https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-internal-investigation-trump-russia-probe-crossfire-hurricane

FBI running internal investigation into its own Trump-Russia probe 'Crossfire Hurricane'

foxnews.com/politics/fbi-internal-investigation-trump-russia-probe-crossfire-hurricane

Russia Investigation

Published May 24, 2022, 4:56 pm EDT

''The revelation came during the trial for Michael Sussmann, who is accused of lying to the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign''

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The FBI is conducting an internal investigation into the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation, also known as Crossfire Hurricane.

The news of the internal review came during testimony from FBI Special Agent Curtis Heide Tuesday during the trial of Michael Sussmann

— the first trial out of Special Counsel John Durham’s years-long investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

Heide confirmed during testimony that he is being investigated for withholding potentially exculpatory information in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Heide said Tuesday that the exculpatory information in question was a "recording from one of the subjects."

Fox News first reported in 2019 that Durham’s review was zeroing in on transcripts of recordings made by at least one FBI confidential human source who met with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos overseas in 2016, specifically looking at why certain "exculpatory" material from them was not presented in subsequent applications for FISA warrants against Page.

A source, in 2019, told Fox News that the "exculpatory evidence" that could be included in those transcripts, which were declassified and released in April 2020, was Papadopoulos denying having any contact with the Russians to obtain the supposed "dirt" on Clinton.

Fox News obtained the declassified transcript of the secretly recorded meeting in April 2020. The transcript revealed the confidential human source pressed Papadopoulos on whether the Trump campaign was involved in Russian election meddling

— something that, the transcript shows, Papadopoulos emphatically denied.

It is unclear if this is the "exculpatory" information Heide is under investigation for omitting from the FISA warrant applications.

The transcript, however, is of a more than 4-hour long conversation between Papadopoulos and a confidential FBI source on Oct. 31, 2016. According to the obtained transcripts, the confidential human source (CHS) met with Papadopoulos and asked whether he thought Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

"No," Papadopoulos replied.

When asked whether he thought the Russians had "special interests" in the election, Papadopoulos said: "That’s all bullsh–. No one knows who’s hacking them," and added that it "could be the Chinese, could be the Iranians, it could be some Bernie, uh supporters. Could be anonymous."

Papadopoulos was then asked whether he thought Russians "have interest in Trump."

"They, dude, no one knows how a president’s going to govern anyway. You don’t just say, oh I like—," he said before being cut off. "I don’t know. Even Putin said it himself. It’s all, it’s like conspiracy theories."

The source went on to press Papadopoulos, saying: "I feel like there’s some heavy Trump supporters out there that kind of want to rig this f—king election in Trump’s favor and then at the same time, I don’t know."

Papadopoulos quipped: "Dude, you, you… there is no rigging in his favor."

The source pushed him, once again, on whether he thought the Trump campaign had anything to do with the hacking of the DNC.

"No, I know that for a fact," he said. "I’ve been working with them for the last nine months. That’s and all of this stuff has been happening, what, the last four months?"

The comments made by Papadopoulos were noteworthy because, according to officials, they were never provided or included in evidence to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) when seeking warrants and warrant renewals to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page over suspicion of Trump campaign ties to Russia.

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>>16336281

A Justice Department official in April 2020 confirmed the authenticity of the transcripts. The official, at the time, told Fox News that the transcript was just one of a series of productions that the Justice Department made in the wake of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on his review of misconduct of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Horowitz wrote in his report, released in December 2019, that "the FBI did not inform of these conversations at the time they occurred" and the "FISA renewal applications on Carter Page did not include these statements."

The transcripts had been classified, but were declassified under former President Trump’s May 2019 move to approve declassification of documents related to the surveillance of his campaign during the 2016 election.

The FBI obtained FISA warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The now-discredited anti-Trump dossier which contained alleged ties between Donald Trump and Russia served as the basis for FISA warrants against him.

