Exposed: Vice President Mike Pence was installed by a Russian operative and has deep ties to “dark money”. 

Governor Eric Greitens is a Republican rising star. The 43-year-old former Navy SEAL rode the coattails of Donald Trump all the way to the Missouri Governor’s mansion in November, when he defeated Democrat Chris Koster 51%-45%.

Greitens has barely been in office for nine months and he’s attracting his fair share of critics. In March, The St Louis Post-Dispatch called his tenure “creepy” and The Kansas City Star published an editorial criticizing Greitens for “secret fundraising and secret spending”.

Just a block away from the Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City, Greitens’ former campaign manager is running “A New Missouri Inc”, a slush fund masquerading as a social welfare nonprofit. The governor operates the nonprofit so he can accept unfettered contributions from foreign and corporate interests, skirting state election rules.

Greitens’ election campaign was powered by a single $1.9 million donation from a super PAC funneled through the American Policy Coalition run by lawyer David Langdon who has been dubbed “the nexus of dark money” by the Center of Public Integrity. Langdon is among a small group of lawyers “working to keep secret the origins of millions of dollars coursing through the American political system.”

It’s emerged that Greitens’ other big donor included the DeVos family who have been grooming Mike Pence for years and his election was run by Nick Ayres, Pence’s Chief of Staff.

Pence’s pick as VP was engineered by Paul Manafort. The two had daily phone calls during transition. 

Donald Trump initially wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to serve as his Vice President but Campaign Manager Paul Manafort had a different idea. On July 12 last year, Manafort concocted a tall tale about mechanical problems with Trump’s plane to force the then presumptive nominee to overnight in Indianapolis and meet Indiana Governor Mike Pence for breakfast the next morning.

“What had previously been reported as a “lucky break” by the New York Times was actually a swift political maneuver devised by the now fired campaign manager. Set on changing Trump’s mind,” CBS News reported.

The entire Trump family met Pence and his brood at the Governor’s mansion the next day and the two politicians sealed a deal to run on the same ticket. Pence declared he was “honored’ and “humbled” to be considered and Trump sidelined Christie by telling the New Jersey Governor, “it would tear my family apart if I gave you VP,” a source said.

Within a month, Manafort was officially exiled from the Trump campaign after it was revealed he illegally took $12.7 million from a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician. It later emerged Manafort was also being paid $10 million a year by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on behalf of Vladimir Putin between 2006 and 2009, “to greatly benefit the Putin Government,”

While Manafort officially disappeared from the campaign in August, he kept in close contact with Mike Pence well after Election Day and throughout the transition. “I think he is weighing in on everything,” a former official told The Daily Beast. “I think he still talks to Trump every day. I mean, Pence? That was all Manafort. Pence is on the phone with Manafort regularly.”

It’s worth recalling Pence headed the Trump transition team and was responsible for appointing Lt-Gen Michael Flynn as the National Security Adviser despite having been warned Flynn was compromised by Turkey and Russia. Flynn would later be forced to resign for his compromising contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Pence’s role in any Obstruction of Justice related to Flynn and the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s investigators are also probing Manafort’s financial dealings with Russia, Deripaska and donations to the Republican Party. Pence has also lawyered up with seasoned criminal attorney Richard Cullen of the law firm McGuireWoods to “assist him in responding to inquiries by the special counsel.”

Pence’s ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska date back to before the campaign and may involve an illegal private email account Pence maintained while Indiana Governor.

Another sign Russian fingerprints were all over the Pence appointment came in the form of a ringing endorsement from Sergei Millian, president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and a long-time Deripaska associate. Millian called Pence an “excellent’ candidate” all while being under FBI investigation as a Russian spy recruiter. “He works well in his post and gets by without scandals,” Millian said.

Deripaska used to be one of Russia’s richest men but a series of bankruptcies has left him and his company Rusal beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, then Indiana Governor Mike Pence led an economic mission to Israel and later picked up a lucrative deal from Rusal’s Israeli partner Omen to open an aluminum parts factory in Pence’s state of Indiana.

