Putin just made Trump a deal he can't refuse

[Professor Emeritus]

The White House said on Wednesday it is entertaining a proposal raised by Russian President Vladimir Putin to interrogate Americans in exchange for assistance in the ongoing US investigation into election interference, putting the White House at odds with the State Department.

So, we turn over our own agents to Putin to interrogate....

and in return he will "assist" us in investigating his own meddling in our elections.

And the White House is openly admitting that they are considering this.


It's like he's trying to sabotage himself at this point.





WH entertaining Russian proposal to interrogate Americans in exchange for Mueller investigation assistance - CNNPolitics

The White House said on Wednesday it is entertaining a proposal raised by Russian President Vladimir Putin to interrogate Americans in exchange for assistance in the ongoing US investigation into election interference, putting the White House at odds with the State Department.

Putin raised the idea in his summit talks with President Donald Trump on Monday, according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. The Americans wanted for questioning by Moscow include Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, and American-born financier Bill Browder, who successfully lobbied the US government to impose new sanctions on Moscow.

Sanders indicated on Wednesday no final decision had been made but that the proposal was under consideration. "The President's going to meet with his team and we'll let you know when we have an announcement on that," she said.

However, at the State Department on Wednesday, spokeswoman Heather Nauert offered a more forceful denunciation of the Russian allegations than her White House counterpart.

"The overall assertions that have come out of the Russian government are absolutely absurd," Nauert said. "The fact that they want to question 11 American citizens and the assertions American citizens -- we do not stand by those assertions that the Russian government makes. The prosecutor general in Russia is well aware that the United States has rejected Russian allegations in this regard."

On Monday, Putin suggested special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators could come to Russia to question the two dozen Russians that have been charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential election. But in return, Putin said he would expect the US to allow Russian investigators to question what he called fugitives on American soil.

"For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case," Putin said. "Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States, and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States."

Trump called the notion an "interesting idea" during his press conference with Putin in Helsinki.

Browder grew up in Chicago but gave up his citizenship nearly 20 years ago and is now a British citizen. His Russian associates uncovered a massive tax fraud scheme in Russia that was prosecuted in US courts. But Putin has accused Browder of perpetrating the fraud, which Browder denies. Nonetheless, Browder was tried in absentia and sentenced to prison in Russia, making him a fugitive of Russian law enforcement.

Russian media has said McFaul was named as a "person of interest" in the ongoing investigation into Browder and related matters. McFaul was US ambassador to Russia when President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law, imposing harsh sanctions that Browder and McFaul supported.

After Sanders' comments, McFaul wrote on Twitter, "I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin."

In tweets this week, Browder denied Putin's claim that he donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. He also noted that one of the other Americans that Putin wants to question is former congressional staffer Kyle Parker, who Browder said "single handedly drafted the Magnitsky Act that Putin hates so much."

Browder was briefly arrested in Spain earlier this year, due to his criminal conviction in Russia, but was released after local authorities determined the Russian arrest warrant "wasn't valid."

 

[GPBear]

Can we fukking impeach this guy already?
Jesus Christ what’s taking so long

I wish that I could see into an alternate universe where Obama pulled something like this to see Faux news talking heads completely explode like a supernovae

 

[Wargames]

Breh is bad comedy at this point

 

[88m3]

Trump and all of his associates need to be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Can we fukking impeach this guy already?
Jesus Christ what’s taking so long

I wish that I could see into an alternate universe where Obama pulled something like this to see Faux news taking heads completely explode like a supernovae

When he got elected I was betting he wouldn't last two years. And that was because I was certain that he would either:

a. Have a heart attack/stroke because he's so out of control with his emotions and takes no care of himself whatsoever and president is a way stressful job

b. Get impeached because there's no way he wouldn't commit an impeachable offense



What I didn't bank on is the Republican establishment rolling up to protect him like this. I thought, "He's outside the establishment, they don't trust him, they'll check him when he gets out of line." But like 70% of the Republican base is behind him now like the biggest personality cult I've seen in my life and so the politicians won't do NOTHING real to check him. It's like every Republican politician who voted for impeachment knows that they'd get primary'd the next year.

 

[GPBear]

When he got elected I was betting he wouldn't last two years. And that was because I was certain that he would either:

a. Have a heart attack/stroke because he's so out of control with his emotions and takes no care of himself whatsoever and president is a way stressful job

b. Get impeached because there's no way he wouldn't commit an impeachable offense



What I didn't bank on is the Republican establishment rolling up to protect him like this. I thought, "He's outside the establishment, they don't trust him, they'll check him when he gets out of line." But like 70% of the Republican base is behind him now like the biggest personality cult I've seen in my life and so the politicians won't do NOTHING real to check him. It's like every Republican politician who voted for impeachment knows that they'd get primary'd the next year.

