Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:45 p.m. No.15863730   🗄️.is 🔗kun

President Donald J. Trump:

 

“Time Warner, the owner of Fake News CNN, has just announced that they will be terminating a very popular and wonderful news network (OAN). Between heavily indebted Time Warner, and Radical Left Comcast, which runs Xfinity, there is a virtual monopoly on news, thereby making what you hear from the LameStream Media largely FAKE, hence the name FAKE NEWS! I believe the people of this Country should protest the decision to eliminate OAN, a very important voice…

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:47 p.m. No.15863742   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3743

ICYMI: "Of Course Vladimir Putin Invaded Ukraine Under Joe Biden's Watch"

 

https://newsweek.com/course-vladimir-putin-invaded-ukraine-under-joe-bidens-watch-opinion-1682543

 

 

Of Course Vladimir Putin Invaded Ukraine Under Joe Biden's Watch | Opinion

 

In February 2014, Russian kingpin Vladimir Putin invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula, which had been under Ukrainian jurisdiction. The timing was no accident, coming as it did only a handful of months after then-President Barack Obama reneged upon his own chemical weapons "red line" for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, effectively leaving the resolution of the then-nascent chemical weapons crisis in Putin's hands. Putin, like a shark smelling blood, sensed weakness and acted accordingly. To this day, Crimea remains under de facto Russian control.

 

It is not exactly a mystery what motivates Putin's actions on the geopolitical chessboard. He is a former KGB operative who has publicly bewailed the dissolution of the Soviet Union as one of the greatest tragedies in modern world history. If Putin had his druthers, "Mother Russia" would once again become "Greater Russia—likely including all the ethnic Slavic portions of Central and Eastern Europe. And as the world saw in Crimea, Putin will act on those druthers when he is emboldened by a seeming lack of deterrence. This shark smells blood—lots of it.

 

It is thus no great surprise that, just as he did during the reign of the last feckless Democratic president, Putin has once again decided to take chunks of Ukraine and redraw the post-Cold War maps to better reflect his conception of Greater Russia. There was, in the seemingly endless lead-up to Russia's decision to send tanks into the Donbas (as of this writing, now heading toward Kyiv), remarkably little appetite for firm deterrence from the U.S. or anyone else in NATO. President Joe Biden promised sanctions—an only arguably effective tool, at best, and which largely amounts to performative preening so that State Department lackeys and NGO staffers can sleep better at night. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, deeply unpopular on the home front, penned a condemnatory Wall Street Journal op-ed. Yawn.

 

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to overstate the utterly pathetic nature of the Biden presidency thus far. To merely call him feckless or incompetent would be insufficient. Some on the Right like to ask if a conservative politician "knows what time it is," proverbially speaking, but the doddering dolt who is America's commander-in-chief likely does not even know what year it is. His presidency is a disgraceful exercise in how to do everything wrong: the highest inflation in decades, out-of-control spending, supply chain crises and mass product shortages, a humiliating and botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the terrorist Iranian regime racing toward a nuclear weapon. Biden's is the "Murphy's law" presidency—anything that can go wrong has indeed gone wrong.

 

One readily imagines Chinese President Xi Jinping fondly looking out over the Taiwan Strait, salivating over the prospect of reunifying the Republic of China with the People's Republic of China. Who will stop him? Surely not the senile leader of a political party that counts the promotion of transgender rights and the dissemination of the civilizational arson that is critical race theory as its seemingly highest political priorities.

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:47 p.m. No.15863743   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3750

>>15863742

Biden also teamed up last summer with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Putin a massive win on Russia's coveted Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which spans 764 miles across the Baltic Sea. Biden's capitulation on Nord Stream 2, abetting Germany's unquenchable desire for more Russian natural gas at the expense of piqued allies such as Poland, presaged the timing of Putin's most recent Ukrainian blitzkrieg. Biden's bestowing an American imprimatur to Nord Stream 2 was a legitimizing event for both Putin and for Russia, which in its modern post-Cold War form roughly resembles a Persian Gulf-style petrostate. The way to deter and combat Russian hegemony is through the means of energy policy and energy diplomacy. Unfortunately, as the case may be, Biden last year put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline here in the U.S. The combination of nixing Keystone XL while signing off on Nord Stream 2 was, and remains, indefensible.