It’s around that time that Pence had an email scandal of his own. Pence’s private AOL email account was compromised by a Russian hacker. Pence took six months to turn over his emails to Indiana officials, raising the specter that Russia may have kompromat on Pence and that he may have attempted to delete important emails before handing over the documents to investigators.

Pence has also been close to mercenary Erik Prince for over a decade. Prince met with Pence at the Trump transition offices in December 2016 before undertaking a secret mission to meet with Russian officials in the Seychelles In January this year.

Republican dark money and Russia operatives are backing a new team in the event Trump is impeached.

With the Trump administration in trouble, Vice President Mike Pence has taken the unusual move of forming his own fundraising committee, raising millions for a political action committee and a legal defense fund for the Trump-Russia affair. Pence’s fund is the brainchild of Nick Ayres, who also became the Vice President’s Chief of Staff on July 28.

There are signs the group of billionaire funders and Russian operatives who helped install Trump are preparing for his impeachment and readying Pence for the presidency with Missouri Governor Eric Greitens being groomed for vice-president.

Those dreams may be short-lived. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Vice President Mike Pence is himself a person of interest in Robert Mueller’s investigation. Pence had extensive and daily interactions with Paul Manafort, a known Russian asset, even after Manafort left the campaign. Pence’s financial deals involving satellite companies of Oleg Deripaska and “dark money” political operations remain the subject of increased scrutiny complicated by Pence’s own hacked email scandal. Most troubling to investigators must be the notion that Pence himself was installed at the behest of the Kremlin.

The post Dark Shadows appeared first on Narativ.

New details of how the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin forged a deal during the 2016 Campaign and the mysterious role of a pro-Russian mercenary who has close ties to Mike Pence.

With additional reporting by Tracie McElroy

By July 2016, former MI6 Russia Desk head, Christopher Steele, had become frustrated. Despite a growing dossier of compromising evidence against Donald J. Trump’s collusion with Russia, the media and law enforcement narrative was instead focused on what seemed like a much lesser investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.

Steele became convinced the Trump campaign had been intentionally amplifying the Clinton e-mail scandal because they knew Russia had been hacking the DNC emails and may have had possession of Clinton’s 30,000 missing e-mails. Publicly, a number of Trump campaign operatives had been championing this narrative – notably former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and Erik Prince, America’s most famous mercenary.

Prince, the 48-year-old former CEO of Blackwater, was too radioactive to be officially named as a member of Trump’s campaign but all indications are that he played a crucial role. Prince personally donated $250,000 to the Trump coffers and to a pro-Trump super PAC led by Rebekah Mercer (a major christian conservative donor). Mercer owns Breitbart, then run by Stephen Bannon, and Prince made several appearances on Bannon’s Breitbart Radio to spin up conspiracy theories about the Clinton e-mails, according to the Washington Post.

By all accounts, Prince’s role was far larger than just your typical donor relationship with a politician. “A former senior U.S. official who has advised the Trump transition told The Intercept that Prince has been advising the team on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the defense and state departments,” according to PJ Wilcox. He was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

Then, in January this year, Prince held a meeting with a representative of Putin’s government and the UAE in the Seychelles in order to open up a back-channel between Trump and Russia.

Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, serves as education secretary in the Trump administration and his brother-in-law, Dick DeVos, owns Spectrum Health.

Unusual spike in Spectrum Server activity as Trump Adviser visits Russia for secret meeting.

Spectrum Health is particularly important to investigators of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. A server registered to the company is very deeply intertwined in the caper that is the becoming the greatest political crime in history.  It’s Spectrum’s server which is believed to have been consolidating and washing private email addresses with voters information hacked by Russian-paid hackers via a server at Trump Tower and one run by Russia’s Alfa Bank. The illegally obtained information was used to create a database which Breitbart, Infowars, RT and Sputnik News used to bombard voters with fake and hyped news to help turn the electorate towards Trump.

