How Do You Know When Obama Is Lying?

Counterpunch  |  the former constitutional law professor Obama knows damn well that the President of the United States is NOT “elected by all the people.” Thanks to the openly undemocratic Electoral College system, the winner of the national presidential popular vote has failed to win five U.S. presidential elections so far, including the last one.

And to what “democracy” is Obama referring? The United States is a corporate and financial oligarchy. This is an open secret understood very well (in private) by the onetime record corporate fundraiser Obama. Even some conservative elites like the veteran federal jurist and economist Richard Posner concede this basic reality.  As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched book Democracy in America? (written and researched during the highly instructive years of Obama’s Citigroup presidency):

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).”

By Gilens and Pages’ findings, based on exhaustive inquiry into hundreds of bills and policies enacted and blocked since the 1980s, the basic same rule – concentrated wealth wins, the populace loses – holds regardless of which major party or party configuration holds or distributes nominal power in in Washington.

The “hope” and “change” Obama administration, loaded with agents of high finance, was a case in point. It gave Americans a blunt object lesson on who really owns and runs the country, helping thereby to spark the Occupy Wall Street rebellion, which Obama’s Department of Homeland Security helped crush (along with hundreds of Democratic city governments from coast to coast).

Seven in the ten Americans currently support Medicare for All – a desperately needed policy that the current pretend-progressive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden suggests he would veto if it came to his desk as president!

Barack And Michelle Obama's Martha's Vineyard Estate

thelist  |  Barack and Michelle Obama's beautiful Martha's Vineyard estate seems to be ripped from the pages of a storybook.

Martha's Vineyard, a picturesque Massachusetts island, has been a vacation favorite for many Presidents and first families, from the Kennedys to the Clintons. Lately, however, the Obamas have been amongst the island's most regular presidential visitors — spending time than ever on the island since President Obama's time in office. And while visiting the island may be thoroughly enjoyable, the former first family decided to plant roots and buy a stunning mansion on the island.

As reported by People, in December 2019, the Obamas spent a cool $11.75 million to buy their 6,892-square-foot home dream home, which sits on a stunning 29 private acres. While almost $12 million may sound like a high price to pay for a vacation home, this luxurious Martha's Vineyard estate is well worth the hefty price tag. Here's a look inside Barack and Michelle Obama's beautiful Martha's Vineyard estate.

Barack and Michelle Obama's Martha's Vineyard estate is certainly dreamy.

Martha's Vineyard is known for beautiful homes and stunning beaches. So, it's no wonder why the Obamas wanted to spring for a home-away-from-home on the island — and they didn't skimp, either. The mansion they chose, located on Edgartown Great Pond, is enormous. The home boasts almost 7,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, a private pool, and multiple living rooms, according to the estate's real estate listing. And with 29 private acres of manicured lawns, greenery, and beach, this estate has a little bit of everything.

Obama Destroyed Black American Wealth While

peoplespolicyproject |  The People’s Policy Project is proud to release its first formal paper. Co-authored by Ryan Cooper and Matt Bruenig and designed by Jon White, it uses data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to track the evolution of African-American wealth during the Obama presidency, and how that wealth was affected by housing policy choices made by the administration.

The paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis, the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and so homeowners were left to drown.

As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013.

Most middle-class wealth is housing wealth. Obama’s failure meant that while the top 10 percent of white households saw large increases in wealth due to the bank bailout restoring stock market values, almost everyone else in the country suffered serious losses.

For the rest of the paper, click here.

Media Coverage Jacobin: How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

The Dig: The Destruction of Black Wealth with Ryan Cooper

Newsweek: Racism in Boston: African-Americans Have a Median Net Worth of $8, New Report Shows

Splinter News: How the Obama Administration Failed Black Homeowners

Chapo Trap House

The Democrats Obviously Don't Want To Win....,

theautomaticearth |  No, no matter how much I read and watch, I can’t shake the idea (less so as I go along, actually) that the Democrats don’t really, honestly, want to win the 2020 presidential election. Obviously, there are many in the party who do, and voters too, but not the ones pushing the levers and pulling the strings. Those, whoever they may be, that are picking candidates, setting policy, maintaining media contacts, doctoring spins.

Because is there anyone among you who has ever seen a worse candidate than Joe Biden? I’m not just talking about his dementia and gaffes, but you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who can use Biden and enthusiasm -let alone inspiration, or even better: exhilaration- in one sentence that doesn’t include the word “no”. And isn’t that the #1 requirement for a candidate?