Former Trump adviser Carter Page. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The dossier was commissioned by Fusion GPS

— an opposition research firm hired by Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias to conduct research against Trump. It was authored by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through law firm Perkins Coie

— where Elias and Sussmann were employed.

Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI when he told Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the presidential election, that he was not doing work "for any client" when he requested and attended a meeting in which he presented "purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communicates channel" between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.

Durham’s team alleges Sussmann was, in fact, doing work for two clients: the Hillary Clinton campaign and a technology executive, Rodney Joffe. Following the meeting with Baker, Sussmann billed the Hillary Clinton campaign for his work.

Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to the charge.

Meanwhile, Heide also testified Tuesday he was sent to Washington D.C. in 2016 to join the team investigating Hillary Clinton's private email server and handling of classified information. The FBI's codename for that probe was "Midyear Exam."

Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.

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>>16336288

>>16336281

>>16336327

https://thesaker.is/nato-vs-russia-what-happens-next/

NATO vs Russia: what happens next

thesaker.is/nato-vs-russia-what-happens-next

''In Davos and beyond, NATO’s upbeat narrative plays like a broken record, while on the ground, Russia is stacking up wins that could sink the Atlantic order.''

By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and crossposted with The Cradle

Three months after the start of Russia’s Operation Z in Ukraine, the battle of The West (12 percent) against The Rest (88 percent) keeps metastasizing. Yet the narrative – oddly – remains the same.

On Monday, from Davos, World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab introduced Ukrainian comedian-cum-President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the latest leg of his weapons-solicitation-tour, with a glowing tribute. Herr Schwab stressed that an actor impersonating a president defending neo-Nazis is supported by “all of Europe and the international order.”

He means, of course, everyone except the 88 percent of the planet that subscribes to the Rule of Law – instead of the faux construct the west calls a ‘rules-based international order.’

Back in the real world, Russia, slowly but surely has been rewriting the Art of Hybrid War. Yet within the carnival of NATO psyops, aggressive cognitive infiltration, and stunning media sycophancy, much is being made of the new $40 billion US ‘aid’ package to Ukraine, deemed capable of becoming a game-changer in the war.

This ‘game-changing’ narrative comes courtesy of the same people who burned though trillions of dollars to secure Afghanistan and Iraq. And we saw how that went down.

Ukraine is the Holy Grail of international corruption. That $40 billion can be a game-changer for only two classes of people: First, the US military-industrial complex, and second, a bunch of Ukrainian oligarchs and neo-connish NGOs, that will corner the black market for weapons and humanitarian aid, and then launder the profits in the Cayman Islands.

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>>16336388

A quick breakdown of the $40 billion reveals $8.7 billion will go to replenish the US weapons stockpile (thus not going to Ukraine at all); $3.9 billion for USEUCOM (the ‘office’ that dictates military tactics to Kiev); $5 billion for a fuzzy, unspecified “global food supply chain”; $6 billion for actual weapons and “training” to Ukraine; $9 billion in “economic assistance” (which will disappear into selected pockets); and $0.9 billion for refugees.

US risk agencies have downgraded Kiev to the dumpster of non-reimbursing-loan entities, so large American investment funds are ditching Ukraine, leaving the European Union (EU) and its member-states as the country’s only option.

Few of those countries, apart from Russophobic entities such as Poland, can justify to their own populations sending huge sums of direct aid to a failed state. So it will fall to the Brussels-based EU machine to do just enough to maintain Ukraine in an economic coma – independent from any input from member-states and institutions.

These EU ‘loans’ – mostly in the form of weapons shipments – can always be reimbursed by Kiev’s wheat exports. This is already happening on a small scale via the port of Constanta in Romania, where Ukrainian wheat arrives in barges over the Danube and is loaded into dozens of cargo ships everyday. Or, via convoys of trucks rolling with the weapons-for-wheat racket. However, Ukrainian wheat will keep feeding the wealthy west, not impoverished Ukrainians.