Independent analysis of the server activity by David Schiminovich points to a significant spike in traffic between Spectrum’s servers and the one in Trump Tower on July 9 and 31. The first, on July 9, came on the same day Carter Page, another Trump adviser, held a secret meeting in Moscow with Putin’s handpicked CEO of Russia’s main oil company, Rosneft. It’s at that meeting that a quid-pro-quo was believed to have been negotiated, Trump would drop sanctions against Russia in exchange for help with the election. According to the Steele Dossier, a sizable portion of Rosneft would also trade hands for the effort.

While Christopher Steele is well-regarded in intelligence circles, his account of Page’s meeting with the Rosneft CEO is yet to be publicly confirmed. What is clear, is that on Page’s return from Moscow, the Trump campaign began an earnest campaign to put in place the lessening of sanctions against Russia.

After secret Russian meeting, Trump team makes public moves in support of dropping sanctions.

Back in the U.S., Page attended the GOP’s platform planning week in Cleveland which began on July 11, a week before the Republican National Convention. One of the first orders of business was a surprising plank proposal to water down support for Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-backed rebels. Instead of sending the Ukrainians “lethal weapons”, the GOP pledged “appropriate support”.

Page attended a follow-up meeting with Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor JD Gordon and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event staged by the Heritage Foundation on July 19. “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia,” according to delegate Victor Ashe.

Trump was officially nominated to lead the Republican ticket at the Republican Convention in Cleveland.  The day after the convention ended, July 22, Wikileaks published the first hacked DNC emails which they obtained from Russian hackers.  It’s notable that the Trump/Alfa/Spectrum servers showed increased activity at the same time.

The next day, July 23, Christopher Steele penned a memo to the FBI stating that Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine.

Trump got a boost in the polls from the Wikileaks DNC e-mail dump. On July 27, he publicly asked Moscow for even more help. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be nice.”

At the same news conference, Trump made a less noticed but equally significant comment about Russian sanctions which lent credence to the details of what Steele alleged happened at the Page meeting on July 9 in Moscow. German reporter, Mareike Aden, asked Trump whether he would recognize Crimea, if elected. Trump replied: “Yes. We would be looking at that.”

On July 31, the Spectrum server had another unusual spike.

Behind the scenes, mercenary Erik Prince proposed dropping Russian sanctions and worked to build a back-channel with Russia.

Wherever you look behind the Trump campaign, the same names keep coming up: Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon, Peter Thiel, Betsy and Dick DeVos and Erik Prince. These seven continue to pull the strings of the administration, Russia collusion and the mass disinformation campaign which supported it.

It’s Prince who is known to have worked behind the scenes to open a back-channel between the Trump Administration and Moscow. Prince’s world-view also closely aligns with Trump’s foreign policy of detente.

“Think about it: If FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can deal with Stalin to defeat German fascism in World War II, certainly the United States of America could work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. We don’t have to agree with the Russians on everything, or even on a lot, but we can at least agree that crushing ISIS in the Middle East is a very good idea.,” Prince is quoted in The Intercept. It may be coincidental, but it’s unusual that Prince’s brother-in-law owns the company whose server had repeated unusual links with the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank. It should be noted Prince’s company “Frontiers Services Group” also worked for the Chinese Government.

Mike Pence has close ties to pro-russian mercenary Erik Prince.

Which brings us to Vice President Mike Pence, who seems to be operating as a President-in-waiting, pending a Trump impeachment. This should trouble Americans because behind the scenes Pence is powered by the very same people who put Trump in office and is closely aligned to Erik Prince.