They ostensibly went with Kamala Harris to provide some of that, if we may believe the press. She’ll whip up the voters into wild bouts of inspiring enthusiasm! Only, Kamala bowed out of the primaries even before 2020 started, after spending $40 million -part of which is still not paid off- because she was stuck at 2% support and couldn’t generate … any enthusiasm.

What you got is a really old man who couldn’t get a toddler excited about ice cream, and a token black woman who nobody even in her own party likes. Mix those ingredients into a convention that attracts just half the viewers of the 2016 one and generates the excitement level of an infomercial for kitchen appliances, and is it any wonder I doubt that the “behind the curtain party” is in this to win?

As for the political program, the agenda, there is really only one item on it: Donald Trump. And no matter how many millions of times it may be repeated in speeches and news articles, NOT being something is in the end NOT a positive message. You’re supposed to win on your own merit, not someone else’s perceived lack of merit. Newsflash: “MOST BIDEN SUPPORTERS SAY THEIR VOTE IS AGAINST TRUMP RATHER THAN FOR BIDEN – WSJ/NBC News poll”.

This bit from the Guardian on Monday sums it up nicely, and it veers into late night comedy territory while doing it (what more can one ask for?):

Virtual Democratic Convention Kicks Off With Emphasis On Unity

The Democratic national convention begins on Monday with a star-studded lineup and heavy emphasis on unity aimed at presenting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the US’s best hope for healing a deeply divided nation[..]

The Dems have a hard enough time uniting their own party, let alone the nation. And there’s not a Trump supporter who would move into their camp – other than the odd washed up GOP politician.

FISA Warrant On Carter Page Enabled Obama Surveillance Of The Entire Trump Team

tabletmag  |  A few weeks ago, Americans learned, from a letter sent by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, that Rice had sent herself an unusual “email for the record” on Barack Obama’s last day in office. In the email, Rice claimed to be memorializing a high-level meeting of Obama officials in January 2017, at which they discussed whether to limit the information they were sharing with President-Elect Donald Trump on the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, concluded that the purpose of this meeting was to keep Trump in the dark about the extent to which he himself was under investigation. He concludes from the fact of the email’s existence and its odd timing that the device of briefing Trump on limited portions of the documentation was a tactic —one intended to obscure the fact that Trump was a target of the investigation, even if he was not technically the subject of it. In fact, McCarthy wrote, given the type of investigation, Trump was effectively the main target.

In establishing this, McCarthy alluded to an aspect of counterintelligence investigations and surveillance that Americans tend to know little about. This is McCarthy’s key passage (emphasis in original):

Whether eavesdropping is done for national-security purposes under FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] or for law-enforcement purposes under criminal statutes, the objective is always the same: to uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise. 

The point is to identify all of the conspirators, and especially to establish the complicity of the most insulated leaders. Carter Page may have been the surveillance target named in the FISA warrant, but he was of low rank in the alleged conspiracy. The point of monitoring Page was to determine exactly what he was doing and, just as crucial, who was directing him.

McCarthy’s point here means that the surveillance authorized by the FISA warrant wasn’t limited to the personal communications of Carter Page; it only began there. To understand the “conspiratorial enterprise,” investigators and analysts have to follow up on all the entities Carter Page is in contact with.

And they don’t stop there. A conspiratorial enterprise is bound to involve communications beyond Carter Page’s first circle of direct contact, so investigators need to look at the next circle as well. They may need to look further, depending on the communications patterns they find in the first two circles radiating from their named target. But under current rules, it’s the first two that government investigators can routinely gain access to in order to “uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise,” without needing to apply for further warrants.

This convention is referred to as the “two-hop” rule, and, like many provisions of surveillance law, has come in for criticism by civil libertarians. The original FISA was passed in 1978, before the internet age. After 9/11, information technology enabled surveillance operators under the Patriot Act, which complemented and in some ways overlapped FISA surveillance, to inaugurate a “three-hop” rule exploiting computer-networked communications to look well beyond the first-order contacts of a central subject (under Patriot Act surveillance, a terror suspect). This was done via presidential order and came as an unwelcome surprise to the public when the practice was revealed, and initially dubbed “warrantless wiretapping,” in 2005.

The Tashina Gauhar Nexus - Pure Coincidence Theory

Google yielded two references to the name Gauhar, they both have similar meanings.
The name Gauhar is from Persian گوهر (gohar) meaning “jewel, gemstone”.
Gauhar The meaning of the name Gauhar is A Pearl. The origin of the name Gauhar is Arabic.

