>>20401333 House passes resolution to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee. PN

Question how did happen yesterday on Sunday

The Coming 2024 Leftist Election Grift

Voter rolls filled with unqualified voters—for instance, voters without a valid address or with an insufficient or incorrect address—are ready-made for fraud.

Daniel StreetFebruary 10, 2024

The 2024 U.S. presidential election will likely pit former President Donald J. Trump against current President Joseph Biden in an epic rematch of the 2020 election. As most Americans know, in 2020, the Democrats and their allies on the far left reached deep into their bag of dirty tricks to put Biden in the White House. They will undoubtedly pull out all of the stops yet again in 2024. This time, however, far more people are watching and are aware of the grifts being run in our elections by the left. With so many election integrity groups and concerned citizens watching this time around, what will the Democrats do to tilt the results in their favor? They have quite a few arrows in their quiver, but virtually every trick relies on one thing: dirty voter rolls.

Voter rolls filled with unqualified voters—for instance, voters without a valid address or with an insufficient or incorrect address—are ready-made for fraud. A mailed ballot may go out to that person, but if the address is wrong or incorrect, the ballot will not reach the voter.These “floating ballots” are often gathered and cast as votes illegitimately. These practices, along with many others, are widely practiced around the country.

Election integrity groups all over America are fighting to clean voter rolls, state-by-state and town-by-town. Progress has been made. For instance, election integrity groups worked hard to clean up Wisconsin’s voter rolls after the 2020 election. Using fractal technology to tie voter rolls to addresses in state property tax databases, phantom voters are being removed from voter rolls throughout the country, making mail in ballot shenanigansmore difficult.In Michigan, an election integrity group puts qualified voter file data at your fingertips,allowing ineligible voter registrations to be readily identified. These are just a smattering of the efforts going on across the country to clean up voter rolls, but hopefully the point is made: A lot of people are doing good work to try to clean up the voter rolls all over the country.

What is the problem, then? How will the Democrats and far-left non-governmental organizations (NGOs) tip the scales back in their favor? Part of the answer is the National Voter Registration Act(NVRA). This Act is commonly known as the Motor Voter Law, because itmandates states to allow people to register to vote when obtaining a driver’s license. While this law actually requires states to remove the names of ineligible voters and to maintain “accurate” lists of registered voters and is used by election integrity groups to challenge inaccurate voter rolls, other provisions are problematic.

The NVRA provision presenting the problem in this context is 52 U.S.C. §20507(c)(2)(A). This provision creates what is known as the “quiet period” in the 90 days leading up to a federal election and prohibits states from “systematically” removing “names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” during that 90-day window. As the court observed in Arcia v. Fla. Sec’y of State, 772 F. 3d 1335 (11th Cir. 2014), the NRVA allows three forms of removals in the 90 days before an election: (1) removals at the request of the registrant; (2) removals for criminal conviction or mental incapacity; and (3) removals upon the death of the registrant. In that case, the court prohibited the Florida secretary of state from systematically removing illegally registered people who were not American citizens in the 90-day “quiet period.”

How will the left seek to take advantage of this 90-day “quiet period” where voters may not be systematically removed from the rolls? What happened in Muskegon County, Michigan, in 2020 is illustrative. In October 2020, thousands of voter registration applications were filed in Muskegon County, Michigan. The city clerk was immediately suspicious, asmany of the applications were in the same handwriting and contained incomplete or invalid addresses. The city clerk reported the matter to local police. An investigation confirmed many of the registrations were fraudulent and that the company gathering and submitting the registrations worked with Democratic political organizations, including working with the Biden campaign in multiple States in 2020…

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/10/the-coming-2024-leftist-election-grift/

>>20401669

2/2

The police interview with the contractor’s “compliance officer” was obtained by an independent researcher and released in November 2023. In it, the employee outlines theproblems with “false registrations” that were happening “everywhere,” not just in Muskegon. Listen to this person’s interview for more on the type of organization this is and how it operates.

Under a provision of the Federal Voting Rights Act, 52 U.S.C. §10307(c), a person who knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his “name, address, or period of residence” to register to vote or “who conspires with another individual” for the purpose of encouraging false registrationmay be imprisoned for 5 years. Despite this, no one was prosecuted for the thousands of false voter registrations submitted in Muskegon, Michigan. In fact, instead of expanding the investigation to other jurisdictions in Michigan as well as into other states, the investigation was shut down, according to news reports. That does not inspire much confidence in the people in charge of maintaining the integrity of our elections, does it?

