and said he was working with Michael Flynn and now Don Jr. who was perfectly willing to get dirt from the Russians on Hillary that was illegally obtained by spying.

No misdemeanor was committed.
No crime was committed.
No ethical violations were committed.

It was another big nothingburger– put out there by the Deep State and liberal media to continue their unhinged Russian conspiracy.
These people are sick and need help.

The New York Post reported:

The news was delivered by the New York Times in the breathless tones that might announce a cure for cancer or the discovery of life on Mars:


“President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.”


To which a rational response is … who wouldn’t? And also: so, what? A third response is unprintable.


Just as the “Russian collusion” fantasy – a resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat last fall – was finally fading from the fever swamps of the “resistance” and its media mouthpieces, along comes the Times with a pair of journalistic nothingburgers.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/07 ... -big-yawn/

Still waiting.

Misty » 09 Jul 2017 11:02 pm » wrote: The sweat and desperation you smell is coming from your own armpits.

I told you that whole right wing 'it was a set up by Democrats' lie has been debunked.

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 11:05 pm » wrote: Oh **** off.

I answered, but I've been waiting many, many years for you to answer my countless questions to you, troll.

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 11:05 pm » wrote:And I'll bet that's every bit as accurate as every other lie that's been told about Trump and officials.

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 11:05 pm » wrote:It was another big nothingburger– put out there by the Deep State and liberal media to continue their unhinged Russian conspiracy.

Termin8tor » 09 Jul 2017 8:42 pm » wrote:Sure, you're a liar.
That answers just about every point you make.
And exchanging 9 words with a Russian official you pass at an open gathering isn't something you have to report, which is what happened in several supposedly conspiratorial meetings you and the corrupt MSM babbled about.
Imbecile.

The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians

I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest.

I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story.

What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”:
I’m writing this piece in the spirit of Benjamin Wittes’s account of his interactions with James Comey immediately following the New York Times story for which he acted as a source.

The goal is to provide a fuller accounting of experiences which were thoroughly bizarre and which I did not fully understand until I read the Journal’s account of the episode yesterday. Indeed, I still do not fully understand the events I am going to describe, both what they reflected then or what they mean in retrospect.

But I can lay out what happened, facts from which readers and investigators can draw their own conclusions.

For the purpose of what follows, I will assume readers are already familiar with the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on this matter.

My role in these events began last spring, when I spent a great deal of time studying the series of Freedom of Information disclosures by the State Department of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and posting the parts I found most interesting—especially those relevant to computer security—on my public Twitter account.

I was doing this not because I am some particular foe of Clinton’s—I’m not—but because like everyone else, I assumed she was likely to become the next President of the United States, and I believed her emails might provide some insight into key cybersecurity and national security issues once she was elected in November.

A while later, on June 14, the Washington Post reported on a hack of the DNC ostensibly by Russian intelligence.

When material from this hack began appearing online, courtesy of the “Guccifer 2” online persona, I turned my attention to looking at these stolen documents.

This time, my purpose was to try and understand who broke into the DNC, and why.

A few weeks later, right around the time the DNC emails were dumped by Wikileaks—and curiously, around the same time Trump called for the Russians to get Hillary Clinton’s missing emails—I was contacted out the blue by a man named Peter Smith, who had seen my work going through these emails.

Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative.

Initially, I assumed the query must have been about my work on the DNC hack; after all, few people followed my account prior to the DNC breach, whereas my analysis of the break-in at the DNC had received considerably more coverage.

I assumed his query about the “Clinton emails” was therefore a mistake and that he meant instead to talk to me about the emails stolen from the DNC.

So I agreed to talk to him, thinking that, whatever my views on then-candidate Trump, if a national campaign wanted an independent non-partisan view on the facts surrounding the case, I should provide it to the best of my ability.

Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked—in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too—and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election.

Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

Under other circumstances, I would have gone no further.

After all, this was occurring in the final stretch of a U.S. presidential election, and I did not feel comfortable, and had no interest in, providing material help to either of the campaigns beyond merely answering questions on my already public analysis of Clinton’s emails, or of the DNC hack. (I’m not a U.S. citizen or resident, after all.)

In any case, my suspicion then and now was that Hillary Clinton’s email server was likely never breached by Russia, and moreover that if Russia had a copy of Clinton’s emails, they would not waste them in the run-up to an election she was likely to win.

I thus thought Smith’s search for her emails was in vain.

But following the DNC hack and watching the Russian influence campaign surrounding it unfold in near real-time, Smith’s comment about having been contacted by someone from the “Dark Web” claiming to have Clinton’s personal emails struck me as critically important.

I wanted to find out whether this person was merely some fraudster wanting to take Smith for a ride or something more sinister: that is, whether Smith had been contacted by a Russian intelligence front with intent to use Smith as part of their scheme by laundering real or forged documents.

I never found out who Smith’s contact on the “Dark Web” was.

It was never clear to me whether this person was merely someone trying to dupe Smith out of his money, or a Russian front, and it was never clear to me how they represented their own credentials to Smith.

Over the course of our conversations, one thing struck me as particularly disturbing.

Smith and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States.

I explained that if someone had contacted him via the “Dark Web” with Clinton’s personal emails, he should take very seriously the possibility that this may have been part of a wider Russian campaign against the United States.