The Prince and DeVos clans have a long history of supporting right-wing causes from  bankrolling Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” to supporting anti-gay, anti-abortion organizations and ballot initiatives. Erik, was very close to Charles “Chuck” Colson, Richard Nixon’s “Watergate hatchet man” who Pence calls “a dear friend and mentor.” Erik Prince donated to Pence’s PAC “Principles Exalt a Nation”. After Prince’s Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in 2007, Pence organized a welcoming reception for Prince in Washington D.C.  The Prince and Devos clans also support and believe in establishing a Christian government in the US, just like Pence. 

While Pence claims he is not aware of any collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, it’s clear Prince not only acted in an advisory capacity for Pence when he headed the Trump transition team, he was actively involved in setting up a back-channel with Russia. Prince and Pence have been close friends and allies for at least a decade.

If President Trump is impeached and Mike Pence becomes President, the group of evangelical supporters who helped elect Trump may be closer to achieving their and Vladimir Putin’s goal. Jeremy Scahill puts it all in a far more Machiavellian way, “Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors,” says Jeremy Scahill.

Opinion: Is John Kelly our Alexander Haig?

The post Trojan Horse appeared first on Narativ.

Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump, have more connecting them than Ivanka Trump. 

On April 19 last year, Donald J. Trump was taking a victory lap after winning the Republican Party nomination. In his speech, he mentioned by name a number of bold-named businessmen who were there to hear him crow. Carl Icahn, Howard Lorber and Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust.

“The great Steven Roth,” Trump extolled. “Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South, it’s a tremendous success.”

“I said, ‘Steve, congratulations on the building,'” The newly-minted Republican presidential nominee said.

“He said, ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’ Is that right? My man!”

Trump and Roth have been friends (and sometimes business foes) for over 30 years.  They jointly own the 1290 Sixth Avenue office tower. Trump and Roth became business partners after Trump threatened to sue his former partners for trying to sell it to another party without his permission. 1290 Sixth Avenue became the second largest in Vornado’s portfolio but by no means the only marquee property in Roth’s sprawling Manhattan empire.

One other is 666 Fifth Avenue, which Roth’s Vornado Trust co-owns with Jared Kushner’s family. Jared made news in Manhattan’s real estate circles when he purchased the trophy building for $1.8 billion, using mostly borrowed money. By all accounts, Kushner overpaid for the building by paying twice as much per-square-foot than any other Manhattan building sale before it, according to the New York Post. Tellingly, the deal closed on Jared’s 26th birthday, Jan. 10, 2007.

It was an expensive birthday gift by any measure but for the young real estate scion it represented a giant statement to Manhattan. Two years earlier, his father, Charles Kushner, was imprisoned for 14 months after pleading guilty for tax evasion charges and for making illegal campaign contributions. Before exiting prison, Charles turned over his holdings to his eldest son to manage a business free of an ex-convict CEO. Jared was just 25. If his father’s prison sentence wasn’t enough for the young heir to handle, the circumstances that led to it, tore the Kushner clan apart.

Before being charged in 2005, Charles Kushner heard his brother-in-law was talking to investigators about his misdeeds. To gain leverage over him, Kushner paid a “very attractive, high-end call girl $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a Bridgewater, NJ, motel after she pretended to need a ride when her car broke down,” according to the Post. Jared’s father had the whole motel encounter taped and sent it to his sister, Esther. She turned the tape into the feds. Classic kompromat.

Now it seems, Kushner family history could be repeating itself. Investigators want to know if Jared has kompromat all of his own. Only this time, the disparaging evidence is financial in nature and it’s the Russians who could be holding it over him.

666 Fifth Avenue, The trophy building Jared bought for $1.8 Bn in 2007 has proved to be a financial noose around him and the family. By 2008, the building was generating just 70 cents on every dollar it owed.  Under pressure, Jared was forced to sell the pricey store space for $525 million to a partnership in 2008 and a 49 percent stake in the office portion to Stephen Ross’ Vornado in 2011. Yes, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump share more than wife and daughter, they share a business partner. A $1.2 Bn mortgage on Jared’s trophy building is due in just two years which unpaid, could destroy the family fortune.

