Natalia Veselnitskaya

Democrats colluded with Russia to hack 2016 election

July 25, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

We’ve been thinking this for months, but here’s another post because this article explains it so well:

While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.

The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides…

Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information. Mr. Steele was paid by the Democrat-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS with money from a Hillary Clinton backer. Fusion GPS distributed the dossier among Democrats and journalists. The information fell into the hands of the FBI, which used it in part to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign aides.

Mr. Steele makes clear that his unproven charges came almost exclusively from sources linked to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin…

“If anyone colluded with the Russians, it was the Democrats,” said a former Trump campaign adviser who asked not to be identified because of the pending investigations. “After all, they’ve routinely shopped around false claims from the debunked Steele dossier, which listed sources including senior Kremlin officials. If anyone should be investigated in Washington, it ought to be Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Mark Warner and their staffers.”

RTWT. It has more detail on why the dossier was fake and how Hillary’s campaign used it anyway.

My major criticism of the article would be that John McCain’s name doesn’t appear; I’ve noted recently how he had such early access to the dossier as to suggest that he may have helped spread it.

The founder of Fusion GPS is going to “plead the fifth” about his company’s role in all this.

[Senate Judiciary] Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., confirmed in a statement that they subpoenaed Simpson to appear before the committee Wednesday as part of a hearing about the influence of foreign lobbying in last year’s presidential election.

“Simpson’s attorney has asserted that his client will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to the subpoena,” Grassley and Feinstein said.

Remember that Fusion GPS also had ties to Natalia Veselnitskaya lobbying in favor of Putin (that is, lobbying against the anti-Putin Magnitsky Act). Fusion GPS had a representative at Veselnitskaya’s nothing-meeting with Donald Trump Jr., that lefties were so excited about last week.

UPDATE: They reached an agreement with the Fusion GPS guy to get an interview (I think that’s not under oath?). But Democrats stalled the committee interviewing another Fusion GPS-related witness. Dems must be really nervous.

And, it boomerangs

July 14, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

The “Trump Jr.” story is evolving into a story of *Democrat* collusion with Russia.

We learned yesterday that Natalia Veselnitskaya is basically a Democrat activist (as well as anti-Magnitsky) and in 2015, the Obama administration moved Heaven and Earth to get Veselnitskaya into the U.S.
Why would Democrats want her to meet (under false pretenses or whatever) with the Trump campaign? Well…
Loretta Lynch allegedly wiretapped Manafort’s phone during the Trump Jr. meeting. If true, it would be illegal wiretapping; in June 2016, the Obama administration had not yet gotten the FISA warrant(s) to do surveillance on the Trump campaign.
Was Fusion GPS (hired by Democrats to get the infamous, fake “Trump dossier” going) present at the meeting, as part of Natalia Veselnitskaya’s party? Why, yes they were. From the same link:

The meeting included Donald Trump Jr., Manafort, Jared Kushner, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Fusion GPS associate Rinat Akhmetshin – a Russian-American lobbyist who confirmed today that he was present during the June 2016 sit-down.

Incidentally, Akhmetsin was an unregistered Russian lobbyist working against the Magnitsy Act – same as Veselnitskaya and, for that matter, same position on the Magnitsky Act (against it) as Hillary Clinton.
Is Fusion GPS now lawyering up? Possibly.

Fusion GPS, the firm behind the discredited 35 page Trump-Russia ‘dossier,’ was co-founded by Glenn Simpson, who abruptly canceled his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week in light of recent events linking the democrat opposition research firm to a second attempt to take down the Trumps.

Also discussed in this article.
For fun: In 1996, Time magazine openly cheered U.S. interference in Russian elections.

Insane asylum updates

July 13, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

First, a few items on the “Trump dossier” (which I previously backgrounded here).

The Washington Post has further discredited one of the dossier’s most salacious claims.
Did John “Landslide” McCain have anything to do with the dossier? A British defamation lawsuit shows that, at the least, McCain had exceptionally early access to it.

According to a new court document in the British lawsuit, counsel for defendants Steele and Orbis repeatedly point to McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal Trump critic, and a former State Department official as two in a handful of people known to have had copies of the full document before it circulated among journalists and was published by BuzzFeed…Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and a Russia adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, discussed the 35-page dossier with McCain…

The British court document also confirmed that Washington research firm Fusion GPS, co-founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, had been hired to conduct opposition research by one of Trump’s GOP primary opponents. Later, Democrats paid for the same research on Trump’s past and alleged Russian ties.