Moreover, expect NATO this summer to come up with another monster psyop to defend its divine (not legal) right to enter the Black Sea with warships to escort Ukrainian vessels transporting wheat. Pro-NATO media will spin it as the west being ‘saved’ from the global food crisis – which happens to be directly caused by serial, hysterical packages of western sanctions.

Poland goes for soft annexation

NATO is indeed massively ramping up its ‘support’ to Ukraine via the western border with Poland. That’s in synch with Washington’s two overarching targets: First, a ‘long war,’ insurgency-style, just like Afghanistan in the 1980s, with jihadis replaced by mercenaries and neo-Nazis. Second, the sanctions instrumentalized to “weaken” Russia, militarily and economically.

Other targets remain unchanged, but are subordinate to the Top Two: make sure that the Democrats are re-elected in the mid-terms (that’s not going to happen); irrigate the industrial-military complex with funds that are recycled back as kickbacks (already happening); and keep the hegemony of the US dollar by all means (tricky: the multipolar world is getting its act together).

A key target being met with astonishing ease is the destruction of the German – and consequently the EU’s – economy, with a great deal of the surviving companies to be eventually sold off to American interests.

Take, for instance, BMW board member Milan Nedeljkovic telling Reuters that “our industry accounts for about 37 percent of natural gas consumption in Germany” which will sink without Russian gas supplies.

Washington’s plan is to keep the new ‘long war’ going at a not-too-incandescent level – think Syria during the 2010s – fueled by rows of mercenaries, and featuring periodic NATO escalations by anyone from Poland and the Baltic midgets to Germany.

Last week, that pitiful Eurocrat posing as High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, gave away the game when previewing the upcoming meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council.

Borrell admitted that “the conflict will be long” and “the priority of the EU member states” in Ukraine “consists in the supply of heavy weapons.”

Then Polish President Andrzej Duda met with Zelensky in Kiev. The slew of agreements the two signed indicate that Warsaw intends to profit handsomely from the war to enhance its politico-military, economic, and cultural influence in western Ukraine. Polish nationals will be allowed to be elected to Ukrainian government bodies and even aim to become constitutional judges.

In practice, that means Kiev is all but transferring management of the Ukrainian failed state to Poland. Warsaw won’t even have to send troops. Call it a soft annexation.

The steamroller on the move

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>>16336392

The steamroller on the move

As it stands, the situation on the battlefield can be examined in this map. Intercepted communications from the Ukrainian command reveal their aim to build a layered defense from Poltava through Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhia, Krivoy Rog, and Nikolaev – which happens to be a shield for the already fortified Odessa. None of that guarantees success against the incoming Russian onslaught.

It’s always important to remember that Operation Z started on February 24 with around 150,000 or so fighters – and definitely not Russia’s elite forces. And yet they liberated Mariupol and destroyed the elite neo-Nazi Azov batallion in a matter of only fifty days, cleaning up a city of 400,000 people with minimal casualties.

While fighting a real war on the ground – not those indiscriminate US bombings from the air – in a huge country against a large army, facing multiple technical, financial and logistical challenges, the Russians also managed to liberate Kherson, Zaporizhia and virtually the whole area of the ‘baby twins,’ the popular republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia’s ground forces commander, General Aleksandr Dvornikov, has turbo-charged missile, artillery and air strikes to a pace five times faster than during the first phase of Operation Z, while the Ukrainians, overall, are low or very low on fuel, ammo for artillery, trained specialists, drones, and radars.

What American armchair and TV generals simply cannot comprehend is that in Russia’s view of this war – which military expert Andrei Martyanov defines as a “combined arms and police operation” – the two top targets are the destruction of all military assets of the enemy while preserving the life of its own soldiers.

So while losing tanks is not a big deal for Moscow, losing lives is. And that accounts for those massive Russian bombings; each military target must be conclusively destroyed. Precision strikes are crucial.

