Stone Cold Russiagate

Well the "Polar Vortex" arrived in earnest overnight, with temperatures plunging from 38 F yesterday afternoon to 8 this morning when Skye asked to go out into the back yard to do her business and harass the birds and squirrels. Not exactly the sort of weather that Wisconsin or Minnesota are having, but it's damn cold for us. Likely the coldest of the year. According to the weather underground it will be 2 more days before we get above freezing again. Brrr.

Fox, Tucker Carlson: Roger Stone raid shows that CNN is no longer covering Robert Mueller. They're working with him

Mueller is the single most powerful person in America, and yet nobody voted for him. He is a living rebuke to the principles of our democratic system. At the same time, our leaders tell us that we need Robert Mueller — an all-powerful, unelected prosecutor, accountable to no one — to protect us from threats to – brace yourselves here – democracy. Nobody in Washington catches the irony in any of this. Mueller himself is the threat to our democracy. The most powerful man elected by nobody.

Gateway Pundit: Roger Stone: Mueller Thinks He Will Remove Trump and VP Pence and Replace Them with Nancy Pelosi (video at link)

I’m targeted here because they want to silence me. I’m 66-years-old. I support the Second Amendment but don’t own a firearm… I can’t swim even though they had two amphibious units planted behind my house… I’m not going to testify against him because I have no negative information on Trump… I honestly believe they are going to try to charge the president and vice president with some hoked-up frame of Russian collusion. That way they can make Nancy Pelosi president. She can make Hillary Clinton Vice President and then step aside.

But nobody is talking about impeaching Pence, right? Wrong, WaPoo, If Trump is impeachable, so is Pence, Michael J. Glennon January 21 , Michael J. Glennon is a law professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Well, you can't say you haven't been warned. CNN Hid Images and Video of Roger Stone’s 72-Year-Old Wife Being Dragged Out of Home Barefoot and In Nightgown. Not a sympathetic image for their agenda.

The Dersh, Why Was Stone Arrested Instead of Being Asked to Surrender?

If Hillary Clinton had been elected president and if a special prosecutor had arrested one of her associates in the rough and demeaning manner by which Stone was arrested, civil libertarians would be up in arms. They would correctly argue that to marshal dozens of armed FBI agents to arrest an elderly man accused of non-violent crimes is an abuse of authority and a waste of FBI resources. They would complain that it constitutes intimidation and violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But because the arrest is of a Trump associate and the purpose is to get evidence against President Trump, we have not heard from fair-weather civil libertarians who use civil liberties and constitutional rights as tactics to serve their partisan political agendas.

The ACLU has been absolutely silent in regard to the questionable tactics employed by Mueller. They, too, would have been up in arms had these tactics been employed against their favorite candidate and mine, Hillary Clinton. They would have demanded an explanation as to why the extraordinary power of arrest, which is supposed to be reserved only for cases warranting this use of force, was employed in this case. Their silence speaks volumes about their partisanship and lack of neutral standards of civil liberties.

Politico, Roger Stone faces a gag order. He has a plan to resist it. Shhhhh. Don't make noise while we railroad you.“The most dangerous thing is to go silent,” Stone said then. “When you’re silent, people assume you’re guilty of something.”

USA Today, 'Altered' documents from inside Mueller probe fed Russian disinformation campaign, prosecutors say. The Peacock, Mueller says Russians are using his discovery materials in disinformation effort

Russians are using materials obtained from special counsel Robert Mueller's office in a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the investigation into Moscow's election interference, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

One or more people associated with the special counsel's case against Russian hackers made statements last October claiming to have stolen discovery materials that were originally provided by Mueller to Concord Management, Mueller's team said in court documents filed on Wednesday in the Russian troll farm case.

That was always a danger when you charge a company from a foreign country with a crime. Which is why it was a bad idea to charge them in the first place. Espionage should be handled as espionage, not criminal law. They were show indictments in the first place, and Mueller never really expected them to step up and contest them.

CNN, Treasury official pleads not guilty to charges of leaking sensitive financial reports to the press

A senior Treasury Department official pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court Wednesday to charges that she disclosed sensitive financial transaction reports pertaining to multiple entities tied to President Donald Trump and Russia.

The official, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, allegedly leaked the documents, known as Suspicious Activity Reports, to a reporter whom CNN has previously identified as working for BuzzFeed News.

