Tuesday, May 15th.
COHEN: FOLLOW THE MONEY
- Michael Avenatti doubles down on his threat to sue the Daily Caller
- Michael Avenatti Posts Photos Of Cohen With Qatari Investor Accused Of Bribery
- Michael Avenatti is using Trump-like tactics to battle Trump. But that may carry risks for his client.
- Qatari investor confirms he attended Trump Tower meetings in 2016
“Mr. Al-Rumaihi was at Trump Tower on December 12, 2016. He was there in his then role as head of Qatar Investments, an internal division of QIA, to accompany the Qatari delegation that was meeting with Trump transition officials on that date,” said a spokesperson for Sport Trinity, a company that Al-Rumaihi co-owns. “He did not participate in any meetings with Michael Flynn, and his involvement in the meetings on that date was limited.”
This is confirmation.
THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION
- Michael Cohen’s Meetings With Michael Flynn and a Qatari Diplomat Might Be the Key to Unlocking the Steele Dossier
- A Judge Just Denied Paul Manafort’s Motion To Dismiss The Indictment Against Him In DC
- Judge: Special counsel had authority to prosecute Manafort
- Russian Troll Farm Hijacked American Teen Girls’ Computers for Likes
- The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in the Vietnam War
- The Justice Department can’t give Devin Nunes what he wants without burning British intelligence
- Mueller: Secret Court Order Suspended Statute Of Limitations On Manafort Charge
Because investigators were relying on a foreign government to produce certain evidence, Mueller last June asked a magistrate judge in Virginia to suspend the statute of limitations on the charge that Manafort failed to to file a Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR), according to the filing. Mueller ultimately brought that charge against Manafort in February. The judge’s decision granting Mueller’s request to suspend the statute of limitations was previously under seal, but was included in Monday’s filings.
Think about the timing of this court order. June 26, 2017, three days before Statute of Limitations ran out. Also about 6 weeks after the Mueller Investigation began, and 4 months before Manafort was indicted.
Mueller’s team was months ahead of everyone else almost a year ago.
COLD WAR 2.0: THE JUDEO-SINO EDITION
Israel
- Nothing says ‘peace’ like 58 dead Palestinians
- At least 55 dead, 1,200 wounded in Gaza protests as U.S. Embassy opens in Jerusalem
- Half of evangelicals support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy
- U.S. Blocks Security Council Statement Calling for Investigation Into Gaza Violence
- Israel Kills Dozens of Unarmed Protesters in Gaza as Jared Kushner Speaks of Peace, in Jerusalem
- A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem
- ‘DADDY’S LITTLE GHOUL’: New York Daily News Rips Ivanka Trump Over Embassy Opening
China
- Why Trump Is Suddenly Worried About Saving Jobs in China: 6 Theories
- Schiff: Trump deal with ZTE a ‘violation of the emoluments clause
- The President* Is Tap Dancing on the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution
- Yep, That $500 M from China to Trump Project Looks Like a Pretty Big Deal
- ‘See You in Court’: With China Funding New Trump Resort Project, President in Clear Violation of Constitution
- Trump Orders Help For Chinese Phone-Maker After China Approves Money For Trump Project
- Blumenthal, et al. v. Trump
Senator Richard Blumenthal, along with other members of Congress, have sued President Donald Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution.
North Korea
- Report: North Korea threatens to cancel Trump summit
- N Korea cancels talks with South Korea and warns US
WHITE HOUSE CHAOS
- Donald Trump Was Not at the Hospital with Wife Melania for Surgical Procedure That Blind-Sided Her Friends
- ‘This Is a Big Deal’: Fearing ‘Public Relations Nightmare,’ Pruitt’s EPA Blocked Release of a Major Water Contamination Study
- Worried about a ‘public relations nightmare,’ White House and EPA aides worked to block contaminated water study
- White House thought burying a report about poison drinking water was a great idea
- Scott Pruitt’s vision of a ‘lean’ EPA includes spending a lot of money on himself
- Ana Navarro: ‘White House is irritated John McCain is not dying of cancer’
- Veterans group urges Senate to back McCain, block Haspel in ad
- Doug Jones to oppose Haspel as CIA chief
- Haspel says CIA should not have conducted interrogation program
- Mitch McConnell calls for White House aide to publicly apologize for McCain comments
- Trump’s pick to run Labor’s pension agency: Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law
- Anderson Cooper Claims Trump’s White House Has Been Instructed Not To Issue Apologies
#NEVERAGAIN
- 2 parents of murdered Parkland teens run together for Broward school board
- March for Our Lives organizer: Media has stopped talking about Parkland shooting, but we are still working
- Why More Than 90 Percent Of Gun Owners Don’t Join The NRA
- Help Us Ban Bump Stocks – Giffords
- I’m 18 and Gun Violence Walkouts Inspired My Run for Office Meet Gabrielle Anzalone, who is running for the board of education in her area. teenvogue.com
GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD
- Obama inauguration CEO: Trump spent 4x more, for a smaller crowd
- ‘Tricked by the devil.’ They backed Trump. Now, his foreign labor cuts may ruin them.