Peter Strzok was raised in Iran

Liza Page’s mother is Iranian her name is Tamara Najarian

Huma Mahmood Abedin was taken by her parents to Iran where she grew up. Her father founded the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. After his death Abedin’s mother took it over.

Trump Thanks Obama For Handing Him The NDAA Power

Those DHS Federal Police could take the Portland arrestees to the nearest military base and hold them there incommunicado with no call to lawyers. Their relatives might never be informed about their detention.  Except for Habeus Corpus…,

About that Habeus Corpus, Obama cancelled that when he “reluctantly” signed the National Defense Authorization Act.

“The National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Obama on the 31st December 2011 authorises the indefinite detention, without trial or indictment, of any US citizens designated as enemies by the executive. The individuals concerned are not only those who have been captured on the field of battle, but also those who have never left the United States or participated in any military action.”

globalresearch |  Far from having broken with his Republican predecessor, Democratic President Barack Obama has now reinforced the law of exception that he criticised when he was a senator. It is now possible to deprive United States citizens of their fundamental rights because they have taken part in armed action against their own country, but also when they take a political position favourable to those who use military action to resist the Empire. Worse – Barack Obama has added to the law John Yoo’s “Unitary Executive theory,” which puts an end to the principles of the separation of powers as defined by Montesquieu. The security policy of the United States President now escapes all control.

The Presidential elections, and the game of a possible changeover between Democrats and Republicans, cannot hide a marked tendency towards mutation in the form of the United States executive, regardless of the colour of the Presidential ticket. And it seems that the most significant change in the law has taken place under President Obama.

Barack Obama was elected by evoking a future based on respect for the fundamental rights of individuals and nations. But assessment of his presidency reveals an entirely different picture. The visible aspects of this, such as the failure to close down Guantánamo Bay, the maintenance of exceptional military tribunals or the practice of torture in Afghanistan, are only the tip of the iceberg. These elements only allow us to note the continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. 

However, there has been such reinforcement of the previous political structure that the form of the state has now changed, creating a hitherto unseen modification of the relation between the authorities and the citizens of the United States.

The possibility of treating US citizens as foreign ’terrorists’ has been a constant objective of the government executive since the attacks of 9/11. By the new prerogative which has been awarded him by the National Defense Authorization Act – that of being able to nullify Habeas Corpus for US citizens and not just for foreign nationals – the Obama administration has achieved what the previous government had only planned but never instituted.

A Better Description For A Fascist Police State Network Could Not Be Written

counterpunch |  A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).  In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

The For-Profit Militarized Police State Is JoeBidenBama's Political Legacy

jacobinmag |  Defund the police” has become a nationwide mantra, and for good reason: budget data from across the country show that spending on police has far outpaced population growth and drained resources from other public priorities.

Basically, our cities have been siphoning money from stuff like education and social services and funneling the cash into ever-larger militarized security forces.

Nationally, the numbers are stark: between 1977 and 2017, America’s population grew by about 50 percent, while state and local spending on police grew by a whopping 173 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to data from the Urban Institute. In other words, the rate of police-spending growth was triple the rate of population growth.

Chicago and New York embody the trends.

The former has been losing population over the last decade. At the same time, Mayor Rahm Emanuel grew the police budget by 27 percent during his eight-year term, to the point where Chicago now spends more than 38 percent of its general fund on police. Those increases coincided with a spate of police brutality scandals, as well as budget cuts that resulted in teacher layoffs and the mass closure of Chicago public schools. And yet Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has been pushing a new 7 percent increase in the police budget.

In New York, it’s a similar story. Back in 2008, the city spent $4.1 billion on its police force, according to City Council documents. Twelve years later, the city is spending $6 billion on its police force. That’s a 46 percent increase during a period in which the city’s population growth was essentially flat. A new report by New York City comptroller Scott Stringer notes that in the last five years alone, spending on police rose by 22 percent, driven by a 6 percent increase in the number of officers on the force.

All this happened during a period when the city experienced many years of budget cuts to social servicesandschools. Indeed, as Public Citizen points out, New York’s police budget is now “more than the city spends on health, homelessness, youth development and workforce development combined.”

These are hardly anomalies, as illustrated by a Center for Popular Democracy report looking at twelve major cities. That analysis concluded that “governments have dramatically increased their spending on criminalization, policing, and mass incarceration while drastically cutting investments in basic infrastructure and slowing investment in social safety net programs” to the point where today, “police spending vastly outpaces expenditures in vital community resources and services.”