There is a raging debate among Russian military experts on why the Ministry of Defense does not go for a fast strategic victory. They could have reduced Ukraine to rubble – American style – in no time. That’s not going to happen. The Russians prefer to advance slowly and surely, in a sort of steamroller pattern. They only advance after sappers have fully surveilled the terrain; after all there are mines everywhere.

The overall pattern is unmistakable, whatever the NATO spin barrage. Ukrainian losses are becoming exponential – as many as 1,500 killed or wounded each day, everyday. If there are 50,000 Ukrainians in the several Donbass cauldrons, they will be gone by the end of June.

Ukraine must have lost as many as 20,000 soldiers in and around Mariupol alone. That’s a massive military defeat, largely surpassing Debaltsevo in 2015 and previously Ilovaisk in 2014. The losses near Izyum may be even higher than in Mariupol. And now come the losses in the Severodonetsk corner.

We’re talking here about the best Ukrainian forces. It doesn’t even matter that only 70 percent of Western weapons sent by NATO ever make it to the battlefield: the major problem is that the best soldiers are going…going…gone, and won’t be replaced. Azov neo-Nazis, the 24th Brigade, the 36th Brigade, various Air Assault brigades – they all suffered losses of 60+ percent or have been completely demolished.

So the key question, as several Russian military experts have stressed, is not when Kiev will ‘lose’ as a point of no return; it is how many soldiers Moscow is prepared to lose to get to this point.

The entire Ukrainian defense is based on artillery. So the key battles ahead involve long-range artillery. There will be problems, because the US is about to deliver M270 MLRS systems with precision-guided ammunition, capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 70 kilometers or more.

Russia, though, has a counterpunch: the Hermes Small Operational-Tactical Complex, using high precision munitions, possibility of laser guidance, and a range of more than 100 kilometers. And they can work in conjunction with the already mass-produced Pantsir air defense systems.

The sinking ship

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>>16336388

>>16336392

>>16336401

>>16336402

The sinking ship

Ukraine, within its current borders, is already a thing of the past. Georgy Muradov, permanent representative of Crimea to the President of Russia and Deputy Prime Minister of the Crimean government, is adamant: “Ukraine in the form in which it was, I think, will no longer remain. This is already the former Ukraine.”

The Sea of ​​Azov has now become a “sea of ​​joint use” by Russia and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), as confirmed by Muradov.

Mariupol will be restored. Russia has had plenty of experience in this business in both Grozny and Crimea. The Russia-Crimea land corridor is on. Four hospitals among five in Mariupol have already reopened and public transportation is back, as well as three gas stations.

The imminent loss of Severodonetsk and Lysichansk will ring serious alarm bells in Washington and Brussels, because that will represent the beginning of the end of the current regime in Kiev. And that, for all practical purposes – and beyond all the lofty rhetoric of “the west stands with you” – means heavy players won’t be exactly encouraged to bet on a sinking ship.

On the sanctions front, Moscow knows exactly what to expect, as detailed by Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov: “Russia proceeds from the fact that sanctions against it are a rather long-term trend, and from the fact that the pivot to Asia, the acceleration of reorientation to eastern markets, to Asian markets is a strategic direction for Russia. We will make every effort to integrate into value chains precisely together with Asian countries, together with Arab countries, together with South America.”

On efforts to “intimidate Russia,” players would be wise to listen to the hypersonic sound of 50 Sarmat state-of-the-art missiles ready for combat this autumn, as explained by Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin.

