Identity of the Repub. Congressman who met with arrested Russian agent just revealed

Butler1000 said:

Key wording. They were planning to work with whoever BEFORE Trump announced his candidacy.

When are people going to realize it was about hurting Clinton. She tried to interfere in the Russian election first when she was at State.

This is good though if it hurts the NRA. Love to see them taken down over this.

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“APPALLING,” “A MESS,” “NOTHING SHORT OF COWARDLY”: WASHINGTON INSIDERS REEL AS TRUMP CAVES TO PUTIN IN HELSINKI
Current and former U.S. officials were stunned. It was a “dereliction of duty,” says a former NATO ambassador. “It may well be the most damaging trip by an American president in memory.”

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Frankfooter said:

That's messed up.


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-helsinki-summit

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Butler1000 said:

So hurting the NRA is now a bad thing? They are the defacto propoganda arm of the arms dealers.

See how the real cockroaches are now being exposed.

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Frankfooter said:

What's messed up is that you are now cheering for foreign governments to fuck up other countries.
What next for you, are you going to encourage Putin to come in and kill healthcare in Canada?

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Charlemagne said:

The identity of the Republican Congressman who met with arrested Russian agent was just revealed

BY NATALIE DICKINSON

PUBLISHED ON JULY 16, 2018

In a stunning turn of events, the Department of Justice has announced the arrest of a Russian national, Maria Butina, on charges of “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

The move can only be seen as a serious rebuke to the President, who spent the entire morning defending the Russians and arguing that there was no collusion or interference in the 2016 election by agents of the Russian Federation.

Facebook's new algorithm changes have decimated the reach and the ad revenue of independent news sources like ours. Please become a patron of our news website and help us pay our writers by making a small contribution:

But more importantly, the indictment reveals that long before Trump announced his candidacy or began rocketing up in the polls, the Russians were worming their tendrils into the Republican Party – and they were using the National Rifle Association to do it.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has just been exposed as the Republican Congressman who traveled to Russia

The indictment from the FBI states that a as-yet unidentified person openly admitted to setting up secret communications between the Russian Kremlin and “key Republican leaders.”

Evidence heavily suggests that “U.S. Person 1” is former NRA President David Keene:

While the U.S. Congressman identified in the indictment has been confirmed to be Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who is on the record as having traveled to Moscow in August 2015.**

Not only does it indicate that it is not just Trump but the entire Republican Party involved in some kind of treasonous collusion plot with agents of the Russian Federation, Butina’s indictment makes it clear that they had laid the foundation for supporting the Republican nominee through the NRA**even before Trump had declared his candidacy:**

According to the affidavit in support of the complaint, from as early as 2015 and continuing through at least February 2017, Butina worked at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank.** This Russian official was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2018.

Butina used to work closely with Alexander Toroshin, former deputy governor of Russia’s central bank whose ties to the NRA have drawn harsh scrutiny from the Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation over suspicions that the Russians were funneling illegal campaign funds to Trump through the NRA and its network of PACs.

The Department of Justice could not have picked a better way to respond to the President’s appalling remarks this morning – and this stunning revelation makes it clear that this goes much deeper than just Trump.

https://washingtonpress.com/2018/07/16/the-identity-of-the-republican-congressman-who-met-with-arrested-russian-agent-was-just-revealed/

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Frankfooter said:

What's messed up is that you are now cheering for foreign governments to fuck up other countries.
What next for you, are you going to encourage Putin to come in and kill healthcare in Canada?

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Butler1000 said:

No one is cheering this. But the focus in Trump is misplaced.

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Frankfooter said:

Trump deserves the focus at this point.

The US should have (and arguably is) investigated the shit out of a foreign government fucking with their voting. Yet time after time Trump has tried to stop that investigation, called it a 'witchhunt' and generally acted like he was the target, not Putin.

You don't wonder why?

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Butler1000 said:

No he doesnt. As well this arrest is NOT connected to the Mueller investigation. It was a seperate o e completely if a Russian agent trying to infiltrate. And watching CNN they stated that she had tried and failed to gain an in to the Trump campaign.

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1. How do Erik Prince, the Seychelles, and the inauguration fit in?

The Blackwater mercenary founder (and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) traveled to the remote islands in the Indian Ocean just before Trump’s inauguration to have a secret meeting with a Kremlin official. He’s denied the meeting had anything to do with Trump—saying it was a routine business meeting for himself—but the FBI met him at Dulles to question him, and Mueller has reportedly gathered Prince’s telephone records. Similarly, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who—oddly—attended Trump’s inauguration just days after meeting with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at Trump Tower and was at the infamous RT TV dinner in Moscow in 2015 with Putin, Michael Flynn, and Jill Stein, was surprised on the tarmac at a US airport by FBI agents from Mueller’s team when he visited the US.