Obama Plays You Cause You Must LIKE Getting Played

nakedcapitalism |  Jokes reveal truths, which is why the best way to appreciate the real Obama, not the fabled character of hope and change, is how he tells jokes.  He’s good at, no, great at telling jokes.  He kills at comedic performances, and his sense of timing is magnificent.  Jokes, though, show how someone really sees the world, and the joke I’m thinking of is one he made during a speech in March 2009, when the revelations of AIG’s massive retention bonuses became public.  It had been less than two months since Obama’s inauguration, but the major policy framework of the administration – the bailouts – had been laid down.  The AIG bonus scandal was outrageous to the public, a symbol of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being funneled to an arrogant corporation that had helped destroy the economy.

Barack Obama had stepped up to the lectern to deliver a stern rebuke to AIG executives who had taken bonuses with taxpayer money.  Obama talked of the outrage of an irresponsible company, and how his administration would do everything within its power to get the money back.  But a few minutes in, he coughed, slightly, choking a bit, as his mouth was a bit dry.  But after he coughed, he stopped, and reflected on the gesture with a joke.  “I’m choked, choked with anger”, he said.  Obama chuckled.  Reporters laughed.  And it was funny, really funny.  Because everyone in the room knew that Obama wasn’t actually angry about the AIG bonuses, and never intended to do anything about it.  No one there was angry about the bonuses, and everyone knew nothing would happen to AIG executives.  The House would pass bills, which would die in the Senate.  The only people angry were Americans at large, who could not believe that their government worked for Wall Street.  So the joke was funny, ironic, cool.  But the moment wasn’t right for it, because this was a serious time for outrage – so Obama quickly reverted to form, and the teleprompter took over.

Pundits didn’t reflect on this “joke”.  No one really noted it.  It was very much like George Bush’s comment to reporters that was only later highlighted by Michael Moore, when Bush was on a golf course and perfunctorily said “we must find these terrorist killers….” and then turned to swing a golf club.  “Now watch this drive.”  Obama had risen to that level of duplicity, not a lie in the conventional sense of saying something that wasn’t true, but an entirely constructed false persona. 

He had polished the tools of the Presidency – the utter banality of PR, the constipated talking points, the routine abuse of power – and taken them to a new level with a self-aware sense of irony about his own narcissistic dishonesty.  His challenge was so outrageous – I dare you to call me on what a liar I am as I joke about how much I am lying to you right now – that he turned an obnoxious bluff into art.

Obama had shown this breathtaking tendency to con people as they knew they were being conned before, the most public time during the campaign being his cynical answer when he was asked about his promise to renegotiate NAFTA.  He had said, when fighting for union votes with Clinton, “I will make sure we renegotiate (NAFTA).”  Even as he said this, it turns out that campaign advisor Austan Goolsbee had gone to Canada to assure them this was a lie (sure enough, Obama’s trade policies are identical to Bush’s, or worse).  And once the election ended, and Obama was asked about his broken promise by a reporter, he gave the following answer.

“This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign,” President Obama said during his Transition in early December, when a reporter asked him about criticisms he and now-Secretary of State Clinton had made about each other’s foreign policy views.
“They’re your quotes, sir,” said the reporter, Peter Baker of the New York Times.
“No, I understand. And you’re having fun,” Obama continued. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not faulting it.”

This is cynicism as art.  It’s literally a Presidential candidate running on hope and change saying that campaign promises are a joke and a ruse.  His comments on AIG were similarly dishonest. 

Rule Of Law: Obama Landgrab In Chicago

chicagotribune |  “Throughout this entire process, the city’s primary, indeed sole, loyalty was to the former president personally and his foundation,” lawyers for Protect Our Parks wrote in its appellate brief, which noted that one of the center’s top cheerleaders, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, had served as Obama’s White House chief of staff.

During his 20-minute argument before the 7th Circuit, Richard Epstein, the lead attorney for Protect Our Parks, balked at the city’s insistence that only a small percentage of the roughly 500-acre park would be affected by the project.

Almost half of the park already is a lagoon or marshland, Epstein said. Factor in the destruction of trees and ripping up of roads that would come with the center’s construction, “and you’re essentially taking away 80 to 90%” of the park’s usable territory, Epstein said.

“What we have is land worth $200 million ... given away for $10,” Epstein said, citing the amount listed on the 99-year land-use deal inked by the City Council. “This is a massive transfer.”

The attorney representing the city, Benna Ruth Solomon, argued that the state legislature specifically addressed any legal concerns when it updated the Museum Act in 2016 to include presidential centers in the list of entities that could be built on park land.

Solomon also said the district court was correct in ruling that the deal entered into by the city with the Obama Foundation was not a lease, as characterized by the plaintiffs, but a “use agreement” that has a “very, very public purpose.”

“We’re not taking parkland and giving it a nonpark use,” Solomon said. “We’re taking parkland that used to be used simply as a park with grass and trees … and we will now have a park with other park purposes,” including the cultural benefits of a museum, she said.

Among the questions posed by the three-judge panel, made up of Judge Amy Barrett, Judge Daniel Manion and Judge Michael Brennan, was whether the litigation even belonged in federal court.

At one point, Barrett interrupted Epstein’s argument and asked him to address why the lawsuit wasn’t brought in state court, where land-use disputes typically are settled.

“It seems like we’re sitting as a zoning board,” Barrett said.

A written ruling will come at a later date.

Herb Caplan, president and co-founder of Protect Our Parks, told the Chicago Tribune in an interview this week that he’s optimistic about their chances on appeal.

“We’re obviously being outspent and outpowered by both the city of Chicago and the University of Chicago and the Obama Foundation,” Caplan said. “But we believe in the rule of law. … I’m confident that the court will do the right thing."

With The DNI Declassifications - Even Coffee-Boy Papadopoulos Gets The Final Two Of His Fifteen Minutes...,

greatgameindia |  According to a secret transcript that was just declassified, one of the spies the FBI deployed against George Papadopoulos said that Israelis and U.S. Jews are “all f—ing spies,” referred to them as “f—ing c—suckers,” and said they should all be executed. The declassified transcript published on Tuesday revealed a “confidential human source” (CHS) from the FBI quoted as saying that Israeli Mossad spies need to be fucking kicked out of USA.

The 206-page transcript captured conversation between Papadopoulos and an unidentified CHS, seemingly across one continuous episode on November 26, 2016. George Demetrios Papadopoulos is a former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Donald Trump presidential campaign. He served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.

The FBI claimed to have begun surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos told the Daily Caller that the CHS is named Jeffrey Wiseman.

Last year, one of the most high-profile Israeli spy network in the US was brought down by American intelligence. This secret high-society elite group was recently exposed on the global stage with the arrest of the sex-trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein.

Although, Epstein is portrayed as just another billionaire pedophile, he was actually a high-class Israeli spy. He used perverted sexual desires as a cover to corrupt and infiltrate higher echelons of power in government and businesses (including in India). This is the source of political sex-scandals and video-tapes which surface now and then when someone refuses to obey orders.

Flynn Was Not Unmasked - He Was The Target Of The Investigation

Dailymail |  President Trump's acting chief of national intelligence has declassified a list of former Obama administration officials said to be involved in the 'unmasking' of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Richard Grenell, the acting Director of National Intelligence, paid a visit to the Justice Department headquarters last week in Washington, DC, and brought a list of former Obama aides with him, ABC News is reporting. They remain a secret from the general public. 

'Unmasking' is the procedure to name - to those with high-level security clearances  -an American citizen whose name appears in intelligence gathering such as eavesdropping or wiretaps that are initially aimed at suspected foreign agents.

U.S. citizens' names are obscured in such intelligence gathering, unless there is specific permission from the FISA court to eavesdrop on them over concerns they are working for or influenced by foreign intelligence agencies.

Supporters of Trump allege that members of the Obama administration improperly sought to investigate Flynn over contacts he had with the ambassador to Russia, Sergei Kislyak, during the transition to the Trump administration.

The FBI and then the Mueller probe focused on Flynn telling Kislyak that sanctions put in place on Russia at the end of December 2016 by Obama would be reviewed - which he then denied telling Kislyak to both Mike Pence and then the FBI. 

It is alleged that Flynn's identity was unmasked during the course of the federal investigation into contacts held between Russian figures and the Trump presidential campaign.

Flynn's calls with Kislyak were routinely intercepted because all the diplomat's communications were the subject of eavesdropping.

Flynn's name would have been redacted in intelligence reports but some top officials were then able to ask for the name to be 'unmasked.'

The heads of all intelligence agencies and members of the national security council have such power - as does the president.

Under the Obama administration, membership of the national security council included Joe Biden, as vice president, Susan Rice, the national security adviser, Ash Carter, the defense secretary, Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, and Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations.

All were legally empowered to ask for unmasking but leaking an unmasked identity would be a felony.

What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?

Foxnews |  Former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn's lead attorney accused top officials of orchestrating a plot to frame her client, insisting that former President Barack Obama himself was in on it.

Flynn had initially pleaded guilty to providing a false statement to the FBI regarding his contact with a Russian ambassador, but later changed his story and pushed back by questioning the FBI's tactics.

OBAMA KNEW DETAILS OF WIRETAPPED FLYNN PHONE CALLS, SURPRISING TOP DOJ OFFICIAL IN MEETING WITH BIDEN, DECLASSIFIED DOCS SHOW

"These agents specifically schemed and planned with each other how to not tip him off, that he was even the person being investigated," Powell told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," pointing to evidence that FBI agents took a casual approach with Flynn, not telling him they were investigating him and not warning him that it would be a federal crime to lie during their conversation.

"So they kept him relaxed and unguarded deliberately as part of their effort to set him up and frame him," Powell said.

According to recently released testimony, President Obama revealed during an Oval Office meeting weeks before the interview that he knew about Flynn's phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, apparently surprising then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and then-FBI Director James Comey to "stay behind." Obama "specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information."

Wayminnit..., This Seems Like A Particularly Uncharacteristic Obama Moment

washingtonexaminer |  Obama “started by saying that he had ‘learned of the information about Flynn’ and his conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak," Yates said, according to the notes. “Obama specified he did not want any additional information on the matter but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently.” 

Yates told investigators that “at that point,” she “had no idea what the President was talking about.” She “recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act” but could not remember if Comey specifically said there was an “investigation.” 

"It was not clear ... where the President first received the information," Yates said, adding that she “did not recall Comey’s response to the President’s question about how to treat Flynn.” Yates told Mueller's team, “She was so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time," the notes said. 

The Justice Department’s Thursday court filing described the ensuing clash between Comey and Yates on the question of whether to tell the incoming Trump administration that the recording of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador did not entirely square up with what Flynn had apparently told incoming Vice President Mike Pence. Comey “took the position that the FBI would not notify the incoming Trump administration of the Flynn-Kislyak communications." Yates and other senior DOJ officials “took the contrary view and believed that the incoming administration should be notified.” 

Yates told Mueller’s team about a pre-inauguration conversation about notifying the Trump team either with Comey or now-fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and “recalled that the FBI was resistant to the idea.” She also “recalled Comey’s view was that no one really knew if the Vice President was aware of the calls,” but “the DOJ response was that they shouldn’t assume the Vice President was aware and had knowingly lied.” The FBI notes state that “in the days immediately leading up to inauguration, Yates was really pushing to notify, while Comey was still very resistant.”

Yates, who noted it was "not always clear what the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn" and whose team noted the case appeared to vacillate between being a counterintelligence investigation and a criminal investigation, told investigators she decided “enough was enough” and would tell the White House a few days after President Trump’s inauguration. On Jan. 24, 2017, Yates and her team agreed that she would inform the Trump White House about the Flynn recordings, and Yates called Comey to let him know. But when Yates spoke with Comey later that day, he “informed her that two agents were on their way to interview Mike Flynn at the White House.”

Joltin Joe Obidenbama Not Hiding From Coronavirus, He's Hiding From Tara Reade!

nymag |  Tara Reade’s mother may have called in to the Larry King Show to discuss problems her daughter had experienced while working for “a prominent senator,” the Intercept reported on Friday. Reade has accused former Vice-President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, of sexually assaulting her when she worked for his Senate office. The Intercept report, which includes a partial transcript of the call in question, provides new corroborative evidence for Reade’s story.

In the call, a woman asks King, “what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington?” Her daughter, she added, “has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”

Though the Intercept story doesn’t confirm that the Larry King caller was indeed Reade’s mother, some biographical details do match up. The caller and Reade’s mother, who died in 2016, lived in San Luis Obispo County in August 1993, and Reade would have just left Biden’s office around the time of the call. Reade told the Intercept in previous interviews that her mother had called into the Larry King Show, though she couldn’t recall the date.

Hours after the Intercept published its report, the conservative Media Research Group published a clip of the episode in question; Reade confirmed to Holly Otterbein of Politico that she could hear her mother’s voice.

Reade has said that in 1993, Biden pushed her up against a wall in the Senate complex, kissed her, and then digitally penetrated her underneath her skirt. In 2019, she told reporters that the former vice president had touched her neck and ran his fingers through her hair on several occasions, which made her one of over a half dozen women to say that Biden had kissed or touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable.

Through representatives, Biden has consistently denied assaulting Reade, and it is generally difficult for journalists to prove that a sexual assault definitively occurred. Deficiencies in the criminal-justice system and the fear and stigma associated with public identification as a victim of sexual abuse can also prevent a person from reporting an attack to the police, let alone the press. But key aspects of Reade’s account — namely, that she told friends and relatives about the incident — have proven true. The New York Times previously confirmed that Reade told a friend about the attack when it allegedly occurred. “Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden,” the Times reported.

Gynocracy: Nominating A Demented Rapist Puts Democrat Contempt For Wymyn #MeToo On Fleek

jacobin |  When it first became clear that Joe Biden was launching a 2020 campaign for president, a lot of us were amazed that centrist Democrats would, in the #MeToo era, be stupid enough to back his candidacy. But we shouldn’t have been surprised: their feminism is fleeting and opportunistic.

This week, Tara Reade, a former Biden aide, detailed her 1993 experience of sexual assault on “The Katie Halper Show” after trying for years to get someone to listen. Reade has, predictably, been smeared as a Russian agent, because that’s how mainstream Democrats respond to anything they don’t want to hear. But she’s just one of seven women who have accused Biden of horrible behavior, charges that have been public for years.

Democratic elites have known for years about Biden’s shabby, boorish treatment of Anita Hill, the dignified law professor who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. Hill brought workplace sexual harassment into the public eye years before #MeToo. Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. He has since said that he “wished he could have done something” to ensure that her claims got a fair hearing, a pretty inept apology considering he was in charge of the proceedings.

From mainstream feminists, we’re hearing little about Biden’s #MeToo problems. In fact, some have flatly declined to be involved. As the Intercept reported this week, the feminist legal group Time’s Up had refused to take Reade’s case. In a twist, Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, is managing director of Time’s Up’s PR firm, SKDKnickerbocker. In another twist, Dunn also advised big Democratic donor (now convicted rapist) Harvey Weinstein on how to handle his own rape allegations. Another partner in SKDKnickerbocker, Hilary Rosen, has also been advising Biden’s presidential campaign.

The allegations aren’t getting much play in the mainstream media either. Sure, it’s a busy news cycle. And everything about Biden is boring, even his sexual assault allegations. But the day Reade’s charges went public, CNN ran an “analysis” by Chris Cillizza about Biden and gender. Its theme? “The Top 10 Women Joe Biden Might Pick as VP.”

By contrast, we’ve heard for years from these same quarters about the supposed mean, sexist tweets of the Bernie Bros, and about Bernie Sanders’s alleged tone-deafness on gender issues. But Sanders is the only candidate now running for president with no sexual assault or harassment charges against him. That’s obviously a low bar, and it’s unfortunate we have to mention it. But, perhaps relatedly, Sanders is also the only one in the race who has always been pro-choice, has always been committed to full abortion access regardless of income, and has been fighting for universal childcare for decades, as well as for advancements that benefit working-class women even more than men, like the $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. Yet if you relied on the mainstream media for information, you’d assume that Biden was the feminist candidate in the primary, while Sanders was “problematic” for women.

Black Political Co-option Dwarfs Tulsi/Bernie Media Erasure

Living Memory Black political history and struggle is not only co-opted but ruthlessly distorted and exploited in furtherance of everything from the the "replacement negroe program" to degenerate identity politics in America. As go black folks, so goes America!

blackagendareport |  There really is no more to the clap-trap about a Black electoral “strategy” than attempting to figure out which way the white folks are going and then circling the Black wagons, accordingly.

“Black have been convinced by corporate media that white folks will hold Sanders’ socialism against him and allow Trump another mandate.”

With his victory in the Blacktropolis of Detroit,  the clueless corporate champion Joe Biden has definitively won the “Black” Democratic presidential contest. Unlike South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, where collaborationist preachers have always held sway over huge sections of the Black electorate, Detroit was once home to the Marxist-oriented League of Revolutionary Black Workers  and sent avowed socialist John Conyers to Congress for 52 years, from 1965 to 2017. Detroit isn’t afraid of people that call themselves socialists – actually, very few Black people are socialism-phobic, and young Blacks are even more socialist-friendly than their white counterparts.But this is the election cycle when Blacks circle their wagons around the Democratic establishment, perceiving it as the only refuge from Donald Trump and his marauding White Man’s Party.

The difference between 2016, when Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan, and this year’s primary is simple: the experience of four years of Donald Trump. Black people want desperately to sweep the Orange Menace and his Amerikaners from power, and have been convinced by corporate media that white folks will hold Sanders’ socialism against him and allow Trump another mandate. 

“Very few Black people are socialism-phobic, and young Blacks are even more socialist-friendly than their white counterparts.”

Black people don’t vote their own political convictions in Democratic primaries; they give their votes to candidates they believe are the best bet to defeat the White Man’s Party. With such a “strategy,” Black folks almost never win -- in terms of getting an officeholder who thinks as they do -- but are content to avoid losing catastrophically to the worst “crackers.”

Black voters are aware of Biden’s many transgressions against them -- but that’s what white “moderates” do, and older Blacks have convinced themselves that a white moderate is needed to flush the overtly white racist Trump from power. Black voters support Bernie Sanders’ agenda, which very much resembles a Black political center of gravity that decades of polling has shown is far to the left of the white political spectrum. In fact, majorities of the very voters that awarded sweeping victories to Joe Biden in the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries told exit pollsters  they “support a single government health insurance plan for all?” – the very definition of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Sanders’ signature program won the primaries, hands down – but Bernie lost to the corporate hack that opposes Medicare for All. Indeed, all  of Sanders’ core issues – Green New Deal, a living minimum wage, cancellation of student debt – are supported by super-majorities of Democrats (and huge numbers of Republicans).

The Pritzkers and Transgenderism: (Obama Was A Pritzker Sock Puppet)

unz  |  It seems like we woke up one day to find that, out of nowhere, distinguishing between male and female has become illegal. In defiance of intuition, common sense and 3rd grade biology, a number of liberal plutocracies like Canada and the United Kingdom have legislated to force-feed their subjects the doctrine of transgenderism, which contrary to the idea that it is an individual choice, is always coupled with mandates that ordinary citizens acknowledge the delusions of wealthy narcissists and perverts.

In the United States, using the incorrect pronoun or expressing suspicion that transgender people are simply mentally ill incurs a massive personal cost. Such expressions can get one put on a Southern Poverty Law Center hit list, banned from the ability to use social media and banking services, and opens one up to harassment and violence from anarchist and radical liberal militias given vast leeway to operate by the police.

An army of phony scientists, shameless academics, politicians and activist legal fronts, armed with unfathomable amounts of money, have been successful in using every dirty trick to completely circumvent and upend legislative democracy. Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “The Age of Entitlement,” outlines how elites have been able to use Civil Rights precedents – where laws are decided in courts rather than by elected representatives and referendum – to radically transform American society by overruling the US Constitution and the will of the people.

Civil Rights, what was originally promoted as a second “Reconstruction” that would only impact issues related to Jim Crow in the South, has become a parallel vein of political power, where laws and rules that impact society as a whole are no longer tethered to public opinion or consent, but instead decided by a small group of rich Jews and capitalists, sometimes in the same family and playing diverse roles on the pitch to make their grotesque and oppressive dystopia real.

Did SARS-CoV2 Already Do Neuroinvasive Brain Salad Surgery On Joe Biden?

caitlinjohnstone |  It’s very bizarre and dissonant how there are currently two separate and non-overlapping lines of criticism going on against the campaign of establishment-anointed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. There are the perfectly accurate criticisms regarding the right-wing, militaristic policy positions of the politician Joe Biden used to be, and then there are the equally accurate criticisms of Biden’s handlers and Democratic Party leadership for wheeling out the dementia-addled husk of a man he currently is to run for the world’s most powerful elected office.

These two debates do not interweave, because they are not relevant to one another. It doesn’t matter what political positions a dementia victim once had; what matters is taking care of him and keeping him away from hazards, like sharp objects and nuclear launch codes. It’s impossible to know what actual political convictions still remain held within a mind that can no longer lucidly string thoughts together anyway.

I hate doing this. I hate repeatedly writing about the obvious and undeniable fact that an old man is exhibiting obvious and undeniable symptoms of incipient dementia. It isn’t fun, and it doesn’t feel good. But the alternative is laying down and allowing the Democratic party and its allied media to gaslight people into believing it’s not a thing, as they are doing currently.