Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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John McCain Associate Gave Dossier To BuzzFeed

Via The Daily Caller

A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday.

David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.

BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on Jan. 10, 2017.

The disclosure was made as part of a final report ahead of Ungaro’s ruling in favor of BuzzFeed in a defamation lawsuit.

The revelation that Kramer was BuzzFeed’s source settles one of the main mysteries of the dossier, which alleges a vast conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

According to Ungaro, BuzzFeed and Kramer dispute how Bensinger obtained a copy of the dossier.

“The parties dispute whether Kramer gave Bensinger a copy or whether Bensinger took photos of the Dossier when Kramer was not looking,” reads a footnote in Ungaro’s filing.

“Kramer testified that Bensinger took photos of the Dossier when Kramer was out of the room, even though he asked Bensinger not to,” wrote Ungaro, adding that, “in a later declaration, Kramer stated that he had no objection to Bensinger taking a hard copy and had provided hard copies to other journalists.”

The other journalists Kramer met with are not identified.

Read the entire article HERE.

Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

By Ryan Gallagher

Google Has Been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

Read the entire article HERE.

Arab refugees in sights of Berlin’s crime ‘clans’

Via Yahoo News

Berlin crime gangs of Arab origin have long earned infamy with violence and brazen robberies but now, police warn, they have targeted a new generation of refugees for recruitment.

Known in the media as Berlin’s “clans”, whose founders themselves fled war in Lebanon in the 1980s, they have long controlled much of the city’s illegal drugs trade, street prostitution and protection rackets.

While East European and Asian organized crime and homegrown biker gangs are also active, the clans have been especially visible, given many members’ love of gangster bling and muscle cars.

The dozen or so Arabic and Kurdish-origin extended families, with their patriarchal structures and codes of honour, have also been mythologised by rap artists and portrayed in the TV series “4 Blocks”.

Now police warn that the clans have sought out new members from among the over one million asylum-seekers who have arrived in Germany since mid-2015, half of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The clans “are trying to get others to do the dirty work” such as selling drugs or committing small burglaries, said Benjamin Jendro of the GDP police union.

Many refugees, he said, are “men who have arrived alone in Germany” and who “have not yet had to do with the justice system,” making it less likely they will go to prison if caught.

An undercover police investigator also told Die Welt newspaper that “above all, it is the young, physically strong men who are in the sights of the clans, who make them do the dirty work”.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Mueller probe could turn out to be a disaster – for the Democrats

By Marc Thiessen

The special counsel was appointed to investigate whether Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. If Mueller finds incontrovertible evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, then the president will be — and should be — removed from office. But it is also possible that Mueller will not find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia, and that Mueller or federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District will find evidence for some other charge unrelated to a conspiracy with Russia — such as Trump’s hush-money payments to alleged former mistresses or crimes related to Trump’s family business.

That would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats, for three reasons. First, their base would demand that the new Democratic House majority impeach Trump, even if the charges have nothing to do with Russia. The “resistance” does not care about Russia; it cares about getting rid of Trump, and any pretext will do. The pressure from the grass roots to impeach the president would be hard, if not impossible, for the new Democratic majority in the House to resist.

Second, such an effort to remove Trump from office would fail. Even if House Democrats managed to pass articles of impeachment, there is zero chance that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to convict Trump for paying hush money to an adult-film star and a Playboy playmate or for pre-presidential financial improprieties. And Americans — who rightly thought the purpose of the Mueller probe was to find out if Trump committed treason by working with Russia to steal the election — would see Democrats engaged in a pointless effort to remove the president over completely unrelated allegations.

Third, such a failed impeachment effort would backfire on Democrats just as the impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Republicans in the 1990s.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia

By CJ Hopkins

Not that 2017 wasn’t already paranoid. It was. It was completely paranoid, and otherwise clinically batshit crazy. But 2018 has been batshit crazier. It started out with the Internet companies that control the flow of information that most of us now perceive as “reality” launching an all-out War on Dissent, purportedly to protect the public from “divisive” and “confusing” content, and other forms of Russian “influencing.”

Twitter started sending out scary emails warning customers that there was “reason to believe” that they had “followed,” “retweeted,” or “liked the content of” accounts “connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization.” Facebook launched its own Ministry of Truth, manned by “a dedicated counter-terrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials” (also known as The Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial propaganda wing). Google stepped up its covert deranking of insufficiently Russia-hating and other “non-authoritative” websites.

This Orwellian corporate censorship campaign was enthusiastically welcomed by liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives, who by this time were already completely convinced that secret Russian Facebook agents were conspiring to transform the Western masses into zombified, Russia-loving neo-Nazis by means of some sort of irresistible Putin-Nazi hypno-technology that would melt their brains to oatmeal the second they clicked on one of those dancing cat GIFs.

But the paranoia was just getting started. By the Spring, professional Putin-Naziologists were issuing warnings explaining that anyone using words like “globalist,” “globalism,” or “global capitalism” was an anti-Semite. There was no such thing as “globalism,” they told us. “Globalist” was just Nazi codespeak for “JEW!” Moreover, anyone criticizing “the media,” or mentioning “banks,” “Wall Street,” or “Hollywood,” or, God help you, making fun of “George Soros,” was clearly a Russia-loving, Sieg-heiling Nazi.

Read the entire article HERE.

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