 

The American national interest is not necessarily tremendously affected, one way or the other, by the fate of the Donbas. Our Central and European allies would strongly prefer Ukraine and Belarus (a Russian puppet state, as presently governed) be kept intact as buffer zones. But Ukraine—like Russia, a deeply corrupt and oligarchy-driven society—is not a NATO member. There are crucial legal, strategic, cultural and historical differences between Russian tanks rolling into the Donbas, on the one hand, or rolling into Warsaw or Budapest, on the other hand. What's more, if one takes seriously the hysterical shrieks of "liberal democracy is on the line!" that have recently become a cable news talking-head staple, it is curious that even our foremost Western European allies seem asleep at the wheel. Where, exactly, are the British and the French?

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:53 p.m. No.15863784   🗄️.is 🔗kun

ICYMI: "Biden’s inflation blame shifting falls flat"

 

https://reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-bidens-inflation-blame-shifting-falls-flat-2536583/

 

 

 

Biden’s inflation blame shifting falls flat

 

Biden’s blame shifting on inflation is a sight to behold. It’s even too much for some officials from past Democratic administrations.

 

Last year, Mr. Biden said the ongoing rise in inflation would be temporary. When NBC’s Lester Holt pressed him recently as to why the rise has continued, the president called Mr. Holt a “wise guy” and blamed the supply chain crisis.

 

Insults aside, Mr. Holt was right to press Mr. Biden. Inflation hit 7.5 percent in January, the highest figure in four decades.

 

The Biden administration’s response is attack businesses. The Department of Justice announced recently that it plans to investigate companies “who would exploit supply chain disruptions” to earn what the department calls “illicit” profits. The goal, the department says, is to keep companies from “overcharging customers under the guise of supply chain disruptions.”

 

As reason.com notes, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D–Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I–Vt., have been very vocal in promoting the theory that corporate greed, and not questionable government action, drove inflation.

 

“The DOJ and FBI would rather launch a global investigation of ‘illicit’ supply chain profiteering than acknowledge the obvious and inevitable result when unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus combines with decades of protectionism and regulatory sclerosis,” Scott Lincicome, director of general economics and trade policy for the Cato Institute, told Reason.

 

It’s not just right-leaning economists crying foul. A year ago, former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers warned Mr. Biden’s coronavirus spending binge could lead to inflation “not seen in a generation.”

 

Steven Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, echoed Summers in a recent The New York Times piece.

 

“Supply issues are by no means the root cause of our inflation,” Mr. Rattner wrote. “Blaming inflation on supply lines is like complaining about your sweater keeping you too warm after you’ve added several logs to the fireplace.”

 

Mr. Rattner said most of our supply problems have been “homegrown.”

 

“Americans have resumed spending freely, and along the way, they have been creating shortages akin to those in a shopping mall on Black Friday,” he wrote. “All that consumption has resulted from vast amounts of government rescue aid (including three rounds of stimulus checks) and substantial underspending by consumers during the lockdown phase.”

 

Companies that keep products on the shelves, despite the current chaos, deserve praise, not politically tinged threats from the feds.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-bidens-inflation-blame-shifting-falls-flat-2536583/

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:55 p.m. No.15863793   🗄️.is 🔗kun

ICYMI: "Sen. Scott to Newsmax: Biden Cause of US Energy Dependence on Russia"

 

https://newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/russia-pipeline-biden-ukraine/2022/02/26/id/1058656/

 

Biden caused the current energy crisis and the United States' dependency on Russia for oil, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Newsmax Saturday.

 

“Why would you ever want to be dependent on somebody else? We’re sitting here and we have all these natural resources in our country and this president shuts down the Keystone pipeline, attacking the fossil fuels and wants us to be energy dependent on Russia, our enemy, or the Middle East where President Trump reduced our conflicts there,” Scott told Newsmax TV’s Eric Bolling during an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

 

“You look at this president, why wouldn’t he secure the border, why wouldn’t he make us energy dependent, why won’t he hold (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and (Chinese President) Xi responsible here? What’s his purpose here? He’s got radical policies, gross incompetence.

 

“Where’s Putin going to stop? Is he going to stop with Ukraine? Is Lithuania next? Poland?”

 

Putin’s move to invade Ukraine has already impacted energy markets as Russia is one of the world’s top oil and gas suppliers.

 

Oil prices this week topped $105 per barrel, the highest since 2014.

 

Nearly two years ago, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the price of crude oil dropped to below $0 dollars a barrel, a record low.