This week’s meetings in Davos brings to light another alignment forming in the world’s overarching unipolar vs. multipolar battle. Russia, the baby twins, Chechnya and allies such as Belarus are now pitted against ‘Davos leaders’ – in other words, the combined western elite, with a few exceptions like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Zelensky will be fine. He’s protected by British and American special forces. The family is reportedly living in an $8 million mansion in Israel. He owns a $34 million villa in Miami Beach, and another in Tuscany. Average Ukrainians were lied to, robbed, and in many cases, murdered, by the Kiev gang he presides over – oligarchs, security service (SBU) fanatics, neo-Nazis. And those Ukrainians that remain (10 million have already fled) will continue to be treated as expendable.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir “the new Hitler” Putin is in absolutely no hurry to end this larger than life drama that is ruining and rotting the already decaying west to its core. Why should he? He tried everything, since 2007, on the “why can’t we get along” front. Putin was totally rejected. So now it’s time to sit back, relax, and watch the Decline of the West.

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https://thesaker.is/nato-vs-russia-what-happens-next/

>>16336429

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/21/fact-check-disease-outbreaks-dont-occur-only-u-s-election-years/5601357002/

Fact check: Disease outbreaks don't occur just in U.S. major election years

usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/21/fact-check-disease-outbreaks-dont-occur-only-u-s-election-years/5601357002

FACT CHECK

Vincent Gabrielle

USA TODAY

The claim: Every election year has a disease.

Does a connection exist between election years and the emergence of new epidemics?

A viral meme has been circulating on various social media sites, including Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. The meme depicts a whiteboard seen at an unidentified doctor’s office. Another version appears like a mural, with a speech bubble containing information.

On the board or mural are listed various diseases next to the dates of American presidential and congressional midterm elections. The diseases listed are SARS 2004, Avian 2008, Swine 2010, MERS 2012, Ebola 2014, Zika 2016, Ebola 2018 and Corona 2020.

The whiteboard version also includes "facts" that say COVID-19 is not particularly lethal.

More:Fact check: What's true and what's false about coronavirus?

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>>16336452

When these outbreaks really occurred

“This is such a stretch,” said Kathleen Brown, professor of public health at the University of Tennessee. “There were outbreaks during years of elections but there were also outbreaks in years where there were not elections.”

“The author of this (meme) is not telling the whole story,” Brown said.

The list of diseases is misleading.

SARS, for example, emerged in February 2003, which was not a presidential or congressional election year, and by July 2003 the World Health Organization declared SARS was contained. A trickle of cases continued into May 2004. Only eight people in the United States caught SARS and none died. SARS was given only a passing mention on the Republican Party platform and was not a major election issue.

Avian 2008 likely refers to avian flu. The most prevalent avian flu viruses, H5N1 and H9N2, have been detected in both humans and birds for over a decade. Outbreaks of these strains have been tracked as far back as the 1990s to poultry markets in Hong Kong. The WHO reports that periodic outbreaks or isolated cases of H5N1 have persisted since 1996 at low levels more or less uninterrupted.

The biggest victims of avian flu are livestock birds. Millions of chickens and geese have been culled in response to avian flu. But it was never an election issue. The disease is mentioned passingly in the 2008 Democratic Party platform as an issue needing international cooperation in Asia.

The other diseases listed fare similarly when subjected to scrutiny.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, emerged in 2012, but major outbreaks did not occur until 2015 and 2018. Neither outbreak occurred particularly close to major American elections and most cases were tied directly to human contact with camels. Human-to-human transmission happened only in rare circumstances.

Ebola did not first emerge in 2014. Periodic outbreaks of Ebola have been documented since 1976.

Zika, similarly, was first detected in humans in Tanzania in 1952, and slowly spread along the equatorial Pacific until it reached Brazil in 2015.

Swine flu peaked in 2009; it spread during normal flu season.

More:Fact check: Flu vaccine hasn't eradicated the flu, but it has lessened the burden of the virus

“It’s essentially trying to draw a link there that is tenuous at best,” said Sephen Kissler, a postdoctoral immunology researcher at Harvard. He said if the idea is that these illnesses were engineered to align with election years, then “they didn’t do a very good job of doing it.”

While Zika and the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak were both mentioned by politicians, in neither case was the disease response brandished as a referendum on the government.