2. How do the UAE, Qatar, and Jared Kushner fit in?

While we’ve mostly talked about Mueller’s probe as focusing on Russia, there are clearly some adjacent questions about other foreign influence in Washington involving Republican donor Elliott Broidy, among others. A key Middle East go-between, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, is both cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and has testified before his grand jury—indicating a line of inquiry that hasn’t resulted in any public charges but is somehow central to Mueller’s underlying investigation.

Qatar itself evidently gathered information about the UAE’s campaign to influence Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner but opted against handing it over to Mueller. The special counsel has also been looking into Kushner’s friend Rick Gerson, in part over another, separate meeting in the Seychelles in 2017. Unlike the probe into Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Mueller hasn’t handed this thread of the investigation off to another office, which appears to indicate that in ways not yet clear to the general public, the UAE and Qatari questions are related to the underlying Russia probe. This open line of inquiry could be related to why Kushner has still not been able to receive the highest level of security clearance for his work at the White House.

3. What role did Sergey Kislyak, the GOP convention, and the finances of the Russian Embassy play?

The former Russian ambassador to the US (who was replaced in September by Anatoly Antonov) has been a puzzling figure over the nearly 18 months since the investigation began. It was his meetings with now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention—a convention that saw still unexplained attempts to make the platform more pro-Russia—that led to Rosenstein taking charge of the investigation. And ongoing revelations about meetings with Sessions and Jared Kushner and telephone calls with Michael Flynn have given him a shadowy Rasputin-like presence in the entire affair.


As the full scope of the Russian effort becomes clear, it’s all but certain that such a high-level, coordinated attack would have never been attempted against the US without Kislyak’s knowledge; he was—and is—a well-wired, savvy, loyal, longtime diplomat, a native Ukrainian who chose to remain Russian when the Soviet Union broke apart and whose term as ambassador coincided with increased espionage efforts against the US (at least one of which involved attempting to recruit future Trump aide Carter Page).

Add to all of that the news from Buzzfeed that Mueller is scrutinizing numerous suspicious payments and cash withdrawals from the embassy as well as hints about how Russians like Alexander Torshin might have sought to cultivate the National Rifle Association and Mueller’s apparent interest in the NRA’s funding, and it seems like the special counsel is zeroing in on the way Russian money might have flowed through the American campaign illegally.

4. How do Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and other Americans and Brits fit into the GRU indictment?

As Rosenstein noted, the GRU indictment stopped short of charges against anyone who interacted with the Russian hackers who masqueraded as “Guccifer 2.0,” but there are lots of bread crumbs about those interactions in the indictment that could, with additional facts, be grounds for possible criminal charges. A US congressional campaign solicited and received files on its opponent from Russia. Guccifer 2.0 interacted with “another entity,” certainly Wikileaks, about leaking the stolen Democratic files and the best timing to do so.

And longtime Trump aide Roger Stone says he thinks his interactions with Guccifer 2.0 are mentioned in the indictment too—perhaps not surprising, since Stone notably tweeted in August 2016 that it will soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel,” months after the GRU had stolen Podesta’s emails but months before they were released publicly.


There are numerous previous indications that Mueller is keenly focused on Wikileaks and Stone. At least seven Stone associates have been questioned by Mueller’s team, including Stone’s social media aide last month and the sometimes-twitchy Trump adviser Sam Nunberg back in March.

FBI agents that same month intercepted another informal adviser at the airport in Boston to ask about Wikileaks and Stone. Stone himself has even made the odd statement that he’s “prepared” to be indicted. Stone associate Michael Caputo, another Trump campaign aide, told ABC back in March after being interviewed by Mueller’s team that the questions posed to him were focused on Stone: “In general they're talking about, you know, Guccifer and DCLeaks and Wikileaks. They’re talking about the timing of some things that happened at the campaign and at the convention.”

Beyond just Stone, there are numerous open questions about Wikileaks, identified only as “Organization 1” in Friday’s indictments. Relatedly, Mueller appears to have zeroed in on British politician Nigel Farage and other self-described “Bad Boys of Brexit,” including businessman Aaron Banks, who met repeatedly with the Russian ambassador in the UK as the Brexit campaign unfolded.

5. What did Mueller learn from George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn?

Perhaps the most notable unanswered question in the Trump investigation so far is what Papadopoulos (whose loose lips kicked off the entire original FBI probe), former Manafort business partner Rick Gates, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn all traded for leniency in their own guilty pleas. Mueller has handed out nearly 200 criminal charges so far against dozens of targets. And yet—by all appearances—not a single one of those charges have stemmed from information provided by his cooperating witnesses. What did they give Mueller?