It’s funny how Fusion GPS keeps popping up. But I didn’t know that Fusion GPS also had GOP (probably #NeverTrumper) connections, as well as Democrat.
Natalia Veselnitskaya drips with Democrat sympathies and ties to Fusion GPS / the “Trump dossier”.
Apart from her social media posts, photos of her sitting with Democrats at a Senate hearing, and so forth, the Obama administration explicitly gave her a special pass into the U.S. in 2015. Why?

That makes it all the more possible that her intent in getting a fake meeting with the Trump campaign was to set them up for the FISA warrants that enabled the Obama administration to spy on them.

Either Congress or a Special Counsel should now investigate those FISA warrants and the Obama administration’s spying on its domestic political opponents.
Are TrumpRussia and #NothingGate really Hillarygate? The connection between Hillary/DNC, Fusion GPS and the “Trump dossier” needs investigating because:

This connection has raised the question of whether Kremlin prepared the dossier as part of a disinformation campaign to sow chaos in the US political system. If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence…

Former FBI director, James Comey, refused to answer questions about Fusion and the Steele dossier in his May 3 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey responded to Lindsey Graham’s questions about Fusion GPS’s involvement “in preparing a dossier against Donald Trump that would be interfering in our election by the Russians?” with “I don’t want to say.”…

The dossier was not, as the press reports, written by Steele…In Stalin’s day, some of the most valued KGB (NKVD) agents were called “novelists,” for their ability to conjure up fictional plots and improbable tales to use against their enemies…

How to manufacture a scandal

July 9, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

Another piece falls into place, of a mosaic in which Democrats set out in 2016 to create a false appearance of collusion between President Trump and Russia. It’s pretty devious.

First, you need to know about something called the Magnitsky Act.

Congress passed it in 2012, “intending to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009.” (Wiki; or BBC’s account here.)
It prevents 18 Russian officials from entering the U.S. and freezes their assets.
The Russian government (Putin regime) disputes how Magnitsky died and therefore, furiously disputes the act’s appropriateness.
Russia responded in 2012 with their own blacklist on 18 U.S. officials.
The list included Preet Bharara, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara went on to be fired earlier this year by Trump, then hired by Special Counsel Mueller to investigate Trump.
Russia also responded by banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
Natalia Veselnitskaya is a lawyer connected to the Russian government, who lobbies against the Magnitsky Act (e.g., to get it repealed).

The report is that on June 9, 2016, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr. met briefly with Veselnitskaya. Per The New York Times, Trump Jr. said: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children…there was no follow up. I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”

Guess what? The name Fusion GPS pops up again.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for President Trump’s legal team, told Circa:

We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for. Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the President and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier.

I’m not taking a position on the Magnitsky Act, here. (It may be a reasonable response to Putin regime corruption or murder.) The point is the intrigue.

Democrats pay Fusion GPS to dirty-up Trump. Among other things, they create that fake Trump dossier, alleging a variety of non-existent Trump-Russia connections.
As part of it (and this is the new bit), a Fusion GPS operative gets Kushner and Trump Jr. to take a brief meeting – probably “for the children” or something – with someone who turns out to be Veselnitskaya.
I’m guessing that Fusion GPS adds the meeting to the Steele dossier, making it seem Trump could be involved with Veselnitskaya/Putin to undermine the Magnitsky Act. I’m guessing that the meeting also alienates Preet Bharara, when he hears of it.
Then the dossier is used as a basis for getting the NSA and FBI to investigate or surveil candidate Trump.
Which is then a basis for Susan Rice “unmasking”, leaks to create constant suspicion in the media, etc.

I admit that, if Fusion GPS weren’t involved, I’d be less sanguine; the Veselnitskaya meeting could seem suspicious. But, on current information, Fusion GPS is involved. That screams “election dirty tricks”; the more so as it fits into a known pattern of Democrat misdirection on Russia.

So much for the Veselnitskaya meeting. The larger questions remain:

When the DNC was hacked in 2016 (allegedly – I still figure it probably wasn’t), why did the DNC withhold critical evidence from the FBI? What were they afraid of the FBI finding out?
Were they afraid the FBI would find out the extent of the DNC’s dirty tricks with Fusion GPS? Or perhaps, the extent of AG Loretta Lynch’s alleged collusion with Hillary or the Democrats?