It’s almost like republicans (and some democrats who were complicit in his election) are secretly crypto-fascist neo-Nazis who knew they couldn’t voice their xenophobic opinions but were happy to clandestinely vote for a demented egomaniac who publically espouses their privately racist prejudices and is willing to militarize a gestapo. All of which is partially being provoked by an existential fear caused by the oncoming day when America is no longer a majority white nation


It’s so demonic and disturbingly petty

 

[Jhoon]

Let him try.

 

[Goombreh]

Pure insanity.

 

[DrexlersFade]

The collapse is coming

 

[thernbroom]

I'm sure putin requested and got whatever info he needed during his last meeting with trump

 

[hashmander]

who would have thought the toxicity of racism would lead a far right administration to align themselves with other white nationalists even if they're russians. funny thing is i don't think putin is a true believer, he just sees it as a way to damage the west, still makes him a scum bag because there is real suffering caused by these racist people he empowers in the west.

 

[mastermind]

who would have thought the toxicity of racism would lead a far right administration to align themselves with other white nationalists even if they're russians. funny thing is i don't think putin is a true believer, he just sees it as a way to damage the west, still makes him a scum bag because there is real suffering caused by these racist people he empowers in the west.

Putin is a true believer in the white supremacist Christianity that a lot of Trump supporters believe. He passed many laws supporting those efforts since he came in power.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Putin is a true believer in the white supremacist Christianity that a lot of Trump supporters believe. He passed many laws supporting those efforts since he came in power.

1. What is "White Supremacist Christianity" in Russia?

2. Putin was a KGB agent for the atheist Soviet state. It seems to me to be unlikely in the extreme that he suddenly made an honest conversion to Christianity in middle-age at the exact time that it became politically expedient to do so. And even if he had, it was Eastern Christianity, what do you think that has to do with "White Supremacy"?

3. Isn't it a lot easier to believe that, like Trump, Putin could give a crap about religion and is just willing to manipulate whoever he can for control?


Here's an article:

https://risu.org.ua/article_print.php

Anyone who grew up with the Eastern Orthodox Church (in my case, the Greek Orthodox Church in New York) will get a good laugh at Vladimir Putin pretending to be a Christian during his first Easter as Russian ruler.

As recounted by the great journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), the bravest of all the many Putin-critics to be systematically assassinated, in her book Putin’s Russia:

"At the beginning of the Great Matins service there stood, shoulder to shoulder with Putin as if at a military parade, Prime Minister Fradkov and Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin’s new éminence grise, head of the president’s office, a man of diminutive stature with a large head. The three men clumsily and clownishly crossed themselves, Medvedev making his crosses by touching his hands to his forehead and then to his genitals. It was risible. Medvedev followed Putin in shaking the patriarch’s hand as if he were one of their comrades, rather than kissing it as prescribed by church ritual. The patriarch overlooked the error. The spin doctors in the Kremlin are effective but, of course, pretty illiterate in these matters and had not told the politicians what to do. Alongside Putin there stood the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, who had been behind the rebuilding of the cathedral and who alone knew how to invoke the protection of the Cross in a competent manner. The patriarch addressed Putin as ‘Your Most High Excellency,’ which made even those not directly involved wince. Given the numerous ex-KGB officers occupying top government positions, the Easter Vigil has now taken over from the May Day parade as the major obligatory national ritual.

The beginning of the Great Matins service was even more comical than the handshakes with the patriarch. Both state television channels did a live broadcast of the procession around the cathedral that precedes the service. The patriarch participated in this, despite being ill. The television commentator, who was a believer and theologically knowledgeable, explained to viewers that in the Orthodox tradition, the doors of the church should be shut before midnight because they symbolize the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was placed. After midnight the Orthodox faithful taking part in the procession await the opening of the church doors. The patriarch stands on the steps at their head and is the first to enter the empty temple where the Resurrection of Christ has already occurred.

When the patriarch had recited the first prayer at the doors of the temple, they were thrown open to reveal Putin, our modest president, shoulder to shoulder with Fradkov, Medvedev, and Luzhkov.