The spread of Zika was a research funding issue that crossed party lines. Ebola was wrapped up in broader boarder security or health care funding arguments.

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>>16336456

Are outbreaks, elections related?

The other side of the board lists several claims about COVID-19’s lethality and infectivity. It ends with a statement that COVID-19 is being promoted to manipulate the 2020 elections. The implication is that there is a historic trend of attempting to manipulate election results by fomenting panic regarding diseases.

"Coronavirus has a contagion factor of 2. SARS was 4. Measles is 18," the meme states.

This meme understates the transmissibility of COVID-19. The number of new cases an average carrier might infect is between 2.5-3.5. This is called the reproduction number, not the “contagion factor.”

“The underlying narrative that they are saying here is that COVID is not as bad because its not as contagious,” said Kissler, the immunology researcher. “That’s conflating clinical severity with transmissibility, which is not a useful measure of how severe an illness is.”

Kissler explained that Ebola, which can kill 20%-40% of patients depending on the strain, is highly severe but not very transmissible. It has a low reproduction number, but it’s still a serious illness.

The meme also depicts a high recovery rate for COVID-19 patients younger than 50, at "99.7%," ignoring the older people who make up the most vulnerable age group.

“What about people over 50? Do we stop caring about them? That’s why this (COVID) is so bad,” said Kissler, explaining that it is the severity among people who are older and with underlying conditions that makes COVID-19 so harmful from a broader social perspective.

He also said that the meme misunderstands what a death rate means.

“There’s a fallacy of numbers here,” he said, “I hear a lot of people saying the fatality rate is 1% like that’s nothing. But that actually means I have a 1 in 100 chance of dying.”

“There’s not many things I do where I have a 1:100 chance of dying.”

Or put another way. If you know 100 people, you will know at least one person who will die from COVID-19 assuming most people get infected.

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>>16336462

Where the meme originated

This meme has been circulating since late February in some form or another. One version of the meme is the fusion of two related memes, both of which downplay the COVID-19 pandemic and contain conspiratorial undertones.

The earliest examples of the list of different diseases come from far-right conspiratorial Twitter accounts. The list of “facts” comes from a conspiracy theorist associated with QAnon, per reporting from the Daily Beast.

“If you believe one conspiracy you are more likely to believe any and all conspiracies,” said Matthew Pittman, a professor of advertising at the University of Tennessee. Pittman teaches social media studies classes in the school of journalism. He explained that conspiracy memes operate on the level of emotion and involve a lot of motivated reasoning.

“We all like to think of ourselves as rational creatures but we are really emotional,” Pittman said. “We feel first, and we construct our rational later.”

More:What is QAnon and where did it come from? What to know about the far-right conspiracy theory

It is unclear when the two memes first merged.

One early example appears on the Facebook page of a chiropractor based in Pennsylvania. This Facebook page was flagged for COVID-19 misinformation earlier this year and features numerous antivaccine memes. The chiropractor did not respond to USA TODAY’s repeated attempts for comment.

Historically the consequences of pandemics are complex and difficult to predict. Some diseases like H1N1 disappeared from the public consciousness when they subsided. But many diseases never go away and their social and political impacts persist.

Take the case of HIV/AIDS. Emerging months into the presidency of Ronald Regan, HIV/AIDS would account for 14% of male deaths by 1989. The lack of response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic provoked multiple decades of activism, triggered a realignment of federal disease research policy, and led to the first Supreme Court decision recognizing the rights of gay couples. That pandemic had worldwide political implications. But all of this unfolded over decades and over the terms of both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Even though many people in developed nations now have access to treatment, the HIV pandemic has never gone away. According to UNAIDS, 1.7 million people acquired HIV in 2019, and 690,000 died that same year.

The long-term consequences, from a health, economic and political perspective of COVID-19 are still unknown.

Our ruling: ~~False~~

We rate this claim as FALSE, based on our research. This meme contains multiple instances of misstated, incorrect or cherry-picked information arrayed to suggest a connection between elections and novel infectious diseases, and wrongfully implies that the current pandemic is a political plot.

