[Bytor Peltor]

July 25, 2019 (page 366)

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

Former Federal Prosecutor on Mueller: 'He Clearly Did Not Run This Investigation'

September 13, 2020 (page 461)

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

Members of Mueller’s team ’wiped’ phones during Trump probe: DOJ

Sen. Ron Johnson asks DOJ watchdog to investigate Mueller team phones over erased information

"These reports are troubling and raise concerns about record retention and transparency," Johnson wrote in a letter to Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general Michael Horowitz. "Therefore, I respectfully request that your office open an investigation into this matter to determine what, why, and how information was wiped, whether any wrongdoing occurred, and who these devices belonged to."


DOJ FOIA Release: Members of Mueller Team Repeatedly ‘Wiped’ phones as Watchdog Sought Records


““It appears that Special Counsel Mueller’s team may have deleted federal records that could be key to better understanding their decision-making process as they pursued their investigation and wrote their report. Indeed, many officials apparently deleted the records after the DOJ Inspector General began his inquiry into how the Department mishandled Crossfire Hurricane. Moreover, based on this new information, the number of times and the stated reasons for the deletions calls into question whether or not it was a widespread intentional effort,” Grassley wrote in a letter today to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray.“

September 11, 2020

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION
The Honorable William Barr
Attorney General
Department of Justice

The Honorable Christopher A. Wray
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation

Dear Attorney General Barr and Director Wray:

A recent Justice Department Freedom of Information Act release suggests that multiple members of Special Counsel Mueller’s team may have wiped data from their government phones including texts messages during their investigation of Russian collusion in the 2016 election.[1] One team member, Andrew Weissmann, appears to have deleted all of the data on his phone more than once. On March 8, 2018, records show that Weissmann “[e]ntered [his] password too many times and wiped his phone.” On September 27, another report reads, “AAW accidentally wiped cell phone – data lost.” On two occasions, officials admitted to deleting data, and multiple individuals stated that the phone automatically wiped the data after they used the wrong password too many times.

It appears that Special Counsel Mueller’s team may have deleted federal records that could be key to better understanding their decision-making process as they pursued their investigation and wrote their report. Indeed, many officials apparently deleted the records after the DOJ Inspector General began his inquiry into how the Department mishandled Crossfire Hurricane. Moreover, based on this new information, the number of times and the stated reasons for the deletions calls into question whether or not it was a widespread intentional effort.

This would not be the first time the Special Counsel’s office misused records within their possession. On March 8, 2019, I wrote a letter to the Justice Department regarding Special Counsel Mueller’s selective use of emails in the George Papadopoulos Statement of Offense.[2] In that letter, I provided references to a footnote in the Statement that was used by Mueller to suggest that a Trump “Campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.” In full context, however, the emails in question actually show that the Trump Campaign wanted someone “low level” to decline these types of invitations.

Congress and the American people are owed answers regarding Special Counsel Mueller and his team. In light of the serious concerns these new records create, please provide the following no later than September 25, 2020:

All records from the FOIA request in unredacted form.
All records, including text messages, from all government phones used by employees in Special Counsel Mueller’s office.
All records relating to the explanations that each employee within Special Counsel Mueller’s office provided as to why their phone data and records were deleted.
When were you first made aware that Special Counsel Mueller’s employees deleted data and records from their government phones?
Are you investigating whether or not Special Counsel Mueller’s employees violated federal record keeping laws, rules, and regulations? If so, when did that investigation begin? If not, why not?
Has the Justice Department attempted to forensically recover any deleted records? If so, please provide all recovered records in unredacted form. If not, why not?
Has the Justice Department referred this matter to the Inspector General? If not, why not?

I anticipate that most of the responsive documents will be unclassified. Please send all unclassified material directly to the Committee. In keeping with the requirements of Executive Order 13526, if any of the responsive documents do contain classified information, please segregate all unclassified material within the classified documents, provide all unclassified information directly to the Committee, and provide a classified addendum to the Office of Senate Security. The Committee complies with all laws and regulations governing the handling of classified information. The Committee is not bound, absent its prior agreement, by any handling restrictions or instructions on unclassified information unilaterally asserted by the Executive Branch.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Should you have any questions, please contact Joshua Flynn-Brown of my Committee staff at 202-224-4515.

Sincerely,


Charles E. Grassley
Chairman
Committee on Finance

The reason I quoted myself from July 2019 about “Mueller Not Running The Investigation,” do any of the Free Minded Freethinkers here at SYG actually think Robert Muller placed his phone on “airport mode” and intentionally entered the wrong password 10 times? Remember, attempts 5-10 require that you wait:

5 minutes before the next attempt

15 minutes before the next attempt

30 minutes before the next attempt

45 minutes before the next attempt

ONE HOUR before the next attempt

Seriously, is old Bob taking the time to do that?