In the 90-day “quiet period” established by the NVRA, local election officials are effectively the only screening system in place to block unlawful voter registrations. While challenging an individual registration remains possible in the 90-day “quiet period,” challenging thousands of registrations submitted on a particular day or series of days will undoubtedly be a prohibited “systematic” challenge. Do you think these officials in many of theDemocrat bastions in big cities would refuse to accept these bogus registrations? Do you think what happened in Muskegon, Michigan, was an aberration? In jurisdiction after jurisdiction and city after city, piles of fraudulent registration applications will probably be readily accepted. After all, why not?

The bottom line is that theentire Democrat and far-left get-out-the-vote apparatus will be in overdrive in the 90 days before the 2024presidential election, submitting as many voter registrations as possible (valid or not) in order to harvest as many ballots as conceivably possible. This will be one of the primary battlegrounds that will determine the outcome of the 2024 election. Is the RNC ready for it? If “what’s past is prologue,” the answer is probably not.Election integrity groups are doing what they can, but they will need your help. If Americans hope to maintain legitimate elections,2024 is the time for “all hands on deck.”

(Lhttps://amgreatness.com/2024/02/10/the-coming-2024-leftist-election-grift/

Jill Biden can spare us the fake outrage over the damning special counsel report

Miranda Devine

Published Feb. 11, 2024, 6:54 p.m.

So Jill Biden has lashed out at special counsel Robert Hur over his report that let her husband off the hook for willfully retaining and sharing classified files — due to the commander-in-chief’s total lack of recall while being questioned.

It’s as predictable as it is laughable.

“I hope you can imagine how it felt to read that attack— not just as Joe’s wife, but as Beau’s mother,” the first lady lamented in a campaign email over the weekend.

“I don’t know what this Special Counsel was trying to achieve … I can’t imagine why someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”

Spare us.The president was the one who brought up his late son Beau during his interview with Hur.

It’s what he always does when he’s in trouble.

Every time he feels the political heat, he finds a way to turn thespotlight on his life’s tragediesand disarm his antagonists.

It is his shield against accountability, and he has wielded it to great effect his entire career.

You hate to attribute base cynical motives to anyone,but Biden walking through the family graveyard on his way out of Mass, where waiting cameras will capture the perfect poignant image of a grief-burdened man among the tombstones, does tug at the idea.

It isuncanny how these images always emergewhen he is in hot water. Sometimes, in Washington, you can never be too cynical.

As for Hur’s conclusion that a jury would probably acquit Biden because he’s a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,”a.k.a. he has mush for brains, that really got Dr. Jill and hubby hot under the collar.

“My memory is fine,” thundered the president in his calamitous Thursday night press conference, and the Sunday shows were full of VIPs saying how astute and sharp and on the ball he is. Might even be half true.

Sly Joe from Scranton wouldn’t be the first crook whofeigns memory lossto avoid incriminating himself when law enforcement comes knocking.

It worked. He didn’t get indicted.What’s he complaining about?

https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/opinion/jill-biden-can-spare-us-the-fake-outrage-over-the-damning-special-counsel-report/

Election Fraud 2.0! O.K., So What Are You Gonna Do About It?

November 18, 20221/2“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.” –Chesty Puller, United States Marines

Only in politics could 2022 players be surprised by the “innovation” of a mail-in ballot-led strategy exactly the same as was used in 2020.

If more than 20 million people watched Dinesh D'Souza's documentary, 2,000 Mules, why didn’t candidates prepare for phantom voters?Political people are really stupid.

In 2020, Democrats set up corner mail-in ballot drop boxes, harvested thousands of floating ballots, and live, on video tape, dropped them off at ballot-gathering stations.

In 2022,only the Republican Party, truly The Stupid Party, could be caught flat-footed with its opponents doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same way, at full scale, on video, again.

It is exasperating to listen to the moaning in Arizona where the Maricopa County election fraud factory did precisely the same thing in 2022 as it did in 2020 – stealing an election from a group of promising candidates. They even had their candidate skip debates the way Joe Biden did, hiding in her basement!

Let’s ask the question nobody is asking: Why were candidates spending millions on ads and organizationswhile ignoring the work of cleaning up the voter rolls?. The Democrat, leftist ballot strategy has one absolute, must have, ingredient:Floating ballots.

