Tag: Media

Daily Check-In 12/28/2018

Friday, December 28, 2018

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

New Jersey prosecutors have collected evidence that supervisors at President Trump’s Garden State golf club may have committed federal immigration crimes — and the FBI as well as special counsel Robert Mueller have played part in the inquiry, the Daily News has learned.

Anibal Romero, a Newark attorney who represents several undocumented immigrants who used to work at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, said Friday he recently met with investigators from the state attorney general’s office and handed over fraudulent green cards and Social Security numbers that management at the club allegedly procured and gave his clients, Victorina Morales and Sandra Diaz.

…

Before he met with the state prosecutors, Romero said he reached out to Mueller’s office because, while he wanted to contact federal authorities, he was concerned about looping in the Justice Department, which was headed by Jeff Sessions at the time.

“I wasn’t sure, one, if they’d take me seriously and, two, if this could backfire on my clients,” Romero told The News, referencing the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda.

Mueller’s office, which is separately investigating Trump’s campaign for possible collusion with Russians during the 2016 election, made contact and informed Romero the matter was not within their jurisdiction.

A few weeks later, an FBI agent in New Jersey called Romero.

“He said to me that he had received a referral from Robert Mueller’s office and that he already knew the specifics and that he wanted to meet with me in person,” Romero said.

Romero then met with two agents at a federal office in Branchburg, N.J., and outlined the same evidence he had already given the AG prosecutors. The agents said they would “coordinate” with the AG’s office, according to Romero.

Romero said he’s stayed in touch with the FBI and the attorney general’s office but declined to confirm whether either of the agencies have formally opened investigations.

“I’m confident that federal and state authorities will conduct a complete and thorough investigation,” Romero said.

Remember the story a few weeks ago about Trump’s Bedminster club in New Jersey employing illegal immigrants, and they were provided with fake SSN cards and paperwork by the resort? (Daily Check-In 12/06/2018) It’s another one of those stories that got lost in the shuffle of a crazy day, but the short version is that Trump’s Bedminster golf club and resort hired at least 5 illegal immigrants.  To get them on the payroll, the supervisors at the company produced fake paperwork like Social Security Cards for the illegals.

This is… highly illegal.  So illegal that the lawyer for the illegal workers went to the New Jersey Attorney General and Bobby Three Sticks.  Since this isn’t directly associated to Russia, they said it wasn’t their jurisdiction but did refer it to the FBI New Jersey office.

Nothing like an investigation across multiple sovereignties to raise the holiday spirits.

 

SHUTDOWN

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

IMMIGRATION

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

56% of all abortions are by white women. 89% of which consider themselves Christian. Instead of being up in my mentions pretending you give a #%#* about black babies being aborted, you hypocritical evangelicals need to go have a talk with your own wives, daughters & mistresses.

You hypocritical bigots talking about black abortions are the same ones who want to take away healthcare & assistance programs from the Black women you want to have the babies, stereotype them as irresponsible & promiscuous, and label the kids as ‘thugs’ when cops murder them.

All while you erroneously use the ‘immorality’ of Black people to sound your fake moral alarm, you evangelical ‘christians’ are supporting pedophiles, rapists & sexual predators for elected office & think a porn star banging unrepentant racist pathological liar is God‘s anointed.

When it comes to the vile, degenerate profligacy of your morally deficient ‘anointed’ leader in the WH, you evangelical charlatans bend over backwards lowering the standards of moral living to excuse away his malfeasance in the name of grace, which you never offer anyone else.

Evangelicals use ‘Black abortions’ as a racist cudgel to delegitimize Black Lives Matter. They minimize the legitimate grievance of the extra judicial murder of Blacks by police because of abortion, a practice legalized by white Republican judges to benefit white women.

Evangelicals harp on ‘Black abortions’ but turn a blind eye to their GOP heroes like Scott Lloyd, Elliott Broidy, Tim Murphy, & Scott DesJarlais, who push anti abortion legislation while simultaneously knocking up their mistresses/girlfriends and insisting they have abortions.

