45РОССИЯ—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
levitate
I love you, you know.
Not even Paul Manafort would wear that shytYeah that suit is really something else
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
AmericaFacts.
ProPublica
5 hrs ·
"'It is precisely because we have extraordinarily wealthy individuals running the government that we have no way of knowing what the conflicts of interest really are.'"
Trump Appointees, Richest Ever, Elude Scrutiny With Hidden Investments
Advisers’ holdings are buried in layers of shell companies, creating vast opportunities for conflicts of interest while minimizing transparency.
NYTIMES.COM
Why is this clown still asking him that,. Everyone said he already did except your dumb ass and the select dumb asses on fox news.
Its clear that his people did this and the iron grip he has over the media and the internet there, he knew about it and did nothing about it at the very least.
and out of all people, he believes him.
Time needs to hurry up so we can get this clown outta here.
Now Im hearing that the russian foreign aide to Putin is denying they ever spoke to President Orange about the Russian Interference in the 2016 election
Real life Johnny Dangerously, well, Whitey and his brother were more parallel, but it is still pretty interestingRussia Scandal Befalls Two Brothers: John and Tony Podesta
Russia Scandal Befalls Two Brothers: John and Tony Podesta
By KENNETH P. VOGELNOV. 10, 2017
Tony Podesta in 2010 in Washington. He resigned Monday from the Podesta Group, a firm he helped found.Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — One is a rail-thin liberal idealist who spent his career in government, on campaigns and at think tanks. The other is an overweight pragmatist who made a fortune lobbying for all manner of liberal boogeymen.
And now, in a twist with Shakespearean undertones, the two influential Washington brothers have found themselves on opposite sides of the scandals over Russian interference in the 2016 election.
John D. Podesta, perhaps more than anyone except Hillary Clinton, was a victim of the Russian cyberassault on allies of her presidential campaign, of which he was the chairman. Emails stolen from his personal Gmail account were dribbled out by WikiLeaks last fall, revealing the embarrassing rifts roiling the campaign and Washington’s Democratic establishment. He has pushed hard for an aggressive investigation of Russia’s role in the election.
Mr. Podesta’s older brother, Tony Podesta, has been ensnared in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russia’s meddling in the race and whether it involved any associates of President Trump. The efforts by his firm, the Podesta Group, to win support for the agenda of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned former president of Ukraine, were cited in an indictment handed down last month against two former campaign aides to Mr. Trump, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who arranged the Ukrainian lobbying work.
Neither Tony Podesta nor anyone at the Podesta Group has been publicly charged in the case. But Mr. Mueller has subpoenaed the firm and its employees for documents and testimony related to their work and interviewed roughly half a dozen people about Tony Podesta’s involvement. And as the Podesta Group has withered under the scrutiny, its employees were informed in a tearful meeting on Thursday that they may stop receiving paychecks after next week, according to people in attendance.
For some Democrats, there is little question over who deserves the most sympathy.
“Sure, the Clinton campaign made some mistakes, but that’s not like representing a dictatorship,” said James Carville, who has known John Podesta for years through Democratic political circles. Mr. Carville said he was less acquainted with Tony Podesta, but added that “by reputation, you can’t put them in the same book. John is one of the straightest guys I know. Everybody says, ‘Can you believe that those guys are brothers?’”
Mr. Trump, for his part, went after both brothers last month, lumping them together as emblematic of “the swamp” of Washington special interests against which he campaigned.
In fact, the Podesta brothers, who were raised in a modest two-flat on Chicago’s northwest side by a Greek-American mother and an Italian-American father, represent very different strains of a Washington establishment now under attack from left and right.
John Podesta, 68, served as a top White House aide to the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and was believed to be in line as White House chief of staff if Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency. In between campaign and White House stints, John Podesta helped to create and run some of the leading institutions on the American left, including the Center for American Progress think tank, and provided policy and political advice to generations of Democratic politicians and operatives.
Tony Podesta, 74, built one of the highest-grossing lobbying firms in Washington, signing clients across industries and ideologies — including defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, banks like Wells Fargo, drug makers like Mylan and foreign regimes like the government of the former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Tony Podesta is known for his fund-raising — in 2016, he donated or raised nearly $900,000 for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party — as well as for a lavish lifestyle.
