Follow-up on yesterday’s release of Glenn Simpson‘s testimony by Dianne Feinstein where Fusion GPS literally destroyed all credibility of Bill Browder and undermined the Congressional arguments for the anti-Russian Magnitsky Act under president Obama. Steps towards some transparency at last?
○ Fusion GPS Transcript of Testimony Released
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sues BuzzFeed for publishing Steele dossier | NBC News |
A personal lawyer for President Donald Trump filed a defamation action against the website Buzzfeed on Tuesday for publishing a 35-page dossier alleging that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia.
The lawyer, Michael Cohen, provided NBC News with a copy of the lawsuit, which was filed in New York State Supreme Court.
Cohen has consistently and strongly denied any personal role in Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, both publicly and when he appeared before the House and Senate intelligence committees in October.
More below the fold …
In the action, Cohen highlights several allegations in the dossier that he says are provably false. For example, the dossier claimed that Cohen’s wife is Russian and that her father is a leading property developer in Russia, allowing Cohen to carry on a possibly criminal relationship with the Russian government.
The suit says Cohen’s wife was born in Ukraine, immigrated to the United States more than 40 years ago and “has never been to Russia.” Her father, it says, has been to Russia only once.
Enough is enough of the #fake #RussianDossier. Just filed a defamation action against @BuzzFeedNews for publishing the lie filled document on @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and me!
— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) 10 January 2018
Ben Smith, Buzzfeed’s editor, who is a named respondent in the lawsuit, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times on Tuesday night that he was proud to have published the dossier, saying “a year of government inquiries and blockbuster journalism has made clear that the dossier is unquestionably real news.”
Timeline 2014-2015
2014
- Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, which were written for an unidentified private client and shared with the U.S. State Department; sent to Secretary of State John Kerry and Victoria Nuland [transcript].
- The FBI obtains a FISA warrant to surveil Paul Manafort in 2014, based on his political consulting work in Ukraine. Were Steele’s reports used to obtain the 2014 authorization to surveil Manafort?
- Ukrainian President Yanukovych was forced to flee Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, following a coup d’etat by followers of Ukrainian World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. According to Stephen Dorril, author of MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, Bandera’s organization, OUN-B, was re-formed in 1946 under the sponsorship of MI6. The organization had been receiving some support from MI6 since the 1930s. Bandera was recruited by MI6 to work in London in 1948. Bandera’s second in command, Mykola Lebed, was brought to New York City in the same year by the CIA’s Allen Dulles.
- Flynn wrote a letter in 2014 on behalf of Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz on his official Pentagon stationery. He gave a public interview in 2015 supporting Gritz and offered to testify on her behalf. His offer put him as a hostile witness in a case against McCabe, who was accused by Gritz of sexual discrimination. McCabe never recused himself from Flynn investigation.
2015
- McCabe attends a meeting in March 2015 with Clinton ally Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, for the purpose of gaining support for his wife Jill McCabe to run for state legislature against State Senator Richard Black, a leading opponent of Obama’s regime change policy and supporter of General Flynn. McCabe is now being investigated for violation of the Hatch Act.
- Donald Trump announces candidacy for President on June 16, 2015.
- GCHQ surveilled Trump associates beginning late 2015. The alleged intelligence was passed to the United States over the next several months.
Previous diaries on this topic …
○ British Intelligence Delivers Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’
○ Fusion GPS linked to UAE Sheikh and Rubio Donor
○ Another British Spook Stands Up to Vent His Opinions
○ The Trail of VP Alperovitch @CrowdStrike
Further reading …
How Trump walked into Putin’s web | The Guardian | by Luke Harding
The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russia’s influence on Trump – and
uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years.
○ NSA directors defend surveillance tactics in Congressional hearing | The Guardian – Oct. 2013 |
○ Bruce Schneier on the Steele Dossier plus comments (Jan. 2017)
Note for esquimaux: for the West jihadists are freedom fighters, for most other nations they are terrorists. See Afghanistan – Chechnya – Kosovo – Iraq – Libya – Syria. The Colour Revolutions are mostly coup d’états funded and encouraged by western intelligence agencies, NGO’s, and oligarchs looking for profit and exploitation. Accepted facts everywhere except in puritan America. The new US ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, will be reformed by Dutch tolerance within his term of four years … I expect Pete to leave a frustrated man. With emigrants of a backward religion, the first generation tend to be more conservative than their parents and cling to values of the 1950s. Poor man, fortunately he found a home with the Trumpistas of the GOP … destroying America. Holland had 400 years of economic cooperation with the America’s, it’s about to end. Europe will in the short term look Eastward to China and … yes, Russia for economic ties. Brexit and Trump came just-in-time for deliverance.
○ The slow and steady death of Dutch Reformed church
The bloggers @BooMan used to be left and progressive … many have lost their feathers:
○ This revolution is NOT being televised
○ America’s New Cold War
○ Modus Operandi of Sniper Killings: Color Revolutions Red
Today the Democrats are pursuing an anti-Russia stance along with the likes of John McCain … just unbelievable. Who needs an enemy? Russia is militarily powerless as Obama stated: a regional power at best. So the US leadership is threatening with low yield nuclear bombs for the battle field? Insane, inhuman and purely genocidal.