 

Scott, along with several other GOP lawmakers, say Biden never should have waived sanctions against the operators of the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which connects Russia to the German seacoast, and are calling on Biden resume construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

 

“Biden never should have approved the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,” Scott said. “Sanctions against Putin should have been done before. If you don’t hold Putin and Russia accountable, think about the long-term impacts. If we can go back to becoming energy dependent all the prices will go down. Biden caused all this.”

 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz three days ago suspended the pipeline after Russia ordered its military into Ukraine.

 

The pipeline directly links Russian gas to Europe via Germany and is complete but not yet operating. It has become a major target as Western governments try to deter a Russian attack on its neighbor.

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 3:57 p.m. No.15863814   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3820

ICYMI: "A brutal poll number for Joe Biden"

 

https://cnn.com/2022/02/25/politics/biden-poll-npr-pbs-marist/index.html

 

Joe Biden has been president for a little over a year. And that year was not kind to him.

 

In a new NPR/PBS/Marist College poll, more than half 56% of Americans said that Biden's first year in office was a "failure," while just 39% described it as a success.

The news doesn't get better the more you dig into the survey. Two-thirds of independents said Biden's first year was a failure, while more than 9 in 10 Republicans (91%) agreed with that assessment.

Biden's numbers are better among Democrats 80% called year one a success but 15% of members of his own party described his first year in office as a failure.

Now, asking such a binary question either Biden's first year was a success or a failure, with no room in the middle does tend to strip any nuance from issue. There are incredible complexities that go into assessing how a president has done.

Oftentimes, a president is judged in one way during his time in office and in another after he leaves, once the impacts of his policies come into clearer focus.

That said, elections tend to force voters to think in this all-or-nothing way. Either you vote for a Democrat or for a Republican. Either you vote to re-elect your incumbent or you choose the challenger.

Seen through that political lens, these poll numbers are extremely problematic for Democrats on the ballot this fall. We know that, historically, the first midterm election of a president's term is a referendum on his time in office up to that point.

The Point: If the public's report card on Biden's second year in office is anything like the one for his first year, Democrats can kiss their House and Senate majorities goodbye.

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 4 p.m. No.15863833   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3836

Researcher Tells Durham He Saw Holes In The Alfa Bank Hoax Before Democrats Shopped It To The FBI

 

MARCH 14, 2022

 

Last week’s cache of documents is not the first to confirm that Manos Antonakakis rejected the Alfa Bank-Trump secret communication theory before it was peddled to the FBI.

 

Georgia Tech researcher says he tried to politely throw cold water on a key part of the Russia collusion hoax before the Alfa Bank lie was eventually shopped to the media and government agencies, according to a newly obtained document. This new detail was one of several revealed in a document drafted by George Tech’s Manos Antonakakis—the man branded “Researcher-1” in Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann on one count of lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker.

 

As I explained previously, “that indictment alleged that when Sussmann met with Baker on September 19, 2016, to provide the FBI attorney with data and ‘white papers’ that purported to establish a secret communication channel between the Trump organization and the Russia-connected Alfa Bank, Sussmann falsely claimed he was not acting on behalf of a client, when in reality Sussmann was working both for the Clinton campaign and an unnamed ‘U.S. technology industry executive’ since confirmed to be Rodney Joffe.”

 

After the Sussmann indictment dropped, Antonakakis emailed his private lawyers and an attorney and higher-ups at Georgia Tech a document entitled “fallacies” that purported to identify several portions of the indictment he claimed are false or misleading. Last week, The Federalist reported on several details contained in an abbreviated version of the “fallacies” document obtained from Georgia Tech pursuant to a Right-to-Know request.

 

On Thursday, The Federalist received a more complete version of the summary drafted by Antonakakis two days after news broke of Sussmann’s indictment. That version included Antonakakis’s synopsis of what he told Durham’s team about the Alfa Bank hoax.

 

“This part has been taken out of context,” Antonakakis wrote of the indictment’s excerpt from an email he had sent to Joffe after reviewing a draft white paper laying out the Alfa Bank-Trump theory. That excerpt to Joffe read: “A DNS expert would poke several holes to this hypothesis (primarily around visibility, about which very smartly you do not talk about). That being said, I do not think even the top security (non-DNS) researcher can refute your statements. Nice!”

