Jeff Beals, a former Iraq-war diplomat,

wants to represent New York’s bellwether 19th congressional district in the Catskills

… The Democrats are screwing up in a way that also feels eerily familiar. The incumbent is John Faso, a first-term Republican who has voted with Donald Trump 88.5 percent of the time but was just inoffensive enough to win in a purple district back in 2016. Faso, a former State Assembly member, prevailed over Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout, the one-time primary challenger to Gov. Andrew Cuomo who has since achieved progressive icon status in New York. In a disastrous 2016 election from which socialist Bernie Sanders emerged as the closest thing the Democrats had to a consensus figure, Teachout’s left-wing bona fides and celebrity endorsements were no match for the district’s pro-Trump turn. Faso won by nine points, the third-narrowest margin of the state’s otherwise polarized 27 districts.

New York 19 is a bellwether for Democrats because it is both a microcosm of America and an eminently winnable toss-up district: Obama prevailed by eight and 6.5 points here in his presidential campaigns, and there is no reason people in liberal hotbeds like Woodstock, Kingston, and New Paltz are doomed to Republican congressional representation, especially in an era of supposedly incompetent and unpopular GOP governance. If the Democrats can’t win New York 19 with Trump as president, the party’s problems, whatever they may be, are even worse than they look. …

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/264249/jeff-beals-new-york

long article - excellent information

Bill Browder is an American-born businessman with family ties to the Communist Party who is the bane of Vladimir Putin for his efforts to seek global sanctions against Russians. Putin mentioned Bill Browder in his July 16, 2018 news conference with President Donald Trump.

William Browder – who has been instrumental in highlighting the death of a Russian whistleblower – has been called a “a banker turned human-rights activist.” Browder has accused Putin of murdering the whistleblower, Sergei Magnitsky, who was Browder’s attorney. At times, Browder, who made a fortune doing business in Russia, has come up in controversies involving Fusion GPS, the American firm that commissioned the Christopher Steele dossier against Trump with funding ultimately from, in part, the Hillary Clinton campaign….

excellent article - https://heavy.com/news/2018/07/bill-browder-william/

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/4/drudge-exposes-bannons-new-benefactor/

… In November 2017, the Tiananmen Square activist Wang Dan warned of the growing influence of the C.P.C. on university campuses in the United States. His own attempts to hold “China salons” on college campuses had largely been blocked by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association — a group with ties to China’s government. Around the same time, the academic publisher Springer Nature agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles on Tibet, Taiwan and China’s political elite. Reports emerged last year that China is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly to purchase ads on Facebook (a service that is blocked within China’s borders). In Australia, concerns about China’s growing influence led to a ban on foreign political donations.

“That’s why I’m telling the United States they should really be careful,” Guo said. China’s influence is spreading, he says, and he believes his own efforts to change China will have global consequences. “Like in an American movie,” he told me with unflinching self-confidence. “In the last minutes, we will save the world.” …

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-exiled-billionaire-whistleblower.html

Who is this with Bannon? - I think it's this man