>>a coup d’etat by followers of Ukrainian World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera
if you want to convince people that you’re a tool, reading a script provided by Russia, there’s no better way to do it than talking about Bandera.
You refused to answer my question in your other diary: do Russia’s neighbors have the right to independence? Yes or no.
A counter-question:
Do individual states now within the U.S. have a right to independence?
Also yes or no.
AG
P.S. While I’m at it…
How about parts of states that have akmost no real cultural, political or economic relationship to other parts of the same state. Say the NYC area as opposed to almost all of the rest of the state, which…on extensive personal experience and observation over decades…more resembles say West Virginia or rural Pennsylvania than the NYC area and its extensive suburbs.
What say you?
Yea or nay?
thanks for sidetracking my attempt to get Oui to answer a question. No straight answers allowed, just whataboutism.
No, US states have no right to secede, that was settled 150 years ago.
It’s a valid question. Not that there’s any U.S. state, territory, or satellite that has had an historical relationship to the USA for as long as that of Russia and Ukraine. Plus, none of them have had the quasi-independence from the USA in international law as Ukraine has had since the end of WWII — it’s been a UN member state and occasionally a member of the Security Council.
Other than Vietnam, name a country where the US established military bases since 1941 that have subsequently been totally relinquished? Once in (and often by force), we never seem to leave. Not even when the people in the country continuously request that we do so.
Maybe it needs to be “settled” again.
Q-Historically, how long do “settlements” really last?
A-As long as the dominant partner in the ‘settlement” has the power to enforce them.
When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, for example, any number of settlements regarding what countries were and were not parts of that union evaporated in a mater of weeks and months.
What’s that you say? The U.S. is not yet at that point?
Right you are.
And right I am in saying that it is now closer to being at that point than it has been at any time since the pre-Civil War era. If the Trumpsters and the anti-Trumpsters continue their own little civil war past easily imagined boundaries, we may be in for a collapse that would make the U.S.S.R’s final problems look like an internecine family fight over paltry inheritances.
What happens if the threatened “government shutdown” that has long been so well hyped…and equally well used as a cudgel to scare the rubes…actually happens?
Your undoubted…if not made clear on this blog…response will be “Oh…that will never happen!!! We are too great a country!!!”
That’s what the Russians thought.
Until it did.
Entiltlement and exceptionalism squared, by self-congratulatory squares like you.
As the great sign-off of the wonderful post-Depression Bob and Ray radio show went:
And Arthur Gilroy reminding you to…WTFU!!!
Buh-bye…
AG
Just got front-paged @EuroTrib
○ Europe’s Frontier: A Rusted Iron Curtain
Thanks Frank! So it goes …
It’s a valid question, Oui. Also your choice of words does sound like guilt by association.
Assume you mean Oui’s words in the diary as Oui hasn’t commented in this sub-thread.
Agree that it’s a problem with this diary and partially informed my comment below.
Should also add that “guilt by association” is rampant in this country and is seriously interfering with the public’s ability to objectively analyze information and have rational and civil conversations.
Correct.
I’m not going to comment on anything to do with Simpson’s testimony until I’ve completed reading the whole thing (I’m on page 249) and absorbed, thought about, re-read whatever section may need more than one reading, and performed fact-checks as needed and can be done. IOW, I’m not going to rely on secondary (third, fourth, etc-hand) reports from anyone as to what Simpson said in the hearing.
So far, it’s far more interesting than what’s being reported. Suggests lots of questions that have never been posed. But again, I first want to consider it in its totality.
Before posting the diary I read the first 60 pages which related to the Bean LLC holding and organization. This part covered Fusion GPS under contract with Russian oligarch to counter the corrupt tax evader William Browder and the anti-Russia Magnitsky Act.
I intend to read the rest and take notes. I don’t get it why Feinstein went on the solitary tour and released the transcript. Acting as stooge for the IC? What purpose?
One of many curiosities. Will comment further on this point after completing the task. However and so far, acting as a stooge for the IC is too contraindicated to consider. Although it’s possible that she didn’t read and comprehend it or relied on a deeply flawed staff summary of it. A poorly thought out defensive move, IMO. (Not that I’m objecting to being allowed to read it.)
Passing Orbis Memo’s to UK and US Governments by Oui @BooMan on April 29, 2017
It was Fusion GPS in Washington DC who gave Orbis the contract to find dirt between the Trump campaign and Russia!
[Highlights and links added to article are mine – Oui]
More links from my diary …
○ BuzzFeed has redacted Gubarev’s name from the document and apologized
○ Trump’s lawyer launches legal action against BuzzFeed for publishing `completely fabricated’ dossier
○ How Ex-Spy Christopher Steele Compiled His Explosive Trump-Russia Dossier | Vanity Fair – March 2017 |
Only questions supposed to be asked about contacts with Russian nationals, not of any other … especially not the UK/Brexit or Ukrainian collusion.
LATEST NEWS BITS …
○ Plaintiff’s lawyer in Russia dossier suit says they’ve discovered BuzzFeed’s source
○ Top Democrats accuse GOP of ignoring Russia threat in letter to Speaker Paul Ryan
Frivolous suit, meant to intimidate.
This thinly veiled Kremlin propaganda is not fooling me, Oui.
Keep it at Moon of Alabama or I’ll have to put a stop to it.