Had Mrs. Clinton prevailed, as official Washington expected, it most likely would have cemented the legacies of both brothers — John Podesta as a key confidant to presidents and one of the most important Democratic strategists of the past century, and Tony Podesta as the go-to lobbyist for Democratic administrations. Instead, the Podestas have been drawn into the vortex of investigations and conspiracy theories that have enveloped Washington in the Trump era.
Tony Podesta stepped down from his firm hours after it was obliquely referenced in the indictments of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates, though he had been in talks about leaving for months. It is unclear what will happen to his investment in the Podesta Group, which has been hemorrhaging clients and employees, both because of the mounting scrutiny and because businesses are looking for lobbyists with connections to the Trump administration, according to interviews and lobbying filings. Some firm partners are starting a new firm next month called Cogent Strategies, in which Tony Podesta will have no stake.
Last week’s indictment did not name the Podesta Group or another firm with which it worked on the Ukraine account, Mercury Public Affairs. Instead, the indictment referred to them as “two Washington, D.C., firms” that were recruited by Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates.
While both firms disclosed the work to Congress under less-rigorous domestic lobbying rules, they did not initially register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The indictment alleges that was done intentionally — by routing the money through a Brussels-based nonprofit — “to minimize public disclosure of their lobbying campaign” that “was under the ultimate direction” of Mr. Yanukovych, his party and his government.
Tony Podesta and his lawyers are working to navigate the issues raised by the Mueller investigation and accompanying attacks from the right. They have already demanded a retraction from the conservative news media on claims that both Podestas worked with Mr. Manafort to advance Russian interests.
John Podesta, 68, who was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against President Trump, has been caught up in second-guessing over what he and others could have done differently. Doug Mills/The New York Times
John Podesta, for his part, has dedicated his time since the election to trying to expose the connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
After the postelection publication of a dossier by a former British spy into those connections — which included some salacious claims — John Podesta met with Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of the firm that commissioned the opposition research, to compare notes on Russia’s involvement, according to an associate of Mr. Podesta.
During the general election season, the firm’s research was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, though John Podesta has told congressional investigators that he had no knowledge of those payments. The associate said the meeting came as Mr. Simpson was considering whether, and how, his firm could continue its Russia-related Trump research. A spokeswoman for Mr. Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS, declined to comment.
John Podesta has helped raise millions of dollars from major donors with whom he has personal and financial relationships — including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler — for nonprofits fighting the Trump administration. With funding from Mr. Sandler, he helped begin a group called Democracy Forward that is suing the Trump team on a number of fronts, including at least one lawsuit intended partly to reveal whether Mr. Trump’s aides tried to influence the Russia investigation.
John Podesta “could have gone into a bunker and vanished, but instead he dedicated himself to fighting this,” said Faiz Shakir, who worked for him at the Center for American Progress and serves with him on the board of Democracy Forward. “He is very driven by exacting some measure of justice for the unscrupulous form of politics that was utilized against him and his side,” said Mr. Shakir, who considers Mr. Podesta a mentor.
Both brothers declined interview requests through their representatives. But John Podesta provided a written response to a question about whether he saw it as tragic — or at least ironic — that the Russia investigation for which he has been advocating has ensnared his brother.
“The only tragedy is that Donald Trump is president and got there with the Russians’ help,” he said. “That’s a tragedy for the American people.”
For both John and Tony Podesta, the connections with Democratic politics began at an early age. In 1970, they worked together on the Rev. Joseph D. Duffey’s antiwar Senate campaign in Connecticut, for which Tony Podesta served as a top official, and his younger brother — as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton — were volunteers.
Over the next 23 years, the brothers’ paths intertwined. They wove in and out of campaigns and car-pooled together to Georgetown University’s law school, from which they both earned degrees in 1976. Tony Podesta joined the United States attorney’s office in Washington, while John Podesta went to work at the Justice Department.
After a few years, the brothers left those jobs — John Podesta joining the Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Tony Podesta becoming the founding president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way.
In 1987, the brothers teamed up to create a lobbying and public relations firm called Podesta Associates, which was seen as having a liberal bearing, representing a mix of public interest groups and media companies and associations. But after Mr. Clinton won the presidency in 1992 — a campaign for which both Podestas worked — the brothers’ paths diverged once and for all. John Podesta took a job in the White House and divested his stake in the firm, which Tony Podesta pointed in a less ideological direction.