- The End of Trump Won’t Be the End of Trumpism
- Almost all teachers spend their own money on school needs: study
- Not An Onion Story: Blake Farenthold Gets A New Job Lobbying Congress
THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE
FIXING THE INTERNET
The federal investigation in the United States appears to focus on the company’s financial dealings — investigators have reached out to the company’s banks, for instance — and how it acquired and used personal data pulled from Facebook and other sources, according to the American official, who was briefed on the inquiry, and other people familiar with it.
In a sign of the inquiry’s scope, one of the prosecutors involved is the assistant chief of the Justice Department’s securities and financial fraud division, Brian Kidd. The effort is being assisted by at least one agent who investigates cybercrime for the F.B.I., those people said.
Mr. Kidd traveled to London earlier this month with another Justice Department prosecutor and an F.B.I. agent to interview Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who has emerged as one of the firm’s fiercest critics.
Seeing this puts a smile on my face. Check out the Rumor Mill for a little scoop.
- Huge new Facebook data leak exposed intimate details of 3m users | New Scientist
- Facebook suspends ~200 suspicious apps out of “thousands” reviewed so far – TechCrunch
- Kristen Stewart ditches high heels to go barefoot at Cannes – BBC News
I had no where else to put this last story, but the comment section was dripping with a bunch of misogynistic trolls.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
- Sally Yates warns of Trump ‘tearing down the legitimacy’ of the Justice Department
- U.S. identifies suspect in major leak of CIA hacking tools
Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, is believed to have provided the agency’s top-secret information to WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors acknowledged in a hearing in January. The anti-secrecy group published the code under the label “Vault 7” in March 2017.
It was one of the most significant leaks in the CIA’s history, exposing secret cyberweapons and spying techniques that might be used against the United States, according to current and former intelligence officials. Some argued that the Vault 7 disclosures could cause more damage to American intelligence efforts than those by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He revealed extraordinary details about the capabilities of the United States to spy on computers and phones around the world, but the Vault 7 leaks showed how such spying is actually done, the current and former officials argued.
If this fucker was behind Vault 7, then he deserves what comes.
The Vault 7 Project was masterminded by Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who openly works with Russian Intelligence. He enticed Americans to betray their country under the guise of “accountability and transparency” to release these cybersecurity tools. In reality, these were given to Russian Intelligence and handed off to Iran. Within two months, these tools were used to design WannaCry and NotPetya.
BLUE WAVE
- Solar energy in California: We’ll never go to war to take another country’s sunshine
- House Dem: Money at the heart of Trump’s decisions on China, Russia, Turkey
- Fighting the Trump Agenda: A Step-by-Step Guide
- POLITICO’s guide to Tuesday’s primary elections – POLITICO
RUMOR MILL
Remember Tea Pain’s Alfa Bank research? (Daily Check-In 02/20/2018) Here’s a link to an updated version of the story. If what he has to say is accurate, shit’s about to get interesting.
Short version: The Trump Tower Mystery Server (TTMS) had 99% of its communications where it served as the middle man between a server associated to an IP for Alfa Bank in Russia and one for Spectrum Health. However, there were three other pings on that server. (A ping is an attempt at communication from one computer to another, offend done through the command line prompt or a networking tool. The ping sends a request for acknowledgment, and if successful gets a return message. It’s named for the same process used by radar and sonar devices to locate targets.)
One ping belonged to an IT company in Kansas City, and only during the server set up. This is likely from the company that set the server up.
The next came from, hell, I’ll let Tea Pain explain it…
The first ping Tea sleuthed out was Obit.RU. The “RU” extension was the first dead giveaway. Yep, that means “Russia.” But wait, as Billy Mays used to say, there’s more! Obit.RU is a Russian telecommunications company whose website boasts of representin’ Concord Catering, the company owned by the notorious Russian troll farmer, Yevgeny Prigozhin. That’s right, ol’ Putin’s Chef himself. He’s the godfather of the Internet Research Agency that Bob Mueller has indicted for messin’ with our 2016 election.
So, we have a ping to an obscure server from a server owned by the Troll Farm’s ISP. That’s a little bit more than suspect.
The final communication to the server came from NewsCorp/Cambridge Analytica.
Now hold on to your pantaloons, cause this next part might knock ’em off entirely. “News.com.au” is owned by ol’ Rupert Murdoch’s “News Corp”, who’s American headquarters is located at 1211 Avenue of the America’s in New York City. That’s interestin’ in and of itself, but Tea Pain just discovered that until October 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s New York office was in the very same building.
Here’s the thing that’s weird to me… There were only 5 contacts, and one of them was the tech setting up the server. No random ping from a war walker, no contact from another server in Trump Org, not even a ping from an Infosec sweep. That is suspicious AF.
This story’s gonna break big, and you read it here first. Or second.
- Was Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani in the elevator too?
- Rogue Senior Advisor has a podcast. I listened to it this morning.
That’s it for today. Nothing extra tonight. Tomorrow’s post will be pretty light. At least, that’s the plan. Watch tomorrow be the day that shit goes sideways with Ice Cube capping some fool from QIA and Mike Pence gets busted for having an underage black boyfriend.
If that does happen, I don’t know if I should apologize or not.
Thank you, and have a good one.
“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”
– Katy Tur
None of this is Normal 
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