You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An evening of comic entertainment on Holy Night. What is there to like about this individual? He profanes everything he touches."​

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been, since its reconstitution during WWII, an instrument of the state. The best illustration of this is probably the 1949 “Greetings from the clergy and laity of the Russian Orthodox Church to the leader of the nations of the USSR, the Generalissimus Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday.” It states, in part:

"Witnessing at every step your noble efforts to make people’s lives peaceful and happy, we see in your person not only a great statesman and leader, guiding the lives of people in a new direction of history, but also a fatherly, caring trustee of all aspects of our human existence with all its various needs."​

The Russian Orthodox patriarch at the time of Putin’s Easter show was patriarch Aleksi II, who died on December 5, 2008. Lt. Gen. (r) Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet bloc official to defect to the United States, writes of Aleksi II, “The KGB had carried him under the codename ‘DROZDOV’ and awarded him its Certificate of Honor, as was learned from a KGB archive accidentally left behind in Estonia.”

Additionally, we know more from “original KGB documents known as the Mitrokhin Archive (described by the FBI as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source).” We also know more “from Politburo documents released by Father Gleb Yakunin, vice chairman of a Russian parliamentary commission that investigated the KGB’s manipulation of the church.”

And with those details in hand, the “election” of a new patriarch in 2009 was quite a sight to behold:

"On January 27, 2009, the 700 Synod delegates assembling in Moscow were indeed presented with a slate listing three candidates. All, however, belonged to the secret KGB army: Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk worked for the KGB under the code name “MIKHAYLOV”; Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk has just been identified as having labored for the KGB under the codename “OSTROVSKY”; Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga was recently discovered to have been listed under the codename “TOPAZ”.

When the bells at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow announced that a new patriarch had been elected, Metropolitan Kirill, aka “MIKHAYLOV,” proved to be the winner. Presumably, the KGB/FSB considered him to be in a better position to carry out its tasks abroad, where he had directed his efforts during most of his professional life. In 1971, the KGB had sent him to Geneva (Switzerland) as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to the World Council of Churches (WCC), the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries. His task was to use his position in the WCC to spread the doctrine of Liberation Theology—a Marxist religious movement born in the KGB—throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB had infiltrated “MIKHAYLOV” into the WCC’s central committee, and in 1989 the KGB had appointed him chairman of the Russian patriarchate’s foreign relations as well—positions he still held when he was “elected” patriarch. Indeed, in his acceptance speech “MIKHAYLOV” announced that he would establish religious television channels in Russia that would broadcast abroad."​

Kirill/“MIKHAYLOV” recently attacked the “Godless” Ukrainians – though, according to one journalist (a recipient of the Blessed Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II] prize for excellence in journalism dealing with religious themes), “25% of the population attends Easter services in Ukraine compared to 2% in Russia.”

In November, Kirill/“MIKHAYLOV” asked that Russians “remember positive achievements of the Soviet period”:

Moscow, November 5, Interfax – Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia urges to sober evaluation of the Soviet period in the Russian history.

“There would not be modern Russia, if not heroism of the preceding generations, who in the 20s and the 30s not only turned up the soil, though it is also important, but founded industry, science and defense power of the country,” Patriarch Kirill said on Wednesday at Moscow Manege at the opening of the 14th forum-exhibition Orthodox Russia. My History. The 20th century. 1914-1945. From great perturbations to the Great Victory.

According to him, we should not doubt successes of certain state leaders, who stood at the commences of such revival, modernization of the country, even if these leaders committed crimes.

“Where there was will, strength, intellect, political decisiveness, we call it doubtless success as in case with the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, and where there was blood, injustice, and sufferings, we say that it is unacceptable for us, people of the 21st century,” the primate said.

“We do not identify ourselves with these bloody pages, we give these historical personages to God’s judgement, but these negative things should not give right to exclude all positive things that were done, at the same time, all positive things done by certain people should not exclude critical attitude to crimes committed by them,” he said.

The patriarch expressed hope that current exhibition would “help realize the beauty of our people’s heroism in the 20s, 30s and 40s, to see the hard pages and understand: in order to love our Motherland, we should not exclude any historical period from the historical memory, but we should take it with common sense and clear moral perception and then truth will be separated from lies, and the good from the evil.”​

Kirill/“MIKHAYLOV” left the “certain state leaders” unidentified – but the only “state leaders” of the “20s, 30s and 40s” were Lenin and Stalin. The single most prominent theme of Stalinism is: “The leadership of Comrades Lenin and Stalin turned Russia from a backward nation into an industrialized power, which is why Russia – under the wise leadership of Generalissimus Stalin – was able to defeat Hitler.”

Not a word of it is true, and Stalin knew it. Putting aside Stalin’s 1939-1941 alliance with Hitler that started the war to begin with, Stalin’s 1941 decision to ignore intelligence about an impending invasion, and his amazing wartime leadership that resulted in 20 million Russians dead,,,,

 

[Wild self]

The average white American believes that they have more in common with a white Russian than a non white American of the same economic class

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

"I make him offer, perhaps he not refuse, yes?"