The reason I mentioned “airport mode,” the Government issued phones have a built in feature where once you’ve entered the wrong password FIVE TIMES, DOJ Security is notified (email) of the number of FAILED ATTEMPTS so they can either:

A) notify the phones owner to make sure phone wasn’t stolen & reset password if necessary

B) remotely shut down phone

The only way the security notification isn’t sent is when the phone is placed on “airport mode.” Mind you this evidently occurred 15 times with various members of Robert Mueller’s investigative team......it’s as if they all experienced amnesia at the same time.

[h8kurdt]

Great work being done by Trump in taking the forest fires seriously. After being pleaded about the impact of global warming on forest fires he just glibly says
“It’ll start getting cooler. You just — you just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot said.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump responded.

Might as well write the planet off if he gets another four years. Or will sweeping up forests be the key to all our problems? He's about as useful as a marzipan dildo.

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

The reason I quoted myself from July 2019 about “Mueller Not Running The Investigation,” do any of the Free Minded Freethinkers here at SYG actually think Robert Muller placed his phone on “airport mode” and intentionally entered the wrong password 10 times? Remember, attempts 5-10 require that you wait:

5 minutes before the next attempt

15 minutes before the next attempt

30 minutes before the next attempt

45 minutes before the next attempt

ONE HOUR before the next attempt

Seriously, is old Bob taking the time to do that?

The reason I mentioned “airport mode,” the Government issued phones have a built in feature where once you’ve entered the wrong password FIVE TIMES, DOJ Security is notified (email) of the number of FAILED ATTEMPTS so they can either:

A) notify the phones owner to make sure phone wasn’t stolen & reset password if necessary

B) remotely shut down phone

The only way the security notification isn’t sent is when the phone is placed on “airport mode.” Mind you this evidently occurred 15 times with various members of Robert Mueller’s investigative team......it’s as if they all experienced amnesia at the same time.

Several other phones were wiped after they were placed in airplane mode and could not be unlocked because the password was allegedly forgotten, including two belonging to lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and phones belonging to two of his deputies, Kyle Freeny and Rush Atkinson.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by h8kurdt

He's about as useful as a marzipan dildo.

beauregard eats bags of marzipan

[Bytor Peltor]

The Plot Against The President......out in October

[!@#$%!]

 

[The Soup Nazi]

GOP Senator Who Walked Out To Stop Climate Vote Loses House To Wildfire

[Antagon]

Now Trump claims there are "forest cities" in Europe with trees that are somehow more "explosive" than Californian trees. Combustible's too big a word apparently. He specifically mentioned Austria in his confusing ramblings. My take: He may have fallen asleep to some late-80s Schwarzenegger movie and have gotten things confused. It's not uncommon that the presence of the styrian oak leads to plenty of explosions.

Or he might have watched this gripping documentary filmed in Vienna last year.

It's baffling how there are still people who think he's got his shit together.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Antagon

It's baffling how there are still people who think he's got his shit together.

“think” is too kind.

“believe” is more accurate.

[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter, September 15:

 

Science has a well-known anti-Trump bias

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Believe it or not, I’m not by nature a particularly political person. I love figuring out how the world works, and also enjoy finding ways to explain things in plain English. I don’t enjoy partisan fights, although I obviously don’t shy away from taking sides. And I’ve sometimes regretted having gone into economics, a field in which getting the story right all too often offends powerful players, who in turn intervene to prop up zombie ideas that should have died long ago.

But I also realized some time back that politics can and will intrude into any area of scholarly research where some people have strong motivations for getting the story wrong. This has obviously been the case for climate research, where an overwhelming scientific consensus has had to struggle against a whole industry of climate denial, which is almost entirely supported by fossil-fuel interests and has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

In fact, in some ways the climate scientists have had it worse than the economists; mainstream Keynesian economists (which is pretty much what I am) get a lot of abuse, but as far as I know none of us has had politicians trying to criminalize our work, the way Ken Cuccinelli, now a top official at the Department of Homeland Security, did to climatologist Michael E. Mann.

I used to think, however, that climate change was a subject uniquely vulnerable to anti-science propaganda and intimidation. After all, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are invisible and gradual, taking decades to unfold; it’s always possible to mock the science because it happens to be snowing today, while accusing the scientists of taking jobs away from salt-of-the-earth coal miners.

Surely, I thought, it wouldn’t be that easy to politicize a science, to claim that all the experts were part of a vast conspiracy, in an area in which experts’ predictions could be validated and the conspiracy theorists revealed as phonies in a matter of weeks.

But I was wrong.

Epidemiology, like climatology — or for that matter economics — involves trying to model complex systems, so that no prediction ends up being exactly right. And the chains of cause and effect are long enough that the consequences of bad policy take some time to become completely apparent: Florida began reopening in early May, but Covid-19 deaths didn’t spike until July.

