Are You Just Another Slavic Pig On Putin's Kremlin Payroll?

[America Proud]

Is Russiagate as big as Watergate? One thing is certain: The truth is out
there, to quote just one T-shirt. Amid all the chaotic struggles and
cataclysmic disasters that dominate the news cycle, Robert Mueller’s
investigation of the ties between Donald Trump’s presidential run and
Russia is forging ahead, as inevitable as the tide. Mueller has already
seated two grand juries, one in Virginia and one in Washington D.C. The
consensus seems to be that the grand juries point to the inevitable endgame
in which more than one person will be indicted from this investigation
eventually.

If Trump and his team are not guilty of collusion with Russia, then a
stunning number of actions on their part over the past year are impossible
to explain. Here are events and actions by Trump and his staff which defy
all logic, unless they came out of an intent to use Russian influence to
sway American Democracy:

#1: Why did Trump fire FBI Director James Comey?

James Comey, while investigating the ties between the Trump campaign and
Russia, was fired May 9th, 2017, in a news event that casts a long shadow
over the Trump administration even now. Official White House statements
initially claimed that Trump fired Comey based on recommendations from
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, centering on Comey’s alleged
botched handling of a Clinton investigation and claims the FBI was in
“turmoil.” Later Trump himself contradicted these stories, most notably in
a May 11th interview with NBC News, where Trump admits he was going to fire
Comey regardless of recommendation, and that it was over “this Russia
thing.” Later Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee
citing numerous incidents where Trump attempted to persuade Comey to drop
his investigations into Russia ties.

#2: Why did Trump fire Acting Attorney General Sally Yates?

Sally Yates, Acting Attorney General, was one of the first to blow the
whistle on National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to foreign
influence and the first career casualty of the Trump administration. The
official White House statement claimed Yates was fired for opposing Trump’s
Muslim travel ban. Yates would go on to likewise testify before the Senate
Intelligence Committee, pointing out that her concerns that Flynn was
compromised were never honored.

#3: Why did Trump tweet threats against both Comey and Yates when they were
scheduled to testify before the Senate?

Hours before both Senate hearings for Yates and Comey, Donald Trump posted
cryptic tweets which could amount to attempts at witness intimidation:

Follow
Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump
Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got
into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.
10:43 AM - May 8, 2017
22,956 22,956 Replies 16,487 16,487 Retweets 59,372 59,372 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Follow
Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump
James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations
before he starts leaking to the press!
8:26 AM - May 12, 2017
59,333 59,333 Replies 25,538 25,538 Retweets 76,136 76,136 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
This second tweet led James Comey to utter the famous phrase before the
Senate “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” which spawned its own Internet
meme.


#4: Why did Michael Flynn offer to testify in exchange for immunity?

When Michael Flynn was forced to resign after his numerous shady dealings
with foreign countries came to the fore, Flynn made the shocking jump to
offering to testify in exchange for immunity. In his attorney’s words,
Flynn “certainly has a story to tell.” In Michael Flynn’s own words,
immunity “means you probably committed a crime.” To this day, we still do
not know all of that story Flynn has to tell. Various investigative bodies
seem to be confident that they can find out everything without Flynn’s
cooperation, and they’d rather have the door open to prosecuting Flynn.

#5: Why is Carter Page now refusing to testify before the Senate?

Trump Foreign Policy Advisor Carter Page is the darling star of the
infamous Steele Dossier, as an alleged courier between the Trump campaign
and the Kremlin. Page has spent the time since then just about doing
somersaults to flip-flop on his degree of cooperation with the
investigation. First he said he would testify. Now he won’t and will ask
for immunity. He also denies that he refused to testify. And that’s not
mentioning the lawsuit he’s filed against the Steele Dossier claiming
slander. Which may be a tough charge to prove since the FBI has had a FISA
warrant to monitor Page’s activity all this time.

#6: Why did Jared Kushner try to set up a back-channel with Russia?

Jared Kushner, whose sole point of qualification for working on the
taxpayer dime right now is that he’s the son-in-law of Donald Trump, failed
to disclose countless Russian ties and contacts on his security clearance
applications. Since then we keep finding out more things Kushner didn’t
tell us, including his personal email account, his investments with Goldman
Sachs, and, most shockingly, his attempt to set up a back-channel phone
line with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Calls for Kushner to step down
have so far gone unheeded, even from Trump’s own legal team.

#7: What happened at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya?

The June 9th Trump Tower meeting has become so notorious that it gets its
own Wikipedia page. After the story broke, initial claims were that the
meeting was to discuss nothing but Russian adoption policies. It’s since
become apparent that Trump’s son Don Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner,
and Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort attended, and the meeting was
arranged, according to the infamous “I love it” email exchange, to share
dirt on opponent Clinton.

#8: Why hasn’t Trump enacted any of the Russian sanctions directed by the
Congressional bill?

Back in August of 2017, Trump was all but held at gunpoint by Congress to
sign a new bill enacting further sanctions against Russia. He did, but
Trump and his White House staff loudly protested the bill to anyone who
would listen. Trump has since blown off the deadline to enact the
sanctions. Oddly enough, he seems to not have gotten around to it.

#9: Why did the FBI raid Paul Manafort?

Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort could generate a list of twenty
questions all by himself, if not a book or two. But the FBI no-knock raid
on Manafort’s home is as good a place to start as any...


Manafort himself has been the subject of so many charges and allegations
that it turns out over eleven years of activity is being investigated just
to address the scope of it. Manafort was also the subject of an FBI FISA
warrant that even included secretly wiretapping him, both before and after
the election. We haven’t come close to finding out everything that raised
suspicions about Manafort, so we’ll have to wait for it to come out in
court. But the words of his own daughter, calling her father’s earnings
“blood money,” are chilling.