4/4

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/11/facebook-posts/no-connection-between-us-national-elections-and-in/

“Every election year has a disease” … SARS in 2004; avian flu in 2008; swine flu in 2010; MERS in 2012; Ebola in 2014 and 2018; Zika in 2016 and the coronavirus in 2020.

''No connection between the US national elections and international plandemics''

politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/11/facebook-posts/no-connection-between-us-national-elections-and-in

By Emily Venezky March 11, 2020

Most of these diseases were discovered and spread before the election years and were minimally mentioned during campaigns.

SARS, avian flu and MERS had virtually no effect on the U.S. during election years.

One exception: Ebola was a significant campaign issue in 2014.

See the sources for this fact-check

As coronavirus misinformation spreads like wildfire, there have been conspiratorial attempts to connect the disease to election year politics. Many tweets and Facebook posts are making the false claim that there is a trend of disease outbreaks matched to elections.

"Every election year has a disease," reads one.

The posts connect SARS to 2004, avian flu to 2008, swine flu to 2010, MERS to 2012, Ebola to 2014 and 2018, Zika to 2016, and the coronavirus to 2020.

"Coincidences? NEVER."

One post we saw supposedly linked to the World Health Organization (WHO), but that lead to a 404 error page.

Our research showed that most of these connections weren’t real. We decided to take a closer look and see if the diseases were significant enough to appear in party platforms or mentioned during candidate interviews. In most cases, they weren’t.

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>>16336505

SARS

SARS is a coronavirus disease that spread from animals to humans and was diagnosed in China in 2003. SARS is a respiratory illness that affects breathing and is usually associated with coughing and a fever. It is spread through infected droplets that can survive on surfaces and could affect you if airborne.

The SARS outbreak was stopped by July 2003, and in 2004 China took precautions by putting an embargo on animals that could have been the source of the disease.

SARS affected eight people in the United States, and all these cases were contracted from travel abroad. SARS did not spread within the United States during the 2003 outbreak, and there have been no cases reported since then.

SARS wasn’t a main campaign point in the 2004 presidential elections. It was referenced once in the Republican Party platform that was released in August 2004, under a section on international diplomacy that mentioned it as a joint concern of the United States and China.

Avian flu

Avian flu is usually found in aquatic birds and poultry, but in rare cases the influenza can cross over and infect humans. The symptoms of avian flu are like general influenza, including cough, fever, sore throat or headaches.

The two most prevalent avian influenza viruses, H5N1 and H9N2, caused respiratory infections in humans in China as early as the 1990s. Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Egypt, Thailand, and many other countries struggled with the spread of H5N1 from 2004 to 2014.

In 2014, there was only one case of H5N1 in North America, according to the CDC, and there were never any U.S. cases.

As far as the 2008 presidential campaign is concerned, the Democratic Party platform mentioned avian flu briefly to justify strengthening international support systems.

Nevertheless, the avian flu was a pandemic before the 2008 presidential election and has continued to be a problem even today, with new strains appearing as recently as 2017. The 2008 strain of the influenza had no significant influence on elections that we could determine.

Swine flu

The swine flu, more specifically H1N1, started spreading in early 2009 and combined avian, swine, and human influenza in one new strain. The symptoms of the disease are like most flu symptoms, including a fever, chills, cough, sore throat, or a runny or stuffy nose. It also spreads like most influenza, with infected droplets that could be airborne or left on surfaces.

The 2009 swine flu outbreak was the "first global flu pandemic in 40 years," according to the CDC. The panic surrounding swine flu led to many extreme measures, including school shutdowns and people camping outside of free swine flu vaccine centers. But not everyone approved of the vaccine.

PolitiFact checked a statement from October 2009 by Glenn Beck, a conservative talk show host who was against the swine flu vaccination. He believed the vaccine would lead to neurological problems like that of an influenza vaccine from the 1970s. We rated his statement Mostly False.

