[USA] SJEDINJENE AMERIČKE DRŽAVE - unutrašnja politika i uticaj na svetska kretanja

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

Ako nista drugo, na mastovitost im se mora odati priznanje. Cega se sve sete da teoretisu... 

[Helena]

Prilično toga se dešava u USO,  a tema vrlo mirna.

Nego, jel ceo Fox postaje Star ili samo ovi zabavnu kanali?

On 8/30/2023 at 10:30 PM, 𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂 said:

Zasto, ali zasto ovo rade?

 

 

Pod hitno treba da uvedu gornju granicu kandidovanja. Ovo je bolesna ambicija koja ne vidim cemu vodi, a sa druge strane na neki nacin i zlostavljanje starije osobe. 

 

Možda ne tako, jer je protivzakonito, ako dobro shvatam.

Ali mentalnu sposobnost bi trebalo proveriti.

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

56 minutes ago, Helena said:

Prilično toga se dešava u USO,  a tema vrlo mirna.

Nego, jel ceo Fox postaje Star ili samo ovi zabavnu kanali?

Možda ne tako, jer je protivzakonito, ako dobro shvatam.

Ali mentalnu sposobnost bi trebalo proveriti.

 

Za fox nemam pojma, ne pratim bas nesto osim ako ne iskrsne na youtube nesto interesantno. 

 

Pa vidi, zasto je protivzakonito ako je zakonito da ne mozes da se kandidujes za predsednika ako nemas 35 godina. Ako je po zakonu da ne mozes da glasas ako si ispod 18...

Znaci, donja granica je zakonski ogranicena, ali gornja nije. Sa druge strane, ti ljudi koji su vec jednom nogom u grobu donose zakone ciji rezultat nikada nece videti a ni osetiti. 

Ovaj covek kada se ustolicio u senat, bio je mentalno veoma sposaban, ali je toliko dugo tu da je dogurao da baguje zdravstveno. Na stranu sto je on vilijan, meni je mucno da gledam zlostavljanje tipa 'hocete se kandidovati i 2024?' a on jedva stoji na nogama i ne odustaje iako ne zna gde je. (To se odnosi na kompletnu tu tihu generaciju koja u kolicima dolazi na posao, pa ti veruj vlasti).  

 

[Helena]

Onda nisam shvatila i da, deluje mučno.

Fox se ovde reklamira kao Star kanal od 1.10. i sad mene interesuje da li i Fox Njuz menja ime i da li to sve ima veze sa odštetom koju mora da plati.

Ima jedna karikatura koju sam videla na tviter profilu Navratilovr, pa ću je sad postaviti.  

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 2, 2023 by Helena

[Nek grmi jako]

 

Posle čak devedeset i jednog optužnog predmeta protiv Trampa, Bajden i Tramp neck and neck u anketama koje objavljuju režimski mediji, dok je u nekim anketama koje stižu od konzervativaca Tramp čak i u prednosti.

 

Vreme je da se Gavin Njusom, koga smo ovde promovisali kao mogućeg pobednika prajmarisa kod demokrata u vreme kad mu je Vašington post davao samo peto mesto, konačno aktivira i objavi predsedničku kandidaturu.

 

Da ne bude posle češanja po glavi, kao u slučaju Hilari Klinton 2016. godine, uz pitanje - odakle sad ovi rezultati. Jer, Bajden će skoro izvesno izgubiti od Trampa ako se Trampu dozvoli da učestvuje u izborima.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Nek grmi jako

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

5 hours ago, Nek grmi jako said:

Posle čak devedeset i jednog optužnog predmeta protiv Trampa, Bajden i Tramp neck and neck u anketama koje objavljuju režimski mediji, dok je u nekim anketama koje stižu od konzervativaca Tramp čak i u prednosti.

 

 

Meni se uvek vise svidjaju ovakve ankete. Da nije bilo takvih anketa, Tramp bi bio predsednik danas, jer bi Demokrate ostale kod kuce ubedjeni da njihov glas i nije tako potreban. 

Iako anketa nema veze sa zivotom ni realnoscu, samo neka se vrti... 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

48 minuta intervjua jednog veoma ozbiljnog gosta od jednog veoma ozbiljnog novinara. 

 

 

Steta sto gost nije ubacio svoje iskustvo kada su ga kidnapovali vanzemaljci i seksualno zlostavljali, ali valjda su to ostavili za neki novi termin...

 

 

Have a fun... 😂

 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

 

Kada im je dosta? 

 

 

[ters]

45 minutes ago, 𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂 said:

 

Kada im je dosta? 

 

 

 

Nikad im nije dosta, i meni nikad nece biti jasno zasto politicare ne ogranice na sluzbu do maksimalno 60-65 godine starosti. 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

55 minutes ago, ters said:

 

Nikad im nije dosta, i meni nikad nece biti jasno zasto politicare ne ogranice na sluzbu do maksimalno 60-65 godine starosti. 

 

Juce cujem da jedna komsinica ima 98 godina. Znaci, nikada ne bi pomislila, mislila sam da je oko 70. Ne nosi naocare, super interesantna i pametna, cuje sve, mozak joj radi, vozi auto, ide u soping sama, vuce svoje kese... jedino sto nosi stap, verovatno da ne padne. 