There is something very wrong with your theological and political ideology when your “pro life“ champion is a POTUS who tried to have his daughter Tiffany aborted and has paid for at least eight other mistresses to have abortions.

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

RUMOR MILL

This is gonna give me nightmares for a while.  Macs are much harder to get into and pwn, but it is possible.  The Fruitfly malware took advantage of three elements to get access to a system.

  1. Users leaving the default functionalities like Back to My Mac open.
  2. Weak or no passwords
  3. Most Mac users don’t run antivirus software.

I could go into the specific details and fill a couple papers with the security differences between Windows and MacOS, but the short version is that MacOS s a Unix operating system with a really pretty front end.  Because it’s Unix, functionality for different user roles is sandboxed off from each other.  This makes standard virus exposure just from visiting a site next to impossible, but like I’ve said before in Voter Rolls – The Easy Target, there’s more than one way into a system.

Most Mac malware infections come from either phishing attacks or trojans.  Both require the user doing something stupid.  Given a lifetime around computers and their users, I can categorically say the weakest part of any computer security system is the user.

Where Fruitfly differs is that the infector installed it directly on the computer using built-in backdoors for Apple software like Apple File Protocol or Back to My Mac.  These programs would default to a set number of ports on the computer.  The infector would scan those port numbers (which is actually pretty easy to do) and see what was there.  If they came back with the default apps, the infector would try to connect to the Mac.  If he hit little or no resistance on the user name and password, he would go in and install his little program buried so deep in the computer that nothing would find it.  He’d then use that program to occasionally connect back to his server and upload pics from the target computers.

If the port numbers didn’t have the default apps, he wouldn’t go further.  That means that either the apps he needs to use as a backdoor are either offline or moved.  If they’re offline, he can’t get in.  If they’re changed, then he’s dealing with a power user, and if they’re going to the trouble of changing port numbers, then they probably have a bunch of booby traps and tough passwords.

This also explains why Back to My Mac was discontinued in Mac OS Mojave a few months ago.

What’s Ming getting at?  I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear about Republican operatives trying to use similar methods to pwn various devices of Democrats and others.

Daily Check-In 12/20/2018 first mentioned this story, but Sara breaks down a very peculiar past for Brian Kolfage.  This is definitely worth a read, but the main takeaway is that starting in 2011 he went from organizing for Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona to getting caught up in Sheriff Joe’s shenanigans in Maricopa County.  Joe Arpaio is “allegedly” mobbed up to his neck, and this Kolfage guy bounced around from Arizona to Ukraine (while Manafort was there) to Florida.

Also, this GoFundMe attracted A LOT of attention from the Russians.

This is the part that historians will point out that this is the third shutdown in 2018, and the only times that a shutdown occurred when one party had control of the White House, the Senate, and the House.  That’s like an NFL team losing a game to a High School JV team, and accusing the JV team of cheating.

This is once again splitting hairs on the Cohen Prague story, but is worth a deeper look.  Louise’s sources said that Cohen’s device accessed the hotel WiFi, but didn’t say if it was a phone, tablet, or laptop.  Other sources are saying it was one of his phones that pinged cell phone towers.  It’s possible they could both be correct.  If Cohen used his laptop at the hotel to check his mail, his phone could independently contact the cell tower.  I talked about how that works yesterday. (Daily Check-In 12/27/2018)

There is so much shady shit going on in Dubai and the related area that anyone tied to Erik Prince should be very, very worried right now.

Remember, Rand Paul hand delivered a letter from Trump for Putin. (Daily Check-In 08/08/2018)  That’s not standard operating procedure for an open and clear communication channel.  That’s the kind of shit spies and mobsters do.

I’m going to make a Jill Stein/Green Party primer, so that any time someone pulls some Pro-Stein bullshit, I can send them a list of her shadiest shit.