By President Obama’s second year in office, domestic lobbying revenues for the Podesta Group had risen to more than $29 million, buoyed in part by the perception of access to the new administration.
The brothers remained close, even as their lifestyles took different paths.
Tony Podesta moved into a 7,000-square-foot house in Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, which he had bought for $3.9 million in addition to his homes in Australia and Venice. After three years of renovations, he turned it into a fund-raising hot spot with a modern art collection and a wine cellar with thousands of bottles. His divorce from his second wife, 26 years his junior, was widely chronicled in Washington.
John Podesta, who remains married to the mother of his three children, lives in a relatively modest house near American University in Northwest Washington, where his clan makes a habit of getting together for home cooked pasta.
In the end, said Lanny Davis, who has known both Podestas since the Duffey campaign, the brothers have much in common.
“Tony Podesta may have clients that are way to the right of him in politics,” he said, “but neither John nor Tony Podesta, no matter who their clients are, have withdrawn one inch from being liberal Democrats with progressive values.”
A London Meeting of an Unlikely Group: How a Trump Adviser Came to Learn of Clinton ‘Dirt’
By SHARON LaFRANIERE, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANDREW HIGGINS and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZNOV. 10, 2017
Joseph Mifsud, left, and Ivan Timofeev at an April 2016 conference in Moscow for the Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of academics. Valdai Club, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — At midday on March 24, 2016, an improbable group gathered in a London cafe to discuss setting up a meeting between Donald J. Trump, then a candidate, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
There was George Papadopoulos, a 28-year-old from Chicago with an inflated résumé who just days earlier had been publicly named as a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. There was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic in his mid-50s with a faltering career who boasted of having high-level contacts in the Russian government.
And, perhaps most mysteriously, there was Olga Polonskaya, a 30-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg and the former manager of a wine distribution company. Mr. Mifsud introduced her to Mr. Papadopoulos as Mr. Putin’s niece, according to court papers. Mr. Putin has no niece.
The interactions between the three players and a fourth man with contacts inside Russia’s Foreign Ministry have become a central part of the inquiry by the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, into the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election. Recently released court documents suggest that the F.B.I. suspected that some of the people who showed interest in Mr. Papadopoulos were participants in a Russian intelligence operation.
The March 2016 meeting was followed by a breakfast the next month at a London hotel during which Mr. Mifsud revealed to Mr. Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” That was months before the theft of a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee by Russian-sponsored hackers became public.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators are seeking to determine who — if anyone — in the Trump campaign Mr. Papadopoulos told about the stolen emails. Although there is no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos emailed that information to the campaign, Mr. Papadopoulos was in regular contact that spring with top campaign officials, including Stephen Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, according to interviews and campaign documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The revelations about Mr. Papadopoulos’s activities are part of a series of disclosures in the past two weeks about communications between Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials or self-described intermediaries for the Russian government. Taken together, they show not only that the contacts were more extensive than previously known, but also that senior campaign officials were aware of them.
Last week, Carter Page, another former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee that he also had a private conversation with a Russian deputy prime minister on a trip to Moscow in July 2016. Mr. Page, who had previously denied meeting any Russian officials during the trip, said that he had informed at least four campaign officials about his trip beforehand and notified the campaign afterward that the Russian minister had pledged “strong support for Mr. Trump.”
I swear a Civil War would break out if Obama took it this far.
Can't make this shyt upInternational news picked up the Flynn kidnapping plot now
We've got to to get this guy out of power. How do you trust Putin over our own intelligence agencies?
I mean, I have said it before, it's not even a unique thought, the lifelong veteran intel spox, every agency, foot on neck. Some of these folks are fukking cartoon characters in their patriotism, and take their work very seriously. You know over 80% fukking HATE Pompieu (sp?)' the knives are going to be out until Trump resigns and Pompieu is disgraced.Lol this man is conditioning his base for when the hammer drops
Other than the complete collapse of our economy, standing in the world, and innocent casualties, I think a civil war would be a good thing. The only folks that would push it would be the neckbeards and militia groups, which watching them get blown to pieces on tv would be entertaining.
Looks like that suit Joe Pesci wore to court in My Cousin Vinny