Congressional investigators and the FBI are now probing a secret meeting Jared had with Vladimir Putin’s banker at Trump Tower in New York in December last year. The White House and the Russian bank have offered conflicting explanations for the meeting between Kushner and Sergei Gorkov.

The post Ties That Bind appeared first on Narativ.

Russia hacked vital election infrastructure before the election. Did they rig the vote?

Some time within the week of November 3, 2016, the FBI held a hastily convened conference call with Florida’s 67 county election supervisors who operate a specific type of election voting system. They had sobering news for the officials: Russia had successfully hacked the vendor of Florida’s electronic voting machines. The FBI and Homeland Security were so concerned, a second call was organized with Florida state officials to share information on the cyber threat

The Russian hack of a voting machine manufacturer came amidst a frenzy of activity by Kremlin hackers who had successfully gained access to the State Voters Rolls in Arizona and Illinois. What gave investigators pause, however, was the fact that the Florida hack had a different target. It wasn’t just collecting voter identities; it was aimed at the manufacturers of the voting machines across the state.

Almost 20 percent of Americans vote on digital systems that don’t produce a paper trail. This includes several states such as New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as well as several jurisdictions in swing or battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Indiana. Many of the machines are more than 10 years old and contain software no longer maintained by its manufacturers – we’re talking Microsoft XP or older – and are not updated with the latest security patches. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology,  posed a rhetorical question in an interview with NPR:

“With the kind of stealth and sophistication that’s already out there, why wouldn’t a nation-state, cyber-criminal gang or activist group go into election systems that are completely vulnerable?”

Tampering with an electronic voting booth is fairly simple. According to a study by the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012, voting machines can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education. All you’d have to do is unlock or pick the lock, switch out the memory card, and reboot the machine. This was ably demonstrated by Andrew Appel, a Princeton professor in a 2014 YouTube video. Once in place, the hacked machine could count a completely different vote than the one intended by the voter. Most polling stations are in gyms or schools and machines are set up well before voting day so it’s not impossible to gain access to them. Also, every machine needs to be reset before every poll so they have to be opened by someone.

This kind of invasion would require a carefully coordinated attack on thousands, or at least hundreds, of voting machines. Of course you could reprogram the machines in each state at once, if you gained access to the source codes for the machines allowing you to reprogram all the memory cards at once.

According to Salon:

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results.

But a determined hacker could gain access to those source codes by hacking the manufacturer’s mainframe, as Russia is suspected of doing. They could theoretically access the codes, change them, and resave them without anyone actually knowing.

And that’s not the only weak spot. Experts warn that the entire ecosystem is vulnerable. For example, once votes are cast, the data is transferred into a database for immediate counting. The tabulation equipment is also dated and doesn’t have the basic security like encryption or strong passwords, so if you didn’t rig the vote in the actual machines, you could do it at the counting point.

To be clear, the FBI only knows there were hacks of Russian origin of the voting machine manufacturer server, and hacks of state voters rolls in at least two states but no actual manipulation of data voting machines. There are clues, however, that something went awry on voting day. Data analysts have been poring over the election results and they are finding some serious head-scratchers.

Take Wisconsin, for example. President Donald J. Trump won the state by a mere 3,000 votes, but statistical analysis of the result showed Hillary Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that voted on electronic-voting machines.

There are other discrepancies, too. Exit polls, normally reliable predictors of actual poll outcomes, seemed way off compared to actual results last year. Shortly after the election, the National Association of Voting Officials, a group of polling experts, sent a letter to election officials across the country:

“Our examination of the exit data collected by Edison Exit Polling shows a large number and unprecedented discrepancy between the exit polling and the final vote count at minimum in certain states – the so-called swing states of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida. It strongly suggests inappropriate and external meddling of our nation’s most sacred act – the act of its citizens voting.” 

NAVO points to the following:

The hacking of the most recent software updates that are applied to the machines before the election.

Modifying the running code in the machine via wireless technology.

Physically hacking the machines while voting.

