 Photo source: Raw Story Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been recused from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and interactions between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Nevertheless, he seems to have inserted himself several times into the Trump White House attempt to interfere in the Congressional investigation.
An article in Newsweek, released today, may explain some of his behavior. Nunes seems to have developed an admiration for Flynn. In a December, 2016 interview with the author of the article, Jeff Stein, Nunes expressed his admiration for the general: “This guy was one of the best intelligence officers in several generations … I don't know if you've ever met him, but Flynn is extremely smart. He really is top notch.” The Newsweek article can be found here. www.newsweek.com/nunes-memo-trump-russia-probe-flynn-mueller-page-fbi-802710 Nunes has numerous connections to the Trump campaign and the Trump administration. He helped fundraise for Trump during the summer of 2016. (A Fresno Bee article about the fundraiser can be found here.) He was appointed a member of the transition team in November 2016. He worked closely with Michael Flynn during the transition. http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-rep-devin-nunes-named-to-trump-s-1478893307-htmlstory.html Nunes attended a breakfast meeting in January 2017, the day before the Inauguration, that Michael Flynn, then the incoming national security adviser, and Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, also attended. The article from Business Insider describing the breakfast meeting can be found here. http://www.businessinsider.com/devin-nunes-michael-flynn-turkey-russia-2017-11 A Forbes article about Michael Flynn’s ties to Turkey can be found here. https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2017/11/10/mueller-investigation-of-flynn-crimes-as-to-turkey-could-produce-a-second-papadopolous/#680825194c0b A March 31, 2017 article from The Guardian, a British newspaper, describes the apparent loyalty Nunes exhibits for Flynn https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/devin-nunes-michael-flynn-trump-russia
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Representative Devin Nunes Is Part Owner of Winery Named in Lawsuit Alleging Human Trafficking2/11/2018  According to WineBusiness.com, a wine industry online journal, a former Napa Valley winery employee alleged in a lawsuit that in August 2015 she was assigned to work on a company yacht where men had sex with call girls while the group cruised the San Francisco Bay. Court records show that the lawsuit was filed in March for civil rights violations, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment, retaliation and other allegations. The former employee filed the lawsuit in March for civil rights violations, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment, retaliation and other allegations. The case was dismissed November 30, 2016. Court documents can be found here. https://www.winebusiness.com/news/?go=getArticle&dataid=176634 An email from Alpha Omega spokeswoman Kelly Carter to Snopes stated that Nunes is an investor in the winery. “The only time Alpha Omega did business in Russia was in 2013 when a broker handled a one-time transaction for 22 cases of wine. “Rep. Devin Nunes is one of a few friends Alpha Omega managing partner Robin Baggett invited to invest in the winery in 2005. None of the investors has ever been involved with the management of the company. Robin is the sole managing partner and ultimate decision maker at Alpha Omega. Robin has made a point to never mix politics with the business of Alpha Omega. Our business model is simple: grow great grapes, make great wine, hire great people and provide our customers with a great experience.” The article from Snopes can be found here. https://www.snopes.com/devin-nunes-wine-russia/ An article from Town & Country about Nunes’s winery and Trump winery connections can be found here. http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a9278165/devin-nunes-winery/ An article from Palmer Report explains that Alpha Omega Winery does business with a Russian company with ties to President Vladimir Putin. http://www.palmerreport.com/news/russia-devin-nunes-donald-trump/2019/ A link to the Alpha Omega Winery company website can be found here. http://www.aowinery.com/ According to a Los Angeles Times list compiled by Roll Call based on annual financial dissclosures, Representative Nunes is ranked as the 383rd wealthiest member of Congress, with a net worth of $51,000. The article can be found here. http://static.latimes.com/how-much-are-they-worth/ A screen capture of the Nunes data can be found below.   National Public Radio reported today: “A memo alleging the FBI abused its surveillance authority became public on Friday after a push by House Republicans. President Trump authorized the memo's release, even after the FBI expressed "grave concerns" about the ‘accuracy’ of the document, authored by House intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.” NPR release the text of the memo with annotations from their Justice Department, national security, and White House reporters. The annotated text can be found here. https://www.npr.org/2018/02/02/582828461/fact-check-read-the-gop-memo-released-by-house-intelligence-committee Some Republicans have argued that the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian government operatives is based solely on the so-called “Steele dossier,” a set of field documents created by Christopher Steele, retired head of the Russia desk in Great Britain’s intelligence service, MI6. According to an NPR story from today’s “All Things Considered” program, the memo undercuts that argument. “Instead, it says, overtures by Russian operatives to a junior campaign adviser are what sparked the FBI's counterintelligence investigation. George Papadopoulos — who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts — ‘triggered’ the opening of the investigation, the memo says.” Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 of lying to the FBI about his contacts with agents of the Russian government. The “All Things Considered” story can be found here. https://www.npr.org/2018/02/02/582713363/memo-russian-overtures-to-trump-aide-triggered-fbi-investigation While some GOP lawmakers have asserted that the FBI’s interest in Trump campaign aide Carter Page began with the Steele dossier, it is important to note the Page was a focus of FBI attention at least as far back as 2013, when Russian agents in the United States attempted to recruit him for their government. A federal Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the FBI a surveillance warrant on Page in October 2016. Three 90-day extensions were granted. Five senior Justice Department and FBI officials signed off on the three requests for extensions. The memo released today states that all the requests for extension were approved by a federal judge. This would not have occurred unless the warrant was yielding information useful to counterintelligence or a criminal investigation. A Washington Post article explains the issues surrounding the FBI surveillance of Carter Page. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/memo-points-to-fbis-ongoing-interest-in-trump-adviser-carter-page/2018/02/02/89bfdee2-077c-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.eeb1adfeedba Photo source: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
"... it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, so OK, they’re at a record level. There were so many thing happening, Piers. I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clear air. I believe in crystal clear beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all." Photo: Jabin Botsford - The Washington Post/Getty Images  Donald Trump is not a scientist.