Swine flu was a politically polarizing disease when it came to vaccinating and expanding the government’s health budget to prevent more outbreaks. It affected Americans directly and led to preventative legislation, but we found no examples of representatives using H1N1 in their campaigns during the 2010 midterm elections.

MERS

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, is a viral respiratory illness that was first found in dromedary (or one-humped) camels and then spread to humans. Most cases of the disease came from direct or in-direct contact with camels.

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>>16336505

>>16336470

>>16336462

>>16336452

>>16336456

>>16336517

Donkey Pox 2022

>>16336551

>>16336642

here we go again,

same ole shit again!

>>16336667

Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: 1a8912 No.815814 📁

Mar 27 2018 23:42:33 (EST)

PARKLAND is a DISTRACTION.

PARKLAND was specifically organized & designed to DISTRACT [TEST] - watch the news.

ACTORS are ACTING.

FAKE.

NO POWER.

JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED TO THOSE PLAYING THE GAME [ALL].

GUNS ARE SAFE.

TRUST THE PLAN.

Q969

>>16336781

These reporters and networks have been named in the WikiLeaks to have colluded with the DNC or Hillary campaign during the 2016 election cycle:

ABC – Cecilia Vega

ABC - David Muir

ABC – Diane Sawyer

ABC – George Stephanoplous

ABC – Jon Karl

ABC – Liz Kreutz

Q1515

Jun 16 2018 00:50:56 (EST)

>>16336782

>it's just monkey flu

>''it's just ~~m~~Donkey flu''

Why is the Donkey the Democratic Party’s Mascot?

oscarsplace.org/post/why-is-the-donkey-the-democratic-party-s-mascot

July 7, 2021

One of the best things I like about donkeys is that they’re apolitical. If the food is good and the water is clean, donkeys have no problem eating from each side of the aisle. To find out how donkeys became the mascot of the Democratic Party, I asked a handful of friends and no one knew the answer. So, I decided to do a little research and this is what I learned.

The Democratic Party’s donkey and the Republican Party’s elephant have been a part of politics since the 19th century. Most people know what they represent, but nothing else. Here are some interesting factoids about the why, where, and how about the Democratic donkey.

The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. Jackson went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams and serve as America’s first Democratic president.

In the 1870s, influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party. We can’t fully tell the story of the Democratic donkey without discussing the famous Republican Elephant. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House. An image of an elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in at least one political cartoon and a newspaper illustration during the Civil War (when “seeing the elephant” was an expression used by soldiers to mean experiencing combat), but the pachyderm didn’t start to take hold as a GOP symbol until Thomas Nast, who’s considered the father of the modern political cartoon, used it in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon.

Titled “The Third-Term Panic,” Nast’s drawing mocked the New York Herald, which had been critical of President Ulysses Grant’s rumored bid for a third term, and portrayed various interest groups as animals, including an elephant labeled “the Republican vote,” which was shown standing at the edge of a pit. Nast employed the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons during the 1870s, and by 1880 other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party. Along with the donkey and elephant, the German-born Nast is associated with another political animal, the ferocious Tammany Tiger, which the crusading artist famously featured in an 1871 Harper’s Weekly cartoon that attacked New York’s William “Boss” Tweed and Tammany Hall, his corrupt political machine. Not all of Nast’s work was about politics, though; he’s also credited with creating the modern image of Santa Claus. What animals do you think would better represent the two political parties better today? We always love your comments, so why not weigh in? About Oscars Place Adoption Center & Animal Sanctuary Oscar’s Place | The Selway Family Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization committed to the rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming of donkeys abused or abandoned. When an animal suffers because humans are unkind, Oscar’s Place steps in. While we’re just a team of everyday individuals, we deeply care for and are committed to providing a safe haven for farm animals in need. Sources: Wikipedia and USA Today