And I said he need not take my word for it, pointing to a number of occasions where US officials had made it clear that this was the view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Smith, however, didn’t seem to care.

From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so.

He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge.

If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.

When he first contacted me, I did not know who Smith was, but his legitimate connections within the Republican party were apparent.

My motive for initially speaking to him was that I wondered if the campaign was trying to urgently establish whether the claims that Russia had hacked the DNC was merely “spin” from the Clinton campaign, or instead something they would need to address before Trump went too far down the road of denying it.

My guess was that maybe they wanted to contact someone who could provide them with impartial advice to understand whether the claims were real or just rhetoric.

Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign, it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well.

Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign.

Smith told of Flynn’s deep dislike of DNI Clapper, whom Flynn blamed for his dismissal by President Obama.

Smith told of Flynn’s moves to position himself to become CIA Director under Trump, but also that Flynn had been persuaded that the Senate confirmation process would be prohibitively difficult.

He would instead therefore become National Security Advisor should Trump win the election, Smith said.

He also told of a deep sense of angst even among Trump loyalists in the campaign, saying “Trump often just repeats whatever he’s heard from the last person who spoke to him,” and expressing the view that this was especially dangerous when Trump was away.

Over the course of a few phone calls, initially with Smith and later with Smith and one of his associates—a man named John Szobocsan—I was asked about my observations on technical details buried in the State Department’s release of Secretary Clinton’s emails (such as noting a hack attempt in 2011, or how Clinton’s emails might have been intercepted by Russia due to lack of encryption).

I was also asked about aspects of the DNC hack, such as why I thought the “Guccifer 2” persona really was in all likelihood operated by the Russian government, and how it wasn’t necessary to rely on CrowdStrike’s attribution as blind faith; noting that I had come to the same conclusion independently based on entirely public evidence, having been initially doubtful of CrowdStrike’s conclusions.

Towards the end of one of our conversations, Smith made his pitch.

He said that his team had been contacted by someone on the “dark web”; that this person had the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server (which she had subsequently deleted), and that Smith wanted to establish if the emails were genuine.

If so, he wanted to ensure that they became public prior to the election.

What he wanted from me was to determine if the emails were genuine or not.

It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me.

Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails.

To me this felt really wrong.

In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game.

But they were not discouraged.

They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out.

Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.

In the end, I never saw the actual materials they’d been given, and to this day, I don’t know whether there were genuine emails, or whether Smith and his associates were deluding themselves.

By the middle of September, all contact between us ended.

By this time, I had grown extremely uncomfortable with the situation, so when Smith and his colleague asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, I declined to do so.

My suspicion was that the real purpose of the non-disclosure agreement was to retrospectively apply confidentiality to the conversations we had already had before that point.

I refused to sign the non-disclosure and we went our separate ways.

As I mentioned above, Smith and his associates’ knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign were insightful beyond what could be obtained by merely attending Republican events or watching large amounts of news coverage.

But one thing I could not place, at least initially, was whether Smith was working on behalf of the campaign, or whether he was acting independently to help the campaign in his personal capacity.

Then, a few weeks into my interactions with Smith, he sent me a document, ostensibly a cover page for a dossier of opposition research to be compiled by Smith’s group, and which purported to clear up who was involved.

The document was entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” and dated September 7. It detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: “KLS Research”, set up as a Delaware LLC “to avoid campaign reporting,” and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.

The first group, entitled “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure)” listed a number of senior campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.

The largest group named a number of “independent groups / organizations / individuals / resources to be deployed.” My name appears on this list. At the time, I didn’t recognize most of the others; however, several made headlines in the weeks immediately prior to the election.

My perception then was that the inclusion of Trump campaign officials on this document was not merely a name-dropping exercise.

This document was about establishing a company to conduct opposition research on behalf of the campaign, but operating at a distance so as to avoid campaign reporting. Indeed, the document says as much in black and white.

The combination of Smith’s deep knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign, this document naming him in the “Trump campaign” group, and the multiple references to needing to avoid campaign reporting suggested to me that the group was formed with the blessing of the Trump campaign.

In the Journal’s story this evening, several of the individuals named in the document denied any connection to Smith, and it’s certainly possible that he was a big name-dropper and never really represented anyone other than himself.

If that’s the case, Smith talked a very good game.

I’m sure readers are wondering: why did I keep quiet at the time?

Actually, I didn’t.

In the fall, prior to the election, I discussed the events of the story first with a friend, and secondly with a journalist.

The trouble was that neither I nor the reporter in question knew what to make of the whole operation.

It was certainly clear that the events were bizarre, and deeply unsettling. But it wasn’t reportable.

After all, Clinton’s private emails never materialized.

We couldn’t show that Smith had been in contact with actual Russians.

And while I believed—as I still do—that he was operating with some degree of coordination with the campaign, that was at least a little murky too.

The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.

Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.

Cannonpointer » 09 Jul 2017 11:12 pm » wrote:You always know clem is losing when... He refuses to answer a question, and screeches that he doesn't have to because the other person ignored one or more of his.

MIND YOU, the questions of his that people ignore are in every case both rhetorical and falsely premised.

Huey » 09 Jul 2017 3:13 pm » wrote: Looks like Misty used her special powers to edit her post.

Cannonpointer » 09 Jul 2017 11:12 pm » wrote: You always know clem is losing when...