He often speaks nonsense. President Trump’s interview with Piers Morgan, broadcast January 26, demonstrated clearly that the President does not understand the basic concepts underlying current scientific thought on global climate change. His take was false and ridiculous. This is an excerpt from the transcript of the interview: Piers Morgan: Do you believe in climate change? Do you believe it exists? President Trump: There is a cooling and there is a heating and I mean, look – it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming. Right? Piers Morgan: Right. President Trump: That wasn’t working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, so OK, they’re at a record level. There were so many thing happening, Piers. I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clear air. I believe in crystal clear beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all. Now, that being said, if somebody said go back into the Paris Accord, if we could go back into the Paris Accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal, As usual, they took advantage of the United States. We were in a terrible deal. Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in. I like, as you know, I like Emmanuel [Macron, president of France] … No, no, I like Emmanuel, I would love to, but it’s got to be a good deal for the United States. Politifact fact-checked the interview here. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/29/donald-trump/trump-gets-polar-ice-trend-backwards/ New York Magazine covered the interview here. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/trump-to-piers-morgan-polar-ice-caps-actually-doing-great.html The full transcript can be found here. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/01/donald-trumps-interview-with-piers-morgan-full-transcript/ Daniel Dale wrote an article for the Toronto Star listing multiple falsehoods in Trump’s comments in the interview. His article can be found here. https://www.thestar.com/news/world/analysis/2018/01/29/donald-trump-made-seven-false-claims-in-that-piers-morgan-interview.html Photo source: Google Maps  President Trump is again suing the Property Appraiser of Palm Beach County, Florida, over the valuation of his Jupiter golf course. The Palm Beach Daily News reports that President Trump filed the lawsuit in December 2017. The Palm Beach County Tax Collector billed Trump for $398,315. He sent a wire transfer of $296,595.01, and filed a lawsuit. The Palm Beach Daily News estimates that Trump’s payment suggests that he thinks the Property Appraiser overvalued the course by over $5 million. According to a Twitter post from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump listed the property in his presidential financial disclosure as worth “over $50 million,” the county valued the property at $20 million for tax purposes, and Trump is claiming that it is worth less than $25 million. Citizens for Ethics (@CREWCrew): “On his financial disclosures, Trump lists the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, FL value as ‘over $50 million.’ Now he's suing the county for listing it at $20 million for tax purposes, claiming it's actually worth less than $15 million.” The article from The Palm Beach Daily News can be found here. https://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/business/trump-again-sues-over-property-tax-bill-for-jupiter-golf-course/W7ceVDmZuHslCxu3XcAnJK/ An article from My Palm Beach Post can be found here. http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/business/trump-again-sues-over-property-tax-bill-for-jupiter-golf-course/W7ceVDmZuHslCxu3XcAnJK/ A copy of the lawsuit is attached below.  "Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service AIVD have provided the FBI with crucial information about Russian interference with the American elections. For years, AIVD had access to the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. That's what de Volkskrant and Nieuwsuur have uncovered in their investigation." A Dutch newspaper and television station published an important article on January 25, 2018 that has gotten scant attention in the American press. Huib Modderkolk reports that in 2014, Dutch intelligence agents penetrated the Russian hacker group Cozy Bear, also known as APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 29, even taking control of their closed circuit television camera. Dutch agents captured video showing who entered and left the building in Moscow out of which Cozy bear operates, allowing them to match images with photos of known Russian spies. "... they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything." This story is vitally important to American investigations into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election, and possible coordination between agents of the Russian government and members of the Trump campaign team. However, American news outlets have not covered the story as the bombshell it is, spending their airtime and print space on other things. Lisa Negrijn has translated the Vokskrant article into English for the newspaper. That article can be found here. https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/dutch-agencies-provide-crucial-intel-about-russia-s-interference-in-us-elections~a4561913/ Since U.S. media was slow to pick up the story, business analyst Eric Garland translated the story and provided his translation through Creative Commons license. His translation of the article can be found here.  Photo source: NPR
The New York Times reported Tuesday: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week as part of the special counsel investigation, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday, making him the first member of President Trump’s cabinet to be interviewed in the inquiry.” Special Counsel Robert Mueller is increasingly focusing on potential obstruction of justice by President Trump in relation to the firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017. Mueller’s team has informed the President’s lawyers that he will likely interview him in person. As a strong supporter of Trump during the campaign, and his foreign policy advisor, Sessions was close to the Trump team throughout the campaign, while he was a sitting U.S. Senator. Several articles about Sessions and his interview with the Mueller team can be found here, including the New York Times article which originally reported the story. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/579948614/sessions-interviewed-by-special-counsel-robert-mueller-as-part-of-russia-inquiry https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/us/politics/jeff-sessions-special-counsel-russia.html https://www.axios.com/mueller-interviews-sessions-report-1516719103-3c0cc7a1-51a3-40b8-85aa-604739153148.html During the transition between the election and Inauguration, Sessions was one of a number of prominent Republicans who served as vice chairs: Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, former House Speaker (and current spouse of the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican) Newt Gingrich, retired neurosurgeon (and current Housing and Urban Development Secretary) Ben Carson, retired Lieutenant General (and briefly serving National Security Advisor) Michael Flynn, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (whose son currently works in the White House). An article about the transition team, written a few days after the election, can be found here. http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/11/sen_jeff_sessions_leading_trum.html  Twitter recently announced that they will let nearly 700,000 users that they interacted with accounts identified as part of a propaganda campaign financed by the Russian government in 2016. Unless you have seen the process taking place in real time, it is difficult to understand how bots (automated social media accounts), trolls (real individuals aggressively attempting to sow division or discredit experts), and sock puppets (persona accounts run by a real person who is not the person portrayed in the account profile) can spread divisive messages, silence debate, and use abuse and harassment to push political issues in a particular direction. Once you have seen it in real time, it is clear how influential Russian government-financed troll, bot, and sock puppet activity split American voters into angry, isolated camps with little inclination or ability to bridge divides and find consensus. A team of researchers at the University of Washington examined Twitter discourse related to #BlackLivesMatter and police-related shooting events in 2016, and their discoveries have broad and important implications for how Americans can combat the onslaught of divisive messaging and disinformation. One important discovery is that the groups on the two “sides” of the issue were quite separate, with almost no overlap in retweets or conversation. The researchers found that Russian accounts identified as originating at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg - a Russian government-financed troll farm - were clearly working in both pro-Black Lives Matter and anti-Black Lives Matter groups.   The diagrams tell the story. The first shows the isolation of the two groups - people in each group interact primarily with others who express the same views. The second diagram shows Russian-Internet Research Agency identified accounts in orange. It is clear that Russian paid accounts were very active in the separate groups, amplifying divisive messages and increasing division and disagreement. The researchers conclude: “In this paper, we have located RU-IRA-affiliated troll accounts in the retweet network of a politically polarized conversation surrounding race and shootings in the United States. Our findings suggest that troll accounts contributed content to polarized information networks, likely serving to accentuate disagreement and foster division. Furthermore, our findings imply that the troll accounts gained a platform in a domestic conversation, suggesting a calculated form of media manipulation that exploits on the crowd-sourced nature of social media.” Two articles from the University of Washington research group can be found here. Thanks to Kate Starbird of the University of Washington for sharing this research on Twitter. http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Stewart_Starbird_Drawing_the_Lines_of_Contention-final.pdf http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf An article about the announcement by Twitter about notifying users that they interacted with Russian-financed propaganda accounts can be found here. http://nationalpost.com/news/world/twitter-tells-677000-users-they-were-conned-by-russias-u-s-election-propaganda Angry Twitter bird image by Roweig at Deviant Art
 The January 16, 2018 article by Steven Johnson (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html) has been summarized by Nobel Prizewinning economist Paul Krugman in a thread posted to Twitter on January 21. Since he has not published this as an article, here is his thread, with links he included.
Krugman’s original thread can be found here. https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/955102684230705158 On January 9 Senator Dianne Feinstein released the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony of Glenn Simpson, who hired retired MI6 agent Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump's ties to the Russian government.
Simpson explained how Fusion GPS was first hired in 2015 to investigate Trump's background in the early stages of the Republican presidential nominating process. Simpson hired Steele to investigate connections between representatives of the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, and before the House Intelligence Committee in November. Simpson and his business partner, Peter Fritsch, had called for the Senate and House committees to release the testimony. A National Public Radio story about the transcript, which includes a link to the transcript, can be found here. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576789880/author-of-russia-dossier-worried-trump-was-being-blackmailed |
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