And…

Modifying the tallying software local to the precinct or the database at the election center.

The NAVO analysis of exit polls vs. actual results (the full letter can be read here: 2016-election-not-democratic) points to the same vulnerabilities I’ve detailed above. There’s also anecdotal evidence of votes being counted incorrectly on voting day. In Florida, for example, there were widespread examples of voting machine malfunctions, as Ruben Major points out in his blog:

On November 7, 2017 at 3:39PM, during early voting, a report came into the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section stating that there was a “paper trail showing Donald Trump” when the voter selected Hillary Clinton.  

The election results have been widely accepted as fair since the election, except by the current administration (for different reasons… I’ll go into in another post). But now we’ve seen a pattern of an extraordinary efforts by Kremlin officials to meet with Trump’s key advisors, discussing top-secret information with them, attempts to set up secret back-channel communications with Moscow, the firing of FBI Director James Comey who was in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, unexplained Trump server connections with a Russian bank, and an extraordinary fake news operation, it’s becoming harder to gloss over the hacks of voter registration rolls and equipment manufacturers.

We may never know what happened in Florida, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania to deliver the anomalies in counties that used electronic voting machines or between exit and actual polling results, because the machines don’t leave a paper trail. The FBI is still actively investigating Russia’s hacks of voters rolls and voting machines and, considering the context of the unprecedented effort by Russia to undermine the US democracy, investigators cannot be letting any of this go.

The post The Fix appeared first on Narativ.

The Republican Party is imploding. Young Republicans are fleeing and President Donald J. Trump’s support is eroding as quickly as you can spell ‘Russia’. 

On the eve of Montana’s special election to elect a new congressman, Republican front-runner Greg Gianforte body-slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. Gianforte’s attack was in response to Jacobs’ question about a health care bill which threatens to rob many in the party’s base of affordable health coverage. The brutality of the assault, and subsequent lie about what happened, is a canary in the coal mine for a Republican Party falling apart, devoid of values and wholly owned by Russian autocrats.

“I’m sick and tired of you guys,” Gianforte yelled as he body-slammed Jacobs. “The last guy who came here did the same thing. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of here. The last guy did the same thing. Are you with the Guardian?”

All that for asking a question. Almost unnoticed in the scuffle, is evidence the Guardian Newspaper dug up about Gianforte’s investments in two Russian Index Funds which invest heavily in sanctioned Russian companies.

Both are indexed to the Russian equities market and have significant holdings in companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft that came under US sanctions in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Crimea.

Gianforte is an independently wealthy tech entrepreneur (he’s estimated worth is $315M) but his investment in the Index funds is a clear bet on Russia’s economy. Why would he do that unless he believed Russian sanctions would be lifted?

Gianforte may be a canary, but he is not alone. The rot inside the Republican rank and file runs deep, is well-funded and operates with unparalleled sophistication in coordination with its Russian overlords. Together, ‘Russia-GOP’ prey on people’s fears and keep opponent supporters at home, by peddling fake news micro-targeted to people’s Facebook and other social media accounts.

Take Cambridge Analytica, the murky “psychographic” marketing company which figures out your personality profile and targets your fears by amplifying them with conflated or blatantly false content. The company is thought to be responsible for the unexpected ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, the inexplicable campaign of Ben Carson, the bizarre rise of Ted Cruz and of course, the election of Donald Trump.

According to Newsweek,  The company is principally owned by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supported Trump and was a leading investor in Breitbart.  Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman (after Manafort) and now chief strategist at the White House, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board as well as the executive chairman of Breitbart before joining Trump’s team in August.

Investigators want to know how Cambridge Analytica is linked to Russia’s unprecedented cyber operation to manipulate the election, according to Time.