But we’re talking about weeks, not decades, and the story of the coronavirus is as clear as such things ever get.

Experts warned that a rush to resume business as usual, without social distancing and widespread use of face masks, would lead to a surge in new cases. The usual suspects on the right dismissed these concerns, insisting either that Covid-19 was a hoax or that its dangers were being greatly exaggerated by scientists who wanted to bring down Donald Trump. Sunbelt states decided to believe the skeptics, not the scientists — and the result was a huge, deadly viral surge.

So that put an end to the politicization, right? Wrong. Not only are Trump officials still pressuring health experts to minimize the dangers, the top communications official at the Department of Health and Human Services accused his own agency’s scientists of “sedition.”

The moral here is that there’s no such thing as a safe subject when you’re dealing with people who have a totalitarian mind-set — and that is, in fact, what we’re dealing with. I suspect that in the early days of the Soviet Union plant geneticists imagined that they were working in a low-risk field; I mean, who would politicize that? In the end, however, thousands of them were sent to labor camps or executed for questioning the theories of Trofim Lysenko, a quack who somehow became one of Stalin’s favorites.

The fact of the matter is that we’re now struggling over where there’s even such a thing as objective truth. And staying out of politics is no longer an option for anyone.


Quick Hits

Israel lost it, and is going back into lockdown.

A tale of two cities. New York > Madrid.

Chronicle of a disaster foretold — from 2016!

Actually, science knows.


Facing the Music

 

Better than the real president

Live from the Oval Office.

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

You would think federal prosecutors would grow tiresome of being caught destroying evidence and appearing like inept idiots......this is going to get good!

The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday voted to authorize subpoenas for former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, and other Obama administration officials as part of its broad review into the origins of the Russia investigation.


“The committee also authorized SUBPOENAS for Sidney Blumenthal, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, former FBI counsel Lisa Page, former FBI agent Joe Pientka, former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former FBI director of counterintelligence Bill Priestap, former White House national security adviser Susan Rice, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith – who pleaded guilty to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham's review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign – among others.“

[!@#$%!]

Politics
Former Pence aide says she will vote for Biden because of Trump’s ‘flat out disregard for human life’ during pandemic

By
Josh Dawsey
September 17, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. EDT

President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic showed a “flat out disregard for human life” because his “main concern was the economy and his reelection,” according to a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force who left the White House in August.

Olivia Troye, who worked as homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Pence for two years, said that the administration’s response cost lives and that she will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this fall because of her experience in the Trump White House.

“The president’s rhetoric and his own attacks against people in his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing response a failure,” she said in an interview.

Troye is the first Trump administration official who worked extensively on the coronavirus response to forcefully speak out against Trump and his handling of the pandemic. But she joins a growing number of former officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who have detailed their worries about what happened during their time in the administration while declaring that Trump is unfit to be president.

The amount of criticism Trump has faced from former aides is unprecedented in the modern presidency, and it could pose a political risk to his reelection campaign as some of the aides who have spoken out are pressuring other former colleagues to join them.

more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...e11_story.html

[The Soup Nazi]

From Paste:

For QAnon Origins, Look to the Pink Floyd Internet Hoax

Think of it as an origin story, or a cautionary tale: an anonymous persona in an online message board, posting tantalizing hints about a secret intrigue requiring communication and collaboration to unravel.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Antagon

Now Trump claims there are "forest cities" in Europe with trees that are somehow more "explosive" than Californian trees. Combustible's too big a word apparently. He specifically mentioned Austria in his confusing ramblings. My take: He may have fallen asleep to some late-80s Schwarzenegger movie and have gotten things confused. It's not uncommon that the presence of the styrian oak leads to plenty of explosions.

Or he might have watched this gripping documentary filmed in Vienna last year.

It's baffling how there are still people who think he's got his shit together.

Austrian minister to Trump: No, we do not live in forests

[The Soup Nazi]

From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter:

The Electoral College and the Climate

For anyone who wants the US to rejoin the Paris climate accord and limit emissions more aggressively, the 2020 election may seem particularly important. With global-warming projections stressing urgency, former Obama climate envoy Todd Stern tells Foreign Policy, “The stakes couldn’t be any higher.” Scientific American broke with 175 years of tradition and endorsed Joe Biden for president, citing the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes that America’s climate action is being hampered by the Electoral College. (That institution, bemoaned widely by the left after President Trump’s win in 2016, is now a perennial topic of conversation: At The New Yorker, Steve Coll rehashes its history as a way to preserve the power of slave states, and its support from the segregationist South during a Nixon-era push to end it, writing that “[t]oday, it effectively dilutes the votes of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, because they live disproportionately in populous states, which have less power in the College per capita.”) Beinart writes of another effect: As wildfires spread in the Western US, Beinart suggests they’d be treated differently by America’s political leaders, were they happening in swing states.