So, sometime in the next few weeks, get ready for this story to drop.  By the way, accepting hacked emails is a crime.  Especially if they came from a foreign government and were meant to sway an election.

 

That’s it for Friday.  I’m going to start on my retrospective piece in the next few hours, along with other some work on the site.  It’s time to update the Russian Hypothesis and create a page for the Grand Bargain Theory.

Like I said yesterday, I’m putting the weekend on Monday’s post, and starting fresh on Tuesday with a new year.  I also want to do some housecleaning on the site.  One idea is to go through the Daily Check-In Collection and put a quick blurb next to each day with the highlights.  It might help with navigating the site.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

 

 

Daily Check-In 12/27/2018

Thursday, December 27, 2018

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON – A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

…

Both of the newly surfaced foreign electronic intelligence intercepts were shared with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter said. Mueller is investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether Trump’s campaign colluded in the scheme. Mueller also is examining whether Trump has obstructed the sweeping inquiry.

McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller had obtained evidence Cohen traveled to Prague from Germany in late August or early September of 2016, but it could not be learned how that information was gleaned.

If the foreign intelligence intercepts are accurate, the big questions now are whether Cohen has acknowledged to investigators that a meeting in Prague occurred, informed them what transpired and revealed what, if anything, he told Trump about it.

Four people spoke with McClatchy on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of information shared by their foreign intelligence connections. Each obtained their information independently from foreign intelligence connections.

The story they’re talking about was released on Daily Check-In 04/13/2018, but the new part is McClatchy has more sources and each source is independent of one another.  So they’ve got four spooks saying that an Eastern European Nation **coughRomanianscough** were listening to the Russians and caught them talking about meeting with Michael Cohen.  Even better, one of Cohen’s phones was caught pinging a cell tower in a suburb of Prague in 2016.

Here’s the thing with cell phone towers.  If your phone has even the slightest amount of battery charge, it’s going to try to get a signal.  It will send a request out to any nearby cell phone towers, and if one is available, it will respond with a time to return the message.  Since we’re dealing with electricity and the speed of light, this happens in milliseconds.  If there’s only one tower in range, there will be a record saying the phone is a certain time away, which can be calculated to a distance pretty easily, but all that means is that the phone is a certain distance from one tower.  Most places, like a major city like Prague, will have multiple towers for the phone to ping.  When multiple distances from known points are calculated together, that is called triangulation.  The triangulation is usually accurate to within 50 feet.  It’s not enough to find it in your apartment, but accurate enough to find what building it’s in.  We’re not even talking about GPS yet, either.

The phone, the tower, and the provider all have a record of this transaction.

I wonder who he supposedly met.

It said Konstantin Kosachev, a longtime member of the Russian Senate and chairman of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “facilitated” the gathering.

Wow.  The same person that Rand Paul met on behalf of the Russian Government also worked on the Cohen Prague meeting.  What a coinkidink.

Jan Neumann, the assumed name of a former Russian intelligence officer who defected to the United States years ago, said that Cohen’s electronic cell tower trail appears to reflect sloppy “tradecraft.”

“You can monitor and control cell phones in Europe same as you do it here in US,” Neumann told McClatchy. “As long as the battery is physically located in the phone, even when it’s turned off, the mobile phone’s approximate location can be detected and tracked. Any attempt to use an app, to get mail, send texts, connect to a Wifi network, your phone and your location will be detected.”

“It would not be very professional to take your phone to a secret meeting,” said Neumann, who has consulted for the U.S. intelligence community. In this case, he said, “it would be more logical to leave it turned on and connected to a WIFI network in a hotel in Germany.”

It was during the same late August-early September time span in 2016 that an Eastern European intelligence agency eavesdropped on a conversation in which a Russian official advised another that Cohen was in Prague, two of the sources said.

