https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-continues-protect-right-vote-and-prosecute-ballot-fraud

>>3669161

It's a huge trap

A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.

The special-counsel office’s attention to this scheme and its decision to release a rare statement about it indicates the seriousness with which the team is taking the purported plot to discredit Mueller in the middle of an ongoing investigation. Carr confirmed that the allegations were brought to the office’s attention by several journalists, who were contacted by a woman who identified herself as Lorraine Parsons. Another woman, Jennifer Taub, contacted Mueller's office earlier this month with similar information.

The woman identifying herself as Parsons told journalists in an email, a copy of which I obtained, that she had been offered roughly $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence—which had been hired by a GOP activist named Jack Burkman—“to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.”

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Parsons wrote in her letter that she had worked for Mueller as a paralegal at the Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro law firm in 1974, but that she “didn’t see” him much. “When I did see him, he was always very polite to me, and was never inappropriate,” she said. The law firm told me on late Tuesday afternoon, however, that it has “no record of this individual working for our firm.”

Parsons explained that she was contacted by a man “with a British accent” who wanted to ask her “a couple questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974. I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman. I reluctantly told [him] that I had only worked with Mr. Mueller for a short period of time, before leaving that firm to have my first son.”

She continued: “In more of an effort to get him to go away than anything else, I asked him what in the hell he wanted me to do. He said that we could not talk about it on the phone, and he asked me to download an app on my phone called Signal, which he said was more secure. Reluctantly, I downloaded the app and he called me on that app a few minutes later. He said (and I will never forget exactly what it was) ‘I want you to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller, and I want you to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.’” The man “offered to pay off all of my credit card debt, plus bring me a check for $20,000 if I would do” it, she wrote. “He knew exactly how much credit card debt I had, right down to the dollar, which sort of freaked me out.”

Surefire Intelligence was incorporated in Delaware less than three weeks ago, according to online records, and describes itself as “a private intel agency that designs and executes bespoke solutions for businesses and individuals who face complex business and litigation challenges.” Surefire’s domain records list an email for another pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, Jacob Wohl, who began hyping a “scandalous” Mueller story on Tuesday morning. Wohl told The Daily Beast that Burkman had hired Surefire to assist with his investigation into Mueller’s past, but denied knowing anything about the firm’s involvement in an alleged plot to fabricate allegations against Mueller when asked why his email address appeared in the domain records. He did not respond when asked by NBC why a telephone number listed on Surefire’s website referred callers to another number that’s listed in public records as belonging to Wohl’s mother.

Continued:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/special-counsel-refers-scheme-targeting-mueller-to-fbi/574411/

Many basic questions remain unanswered a day after the Pentagon announced an open-ended deployment of over 5,200 active-duty troops to the border, including the cost and scope of the mission as well as the Pentagon’s assessment of any threat posed by arriving migrants.

U.S. President Donald Trump has hardened his stance on immigration ahead of Nov. 6 congressional elections. He has drawn attention to a caravan of migrants that is trekking through Mexico toward the United States as he seeks to fire up support for his Republican party.

Republican lawmakers and other Trump supporters have applauded the deployment. But critics say Trump is politicizing the military, deploying them as a stunt to drive Republican voters to the polls without any real national security threat.

General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the head of U.S. Northern Command, defended the operation at a briefing on Tuesday. He echoed Trump administration concerns about the caravan and compared the border support mission to other domestic military missions, like hurricane relief.

“I firmly believe that border security is national security,” O’Shaughnessy said.

The U.S. military still had no firm idea of what the operation would cost, he added. Pentagon officials have said the Defense Department will need to find a way to pay for the operation, suggesting money may need to be taken from other national security programs.

O’Shaughnessy said just over 1,000 troops had already deployed to Texas as of Tuesday, where they will carry out tasks like building barriers, erecting tents, and flying government personnel by helicopter to and from different locations along the border.

He said the more than 5,200 troops now slated to go to Texas, Arizona and California were only the start of a larger deployment and that eventually troops would go to New Mexico as well.

“What I can confirm is there will be additional force over and above the 5,239. The magnitude of that difference, I don’t have the answer for now,” he said.

The projected U.S. deployment is already roughly the same size as the U.S. military contingent in Iraq.

More:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-border/u-s-general-says-troop-numbers-at-mexican-border-set-to-rise-further-idUSKCN1N42XD