A floating ballot is the one that goes to 434 Prescott Street for Bill Jones. But the address is an apartment building, so it cannot be delivered because it does not indicate that Bill is Unit 34. That free-floating ballot is collected by someone – and eventually voted.

7_74_19.gifThis happens in almost every state in about every multi-unit building. We saw it in many states in 2020 and 2022.

In 2022, innovative Republican candidates, a very few, mailed postcards to every voter in their congressional district. The cards that came back = NON-DELIVERABLE ADDRESS. They challenged ballots sent to these addresses, and perhaps they sent volunteers to find some of those accumulated ballots.

We know a voter integrity team in Georgia, working from their kitchens, doing similar “analysis.”People, this isn’t hard. This isn’t expensive. This is mandatory! Find the phantoms!

Why do we not see every major political campaign have an outreach to identify phantoms and stop the ballot-harvesting?Clue: The Republican organizations are as into keeping phantoms on the voter rolls as the Democrat leftists.

Don’t believe me?

Mike Lindell hired us to work with the voter integrity team in Wisconsin right after 2020 election. Sheriff David Clarke called me when I was in Tucson and asked if we would apply Fractal Programming, which is described at www.Omega4America.com, to voter rolls. Lindell is as colorful in real life as he is selling pillows on television and he's equally passionate.

Let me take you there.

Mike called me at 8:00 p.m. asking me to run the voter rolls for one of the reddest states. The next morning, I had to present the voter roll phantoms to its Secretary of State, via a Zoom call.

I had two hours to find at-scale phantom voters inone of the reddest statesand present them to agroup of 20 lawyersafter my first cup of coffee the following morning.

It wasn’t hard.Voters registered in prison. People voting fromhomeless shelters– for 20 years. (Homeless shelters do not have 20-year residents, don’t email me about this). Active voters in a frat house who were 106 years old, and a voter who was 1,900 years old who registered to vote, just before the 2020 election.…

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/election_fraud_20_ok_so_what_are_you_gonna_do_about_it.html

>>20401847

2/2

The response from this Republican secretary of state was complete denial. No matter how crazy the phantom’s address was – like a jail – he refused to concede there was any phantom inhabitation of his state’s voter rolls.

We now run about 20 states and they are all like this.. Phantom voter fraud is the heart and soul of ballot-harvesting election-stealing.

If we eliminate phantom voter fraud, people will still screw with machines, Maricopa County will make sure its voting machines do not work in Republican precincts, but the fake-ballot harvesting at scale will end. It’s where the big votes are!

Election fraud is an industry. It is core to the fabric of both Democrat and Republican establishments.

If there is anyelection truismwe found in 20 months helping voter integrity teams in over a dozen states,it is that only America-First candidates appear to be victims.

Phantom voters appeared in a state representative election in Wisconsin between two Republicans, one of whom was trying to unseat an unpopular guy. Guess what? Phantoms moved from their current homes, to this little state rep district, voted, then seem to have moved back. All in a couple of weeks.

Do you think this was a Leftist plot? Hardly.

Same thing happened in a Florida congressional race where an America-First candidate lost a primary to a RINO and there were aboutthree times the number of phantomsin the final total as were needed to turn the race. Who do you think won?

Cleta Mitchell of the Public Interest Legal Foundationreported on the 31 states who use ERIC, which was an originally Soros-funded entity, providing virtual food and clothing to phantoms. ERIC is a totally faked-out entity giving both Republican and Democrat governors cover for keeping phantoms on the voter rolls.

Back to Chesty Puller. We know election stealing is the intended end for the ballot-first strategy.

We know how they do it.We see, thanks to Fractal Programming, literally every voter in every state across scores of databases; we can determine if they are likely fake. Same thing with addresses.

We can see voter rolls, on different dates and attack “sovereign voter fraud” when the government is in on it. We can see when the voter is inactive, changed to active, voted, then changed back – invisible to most current tech.

After my last piece on election fraud, I counted almost 1,000 emails. The top question: “What can I do?The answer is to demand every major political campaign have a voter clean-up strategy.

Why would you donate your time, your dough, to a candidate who will just get screwed by phantoms while his or her opponent refuses to debate and lives in a basement?

And start raising hell with your state reps to dump ERIC. Why would any Republican state use a phantom voter care and feeding system? We will never eliminate mail-in voting. We can, however, chase phantoms off the voter rolls and end much of the election stealing.

They are all around us – we have them just where we want them.