As The New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson and Yaryna Serkez recently detailed, in a story and interactive map, different US regions will be affected by climate change differently. Given that America doesn’t choose its presidents based on a national popular vote, Beinart argues the political impact of climate-related disasters will be cordoned off, along with the Electoral College ballots of the states that experience them. “By the time Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin face climate emergencies that rival those currently afflicting California, Oregon, and Washington,” Beinart writes, “the problem may be too far along for anyone to fix.”

[LifeDistortion]

Trump plans to steal the election, this is why he wants his Supreme Court judge in place before election day, so that just like in 2000 they will hand him a victory. It doesn't matter what the results are, if CNN or some other network calls the election for Biden he will contest the results up to the Supreme Court snd with his Conservative majority they will claim him the winner. We are so fucked if this works out for him, he also needs to win the election to avoid going to prison.

[Screaming Skull]

Originally Posted by LifeDistortion

Trump plans to steal the election, this is why he wants his Supreme Court judge in place before election day, so that just like in 2000 they will hand him a victory. It doesn't matter what the results are, if CNN or some other network calls the election for Biden he will contest the results up to the Supreme Court snd with his Conservative majority they will claim him the winner. We are so fucked if this works out for him, he also needs to win the election to avoid going to prison.

Does typing your bullshit out and posting it here help you believe it? I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice person, but you seem confused.

[The Soup Nazi]

A message from Spoon:

 

Hopefully not lost in all of this is the significance of your vote. Today is #NationalVoterRegistrationDay. Register to vote or check your status now at ‪https://www.headcount.org.

#VoteReady

[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT opinion column, September 22:

Trump tries to cancel New York


A few months ago a certain segment of the commentariat — mainly on the center-right — became extremely agitated about the purported menace of “cancel culture,” the shaming and ostracizing of public figures over actions or opinions deemed unacceptable. Cancellation, the story went, represented political correctness gone wild, and endangered free and frank discourse.

The whole thing was, of course, greatly overblown. Yes, political correctness sometimes goes too far, especially when linked with historical ignorance; it was definitely annoying when protesters pulled down a statue of U.S. Grant, an imperfect but great man who saved the Union. (Full disclosure: I’m a bit of a Grant groupie.) But left-leaning cancel culture doesn’t pose any real threat to free discourse, because in 21st-century America we barely have anything resembling a radical left, and whatever left-wing radicalism exists has very little political power.

The radical right, by contrast, has a lot of power, and seems increasingly eager to use that power to punish anyone expressing views it doesn’t like, even — or maybe especially — when those views simply involve telling the truth.

So we have Donald Trump demanding “patriotic education” and denouncing The Times’s 1619 Project, because it’s politically incorrect to admit the role slavery played in our nation’s history. You have the Justice Department announcing an investigation of racism at Princeton that is obviously intended to punish the school for admitting the obvious point that there was racism in its past.

Acknowledging racism isn’t the only issue that stirs up right-wing cancel culture. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, there has been sustained persecution of scientists who acknowledge the reality of climate change. The strange goings-on at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — first acknowledging what everyone else has known for months, that airborne droplets can transmit the coronavirus, then retracting that acknowledgment — strongly suggest that political appointees are trying to cancel epidemiology that conflicts with Trumpist opposition to face masks.

But persecuting scholars and scientists who report inconvenient facts is small stuff. Now the right is going after whole cities.

On Monday William Barr’s Justice Department designated three cities — Portland, Seattle and, yes, New York — “anarchist jurisdictions,” places that “have permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist.”

The first reaction of New Yorkers and, I assume, residents of the other two cities, was to treat this as a joke. Walk around New York, where millions of people are living normal lives in relative safety, and “anarchy” is hardly the word that comes to mind. No, there aren’t mobs of looters roaming the streets, and despite an uptick in murders (offset by a decline in rape) crime remains very low by historical standards.

But the anarchist designation isn’t an empty gesture; it comes with the threat of a cutoff of federal funds. So what is this nonsense about?

The answer, basically, is that Trump and Barr are trying to punish cities that let people express opinions they don’t like, that allow mostly peaceful demonstrations against racism to proceed rather than finding excuses to beat people up.

This is, in other words, right-wing cancel culture on a grand scale. And the fact that people with real power are thinking along these lines should terrify all of us.


Quick Hits

When the right tried to cancel Keynesian economics.

When they tried to cancel climate science.

Canceling public health officials.

Especially when they worry about Trump rallies.

[The Soup Nazi]

Romney bitches out.

That chickenshit motherfucker. And of course Lindsey Graham pledges GOP will support Trump’s nominee, despite not knowing who nominee is.