It’s common knowledge, Robert Mercer backed Cruz in the Republican primaries but when that campaign couldn’t seal the deal, Mercer swung towards Trump, deploying Cambridge Analytica on behalf of number 45. It’s also believed Mercer’s daughter, Bekah, was instrumental in installing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Trump cabinet. According to the Washington Post, Flynn returned the favor by granting Cambridge Analytica’s parent company a lucrative contract, during his 18 day tenure as National Security Advisor.

I’ve already reported that Flynn, Sessions, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Carter Page were all involved in a secret meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last Summer, in an effort to soften the party’s plank on Ukraine and who-knows-what-else. The photo below reportedly snapped minutes after one Trump-Russia meeting shows Kislyak, Manafort and Sessions returning from one of their sideline meetings.

Intelligence Community leaks now suggest there are intercepted recordings of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis) accepting Russian money from Kislyak during the Republican convention. And now it’s emerged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) super-PAC accepted $2.5 Million from a pro-Putin Ukrainian businessman during the last election cycle (images below). The Republican Party has, in essence, become a money-laundering operation for Russia’s murderous regime and its oligarchs.

It’s almost hard to believe the Republican Party, which was founded by anti-slavery activists built on the principles of the revolution and which gave the country Abraham Lincoln has been so thoroughly defiled by this extent of corruption. The future of the Republic – and democracy – requires a strong GOP founded on the values it holds dear. Voters – especially poor white ones – across the country have been betrayed by their leadership.

At the same time, Citizens United needs to be overturned. The Supreme Court decision to label corporations as citizens has corrupted our politics top to bottom, left and right. If Republicans are true patriots, and have any chance of survival, they will fight to return power to its citizenry.  And if any unccorupted Republicans still exist, when will they stand up to their leaders and root out the disease which is eating its way through their party? What America needs now, more than ever, is a rebirth of the Grand Old Party – the party of Lincoln – flushed of its corruption and ready to serve the people. If the politicians can’t do it, the people will.

The post What America Needs Now More Than Ever appeared first on Narativ.

President Donald J. Trump has become a clear and present danger to the republic and US lives. Trump shared classified information about an ISIS plot to blow up commercial planes using laptop bomb with our enemies, endangering US lives. But that’s only the beginning of the constitutional crisis we’re heading into.

The Washington Post and the New York Times just reported President Donald J. Trump shared secret code-word information with the Russians that could isolate the US from the free world and endanger the lives of Americans. Trump handed over the classified information to the Russians when he held a closed-door meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, on Wed May 10.  The code word intel (which is classified above top secret) was acquired by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to the US under strict intelligence rules.

The information Trump revealed would help the Russians identify a secret agent within ISIS who had revealed a plot to use “laptop bombs” aboard commercial planes. The Kremlin would be keen to eliminate or disrupt the asset because of their reprehensible support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The result could mean US lives are at risk whenever Americans fly.

Although the foreign country is not named in the reports, the United States is part of the “Five Eyes” global international community which means intelligence agencies from New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and the US share information on their common good. Other alliances exist with allies who may be less forgiving of such a lapse of judgment by the US President. Even though President Trump can declassify information “at will”,  that doesn’t extend to information gathered by non-US agencies.  In short, Trump threatens the US relationship with our key allies if he reveals information the US didn’t obtain directly.

Trump’s breach of allies’ trust comes just days after Trump potentially committed another serious crime – obstruction of justice – when he colluded with Vice President Michael Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire FBI Director James Comey.

The White House’s public pretext for the firing was related to Comey’s handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation, as outlined in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein but that memo was easy bait for a President looking for a reason to fire the FBI Director.

In a deft move, Rosenstein threatened to resign over the use of his memo as cause for Comey’s ouster. The next day, absent a pretext, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and was forced to reveal the truth. The emperor, it seems, had no clothes.

“When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Trump also copped to Holt he asked Comey on three separate occasions if he was under investigation personally.  That’s not a question you would ask once, never mind three times, if you really believed the whole thing was “a made up story”, “a ruse” or “a hoax”, as the President has said in his many tweets.  It’s also now clear that Trump summoned Comey to the White House and asked him to “pledge his loyalty” just days after acting attorney General Sally Yates alerted the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was “compromised by the Russians”. Yates was later fired. A second count of obstruction of justice.