Prosecutors indicated that a second official could be in legal jeopardy as well, disclosing in court papers that Edwards had discussed with the reporter another employee at the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as "FinCEN," for whom she used the code name "Enigma."

From Da Caller, Judge Orders Release Of Sealed Records From BuzzFeed’s Dossier Lawsuit

A federal judge in Florida on Wednesday ordered the public release of dozens of documents kept under seal during BuzzFeed’s lawsuit over the Steele dossier.
District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro ordered the documents be made public by Feb. 8. More than 40 records used in the case are listed in the order.

Ungaro’s decision will shed light into the discovery process during the defamation case, which included depositions with dossier author Christopher Steele and the founders of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele.

Ungaro ruled in BuzzFeed’s favor Dec. 19, 2018. The website was sued in February 2017 by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech executive accused in the dossier of using his web hosting companies to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems.

Gubarev vehemently denied the allegation, which Steele made in a memo dated Dec. 13, 2016. The memo was the last of 17 memos that compile what is known as the dossier. BuzzFeed published the dossier Jan. 10, 2017.

BuzzFeed apologized to Gubarev after the lawsuit was filed and redacted his name from the copy of the dossier posted to its website. But the website hired a private investigator — a former FBI and National Security Council official named Anthony Ferrante — to uncover evidence to support its legal defense.
. . .
In her final order in the case, Ungaro revealed BuzzFeed obtained the dossier through David Kramer, a former State Department official and close associate of the late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain. Kramer gave BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger a copy of the dossier Dec. 28, 2016.

 Related, Stacy McCain wonders Who Keeps Paying BuzzFeed’s Bills?

Harrison Smith at InfoWars reminds us that BuzzFeed, which recently announced it would lay off “15 percent of its staff (with pink slips to go to up to 400 people, according to one insider),” has received nearly half a billion dollars of venture-capital investment since launching in 2006. In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!

Good work, if you can keep it. But learn to code, just in case!

AP, Judge refuses to unseal criminal charges against Assange

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a request to unseal criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that were mistakenly revealed in another case.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said in a 10-page ruling that free-press advocates seeking to unseal the charges have no proof Assange has actually been charged.

The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press sought to unseal the charges after a federal prosecutor inadvertently typed a reference to “the fact that Assange has been charged” in an unrelated case.

The government has acknowledged it made an error but has not publicly confirmed that charges against Assange have been filed.

Nothing says democracy more than secret charges and court proceedings.  Sneaking in a little Clinton news, Obama’s FBI Ignored Lead That CHINA Had CLINTON EMAILS (The Lid). I certainly expected that, didn't you? Speaking of which, Powerline brings us Clapper at large.

Clapper could certainly have been included in Rep. Devin Nunes’s list of those who should be charged with lying to Congress along with Roger Stone if lying to Congress is now to be treated as a serious offense (see “They need to start with themselves”). President Trump himself has asked “what about the lying done by Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Lisa Page & lover, Baker and soooo many others?” It’s a good question. Former assistant to President Bush (1) Charles Kolb considers the anomalies in the Daily Caller column “Can we give James Clapper the Roger Stone treatment yet?”

And more honest that the average reporter, Belarusian escort who claimed to have evidence proving Trump-Russia collusion now admits the truth

Anastasia Vashukevich, whom the New York Times described as an "escort," grabbed headlines last year when she claimed to possess secret audio recordings that she said would prove a link between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. She said she obtained the recordings while engaging in an affair with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

According to the Times, Vashukevich sought to use the recordings as leverage to free herself from a Thai jail, where she wrote to U.S. officials asking for political asylum in exchange for the alleged evidence. She, along with nine others, were arrested by Thai officials last year for conducting a sex workshop directed at Russian male tourists.

 and competing with the local talent.

Earlier this month, Thai officials deported Vashukevich to Russia, where she was arrested on prostitution charges and later released.
What is happening now?

Vashukevich revealed to CNN in an interview Tuesday that she made up her story about the recordings to generate media attention, which she believed would save her life.

"I think it saved my life, how can I regret it? If journalists had not come at that time and that story had not come to the newspapers, maybe I would [be dead by] now," she said.

Reporters lie because it's good for business and because they hate Trump.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Naomi Wu and FMJRA 2.0: Destroy Everything You Touch up on time and within budget.