 

Antonakakis initially countered that he was asked “to review it as a non-DNS expert and that is what I did,” before explaining what he had told the special counsel.

 

“If my memory serves me right,” Antonakakis wrote, “I was explicit when I told them that I was not the creator or even an editor of this document.” “I told them that I said what I said in my review of this document,” Antonakakis continued, “because this IMHO [was] the best and most polite way I can tell [Joffe] that this analysis is not great.”

 

So, according to Antonakakis, it was manners that caused him to tell Joffe he “very smartly” did not discuss the main “hole” in the Alfa Bank analysis. It was also proper deportment that compelled the Georgia Tech expert to exclaim “Nice!” to the fact that “even the top security (non-DNS) researchers” would be unable to refute Joffe’s statements.

 

Last week’s cache of documents is not the first to confirm that Antonakakis had rejected the Alfa Bank-Trump secret communication network theory posited in the white paper Sussmann later presented to the FBI’s general counsel. In an earlier email obtained from Georgia Tech, Antonakakis wrote that “Researcher 1,” as Antonakakis called himself, “never supported the article.”

Anonymous ID: 055c3f March 14, 2022, 4 p.m. No.15863836   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>15863833

The tone and tenor of these emails mimic those excerpted in the Sussmann indictment that likewise show Antonakakis found the Alfa Bank theory half-baked. For instance, after Antonakakis found no connections between the trump-email.com domain and Russia when he ran a search for the domain, he provided his frank feedback that the results do “not make much sense with the storyline you have.”

 

Antonakakis would later tell Joffe, Lorenzen, and Researcher 2, who was his Georgia Tech colleague David Dagon, that they needed to regroup because their dislike for Trump was giving them “tunnel vision” and their theory would not withstand public scrutiny.

 

While in private and when questioned by a federal prosecutor Antonakakis presented a dim assessment of the Alfa Bank-Trump theory, an attorney representing the Georgia Tech researcher framed “their hypothesis” as remaining, “to this day,” “a plausible working theory.” Antonakakis has also remained mum since the indictment dropped, even as other supposed experts continue to push the Alfa Bank theory. But why?

 

The indictment, when read in light of the numerous documents obtained from Georgia Tech, indicates the Alfa Bank data presented to Baker (and later the CIA) came from outside of Georgia Tech. It shows Antonakakis saying “these datasets apparently have originated from April,” an apparent reference to April Lorenzen, whom the Sussmann indictment called the “Originator.” Georgia Tech “did not pay or use these data in any of our programs,” Antonakakis would write, which is also consistent with the allegations in the Sussmann indictment.

 

Antonakakis also appears to have had no role in compiling the data, conceptualizing the Alfa Bank theory, writing the report, or editing it. Rather, Antonakakis’s involvement seems limited to “querying” internet data maintained by Joffe’s internet company on August 19, 2016, which led him to believe the “storyline” “does not make much sense,” and reviewing Joffe’s draft report and providing feedback to Joffe, albeit while seemingly cheering on Joffe’s ability to hide the holes in the report.

 

Nor is there any indication that Antonakakis knew that Joffe, with Sussmann’s help, intended to present the report to the FBI, CIA, and media. In contrast, the Sussmann indictment alleged that Dagon, after reviewing Joffe’s draft paper, noted that while questions remained, “in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”

 

The Sussmann indictment also alleged that Dagon, identified as Researcher-2 in the indictment, had also drafted a white paper apparently related to the Alfa Bank allegations Sussmann provided to the FBI. Additionally, Sussmann asked Dagon to “speak on background with members of the media” regarding the Alfa Bank allegation, which Dagon did, the indictment alleged.

 

The special counsel’s office made no similar allegations about Antonakakis. So why doesn’t Antonakakis go public with his expert analysis that the Alfa Bank-Trump research was “not great”? Why not “poke holes” in the white paper, as he said a DNS expert could easily do?

 

Is it a misplaced loyalty to his colleagues and a fear that frankness will create more problems for Joffe, Dagon, and Lorenzen? Or is his attorney, who previously represented Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-Source, Igor Danchenko, driving the “Alfa Bank-Trump theory remains plausible” strategy?

 

No matter the answer, we know the Alfa Bank paper was bunk, and the foremost expert in DNS analysis knows it too.

 

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/14/exclusive-researcher-tells-durham-he-saw-holes-in-the-alfa-bank-hoax-before-democrats-shopped-it-to-the-fbi/