Now let’s eliminate their phantom ballot inventory.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/election_fraud_20_ok_so_what_are_you_gonna_do_about_it.html

February 12, 2024

Republicans Live Up to Being the Stupid Party

By Brian C. Joondeph

America’s political system is based on two parties, Republicans and Democrats. Given that the collective differences between the two parties are minimal, they are referred to as the uni-party, the ruling class, or simply “the swamp.”

As humans, we share 70 percent of our DNA with slugs. Republicans and Democrats probably share at least that much in terms of policies and priorities.

As you can tell, I hold little party in high regard, and am registered independent/unaffiliated because as Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Either party will welcome me as a member only if I offer them my email address, phone number, and a credit card number.

I have names for both parties. Democrats are the “evil party” and Republicans are the “stupid party.”

Democrats are evil because they support the murder of full-term babies and encourage confused teenagers to surgically mutilate their bodies for short term adulation but long-term misery, as the New York Times surprisingly pointed out. They want to control people, sacrificing individual liberty and free expression in favor of what they perceive as the “collective good.”

They believe themselves to be their own higher power. Their version of “natural law” is their whims of the day rather than “unalienable rights” endowed by our Creator.

Republicans are stupid because they cannot articulate or enact any opposition to Democrat evil. They believe principled opposition is a watered-down version of Democrat policy. Like a battered spouse or child, Republicans crawl back to their abusers, hoping for a different outcome or a brief smile before the beatings resume.

Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal may have coined this phrase, although Republicans were stupid long before. At a speech to the Republican National Committee in 2013, he told his audience, “We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults.”

A few past examples include President George H.W. Bush famously saying “Read my lips, no new taxes” then promptly raising taxes and losing reelection to an Arkansas slickster. President Ronald Reagan signed an immigration reform bill in 1986 granting amnesty to 3 million illegal migrants in exchange for enhanced border security and employer penalties for hiring illegal workers.

We got amnesty and a bunch of new Democrat voters, but the rest never materialized, like Lucy pulling away the football as Charlie Brown was about to kick it.

7_74_19.gifNegotiating with evil never works as evil will agree to anything, then do as it pleases. That’s a truth for the ages. What is the latest Republican stupidity?

House Republicans had an opportunity to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and couldn’t muster the votes. Even if impeached, a Democrat-controlled Senate would never remove him from office, but a Senate trial, subpoenas, discovery, and testimony would have been enlightening as to the decision allowing illegal migration to the tune of 300,000 migrants per month.

A small group of Republicans thwarted impeachment. Mayorkas’s dereliction of duty in not enforcing existing immigration law and lying to Congress and the American people, saying “the border is not open,” was not “an impeachable offense” according to Reps. Ken Buck, Tom McClintock, and Mike Gallagher….

As the old saying goes, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” Democrats play with sharp elbows and fists and kick their opponents in the balls. Republicans tweet, hold hearings, and hide under the table. The results are predictable and consistent.And the GOP remains the stupid party..

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/republicans_live_up_to_being_the_stupid_party.html

February 12, 2024

Wars and Putin, Lies and Biden

By Christopher Chantrill

In a three-part piece arguing against the various U.S. populist and isolationist movements of the past century, starting with the movement to stay out of World War I, and continuing to World War II, Cold War, Middle East, etc., Thaddeus G. McCotter argues thatthe best way for our leaders to “garner public support for foreign policy is to tell the truth.” Except for one thing:

Question: How do you know when a politician is lying? Answer:when his lips are moving.

When a leader wants to start a war or gift his supporters with a new government program, he will say anything in order to start his war or pass his program. Meanwhile our liberal friends were all worried about Tucker Carlson’s trip to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin.

Because? Because they are afraid that Putin would lie to Carlson? That he would launch a Narrative that would end the Ukraine War short of total victory for Zelenskyy? That Carlson would score a major coup in his post-FoxNews career and boost himself into the top tier of journalism?

President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the platform of “he kept us out of war” and then promptly sent the doughboys to the trenches in France so that Doris Day would be able to star in On Moonlight Bay.

As for FDR and the runup to World War II, well, never mind.

So of course Vladimir Putin was full of lies in his two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson on February 6, as emigré Russian businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky bellowed in a twelve-part X-post.

And you know that the interview was a Bad Thing, because our liberal friends are busy fact-checking Putin’s statements.