At the same time, the special counsel appears to be moving toward sentencing Papadopoulos, meaning that his role in the investigation might be nearing an end, while Flynn’s role will apparently continue into the fall. At the same time, though, it seems clear that Flynn is under the impression that he will off scot-free: His team announced this past week, prematurely it appears, that he plans to join a new DC consulting firm—not exactly the behavior of someone who thinks he’s heading to federal prison.

6. What’s in those 291,000 Michael Cohen documents?

The investigation into Trump lawyer and consigliere Cohen was spun off to New York federal prosecutors and appears to be moving quickly—a federal judge put Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against Cohen on hold because of the likelihood he will soon be indicted. We know that prosecutors seized upward of 291,000 items from Cohen and that Cohen has been steadily dropping hints in recent days that he’s preparing to cooperate with prosecutors, including changing his Twitter bio to reflect he’s no longer Trump’s lawyer. What crimes will Michael Cohen be charged with—and what can he tell prosecutors in exchange for leniency?

7. What’s up with that Trump Tower meeting?

The email to Donald Trump Jr. from Rob Goldstone that kicked off the now infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 has always appeared as if it were picking up on a previous conversation. Goldstone wrote, in part, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” a phrase that seems to indicate that he knows Don Jr. is already aware that Russia is supporting his father. Why was it phrased that way? And what transpired at the meeting with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya—and after?


Nearly every Trump campaign figure of consequence was in the room—Manafort, Kushner, and Don Jr.—and we now know the meeting came just as Russia ramped up its efforts with the IRA and GRU to hurt Hillary and help Trump. The fallout from that meeting, as it became public last summer, appears to be a central part of Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice. If Mueller’s probe can be thought of as five distinct inquiries, this final obstruction question is the only one he has left uncharged—for now.

8. How relevant is Cambridge Analytica and was there a coordinated effort by the Trump campaign or associates to gather intelligence or untoward opposition research on Hillary Clinton?

We know that Mueller has been examining the notorious—and now defunct—data firm behind Trump’s victory that was funded by top GOP donor Robert Mercer, including interviewing former employees and the banks that worked with it. Investigators have evidently told those one-time employees that their focus is on the firm and “associated US persons,” a phrase that seems to imply interest in as-yet-unknown Americans coordinating with the British firm.

But that’s just one part of a spate of loose threads regarding the tech efforts of the Trump campaign in 2016, including a series of Wall Street Journal interviews with longtime Republican operative Peter Smith (just days before he killed himself last spring) in which he outlined how he’d assembled a team to find Hillary’s stolen emails in the summer of 2016. Smith said at the time he was working with Flynn, but there are more unanswered questions than answers about the entire effort.

Focusing on the same timeframe, Mueller’s GRU indictment seems to go out of its way to connect Trump’s famous July 2016 “Russia if you’re listening” comments to the fact that the GRU hackers began to attack Clinton’s personal email accounts after business hours that same day. Given that federal indictments are carefully written and edited mercilessly, it seems impossible to imagine that that phrasing was included by happenstance.

9. Do people like Carter Page and Felix Sater matter?

It’s hard to keep track of the numerous figures who float in and out of the Trump-Mueller-Russia investigation orbit; some, like Michael Caputo, may not end up mattering at all in the final outcome. Yet there are others, like Carter Page—who was a target of a federal counterintelligence surveillance warrant through much of 2016—and Felix Sater, a one-time intelligence asset himself, who may be bit players in the entire matter or may end up proving to be consequential figures.

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Frankfooter said:

You haven't been following the story. There are 9 different avenues people are watching for the Mueller investigation. Putin funnelling money through the NRA for anti-Clinton ads is just one of those 9 ways Putin subverted US democracy.


https://www.wired.com/story/what-robert-mueller-knowsand-9-areas-hell-pursue-next/

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Butler1000 said:

Which has nothing to do with Trump......

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Boober69 said:

Word has it that they found the Russian's they were colluding with...

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Frankfooter said:

Bullshit.
Trump's campaign manager goes to trial in a few weeks, his secretary of state plead guilty. His son arranged a meeting.
Roger Stone says he reported only directly to Trump, he's up next.

You're kidding yourself.

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bver_hunter said:

This lady cosying up to Trump: Trump told her that he liked Putin in 2015. Trump says then that we do not want sanctions with Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGj3btgPZ3w

Now she gets arrested.

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Butler1000 said:

In the video she asked a question on his foreign policy stance from a crowded room.

Do you have any evidence then ever met privately and any promises and or exchanges made.

If that is your definition of cosey up you have the worst live life.......

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