The sources could not definitively pin down the date or dates that the intelligence indicated Cohen was in the vicinity of Prague. Cohen has insisted that he was in Southern California with his son from Aug. 23-29, 2016, but his public alibis have not been so airtight as to preclude flights to and from Europe during the relevant period.

-McClatchy, citing 4 sources, says Cohen was in Prague-area in Summer 2016 -2 sources tell me that another major news org has confirmation. -Cohen tweets he has never been to Prague -WSJ says Cohen told them he went to Prague in 2001.

Greg Gordon of McClatchy told a colleague of mine 10 days ago, “We publish what we have nailed down to an editor’s satisfaction…I can’t help noting that I was a Pulitzer finalist and also contributed to our Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Panama Papers three years ago.”

McClatchy has updated their story to include Cohen’s recent denials. Privately to me, a source tells me that they “absolutely” stand by the story.

This is one of the last major pieces from the Steele Dossier that hasn’t been completely confirmed yet, along with the Rosneft sale and the Pee tape.  Even though we’ve seen things pointing to those parts, we haven’t gotten hard confirmation from the mainstream press yet.

Yet.

I guess you could say that we’re making… Prague-ress on this story?

How about that this story… Czech’s out?

The Pun Jar is now at $250.

Most likely, this is a nude selfie of the troll, but it might be worse.  Much worse.  Like Chris Christie or Sam Clovis naked worse.

 

 

 

 

SHUTDOWN: DAY 6

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Whitaker

 

Mercer

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

IMMIGRATION

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

STUDENT ISSUES

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

ELECTIONS

  1. NEW: FEC filings released today reveal Cindy-Hyde Smith is NOT honoring requests from corporations for refunds of their campaign contributions. Union Pacific, Boston Scientific, Walmart, Leidos, AT&T, Pfizer, Ernst & Young, Facebook and Walgreens did not get their money back
  2. Two entities, MLB and Amgen, were able to reverse their contributions but only by canceling their checks. (Cattlemen’s Association refund appears unrelated.)
  3. Hyde-Smith did return money from the majority owner of the San Francisco Giants and his wife. (They are major GOP donors so perhaps there was pressure from above.) She also returned 5K to Peter Zieve after a http://Popular.infothat showed he was an outspoken racist
  4. Hyde-Smith is not legally obligated to return the money, but it may make it harder for her to raise money in the future. It’s like a clothing store that stops accepting returns. She’s strapped for cash. Only about 60K on hand and another election in 2020.
  5. I’ll be continuing to closely monitor this story in 2019. We’ll see who donates when they think no one is watching. To support the independent journalism that forced these companies to repudiate Hyde-Smith, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Popular Information Original research and fresh insight into the political news that matters most. popular.info          

 

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for Thursday.  I’m planning on doing a retrospective piece this weekend along with Friday’s Check-In.  As far as next week, I’d like to not carry anything across the year change, so the weekend and Monday will be one post, then New Year’s Day for another.

There’s also some housecleaning I need to do with this site.  I’d like to get that done as well.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 12/26/2018

Wednesday, December 26, 2018 and the Christmas Holiday.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Roberts on Sunday temporarily halted a contempt order the company is facing for resisting the subpoena, including the fines the company is accruing for defying the subpoena. Roberts’ order is public, but it provided no new details about the case. His move came after the company on Saturday requested the stay, in a filing that is noted in the court’s docket but is not available to be read publicly.

Roberts on Sunday ordered briefing on the matter due by noon on Dec. 31. It is possible those filings will be under seal.

Previously, an appellate court panel upheld the subpoena, in a vaguely worded judgement. The court revealed that the case had been brought by an unnamed company, owned by “Country A,” that had claimed that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act made the company immune from the subpoena. The appellate court affirmed a district court’s decision that said the matter fell within an exception in the law for commercial activities.

Even during a holiday, we still get some Mueller case news.  As far as I know, this is the first time that the Supreme Court will hear a case under seal.  Of course, that’s as far as I know.