#10: Why did Mike Pence ignore warnings on Michael Flynn’s foreign
connections?

Along with the rest of the issues everyone seemed to be raising to everyone
else about Michael Flynn, Mike Pence was personally warned, yet later
denied knowing anything about Flynn. The story around Pence has since
prompted the old Watergate meme “What did he know and when did he know it?”
That’s because Pence was in charge of the White House transition team when
the Trump administration was moving in. If Flynn, Manafort, Trump, and all
go down over Russiagate, this ensures that Pence goes down with them.

#11: Why did Jeff Sessions meet with Russian ambassador Kislyak and then
lie about it?

At Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing he insisted
“I did not have communications with the Russians.” That turned out to not
only be false, but caught-on-camera-false:


#12: Why did Russia run an ad and social media campaign to influence the
general election?

Most recent news is still developing over Russia’s massive media
involvement with the 2016 US election, in YouTube ads, GMail ads, and a
Facebook campaign. This turns out not to be a case of a few casual online
trolls, but a massive, coordinated propaganda mission.

#13: Why did Devin Nunes try to derail the investigation with his
“unmasking” claims, only to be later recused?

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was caught up in his own
investigation by the House Ethics Committee for his numerous attempts to
sideline the Russiagate story. He started the great “unmasking” hunt which
wasted a lot of energy during the early Senate and House Committee
investigations. Nunes has since been forced to recuse himself from
involvement in Russia-related investigation matters.

#14: Why did Roger Stone know so much about Wikileaks dumps before they
happened?

Trump Campaign Advisor (and Paul Manafort business partner) Roger Stone has
a career in politics on the wrong side of history going back to Watergate
itself, as a Nixon “dirty trickster.” Throughout the Trump campaign, Stone
seemed to have a crystal ball when it came to predicting Wikileaks dumps
that would harm the Clinton campaign. It later came out that Stone
communicated with Russian hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” which has since been
downplayed by Stone and the White House. No matter, Stone is now getting
subpoenaed.

#15: Why did Donald Trump repeatedly deny even doing business with Russia
on the campaign trail?

Here’s Donald Trump in a David Letterman interview in 2013: “I’ve done a
lot of business with the Russians.”


Trump in 2016: What me, Russia? Never heard of them!


Note also that Kelleyanne Conway in this video denies anybody involved in
the Trump campaign had any contact with Russians, at all at all. A claim
which by now has been blasted to shreds.

#16: Why has Trump put so much pressure on recused Jeff Sessions since
Mueller was appointed?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was once seen as Trump’s closest ally, being
the first to endorse his presidential run. But then this course of events
has played out: Trump fired Comey, the Justice Department had to replace
Comey, they appointed Special Council Robert Mueller (himself a former FBI
Director) to take up Russiagate investigations where Comey left off, and
Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from Russiagate matters. This means
Trump can’t fire Mueller directly; he’d have to go through Sessions. Since
that turn of events, it seems mysterious that Sessions’ name is mud in
Trump’s book, to the point that the GOP rises nearly unanimously to his
defense.

#17: Why has nothing to date been dis-proven in the Steele Dossier?

The famous Steele Dossier contains startling allegations against Donald
Trump and the Trump campaign, now familiar with anyone keeping score in
political news. Mueller has since given the report enough weight that he’s
even met with the author, former British M16 Intelligence officer and a co-
founder of Orbis Business Intelligence. While it’s the hottest point on
Republicans’ radar in their desperate bid to discredit it, none of it has
so far been proven untrue. You’d think if the 35 pages of information were
simply a whopping pack of lies, there’d be something easy in their to prove
false. But so far, every word of it has jibed with every step of the
investigation and the facts that have been uncovered.

#18: Why has Trump’s administration blown off US Intel warnings of Russian
cyberattacks?

While we’re all scratching our heads over the Steele Dossier, there’s an
even more credible report that never seems to break the news. Way back at
the beginning, the US’s own Director of National Intelligence released a
report on “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in recent US
Elections,” (full PDF). Among the very clear and urgent findings of the
report are items such as...

“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic
process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and
potential presidency.”

“We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear
preference for President-elect Trump.”

“We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered
campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts
worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.”

...all of which adds up to a Russian operation to undermine US Democracy
and the democracies of the world. Never mind “fake news,” partisan
bickering, or trying to verify a British dossier, we have US taxpayer-
funded intelligence experts telling us right now that our democracy is
under attack. Anybody concerned out there?

#19: Why did Trump deny knowing Felix Sater despite his friendship with
Ivanka and Jared and his having offices in Trump Tower?

Felix Sater doesn’t get much press, but he ought to, because he is the eye
of the Russiagate storm. Both a member of the Russian Mafia and an FBI
informant, Sater, like Trump, is also a real estate developer in New York.
His company, Bayrock Group LLC, has had a long-standing business
collaboration with Trump that produced Trump SoHo, Trump International
Hotel, and other properties. Sater has an office in Trump Tower to this
day. Bayrock also partnered with Don Jr. and Ivanka. When Trump signed a
letter of intent to build a Trump tower in Moscow, Sater himself responded
"Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I
will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this
process.” Sater is so cozy with the whole Trump family that he’s their host
whenever they visit Russia. And now we come to the capstone of Trump’s
Russian business deals, The Moscow Project:


Trump once stated under oath that he wouldn’t know Felix Sater if he saw
him face to face.

#20: Why have so many Trump associates changed their story about Russian
collusion?