More proof FBI probe will likely reveal more than just leaks | Manafort, Snipers, and Azov battalion - Google Search - 2:03 AM 1/22/2019
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It was discovered by others last week that James Baker, the former chief attorney at the FBI, was the subject of an investigation for leaking information to the press. That tidbit accidentally came out when a letter between two Republican congressmen was made public.
Don’t be shocked if it turns out to be much more.
As I reported exclusively back in October 2016, Baker was one of the four people who were present during a meeting in July of that year when it was decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling her emails.
Ex-FBI director James Comey, former deputy director Andrew McCabe and a technology expert were the others.
That’s the group that Comey said “unanimously” agreed not to charge Hillary, despite the fact that the rest of the investigative team wasn’t consulted and the fact that the FBI isn’t supposed to make such decisions.
My point: As I’ve been saying all along, the investigation of what went on at the FBI is likely to be bigger than just about leaks made by Baker and others.
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The saga of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s public statement about the BuzzFeed bombshell has taken yet another surreal turn, and it’s a big one. Rudy Giuliani is now claiming that Team Trump reached out to Mueller’s office before Mueller issued the statement, a clear cut attempt at tampering, which raises a number of questions about what’s really going on here.
The thing is, we don’t even know if this is true. Giuliani is making the claim to CNN, but he lies constantly, and often in inexplicable fashion. Did this really happen? Is Rudy simply making it up? Let’s assume for now that Trump’s people really did reach out to Mueller and ask him to publicly dispute the BuzzFeed report. Even if so, that doesn’t mean Mueller made the statement because Trump asked him to.
If there is a fundamentally incorrect detail in the BuzzFeed article, even a secondary one that doesn’t change the nature of the crimes involved, then Robert Mueller did the right thing by signaling to House Democrats that they shouldn’t immediately roll out impeachment charges like they had been planning to. Trump could have had a field day if the articles of impeachment against him had even one detail wrong.
There is a second, darker scenario: Robert Mueller issued the public statement because Donald Trump demanded as much. If so, it means Trump is even more out on a criminal limb than ever. But the bottom line here is that Mueller knows what he’s doing. He’s twice as smart as Trump, and he’s ten times more experienced at this kind of thing. If Mueller felt that his best shot at finishing the job of taking Trump down was to issue this (ostensibly technically true) statement in order to keep Trump placated for now, then so be it.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report
Written by Sopan Deb
“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.
“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world.”
Thank goodness this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the KGB was involved.
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Urbaityte, 29, was standing against a wall Wednesday at the recently opened KGB Spy Museum in Chelsea, a warehouse-type space housing what Urbaityte said were thousands of artifacts documenting the rise of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the Committee for State Security in English, which is better known as the KGB, the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police.
The museum opens at a time when Russian intelligence services have been at the forefront of both pop culture and current events. “The Americans,” the FX show about a married couple who spied for the Soviet Union in Washington, has been a cultural phenomenon. It won a Golden Globe this year for best television drama. (Another popular TV show, “Homeland,” has had Russian antagonists.)
In a news story that seemed as if it were straight out of “The Americans,” in December, Maria Butina, a 30-year-old Russian, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. As part of a deal with prosecutors, she acknowledged that Russian officials were behind her efforts. Last year a former Russian spy was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury, England, drawing international outrage. Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that Russia was behind the attack.
And a newly released KGB archive has revealed the names of 4,141 Latvians who might have been secret informants for the Soviets.
But this museum, Urbaityte said, is apolitical.
“It’s historical and about technological progress; you cannot erase facts from history,” she said in an interview, sitting next to her father, Julius Urbaitis, 55. They are the co-curators of the new institution.
Urbaitis said the Spy Museum was the culmination of three decades of collecting items related to the KGB. He first had an interest in World War II artifacts, but when he acquired a listening device that belonged to Adolf Hitler, he became fascinated with espionage, he said. The family hails from Lithuania, where they founded a museum in 2014 called Atomic Bunker — which was actually based in an old nuclear bunker.
“My dad has a collector’s spirit,” Urbaityte said.
Some of the objects from Atomic Bunker have migrated to Chelsea. About half the items in the collection, a combination of original artifacts and copies, are owned by the father-daughter duo. The other half were acquired separately by the curators. Urbaityte and Urbaitis do not own the museum, which is private and for-profit. The owners have chosen to remain anonymous.
The museum does not shy away from depicting the harsh tactics of the KGB. There are interactive exhibits, like a model of a chair used for interrogations.
“If people want to, we can tie them up,” Urbaityte said.
The tour starts with a mock-up of a chief officer’s workspace. A mannequin wearing a KGB chief officer’s uniform is at a desk with a flag of Soviet Russia behind him. To the mannequin’s left sits a bronze desk lamp, which, according to the curators, sat in a villa belonging to former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Nearby, Russian propaganda posters cover a wall. One of the oldest items in the space is a switchboard from 1928. Its operator was almost always recruited by the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB, according to a description of the item.
There are also original doors from a KGB prison housed at the back of the museum. The accompanying information reads: “People who did not take psychologically the interrogation process well were put into soft cells. Then people were given various medications to turn from a politically idealistic person into a vegetable.”
Many of the exhibits are dedicated to showing exactly how the KGB carried out business, particularly surveillance. Several glass displays show where KGB agents would embed lenses and bugs: in rings, watches, belt buckles, cuff links and dishes, among other places.
This is not the only spy museum in the United States, of course. There is Spyscape, which opened early last year on Eighth Avenue at 55th Street. And Washington has the International Spy Museum. The National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations is in development and is scheduled to open next year in Ashburn, Virginia.
As we finished up our tour, I couldn’t help but ask: Had the curators seen “The Americans?” After all, some of the devices in the museum were likely to have been visible on-screen in the show.
“It is precise and it’s good and we loved it,” Urbaityte said.
Urbaityte added that Vitali Baganov, who played the role of Stepan in four episodes of “The Americans,” had stopped by the museum recently to offer his support. Baganov also appeared in “The Sopranos” as Valery, the Russian who disappears in one of the show’s most famous episodes, “Pine Barrens.” He recorded a one-minute video on behalf of the budding institution, calling it “fantastic.”
“Creates an atmosphere of really unique KGB past,” Baganov says in the video.
The museum has hired tour guides for the space — a guided walk-through costs $43.99. But if you want to stroll around yourself, it will cost $25 for adults and $20 for students and people 65 or older. Children under 6 enter for free. The curators want audiences to get their money’s worth: Urbaitis said he and his daughter wanted the museum “to blow their minds.”
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manafort, germany, ukraine, tymoshenko, merkel - Google Search
Manafort and the Snipers: The Azov Battalion and the “Russia-Gate” Psy-Op:
"Distilling information concerning the sniper attacks, we review the possibility that Manafort might have played an advisory role in the sniper shootings, that the shootings might have been a provocation and examine the role of the Nazi Azov battalion and its proponents and component figures in connection with the Maidan shootings and the “Russia-Gate” propaganda."
Manafort and the Snipers: The Azov Battalion and the “Russia-Gate” Psy-Op
manafort, germany, ukraine, tymoshenko, merkel - Google Search
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