 

Hocu da kazem, genetika je razlicita kod razlicitih ljudi. Neko se raspadne sa 50, neko sa 90. Ali jednostavno nije uredu da ljudi koji nece doziveti da osete rezultate svoga rada koji utice na sve ostale bude u vlasti. Mozda umre i onaj od 60, ali ipak faktor verovatnoce... 

 

Pod hitno bi trebalo da uvedu gornju granicu, kao sto su uveli donju. Jedini je problem je sto bas ne zele da ogranicavaju sami sebe, pa se to verovatno nikada nece desiti. 

 

Ja licno vise ne mogu ni da ih gledam, ni da ih slusam. Nisam diskriminator, volim da budem u drustvu starijih osoba punih iskustva, naucim nesto, ali ovde se ne radi o tome... radi se o tome da ne mogu da prate trendove, menjanje stila zivota, da ne razumeju kako zive neke druge mlade i nove generacije, zaglavljeni su, sto je i normalno u nekom drugom vremenu i ne mogu jednostavno doneti ispravne odluke za generacije kojima ostaje svet. 

[Dragan]

Da li je tacno ovo sto pise u clanku i da li je to stvarno problem ?

 

Kada davanje napojnica potpuno izmakne kontroli

25 posto napojnice? 30 posto? U SAD-u su turisti i potrošači pod pritiskom da plaćaju više. Postoji razlog za to.

 

Spoiler

Prodavačica u Fresh Baguetteu u Washingtonskoj četvrti Georgetown iznenada okreće zaslon osjetljiv na dodir prema kupcu kako bi potvrdila iznos. Baget košta 4,85 američkih dolara (4,46 eura). Ne radiš ništa drugo. Čim izvadite svoju kreditnu karticu, na ekranu se pojavljuje pitanje: Koliko trebate dati napojnicu ? 15 posto napojnice? 18 posto? 20 posto?

Prodavačica stoji iza pulta i gleda. Razina stresa raste, srce lupa, misli jure. Koliko je ova usluga vrijedila? Žena je bila profesionalna i fina, 20 posto. Ali zašto bi se napojnica uopće trebala plaćati? U pekari u kojoj kupac uzima baguette s police i stavlja ga pred blagajnu, u trgovini u kojoj je usluga prodavačice ograničena na jednostavno prikupljanje gotovine? Ali je li uopće dopušteno ne dati napojnicu?

 

“Tipflacija”, najvruća tema ljeta

Georgetown Bakery nije iznimka. Kod frizera blagajnica traži napojnicu. Na štandu sa sladoledom. Kod prodavača sira. Kod masera. Na turističkim forumima postoje bezbrojni primjeri američkih turista i Amerikanaca koji su upali u zamke davanja napojnica. “Davanje napojnica” u SAD-u je izmaklo kontroli, nedavno se požalio CNBC. Amerikanci koji vole igru riječi već su osmislili hashtag: "Tipflation", najvrućiju temu ovog ljeta, sastavljen od engleskih riječi "tip" i "inflation". Od kupaca se sada sve više ne traži samo napojnica, već se zapravo vrši pritisak da plate više.

Čak iu restoranima u kojima su Amerikanci desetljećima navikli davati napojnice, napojnice su postale predmet sporenja. Jer i traženi iznosi strmoglavo rastu. Prije ruskog napada na Ukrajinu, koji je izazvao globalni skok cijena, napojnica od oko 15 posto smatrana je standardom kada se jede vani. Mnogi terminali za naplatu sada gostima automatski predlažu znatno veće napojnice: konobar daje uređaj s izborom od tri od 22, 25 ili 30 posto. Nemoguće je neprimijećeno utipkati drugačiji iznos u uređaj; društveni je pritisak velik da se prihvati jedna od tri opcije. Iako uz doprinos od 30 posto iznosa računa, upotreba riječi "napojnica" više se ne čini prikladnom.

"Tippflation" ljuti Amerikance. tijekom pandemije Covida Mnogi su ljudi pokazali svoju velikodušnost . Sjedili su u sigurnosti svojih domova dok su radnici restorana odlazili na posao, kuhali, dostavljali. Ljudi su izrazili svoju zahvalnost dajući više napojnica. Prosječna brojka iznosila je gotovo 24 posto, dijelom zahvaljujući uslugama internetskog plaćanja poput Squarea, koje su se tijekom pandemije proširile gotovo jednako brzo kao i koronavirus. U međuvremenu je spremnost Amerikanaca na trošenje ponovno pala, a napojnice su u prosjeku nešto manje od 20 posto. Postoji i mnoštvo studija o navikama davanja napojnica u SAD-u koji voli statistiku; Amerikanci trenutno plaćaju nešto manje od 17 posto u restoranima brze hrane i oko 20 posto za obroke s uslugom konobara ( pročitajte koliko plaćaju Švicarci ).

 

Sada su restorani i platni servisi ti koji stalno predlažu veće iznose. Napojnice bi se u SAD-u trebale smanjiti jer minimalna plaća raste. Od šezdesetih godina prošlog stoljeća napojnice imaju puno važniju ulogu, posebno za zaposlene u ugostiteljstvu, nego u europskim zemljama. Za zaposlenike koji primaju napojnice, zakonska minimalna plaća znatno je niža: savezni zakon propisuje minimalnu plaću od samo 2,13 dolara po satu (oko 1,88 franaka) i 7,25 dolara za poslove bez napojnica.

Za poslužiteljicu Carmen Smith napojnice nisu samo poslastica, već bitan dio njezine plaće. 41-godišnjakinja iz Milwaukeeja zapravo ima drugo ime, ali inzistira na anonimnosti jer daje podatke o svojim plaćama u dobrom restoranu u najvećem gradu u državi Wisconsin . Za dobru noć gosti joj daju 250 dolara napojnica. To je daleko najveći dio njihove plaće. Poslodavac isplaćuje samo zakonsku minimalnu plaću zaposlenicima koji su dobili napojnice. Baza u Wisconsinu je nevjerojatno niskih 2,33 USD po satu, izdašnih 20 centi više od nacionalne referentne vrijednosti.

Radeći četiri dana u tjednu, Carmen Smith zarađuje između 4000 i 5000 dolara mjesečno, prvenstveno zahvaljujući napojnicama. To znači da samci mogu financirati skroman način života. Kao poslužiteljica, Carmen Smith ne prima ni zdravstveno osiguranje ni plan mirovinske štednje, oboje socijalne beneficije koje dolaze s poslom u SAD-u. Osobito zaposlenici na radnim mjestima s niskim plaćama nemaju pristup tome i moraju sami financirati svoju medicinsku skrb i mirovinu, što je bezobrazno skupo.

 

Teški američki san

Koliko god to grubo zvučalo, stvarnost je američkog sna za mnoge ljude. Prema američkom zakonu, gotovo svaki posao može se smatrati poslom s napojnicom. Jedini uvjet je da se napojnice plaćaju. Kupci također ostaju u neznanju kada moraju odlučiti hoće li dati napojnicu kada ih blagajnica zatraži.

Znači li reći ne znači da na kraju dana osoblje odlazi kući s mizernom plaćom? Ako napojnica nije dovoljna za normalnu minimalnu plaću, zakon zahtijeva od poslodavaca da plate razliku. Međutim, rijetko tko slijedi ovo pravilo. Više od četiri od pet šefova krši pravila, otkrile su federalne vlasti u istrazi prije više od deset godina. Od tada više nije bilo nikakvih istraga.

 

Ekscesi su doveli do toga da dijelovi SAD-a žele obuzdati kulturu davanja napojnica. U poslovnim krugovima veliča se kao kapitalistički ideal nagrađivanja temeljenog na učinku. Kritičari, s druge strane, vide suprotno jer se rad jednostavno ne plaća. Oni ukazuju na povijest tradicije davanja napojnica. Uvezen iz feudalne Europe u republikansku Ameriku, tamo je doživio preporod nakon završetka građanskog rata. Od tada su robovi bili slobodni, ali ih bijelci nisu htjeli zaposliti niti platiti. Umjesto toga, plaćali su napojnice. Na taj su način stvorili novu klasu radnika s niskim plaćama koji su, tijekom industrijalizacije, također trebali iskoristiti države na sjeveru.

 

Osam država i teritorija sada je ukinulo minimalnu plaću s napojnicama ili je to u procesu. Glavni grad Washington također ga postupno povećava, isprva sa 5,35 dolara na 7,35 dolara, a želi ga potpuno ukinuti 2027. godine. Tada se ista minimalna plaća od 17 USD primjenjuje na sve zaposlenike. No, ugostitelji se žale da poslodavci ubuduće više neće moći plaćati. Brojni restorani sada su izmislili široku paletu doplata. Počelo je nakon pandemije Covida s "naknadom za oporavak restorana", doprinosom kupaca za pokrivanje prekida rada tijekom karantina, između 3 i 5 posto iznosa računa. Čak i hamburgernice sada naplaćuju "naknadu za uslugu" od 20 posto ili više.

 

Naravno, blagajnik će i dalje tražiti napojnicu. I to s pravom, jer ovisno o tome kako su takve naknade strukturirane, novac završava u blagajni poslodavca, a ne zaposlenika. Ovaj sustav je izuzetno zbunjujući za kupce. Iako restorani moraju navesti sve naknade za usluge na jelovniku, cijene jelovnika uvijek ne uključuju poreze, naknade i napojnice.

U SAD-u računi u restoranima često završe iznenađujuće visoki, i to ne samo za turiste, a taj trend raste. Carmen Smith smatra da zbog toga ne bi trebala patiti količina napojnica. 20 posto je minimum kako bi poslužitelji svojim radom zaradili dovoljno da se uzdržavaju. Čak i ako zarađuju redovnu minimalnu plaću, ovise o napojnicama: čak ni 7,25 dolara po satu, zakonska minimalna plaća u Wisconsinu, nije dovoljno za život.

 

 

Vukao je konce u pozadini, sada ga kažnjavaju kao teroristu

Enrique Tarrio, bivši šef Ponosnih dječaka, dobio je 22 godine zatvora. To je dosad najoštrija kazna za sve koji su umiješani u napad na američki parlament 6. siječnja 2021.

 

Spoiler

Enrique Tarrio nije bio u američkom Kapitolu 6. siječnja 2021., nego sat vremena vožnje dalje u Baltimoreu. Ali znao je što će se dogoditi u glavnom gradu Washingtonu: Njegovi ponosni dečki, desničarska milicija, pokušat će nasiljem spriječiti potvrdu pobjede Joea Bidena na predsjedničkim izborima. Ostao je u kontaktu sa svojim ljudima izvan Capitola putem SMS poruka.

Tarrio se sada suočava s dugogodišnjom zatvorskom kaznom za Dan srama. Proglašen je krivim u svibnju, kada je porota utvrdila da je dokazano da je kriv za urotu za pobunu. U utorak je savezni sudac u Washingtonu izrekao kaznu: osudio je 39-godišnjaka iz Floride na 22 godine zatvora.

Kolovođa prosvjeda

Tarriova kazna dosad je najistaknutija u vezi s napadom na Capitol jer je najduža i ograničava niz kazni protiv Ponosnih dječaka. Vođa druge milicije, Držači prisege, već je osuđen na 18 godina u odvojenom suđenju u svibnju. Ethan Nordean, kao i Tarrio, bivši vođa Proud Boysa, upravo je osuđen na 18 godina iza rešetaka. Još trojica Ponosnih dječaka ovih su dana osuđena na zatvorske kazne od 10 do 17 godina. Ovo su najoštrije sankcije koje su do sada izrečene u postupku protiv više od 1100 okrivljenika u vezi sa 6. siječnja 2021.: Vođe milicije smatraju se kolovođama nasilnog prosvjeda.

Tarriov zločin bio je posebno težak, rekao je sudac prilikom objave presude. Tarrio je bio "vođa zavjere", "vođen revolucionarnim žarom". Sudac je stoga odlučio izreći posebno visoku kaznu za teroriste. No, nije otišao dokle je tužiteljstvo tražilo. Htjela je Tarria strpati u zatvor na 33 godine.

Njegova milicija nastavlja rasti bez njega

Branitelji su Tarria pokušali prikazati kao marionetu Donalda Trumpa, običnog pješaka, vjerojatno skrenulog s puta, ali ne i terorista. Čini se da se sam Tarrio pročistio i opisao 6. siječnja 2021. kao "nacionalnu sramotu". Iako je ponovno negirao da je planirao nasilni državni udar, ispričao se za svoje ponašanje policiji i građanima Washingtona. No, i drugi su se osuđenici tako pokajnički pojavili pred sudom – da bi se nešto kasnije u desničarskim radijskim emisijama pohvalili kako bi ih Donald Trump pomilovao ako ponovno bude izabran za predsjednika.

Za razliku od Oath Keepersa, Proud Boysi se nisu raspali, iako je FBI uhitio vođe obiju milicija nedugo nakon 6. siječnja. Umjesto toga, Proud Boysi su se ponovno okupili bez nacionalnog vodstva. Sada se pojavljuju u napadima na drag showovima ili u žustrim raspravama u lokalnim školskim odborima. To im je čak omogućilo regrutiranje novih članova i otvaranje novih lokalnih ogranaka – što nije posebno iznenađujuće s obzirom na autoritarne struje na američkoj desnici, a posebno među Trumpovim sljedbenicima.

Tijekom predizborne kampanje 2020. Trump se obratio izravno Ponosnim dečkima, koji sebe opisuju kao "prozapadnu bratsku organizaciju za muškarce". "Odmaknite se i budite po strani", rekao je Trump u to vrijeme nakon ljeta desničarskog i ljevičarskog nasilja, poziv koji su desničarske pristaše milicije shvatile kao jasnu naredbu da budu spremne za daljnja djela nasilja. Nakon izbornog poraza Donalda Trumpa, Tarrio je vidio da dolazi hitna situacija.

Suđenje Trumpu počinje u ožujku

Istražitelji nisu pronašli nikakve detaljne planove državnog udara među milicijama. Tarrio je, primjerice, u chatovima prilično maglovito pričao o revolucionarnim vremenima poput 1776., kada je SAD započeo svoj rat za neovisnost. Međutim, istražitelji, porota i suci smatrali su dokazanim da je Tarrio svojim ljudima dao ciljane signale da izvrše pripreme za nasilne prosvjede i da namjerno napreduju u Capitol 6. siječnja 2021. kako bi spriječili mirnu primopredaju dužnosti sljedećem predsjedniku . Tarrio, tadašnji vođa Ponosnih dječaka, nije bio u glavnom gradu jer mu je sudac nedavno zabranio ulazak u grad u drugom suđenju. Vođa milicije ukrao je zastavu Black Lives Matter s povijesne crkve i zapalio je, što mu je u međuvremenu donijelo još pet mjeseci zatvora.

Kazne vođama milicije pokazuju da pravna istraga “Dana srama” napreduje. Sada je pravomoćno osuđeno nešto više od polovice optuženih, a više od polovice ide u zatvor. Sada kada su vođe oluje na Capitol osuđeni, glavna stvar koja nedostaje je glavni čovjek: Donalda Trumpa optužio je posebni tužitelj Jack Smith u kolovozu u vezi sa 6. siječnja. Suđenje bi mu trebalo početi u ožujku, a čekaju ga još tri kaznena postupka.

 

 

Edited September 10, 2023 by Dragan

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

5 hours ago, Dragan said:

Da li je tacno ovo sto pise u clanku i da li je to stvarno problem ?

 

Kada davanje napojnica potpuno izmakne kontroli

25 posto napojnice? 30 posto? U SAD-u su turisti i potrošači pod pritiskom da plaćaju više. Postoji razlog za to.

 

 

 

Da, svi ocekuju tip, cak sve vise vidjam tip vec unesen u racun, tako da ako ne obratis paznju mozes dva puta da ga platis. To nije zakonski, ali... ko ce se time baviti, kome da prijavis, nece ni da dodju da prekontrolisu.

 

Meni tip traze i kada mi odnose stari namestaj, a odnosenje cesto kosta isto ako ne i vise od novog namestaja cija je dostava besplatna. Traze tip apsolutno svuda. 

Ja kada sam sama cesto narucim hranu jer mi je jefitnije nego da kuvam za sebe, otprilike racun od vrednosti hrane ispadne 70-90% veci nego sto je sama hrana. Platis hranu, platis taksu, platis tip, platis dostavu... i na kraju ti dostavi neki koji se vozao kroz jezivi saobracaj (sto je razlog zasto ne odem da pokupim) i opet ga tipujes jer ti je bezveze da ga gledas i znas da je zaradio 8$ na sat, rujnirao svoj automobil, platio gorivo... 

 

Ti ljudi cesto nemaju platu ili imaju toliko mizernu da je mozda i bolje da je nemaju, pa kada to znas, zao ti je da ne tipujes, a sa druge strane zao ti je sto ti placas radnike neke druge kompanije koja nece da ih plati. 

 

Moja prijateljica radi robnoj kuci, luksuznoj. Ona ako nista ne proda nedelju dana, ide kuci sa 200 dolara, a cene u robnoj kuci su ekstremno visoke posto su samo firmirane stvari. Da bi zaradila pristojnu platu mora da proda minimum 5 stvari za dan, sto znaci da ubaci u kasu 15k prodavnici da bi dobila svoj mizerni procenat. (ovo nema veze sa tipom, nego sa nacinom na koji posluju). 

 

Iskreno, za mene jeste problem. Problem mi je da odem u restoran i da dam tip za nesto sto sam vec platila, sto je neko zapisao sta zelim da jedem i stavio mi na sto. Problem mi je da placam tudje radnike. 

 

Da dodam iz iskustva prijatelja koji je radio par meseci u restoranu. On svoju napojnicu deli. Dele je izmedju onih koji narucuju hranu, onih koji donose hranu i devojaka koje stoje na ulazu. Jedino su placeni normalnu platu oni u kuhinji i to ne u svakom restoranu. Napojnicu dobija dvonedeljno, ne po izlasku iz restorana, cak restoran zadrzava deo napojnice. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by 𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂

[ters]

Meni je u oci pala jedna promjena sa tip kulturom u USA - cash tip nestaje... Recimo shuttle bus od avionskog terminala do rent-a-car lokacije je ranije uvijek imao vidnu "kanticu" za tip, i vozac je trcao da ti izbaci prtljag u ocekivanju tip-a... Ove godine toga jednostavno nema . U hotelu, tip koji sam ostavljao za room service, uz ceduljicu "thanks for service!" , je pokupljen mozda dva od tri dana... Za sankovima u barovima, nisam vidio tegle za tip koje su tu ranije stajale... Takodje, mada su masine podesene na 20/22/25% tip u restoranima, uvijek imas opciju da otkucas iznos ili procenat koji zelis. Ni u jednom  pristojnom restoranu, konobar ne zagleda koliko ces ostaviti, niti prilazi racunu dok se ne skoro ne udaljis iz restorana... Jedino u velikim lancima restorana - kao Cheesecake Factory, Red Lobster i slicno, ti gledaju preko ramena da vide koliko ces otkucati...

 

 

[Maharaja]

U Kanadi je sličan trend. Ne još uvek toliko ekstreman, ali je sve više ljudi nezadovoljno kad mašina krene od 18%. Čak postoji i "pokret" da se napojnica uopšte ne daje. Kod nas radnici nisu tako mizerno plaćeni kao u Americi (iako jesu plaćeni malo u većini mesta), ali nije normalno što traže napojnicu čak i kad nema usluge, tipa u kafićima ili barovima gde ideš do šanka po piće.

 

edit: u mnogim mestima zaposleni i ne vide te napojnice, već odu vlasnicima.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Maharaja

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

On 9/10/2023 at 4:05 PM, Dragan said:

 

Vukao je konce u pozadini, sada ga kažnjavaju kao teroristu

Enrique Tarrio, bivši šef Ponosnih dječaka, dobio je 22 godine zatvora. To je dosad najoštrija kazna za sve koji su umiješani u napad na američki parlament 6. siječnja 2021.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Enrique Tarrio nije bio u američkom Kapitolu 6. siječnja 2021., nego sat vremena vožnje dalje u Baltimoreu. Ali znao je što će se dogoditi u glavnom gradu Washingtonu: Njegovi ponosni dečki, desničarska milicija, pokušat će nasiljem spriječiti potvrdu pobjede Joea Bidena na predsjedničkim izborima. Ostao je u kontaktu sa svojim ljudima izvan Capitola putem SMS poruka.

Tarrio se sada suočava s dugogodišnjom zatvorskom kaznom za Dan srama. Proglašen je krivim u svibnju, kada je porota utvrdila da je dokazano da je kriv za urotu za pobunu. U utorak je savezni sudac u Washingtonu izrekao kaznu: osudio je 39-godišnjaka iz Floride na 22 godine zatvora.

Kolovođa prosvjeda

Tarriova kazna dosad je najistaknutija u vezi s napadom na Capitol jer je najduža i ograničava niz kazni protiv Ponosnih dječaka. Vođa druge milicije, Držači prisege, već je osuđen na 18 godina u odvojenom suđenju u svibnju. Ethan Nordean, kao i Tarrio, bivši vođa Proud Boysa, upravo je osuđen na 18 godina iza rešetaka. Još trojica Ponosnih dječaka ovih su dana osuđena na zatvorske kazne od 10 do 17 godina. Ovo su najoštrije sankcije koje su do sada izrečene u postupku protiv više od 1100 okrivljenika u vezi sa 6. siječnja 2021.: Vođe milicije smatraju se kolovođama nasilnog prosvjeda.

Tarriov zločin bio je posebno težak, rekao je sudac prilikom objave presude. Tarrio je bio "vođa zavjere", "vođen revolucionarnim žarom". Sudac je stoga odlučio izreći posebno visoku kaznu za teroriste. No, nije otišao dokle je tužiteljstvo tražilo. Htjela je Tarria strpati u zatvor na 33 godine.

Njegova milicija nastavlja rasti bez njega

Branitelji su Tarria pokušali prikazati kao marionetu Donalda Trumpa, običnog pješaka, vjerojatno skrenulog s puta, ali ne i terorista. Čini se da se sam Tarrio pročistio i opisao 6. siječnja 2021. kao "nacionalnu sramotu". Iako je ponovno negirao da je planirao nasilni državni udar, ispričao se za svoje ponašanje policiji i građanima Washingtona. No, i drugi su se osuđenici tako pokajnički pojavili pred sudom – da bi se nešto kasnije u desničarskim radijskim emisijama pohvalili kako bi ih Donald Trump pomilovao ako ponovno bude izabran za predsjednika.

Za razliku od Oath Keepersa, Proud Boysi se nisu raspali, iako je FBI uhitio vođe obiju milicija nedugo nakon 6. siječnja. Umjesto toga, Proud Boysi su se ponovno okupili bez nacionalnog vodstva. Sada se pojavljuju u napadima na drag showovima ili u žustrim raspravama u lokalnim školskim odborima. To im je čak omogućilo regrutiranje novih članova i otvaranje novih lokalnih ogranaka – što nije posebno iznenađujuće s obzirom na autoritarne struje na američkoj desnici, a posebno među Trumpovim sljedbenicima.

Tijekom predizborne kampanje 2020. Trump se obratio izravno Ponosnim dečkima, koji sebe opisuju kao "prozapadnu bratsku organizaciju za muškarce". "Odmaknite se i budite po strani", rekao je Trump u to vrijeme nakon ljeta desničarskog i ljevičarskog nasilja, poziv koji su desničarske pristaše milicije shvatile kao jasnu naredbu da budu spremne za daljnja djela nasilja. Nakon izbornog poraza Donalda Trumpa, Tarrio je vidio da dolazi hitna situacija.

Suđenje Trumpu počinje u ožujku

Istražitelji nisu pronašli nikakve detaljne planove državnog udara među milicijama. Tarrio je, primjerice, u chatovima prilično maglovito pričao o revolucionarnim vremenima poput 1776., kada je SAD započeo svoj rat za neovisnost. Međutim, istražitelji, porota i suci smatrali su dokazanim da je Tarrio svojim ljudima dao ciljane signale da izvrše pripreme za nasilne prosvjede i da namjerno napreduju u Capitol 6. siječnja 2021. kako bi spriječili mirnu primopredaju dužnosti sljedećem predsjedniku . Tarrio, tadašnji vođa Ponosnih dječaka, nije bio u glavnom gradu jer mu je sudac nedavno zabranio ulazak u grad u drugom suđenju. Vođa milicije ukrao je zastavu Black Lives Matter s povijesne crkve i zapalio je, što mu je u međuvremenu donijelo još pet mjeseci zatvora.

Kazne vođama milicije pokazuju da pravna istraga “Dana srama” napreduje. Sada je pravomoćno osuđeno nešto više od polovice optuženih, a više od polovice ide u zatvor. Sada kada su vođe oluje na Capitol osuđeni, glavna stvar koja nedostaje je glavni čovjek: Donalda Trumpa optužio je posebni tužitelj Jack Smith u kolovozu u vezi sa 6. siječnja. Suđenje bi mu trebalo početi u ožujku, a čekaju ga još tri kaznena postupka.

 

 

 

Lepo su sredili svoje zivote koje ce provesti po zatvorima da bi vratili onog magarca na vlast kojeg boli uvo za bilo koga osim njega. 

 

Cak je u celom ovom cirkusu poceo da prodaje majice sa mugshot slikom... izvukao im je (svojoj veronoj bazi) svaki atom dostojanstva, svaki moguci cent, svaku vijugu koja je radila, na kraju i slobodu za koju se toliko 'bore' a one zatvorene dok je jos bio predsednik, nije pomilovao. Ovde ogromna kolicina ljudi boluje od svedskog sindroma. 

 

 

Na kraju mu je opstinski zatvor rekao, druze, krades tudje vlasnistvo, sve pare name koje si napravio na fotografiji koja ne pripada tebi. 

[zoran59]

What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know?

 

Podugacko je, i za one koje znaju engleski, pa cu staviti u spoiler...

 

Spoiler

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

 

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

 

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops had previously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

 

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

 

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

 

Last year, we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up and kidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

 

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

 

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

 

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

 

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

 

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

 

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

 

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

 

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

 

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

 

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is also fluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

 

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

 

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

 

n one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

 

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paulmade a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

 

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Last year, we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up and kidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

 

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

 

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widelyreported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Last year, wediscovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up andkidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

AsThe Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Funddocuments more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recentlyadmitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail inThe Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?

・That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News”showcased in Hungary?

・That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May,voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?

 

・That, as soon as he was sworn in for a second term, he’d invoke his October 21, 2020Executive Order 13957 that would instantly fire 50,000 senior Civil Service employees encompassing the management of every federal agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees?

・That as soon as that transformation of America and our alliances was complete, Trump would use a national state of emergency to suppress dissent and seize control of voting systems across the nation to insure he and the Republicans loyal to him would continue in power for the long run?

・And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a coup attempt before in this country: wealthy industrialists tried to kidnap or kill President Franklin Roosevelt 91 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.” Not a single one of those conspirators were ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

While, as noted, some of this is just speculation right now, every day we get more information that seems to validate it. After all, if you’re going to try to overthrow your nation’s government and anoint yourself dictator for life, wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to guarantee your success? Why just do half-measures?

The only “innocent” explanation I can come up with for Trump stealing spy-level documents and squirreling them away in Florida:

“Trump is simply mentally ill with a condition common among billionaires: hoarding syndrome. If he hadn’t been born rich, he’d be living in an apartment filled with newspapers and old tin cans from floor to ceiling; instead, he hoards money and anything else he thinks has value that gets close enough to grab.

 

“This is ‘normal’ among kleptocrats like Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier: they think that they are the state, so everything the state owns is their property. Supporting this premise are over 3,000 former contractors and employees (including attorneys) who’ve sued Trump because he’s refused to pay them over the years.”

Even if that’s the extent of it — which I believe is extremely unlikely — we appear to have dodged a huge bullet here.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let go?

Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

 

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

But even the possibility — that the question can be credibly raised given the evidence laid out here (which only scratches the surface) — should give every American pause.

The challenge going forward is now to repair the damage — both foreign and domestic — that this traitor and his colleagues in the GOP did to our nation, and then to make sure no Trump wannabee can ever repeat his attempt.

 

izvor: What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know? | Opinion (msn.com)

 

Zanimljivo, ne javljaju se Bohumilo i Angelia (i jos neki) da brane Trumpa k'o nekad.

 

 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

5 hours ago, zoran59 said:

What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know?

 

Podugacko je, i za one koje znaju engleski, pa cu staviti u spoiler...

 

  Reveal hidden contents

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

 

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

 

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops had previously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

 

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

 

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

 

Last year, we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up and kidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

 

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

 

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

 

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

 

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

 

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

 

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

 

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

 

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

 

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

 

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is also fluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

 

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

 

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

 

n one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

 

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paulmade a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

 

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Last year, we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up and kidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

 

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

 

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

 

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widelyreported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Last year, wediscovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up andkidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

AsThe Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Funddocuments more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recentlyadmitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail inThe Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?

・That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News”showcased in Hungary?

・That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May,voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?

 

・That, as soon as he was sworn in for a second term, he’d invoke his October 21, 2020Executive Order 13957 that would instantly fire 50,000 senior Civil Service employees encompassing the management of every federal agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees?

・That as soon as that transformation of America and our alliances was complete, Trump would use a national state of emergency to suppress dissent and seize control of voting systems across the nation to insure he and the Republicans loyal to him would continue in power for the long run?

・And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a coup attempt before in this country: wealthy industrialists tried to kidnap or kill President Franklin Roosevelt 91 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.” Not a single one of those conspirators were ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

While, as noted, some of this is just speculation right now, every day we get more information that seems to validate it. After all, if you’re going to try to overthrow your nation’s government and anoint yourself dictator for life, wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to guarantee your success? Why just do half-measures?

The only “innocent” explanation I can come up with for Trump stealing spy-level documents and squirreling them away in Florida:

“Trump is simply mentally ill with a condition common among billionaires: hoarding syndrome. If he hadn’t been born rich, he’d be living in an apartment filled with newspapers and old tin cans from floor to ceiling; instead, he hoards money and anything else he thinks has value that gets close enough to grab.

 

“This is ‘normal’ among kleptocrats like Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier: they think that they are the state, so everything the state owns is their property. Supporting this premise are over 3,000 former contractors and employees (including attorneys) who’ve sued Trump because he’s refused to pay them over the years.”

Even if that’s the extent of it — which I believe is extremely unlikely — we appear to have dodged a huge bullet here.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let go?

Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

 

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

But even the possibility — that the question can be credibly raised given the evidence laid out here (which only scratches the surface) — should give every American pause.

The challenge going forward is now to repair the damage — both foreign and domestic — that this traitor and his colleagues in the GOP did to our nation, and then to make sure no Trump wannabee can ever repeat his attempt.

 

izvor: What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know? | Opinion (msn.com)

 

Zanimljivo, ne javljaju se Bohumilo i Angelia (i jos neki) da brane Trumpa k'o nekad.

 

 

 

Rat i mir... a tek delic isprican... 

 

Meni je fascinantno da ljudi iz Srbije, koji su imali 30 i kusur godina da gledaju kako funkcionise korupcija i kako drzava postaje mafijaski bos ili nisu prepoznali to u Trampu (sto je bilo prepoznatljivo vec u prvih par dana, pa sve do danas) ili su jednostavno zauzeli nacio, sovinisticko-fasisticko, rasisticku... poziciju i nista drugo im nije bilo bitno. 

 

Za smrt (odavanje) spijuna je premalo kazna zatvora. Causesku sudbina bi bila vise adekvatna. 

 

Republikanse optuzbe su ustvari prizanja. Tramp je asteroid koji je pogodio ne samo Ameriku, nego svet, i posle udara su sva govna isplivala na povrsinu i sada se ne daju tek tako potopiti. 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

House of representative je zakonodavno telo Amerike. Oni su od 2021 pod upravom republikanaca na celu sa Kevin Mccarthy. Oni su odgovorni i da nadju dokaze i pokrenu opoziv predsednika, a ako ga opozovu senat treba da izglasa sa 2/3 da bi ga uklonili. Kada je Tramp opozvan dva puta, senat ga je zadrzao na mestu predsednika jer su republikanci imali vecinu i nije moglo da se postigne ta dvotrecinska razlika nikako. 

 

Sta danas HOR radi. Nista, hoce da opozovu Hanter Bajdena (koji nije zaposlen u beloj kuci), tj. njegovog tatu iako nemaju nikakav dokaz da je tata u ista umesan. I time su zauzeti vec mesecima. Kopaju li kopaju i ... nista, ali nema veze, ajd da opozovemo. 

Onaj glavni deo u opisu njihovog posla, zakoni, e pa to ne prolazi kod vecine od njih. Vecina izabranih nije dala glas ni za jedan predlog, te sreca da ipak u GOP-u ima jos po koji normalan koji da svoj glas pa prevagne i ti zakoni koji se ticu americkih gradjana koji su ih izabrali da rade u njihovom interesu i dobiju neki zakon da im olaksa zivot se tu i tamo ostvari. 

 

Nevidjeno mlacenje prazne slame. 

 

E da zaboravila sam da dodam. Bajden ni ne moze biti uklonjen sa mesta predsednika jer ga oni opozivaju za nesto iz vremena kada je bio podpredsednik. Posto vise nije podpredsednik... jos vece mlacenje prazne slame. 

Edited September 13, 2023 by 𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂

[Klotzen]

Ti opozivi se pre svega prave da se skrene pažnja javnosti i pokupi par poena rejtinga. Znaju oni da nemaju šanse ali sama rasprava na tu temu će da dođe do ljudi pa će da se udari neka kontra na ove gomile procesa protiv Trampa. I Demokrate su to radile sa njihovim impičmentom tako da sada isto i ovi to hoće. Možda su malo poranili, to su trebali da tempiraju za sledeće leto a ne sada.

[zoran59]

Mitt Romney je desnicar, republikanac i Mormon.

Ipak, izgleda, i posten i dosledan covek.

Ako je tekst istinit.

Kao ateista i levicar, nisam mislio da bih mogao ceniti nekog takvog.

A onda se pojava sazetak dela knjige koja jos nije objavljena (bice za mesec dana). I ima veze sa trenutnim desavanjima.

 

Ovde: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/

 

Link, izgleda vodi na The Atlantic a ne na clanak pod naslovom WHAT MITT ROMNEY SAW IN THE SENATE

Edited September 13, 2023 by zoran59

[Helena]

Konačno je tema oživela,koga još interesuju napojnice.

 

 

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

Sto bi odrasli rekli 

"nisam ja republikanac, ja sam samo realan" 😉

[MeanMachine]

Prvo kineski balon preleti pola Amerike dok ga ne spazi neki cova sa dvogledom i tad vojska sazna da im kinezi lete iznad glava svasta snimaju.

 

Sad vojska ne zna gde im je lovac F-35B, pozivaju gradjane da ako vide avion da ih obaveste:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/18/missing-f-35b-lighting-ii-fighter-jet-us-military-help-marine-corps-pilot-ejects

 

Iz nekog razloga pilotje katapultiran iz aviona a avion nastavio da leti na autopilotu izgleda sa solidnom kolicinom goriva.

 

Nista ne rekose za nagradu, pa vi koji ste blizu juzne Karoline (cini mi se da niko od forumskih gringosa ne zivi u istoj) eto ako vidite avionce ili ako primetite olupinu prvo pitate jel barem placaju dobar rucak 😄

 

 

Kako izgleda avionce imate u tekstu sa linka.

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by MeanMachine

[𝓑𝓪𝓫𝔂]

1 hour ago, MeanMachine said:

 

 

Nista ne rekose za nagradu, pa vi koji ste blizu juzne Karoline (cini mi se da niko od forumskih gringosa ne zivi u istoj) eto ako vidite avionce ili ako primetite olupinu prvo pitate jel barem placaju dobar rucak 😄

 

 

 

Jel ide u pravcu Floride? Ovde malo pa malo zvekne neki avion, te na most, te na plazu... 😐

[tomas.hokenberi]

On 9/2/2023 at 2:17 AM, Helena said:

Nego, jel ceo Fox postaje Star ili samo ovi zabavnu kanali?

Fox zabavni kanali su odavno prodati i nikakve veze sa Fox News kanalima nemaju  i na nekim tržištima su odavno Star. Zadržali su privremeno "Fox" u imenu (nešto slično poput Telenora u Srbiji koji je zadržao naziv "Telenor" par godina pošto je prodat i više nikakve veze nije imao sa norveškim Telenorom. Kod takvih transfera medija, operatora mobilne, svejedno, često je deo ugovora pravo da se određeno vreme koristi naziv koji je koristio stari vlasnik (još jedan primer: kada je Lenovo kupio IBM-ov PC bizniz par godina je nastavio da prodaje računare pod IBM brendom iako IBM više nije imao nikakve veze sa tim).