But when a politician whether Wilson or FDR or Obama or Biden or even Putin makes a speech or sits for an interview, the question is: what is the Narrative? What is the politician trying to put over on us?

7_74_19.gifI don’t know about you, but I am interested in hearing what any headline politician has to say.My question is: what is he lying about, and why?

For instance, the world is wondering whether President Biden’s trainwreck press conference in the wake of his non-indictment for mishandling vital regime secrets was a cunning and sophisticated attempt by his handlers to dump the president before the 2024.

Alternatively, the question in the minds of experts across the world may be whether Biden’s handlers are now so far gone into incompetence that they forgot to keep the White House basement locked. If Biden is the mostincompetent president since Jimmy Carter, imagine how incompetent the people he hired must be.

Enough of Biden. My take on the Carlson-Putin interview is:

Whatabout the Huns and our pal Attila? How come Putin’s Year Zero is not 370 CE when the Huns swarmed into Europe to rape and pillage? And where was NATO when we really needed it?

I was particularly interested in Putin’s references to the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austrian Empire and the significance of the Dnieper River between Russia and Europe. Take Lviv (or Lvov) in today’s Ukraine. It used to be in Galicia, part of the Austrian Empire. And when libertarian saint Ludwig von Mises was born there in 1881 it was called Lemberg.

Putin didn’t mention the Jews. But the area he was discussing was exactly where the Jews of Eastern Europe were concentrated before the Late Unpleasantness in the mid-20th century. On the “Jewish Population Maps” there were many cities in the area where Jews were 50% or more of the population before the Russian pogroms and Hitler’s Final Solution.

Putin practically said that thePoles in 1939 were playing both ends against the middle with Germany and the Soviet Union. Our U.S./European Narrative is, of course, that the Poles were helpless victims caught in a vice between the Nazis and the Commies. I wonder, what will “historians agree” about Poland and 1939 in the New York Times in 2039?

And Putin played the Nazi card when he accused the Ukraine regime of tolerating neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine.I thought that our liberal friends had exclusive use of the Nazi card.

Here’s the thing, dear liberal friends. Whenever I detect a liberal Narrative on some issue, I always tend to think that the opposite must be true. So, if you liberal experts in the New York Times all agree on something like Putin I immediately start to wonder: “What’s the angle here? What is it that liberals don’t want me to know?”

Another thing: do you think our liberal friends actually believe their own lies? I think they do. See, one of the functions of a religious service is the believers to repeat, every Sunday, God’s Sacred Narrative. Kinda like mostly peaceful protestors reciting mostly peaceful slogans at the latest mostly peaceful protest.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/wars_and_putin_lies_and_biden.html

12 Feb, 2024 16:24

G7 looking to create a ‘special envoy’ for Ukraine - Russia’s top spy

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg is being considered for the job, the head of Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service has claimed

(Another illegal Coup de tat happening)

The West wants to create a new “special envoy” to Kiev who would have permanentdirect access to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, has claimed.He likened the proposed position to a foreign “governor” of Ukraine. (Zelensky better flee, he’s become a problem)

In a statement issued by the SVR’s press service on Monday, Naryshkin suggested that the US and the UK are trying to convince other G7 states to establish the post in order to “strengthen themechanisms of direct external control of the territory controlled by the Kiev regime.” (COUP, COUP, COUP happening)

“It is expected that [the ‘special envoy’] will have constant access to President Zelensky and know about all his plans,” the SVR’s statement read. The person will also have the ability to “block the steps of the Ukrainian leadership that are not coordinated with Washington and London, proposing instead the correct solutions, from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons,” it added.

Naryshkin described the reported plan as a “crude attempt by the West to increase the enslavement of the Ukrainian people [which] cannot but cause concern.” However, he claimed it is unlikely that the “governor” would be able to help Washington and London achieve their aims, as he would be “unable to stay afloat for long in the Kiev swamp of mutual hatred, intrigue, deception, flattery, and betrayal.”

Regarding potential candidates for the new role, Naryshkin suggested that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is among the main contenders, as well as other “Russophobic politicians.”

According to the SVR chief, the idea to create the new position comes as the West realizes that Ukrainians are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their chances of victory against Russia on the battlefield.The US and the UK therefore fear betrayal by the elites in Kiev, who may try to switch sides. (So true!)