 

SHUTDOWN

As of this post, the government has been shut down for almost a week, with no end in sight.  There should be some opportunities for negotiations on Thursday and Friday, but if nothing happens by then, I wouldn’t expect it to end until after the new Congressional session starts on January 3rd.

 

TRADE WAR, HEALTH CARE, & ECONOMY

In the past week, the stock market has started to tank based off of the activity of the last year with the tariffs and the last couple weeks with Trump and Mnuchin being dumbasses at best.  Last week was especially harsh.  Personally, my tiny little portfolio dropped 10 percent IN ONE WEEK.  That’s bad.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A INDIVIDUAL-1

I’m not going to go into the whole Santa thing.  Insulting a child for believing in Santa Claus on Christmas Eve should be a major faux pas in a regular universe, but in this timeline it’s not even the worst or stupidest thing of the week.

For the first time since becoming President, Trump visited troops in something resembling a war zone.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was real or not.  Then, I saw the stories about Trump screwing up.  That was enough proof.

That’s the kind of world we live in.

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Whitaker

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

IMMIGRATION

 

SCOTUS 

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

STUDENT ISSUES

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for the last few days.  I stayed off of Twitter for the last couple days.  It was quite refreshing.  I plan on writing a 2018 retrospective piece in the next couple days.

We’re in the lull of the holidays, but things still happen.  Thursday’s post will include a little something about Cohen’s visit to Prague.  Looks like there’s some …. Prage-ress on that front.

The Pun Jar is now at $243.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 12/21/2018

Friday, December 21, 2018 and the weekend.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Jill Stein

And now, the obligatory picture of Jill Stein…

img_5419

 

Flynn

 

Whitaker

So, after the Cohen guilty plea came out, Trump lost his shit on Whitaker and asked him why he didn’t stop the attorneys in SDNY from naming him as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Obstruction of Justice exhibit #4,398, 209.

 

Reality Check

 

Working During the Shutdown

 

Mystery Subpoena Case

Assuming that SCOTUS hears the case, they’ve never taken one on before that was sealed this tight the whole way up.  That we know of.

 

 

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Here’s the thing with this newest shutdown: Nobody wins in the United States.  If the Democrats cave and give in to the wall, they lose their high ground and will screw themselves in the future with the next shutdown when Trump says he wants more money, which he will.  The only reason he won’t is if he’s gone by February, and that feels a little soon for his ouster.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

ISIS, Syria, Turkey, Mattis, Et. Al.

As much as I hate saying it, everything is connected.

Erdogan wants three things following the Jamal Khashoggi murder.

  1. Mohammed Bone Saw to face charges in the murder.
  2. Gulen sent to him for other crimes.
  3. The U.S. out of Syria.

Since Trump, Kushner, and Pompeo are accessories to murder after the fact, Option 1 isn’t happening.  And as much as Trump want to send Gulen to Turkey, we have this thing called Due Process, so Option 2 is out.  That leaves Option 3.  Trump will order the U.S. out of Syria to cover up his crimes.

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

TRAITOR TOTS

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

IMMIGRATION

GoFundMe, GoFuckYourself

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for the last few days.  This post is very light on the explanations and editorializing because, quite frankly, I’m running out of time.  I’m posting this on Christmas Eve, and I have about 6 hours of cleaning to do in about 2 hours.  It’s not impossible, it’s just a pain in the ass.

I’ll be back in a couple days.  I’ll cover the Christmas holiday and Boxing Day on one post.  I’ll also try to get a couple essays done this week.

Happy Holidays everyone.

To those who Christmas is your thing, Merry Christmas.  If you prefer to celebrate the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Saturnalia, Mithras, Yule, Kwanza, Diwali, or Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday, then enjoy your thing.

Yes, I know that Ramadan moves based off of the Lunar calendar and is currently in the Summer and Diwali is in October.  Screw it, I’m putting them in the list in case I missed anyone.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur