https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/nyregion/eric-trump-investigation-election.html
Judge Orders Eric Trump to Testify in N.Y. Fraud Inquiry
retroactive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie-dye
old pond
frog leaps in
water's sound
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54274115
Trump won't commit to peaceful transfer of power
>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/us/politics/durham-clinton-foundation-investigation.html
WASHINGTON — From the beginning, John H. Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William P. Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Mr. Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.
It turns out that Mr. Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Mr. Trump: the Clintons.
Mr. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Mr. Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Mr. Durham’s inquiry.
The approach is highly unusual, according to people briefed on the investigation. Though the suspected crimes themselves are not comparable — one involves a possible conspiracy between a presidential campaign and a foreign adversary to interfere in an election, and the other involves potential bribery and corruption — and largely included different teams of investigators and prosecutors, Mr. Durham’s efforts suggest the scope of his review is broader than previously known.
Mr. Durham’s focus on the Clinton Foundation inquiry comes as concerns deepen among Democrats and some former Justice Department officials that his investigation is being weaponized politically to help Mr. Trump. Congressional Democrats last week called on the department’s inspector general to investigate whether Mr. Durham’s review was free from political influence after his top aide abruptly resigned, reportedly over concerns that the team’s findings would be prematurely released before the election in November.
The Clinton Foundation investigation began more than five years ago, under the Obama administration, and stalled in part because some former career law enforcement officials viewed the case as too weak to issue subpoenas. Ultimately, prosecutors in Arkansas secured a subpoena for the charity in early 2018. To date, the case has not resulted in criminal charges.
Some former law enforcement officials declined to talk to Mr. Durham’s team about the foundation investigation because they felt the nature of his inquiry was highly unusual, according to people familiar with the investigation. Mr. Durham’s staff members sought information about the debate over the subpoenas that the F.B.I. tried to obtain in 2016 and have also approached current agents about the matter, but it is not clear what they told investigators.
A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.
“The Clinton Foundation has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false,” the foundation said in a statement.
Right-wing news media and prominent Republicans have long promoted a narrative that the F.B.I.’s leadership and the Justice Department under the Obama administration were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. They have accused agents and prosecutors of aggressively investigating Mr. Trump and his associates — ignoring evidence to the contrary — while moving more cautiously on allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business while she was secretary of state.
“There was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and F.B.I. when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump.
In the Russia investigation, F.B.I. officials did take aggressive steps such as obtaining a secret wiretap to eavesdrop on a former Trump adviser. But they also moved quietly, deploying informants and an undercover agent in part to keep the existence of the investigation from becoming public and affecting the 2016 election.
Mr. Barr has repeatedly attacked the Russia inquiry as Mr. Durham has investigated it, calling it “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and ignoring a policy that generally prohibits the department from making public statements about current investigations. Mr. Barr’s statements have raised hopes among the president’s supporters that Mr. Durham will unearth evidence of a plot to sabotage Mr. Trump’s campaign and presidency.
So far, only one person has been charged with criminal wrongdoing: Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that investigators relied on to renew an application for a secret wiretap on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The president and his Republican allies have tried to cast the Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization, as corrupt, accusing Mrs. Clinton of taking steps as secretary of state to support the interests of foundation donors.
Critics have suggested that she was part of a quid pro quo in which the foundation received large donations in exchange for supporting the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with ties to mining stakes in the United States, to a Russian nuclear agency. The deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state under President Barack Obama and had a voting seat on the panel.
The allegations against Mrs. Clinton were advanced in the book “Clinton Cash,” by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor at large at Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet once controlled by Mr. Trump’s former top aide Stephen K. Bannon. The book contained multiple errors, and the foundation has dismissed its allegations.
But the book caught the attention of F.B.I. agents, who viewed some of its contents as additional justification to obtain a subpoena for foundation records.
Top Justice Department officials denied a request in 2016 from senior F.B.I. managers in Washington to secure a subpoena, determining that the bureau lacked a sufficient basis for it and that the book had a political agenda, former officials said. Some prosecutors at the time felt the book had been discredited.
The decision frustrated some agents who believed they had enough evidence beyond the book, including a discussion that touched on the foundation and was captured on a wiretap in an unrelated investigation. Other F.B.I. officials at the time believed the conversation’s relevance to the foundation case was tenuous at best.
The disagreement erupted anew later in the summer of 2016, when a top Justice Department official suspected that F.B.I. agents in New York were trying to persuade federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to authorize a subpoena after the department’s officials in Washington had declined such a request. By the time the F.BI. officials revisited the issue, the Justice Department officials were also concerned that serving subpoenas would violate the practice of avoiding such investigative activity so close to an election.
Ultimately, the Clinton Foundation dispute embroiled Andrew G. McCabe, then the F.B.I. deputy director, who was accused of leaking information about the case to a reporter and later lying about it to the Justice Department inspector general. The episode helped prompt Mr. McCabe’s firing in 2018 and a failed effort by the Justice Department to prosecute him.
The foundation case — which had been spread among F.B.I. field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark. — sputtered until Mr. Trump was elected. In early 2018, Patrick C. Harris, a career prosecutor in Little Rock, issued a grand jury subpoena for foundation records, two former law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said.
A foundation official confirmed that the charity was served with a subpoena and complied with the request for information.
Republicans in 2017 had called for a second special counsel to investigate the foundation, but Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, did not believe the scant evidence collected in the case justified one, a person familiar with the matter said. Instead, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, asked John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, to review whether federal law enforcement officials had fully investigated the matter.
Shortly after Mr. Durham began his review, Mr. Barr said in an interview with CBS News in May 2019 that Mr. Huber was winding down his work related to Mrs. Clinton. In January, The Washington Post reported that Mr. Huber’s investigation had ended; its findings were not made public. Mr. Trump later attacked Mr. Huber, accusing him of doing “absolutely NOTHING.”
Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum and Nicole Hong from New York. Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington.
ho boy
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/who-is-john-huber/index.html
>so hard
>or
https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/patrick-crusius/
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Crusius Was Taken Into Custody ‘Without Incident’
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A ‘Manifesto’ Posted to 8Chan Before the Shooting That Appears to Have Been Written by the Shooter Says the Attack Was His ‘Response to the Hispanic Invasion of Texas’
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Crusius Once Wrote on LinkedIn That He Was Not Motivated to Do Anything Other Than to Get By
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Crusius’ Last Known Address Was in Allen, Texas
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Police Say the Shooting Appears to Have ‘Nexus…To A Hate Crime’
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-17/qanon-explained-as-u-s-political-history
The QAnon Party? It’s Not a Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy movements usually end up entering the halls of power. And then they get absorbed.
By Stephen Mihm September 17, 2020, 10:45 a.m. EDT
In American history, conspiracy theory-making has a way of turning into policymaking.
It’s tempting to view QAnon’s rise as a threat to America’s democracy — especially with a believer poised to win a seat in the House of Representatives. But history suggests that conspiracy-based movements have been a part of the U.S. democracy since the nation’s founding.
Long before the modern Republican and Democratic parties held sway, a succession of others rose and fell. In between, smaller fringe movements surged, often embracing some pretty bizarre conspiracies. Eventually, though, the QAnons of the past didn’t take over mainstream parties. Rather, their entry into the halls of power led to their absorption — or, alternatively, excommunication — by more mainstream parties.
The historian Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to highlight the significance of “paranoid” politics in a now-famous essay in 1964. Such conspiracies, he observed, invariably hold that a secretive cabal of elite insiders intends to corrupt and destroy the nation. QAnon’s satanic pedophiles working from within the “deep state” is squarely in this tradition.
Conspiratorial thinking first gained traction in U.S. politics in the late 1790s, when the New Englander Federalists, their power on the wane, became convinced that Illuminati members headquartered in Europe were plotting to destroy the new nation with their trademark secularism. A strange coalition of Federalist politicians and congregational preachers joined together to sound the alarm.
Some Federalist true believers argued that Thomas Jefferson, who would challenge John Adams for the presidency, was the leader of the American Illuminati and the embodiment of the antichrist.
Rev. Timothy Dwight, who was arguably the most prominent pastor associated with the Federalists, led the call to arms in a famous sermon. “Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins?” he asked his congregation in 1798. “Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families? Shall our sons become the disciplines of Voltaire … or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”
This early movement, though, quickly faded out — as did the Federalist Party. Indeed, Jefferson’s victory in 1800 ushered in the demise of the Federalists over the next two decades. But conspiracy thinking hardly vanished.
In the 1820s, the U.S. was left with only a single major political party, the Democratic Republicans. The fragile consensus unraveled over the course of the decade, triggering a fresh wave of paranoia.
Back then, many members of the nation’s political elite belonged to the Freemasons, a fraternal order that flourished in many countries. Membership in this society came with a pledge of secrecy, and high-ranking Masons earned titles like “master” and “high priest.” This was the “deep state” circa 1826, complete with a star defector like Q: William Morgan.
The former Mason — and critic of the Masonic Order — was arrested and promptly disappeared. Though no one ever found a body, the backlash against Freemasons was ferocious. Before long, an entire political party had emerged dedicated to exposing the iniquities of the secret order: the Anti-Masonic Party.
As one historian of this movement has written, “Masonic secrecy became synonymous with darkness, sin, immorality, intemperance, treason, and the work of Satan.” Or as one Anti-Mason politician put it, Freemasonry lured people down “the steps that lead down to the gates of hell; the paths of perdition; conclaves of corruption, atheism, and infidelity.”
And yet, this did not lead to the end of the republic, then in its fourth decade. Instead, the Anti-Masonic Party became institutionalized as a political force, settling on key issues far removed from their original obsession, like higher tariffs.
An Anti-Mason won the governorship of Vermont in 1831; in total, the Anti-Masons sent 40 individuals to Congress, and many more to state legislatures. It was then largely absorbed by the newly formed Whig Party, which vied with the Democrats for dominance beginning in the 1830s.
By the 1840s, though, an even more elaborate set of conspiracy theories would soon coalesce in response to the flood of Catholic immigrants. The alleged papal plot to destroy America triggered even more tell-all “memoirs” than the one about Masons.
These included bestselling books like “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk,” purportedly written by a nun who had fled the convent. It painted a sensationalized portrait rampant with sexual deviance, infanticide, and secret and subversive plots. First published in 1836, it launched a flood of similar exposes with titles like “Mysteries of Popery Unveiled.”
Some native-born Protestants, fearful of papist meddling, combined to create a secretive society to counteract international Catholic influence. The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, as it was known, soon became a formal political party dubbed the Know Nothings, a nod to the secretive nature of its members.
Like the Anti-Masons, the Know Nothings arose at a moment of realignment of the major political parties: The Whig Party was fading away. In fact, most of the Know Nothings eventually joined a new political party by the middle of the 1850s. They called themselves Republicans.
The Populist Party, founded in 1891, was a serious political organization. Though not primarily obsessed with conspiracies, some of its members embraced, among other things, the belief that a cabal of international bankers — typically Jews — manipulated events to suit their needs. The Populists helped make works like “Seven Financial Conspiracies That Have Enslaved the American People” a bestseller. While the party faded away, many of its members would find a home in the increasingly progressive Democratic Party.
In 1958, a candy magnate named Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society, a group that anticipated much of the QAnon worldview.
For most people, the John Birch Society is vaguely associated with anti-communism. In reality, though, Welch and his society offered a far more expansive, all-encompassing vision of a worldwide conspiracy long before the arrival of the communists. In his writings, Welch traced the roots of a collectivist conspiracy back to — you guessed it — the Illuminati.
According to Welch, this all-powerful secret society created a shadowy cabal he called the “INSIDERS” — usually denoted in capital letters — who had been behind history’s watershed events, from the French Revolution to the founding of the Soviet Union. According to Welch, communism was but a “tool of the total conspiracy” that aimed to create an internationalist “one-world government.”
Welch’s breathless account of this “satanic program” held that mainstream politicians and military leaders were either unwitting dupes of this master plan or ruthless agents of the underlying conspiracy. He would impugn leaders like General George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, who Welch considered “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Nothing, he warned his followers, was as it seemed; appearances could be deceiving.
Rank-and-file Republicans, many of them veterans of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against a communist conspiracy, flocked to Welch’s organization. Hundreds of chapters sprang up around the country. At its peak, it numbered at least 100,000 members and operated 400 bookstores that sold Welch’s manifesto, “The Blue Book,” as well as the society’s other publications.
The Republicans had an uneasy relationship with the John Birch Society, tolerating its antics but aware that doing so might tar the party as extremists. It fell to the party’s chief intellectual, William F. Buckley, to marginalize the Birchers. In the early 1960s, he wrote a series of articles from his perch as editor of the National Review, attacking the group for disseminating “paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.”
The campaign succeeded, and the John Birch Society saw its influence wane. But their excommunication was done in service of a larger rebranding of the Republican Party, one that intensified after Barry Goldwater’s loss in a landslide to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. These efforts would ultimately propel Richard Nixon, and later, Ronald Reagan, to the White House.
Forty years later, we are watching the demise of that incarnation of the Republican Party and the rise of QAnon.
All the familiar ingredients are there: the fantasies that the world is controlled by secretive groups of insiders who are agents of secularism and Satan himself, and that they are sexually deviant and hellbent on the nation’s destruction. Add to that QAnon’s embrace of nativism and anti-Semitism, and you’ve got a banquet of conspiracy theories served up to the credulous.
Can our political system tame this madness? If history is any guide, there’s reason for optimism. But one thing to keep in mind is that this may be the beginning of a very long haul.
>https://twitter.com/mailonline/status/1309086243314184199
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8767755/Nicolas-Sarkozy-fails-charges-42m-Colonel-Gaddafis-illegal-payments-thrown-out.html
Nicolas Sarkozy has failed to have criminal charges over £42million of illegal payments from Colonel Gaddafi thrown out by judges in Paris
Nicolas Sarkozy has failed in his bid to have criminal charges over £42million of illegal payments from Colonel Gaddafi thrown out.
Judges sitting at the Paris Appeal Court on Thursday rejected every single one of the former President's, 65, arguments against trial.
'I think the judges were able to resist all kinds of pressure,' said Vincent Brengarth, a barrister for Sherpa, a group that represents the victims of financial crimes, and which is a civil party in the case.
Confirming the devastating judgement against Sarkozy, Mr Brengarth said he was 'satisfied' with the result.
Sarkozy now faces a criminal trial and the prospect of prison over the Gaddafi money, which is believed to have been laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland.
It was said to have provided the cash to propel Sarkozy to power in 2007 – something Sarkozy vehemently denies.
Within a few months of his election, Sarkozy invited Gaddafi to Paris for a state visit and praised him as a great friend and 'Brother Leader'.
But two years ago Sarkozy was charged with taking bribes, embezzling Libyan public funds and illegal campaign financing.
Sarkozy is allowed one more appeal to the Court of Cassation in Paris, with his lawyers saying he is being 'hounded' by the French judiciary.
The case was triggered by Mediapart, the investigative news site which in 2012 published a document signed by Libya's intelligence chief which proved the equivalent of £42million was to be paid to Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has insisted that the contract is a fake, but it has now been ruled it can be used as evidence.
The former head of state's former conservative ministers Claude Gueant and Eric Woerth have also been charged in relation to the allegations.
It was in 2011 that RAF and French Air Force jets led the mass bombing campaign that ended with Gaddafi being hacked to death by a mob.
There have been claims that Sarkozy wanted his old friend and ally dead because of his potential to produce incriminating evidence.
Sarkozy is already set to appear in the dock in Paris on October 5, when he will become France's first ex-president to be tried for alleged crimes carried out in office.
He is said to have illegally tried to influence a judge, and has also been charged in a case relating to fake invoices devised to mask overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign.
Within a few days of Sarkozy losing his presidential immunity from prosecution in 2012, fraud squad detectives raided the Paris home he shares with his third wife, the pop singer and former model, Carla Bruni.
>It looks like we are learning the truth about Boris.