Such fears are completely justified, Naryshkin said, claiming that “the first ones have already left.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s position on the battlefield has continued to deteriorate as its forces lack ammunition and struggle with personnel shortages and low morale. Citing unnamed US officials, the New York Times reported last week that Kiev’s troops could soon be forced to abandon their frontline positions unless they receive more aid from the West.

(The US, UK & NATO has nothing better to do then to create a war they can wage in the EUROPA, they have no other choice.Now they create a special envoy to a “country 404, which doesn’t exist.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/592323-west-ukraine-special-envoy/

12 Feb, 2024 16:27

Dog bites Kiev’s top diplomat

Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba suffered a minor leg wound during a scuffle between his own pets and a larger canine

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has been bitten by a “large dog” while walking his three canines in Kiev, sustaining minor injuries to his leg, the diplomat revealed on Monday.

Kuleba described the incident on Instagram, posting a picture of his wounded leg and saying his pets were targeted by an unleashed dog, but were unharmed.

“Dogs should be loved, but also they should be kept on leashes,” the diplomat wrote.

The wound required treatment and Kuleba went to hospital to get his leg “fixed.” While Kuleba did not elaborate on how “large” the hostile dog was,his injury appeared to be minor.

Kuleba owns three smaller-breed dogs, including a French bulldog he adopted back in 2022. The pooch, named Marik, is said to have been rescued from the now-Russian city of Mariupol. The pet has repeatedly accompanied Kuleba during various diplomatic events.

The Ukrainian diplomat is no stranger to using personal injuries for political gains. In June 2022, he suffered a leg injury while trying to “get back into sports.” Subsequently, Kuleba appeared in casts and with crutches at diplomatic events, while bragging on social media about his resilience, and claiming his leg injury was not an obstacle for him seeking more aid from the West, amid Kiev’s conflict with Moscow.

The minister, like many other Ukrainian officials, has taken an aggressive approach to diplomacy, repeatedly condemning those who criticize Kiev or are seen as sympathising with Moscow. Over the weekend, Kuleba launched a tirade against Tucker Carlson for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin,accusing the American conservative journalist of helping Moscow to spread its “bloodthirsty lies.”KEK!

(If the only reason Tucker did the Putin was to make Kiev angry, its worth it.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/592330-dog-bites-ukrainian-kuleba/

12 Feb, 2024 16:55

EU makes decision about frozen Russian funds

The bloc has approved a measure that would allow it to seize the interest earned by sanctioned assets

The European Union on Monday took a step towards confiscating the interest earned by Russian sovereign funds the bloc has frozen in relation to the Ukraine conflict.

The EU and the US moved to freeze an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian Central Bank in February 2022. Most of those funds are held by the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear.

On Monday, the European Council ordered all depositors holding €1 million ($1.08 million) or more Russian Central Bank assets to keep separate accounts of “extraordinary cash balances accumulating due to EU restrictive measures” and prohibited them from disposing of any interest or profits from the frozen assets.

“This decision paves the way for the Council to decide on a possible establishment of afinancial contribution to the EU budget raised on these net profits to support Ukraineand its recovery and reconstruction at a later stage,”the Council said in a statement.

Moscow has protested the US and EU sanctions as illegal, adding that any attempt to outright seize the Russian funds would be declared theft and receivea response in kind. Russian bankers have also warned that such a step would destroy the confidence of the rest of the world in the rule of law in the West andtrigger a run on European and US banksbecause they would no longer be considered safe.

While the US has been the most outspoken advocate of confiscating the frozen funds to send to Ukraine, theEU stands to lose the most from Moscow’s potential retaliation against such a step. Euroclear alone accounts for €196.6 billion ($211 billion) in frozen Russian assets, and it has accrued nearly €4.4 billion in interest over the past year.

The EU’s “invention of openly fraudulent schemes for the seizure of income from Russian assets is dictated by the need to create the illusion of legitimacy over attacks on our property andthereby camouflage what is in fact an outright theft,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said over the weekend, responding to reports that Brussels would move to seize the interest.

Some EU members have likewise been skeptical of the confiscation proposal. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said last week that it sounded uncomfortably like “communist heritage.”

(This is all going to backfire on the EU in terrible ways. Russia holds assets of EU countries. Russia can now seize their interest. Putin said it was a colossal mistake to use the US dollar as a weapon, now the EU countries are jeopardizing their own countries.Interesting history here, Reagan Admin brought down the USSR by destroying the ruble, now the US and EU will destroy their economies by stealing the ruble.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/592333-eu-frozen-russian-money/