A just released memo written by Comey after Flynn was fired reveals President Trump asked the FBI Director to drop the entire investigation.  “I hope you can let this go,” Comey quotes Trump in the memo he wrote as part of a paper trail documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct justice. As an F.B.I. agent, Comey’s notes will be used in court as credible evidence.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s also been reported by the New York Times, the President and Vice-President secretly conspired to remove Comey. Vice President Mike Pence, who parroted the White House lie, could have been the next President of the US but he’s now been infected by the corruption virus by Trump. Pence should face an indictment on obstruction of justice charges and needs to be impeached. By conspiring with Trump, Pence has placed the US into a succession crisis.

However, even if the Justice Department indicts Trump and Pence along with the exhaustive list of co-conspirators, nothing can force the House, controlled by the Republicans, to begin impeachment proceedings. Up until now Republicans seem hesitant to even appoint an independent prosecutor so impeachment hearings seem unlikely, unless something else happens. And that something else is beginning to emerge.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize US Democracy ran very deep and now threaten to embroil the entire leadership of the GOP – including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Ted Cruz and others. Ryan has been full-throatedly supporting Trump recently framing the President as “a driven, hands-on leader, with the potential to become a truly transformational American figure.” Now it’s emerging, there’s good reason Ryan is Trump’s pocket. According to “Kremlingate” watchers, Ryan also accepted money from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to fill the GOP coffers. If Ryan and other Republican leaders are removed from office too, the balance of power and sheer political survival in 2018 should compel remaining Republicans in the House to act.

I asked Associate Professor Gary Darden, who teaches US Civil War at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey to explain how impeachment would work if such an indictment was coming:

“An impeachment is constitutionally speaking an indictment issued by the House for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while the trial itself would take place in the Senate with senators as jury and chief justice as presiding judge. If the president were to be indicted in a court of law, then that would be, I think, the basis for articles of impeachment in the House. If 2/3 of the House votes in favor of any article (or charge) if impeachment, then it mandates a trial in Senate, where a conviction requires 2/3 of that body.”

The House could be reluctant to act but Darden believes:

“If criminal charges come out of the Justice Dept against the President, then it would be the basis for the House to act. If it didn’t it would be political negligence of the highest order.” 

Still, Darden points out Republicans who supported Trump hold a disproportionate number of seats in the house so the impeachment seems unlikely, but just the threat of it, and a potential lengthy prison sentence for the entire Trump family, could render the President impotent and force a resignation, as it did with Nixon.

If you’re keeping track, that now leaves Trump, Pence and Ryan all out of the running to take over as  President. The next in line for the White House is Senator Orrin Hatch (UT-R), the President pro tempore of the United States Senate. After Hatch, It’s the Secretary of State, Putin-buddy Rex Tillerson (likely to be indicted too) and then Jeff Sessions (clearly already compromised) and the rest of the cabinet.  This is why there are two potential outcomes to an impeachment crisis: President Orrin Hatch or the next Speaker of the House, if Ryan is implicated.

Whomever it is, would be President until 2020 as there simply is no mechanism for a snap election in the US. Even under these extraordinary times.

“Hate is a far better motivator than love,” a boastful Roger Stone told NPR this week. “It’s one of Stone’s golden rules.”  Stone is the political operative who helped put Donald Trump in the White House.  He says of the President, “I was like a jockey looking for his horse. You can’t win a race without a horse.” Stone is about to see his golden rule work against his winning horse.  Trump has now threatened American lives, betrayed the country, our allies, the rule of law and made his bed – with Vladimir Putin – the end result will enrage the American population which should have brutal consequences for both the President and the Russian autocrat.

The post Trump-Russia Is Far More Serious Than You Ever Imagined appeared first on Narativ.