Sep 302019
 
 September 30, 2019  Posted by at 2:25 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1940

 

Two countries, the US and UK, both seem to barrel down towards great troubles, hence the title Twisted Pair. When I set it up yesterday, I was going to write an essay combining the two, but it now looks like there’s going to have to be two separate essays. Still, I’m wondering how connected both are, and how they’re connected.

And I don’t mean in the popular Boris equals Trump sense, I find the role of for instance the respective intelligence communities and media far more interesting than such cheap ‘solutions’. That’s for the MSM to sell to you, not me.

Let’s start with the US. Over the past few days, a series of snippets have appeared that each make me think: can this be true? The first such snippet is that House Intelligence Committee head Adam Schiff supposedly sat on the ‘whistleblower’ complaint for over a month.

By the way, the term whistleblower is a terrible misnomer, but everyone’s using it, can’t undo that anymore. Still, you can’t be a CIA agent, be planted somewhere, leak on what goes on there and then be labeled a whistleblower. That works only if you share CIA secrets.

Niceties aside, it appears that Schiff sat on the complaint since August 12. First question is: why? But there are other questions as well. Two weeks ago, Schiff complained that acting DNI chief Joseph Maguire refused to share the contents of the complaint with Congress. But Maguire did that only after consulting with his legal counsel:

Schiff: Top Intel Official Has Refused To Turn Over ‘Urgent’ Whistleblower Complaint

Schiff ripped Maguire for breaching a law that requires him to share with Congress any whistleblower complaint deemed urgent by the intelligence community’s inspector general. He said the confluence of factors led him to believe the complaint involved Trump or other senior executive branch officials.

But DNI general counsel Jason Klitenic insisted in a letter to Schiff on Tuesday that Maguire had followed the letter of the law in blocking the transmission of the complaint to Congress. The whistleblower statute governing his agency, he said, only applies when the complaint involves a member of the intelligence community. Because it was aimed at a person outside the intelligence community, he said, the whistleblower statute does not apply to this scenario.

Under the statute, Klitenic stated, deeming a whistleblower complaint “urgent” is only valid when it applies to conduct by someone “within the responsibility and authority” of the DNI. Therefore, he said, after consulting with the Justice Department, he determined the complaint did not qualify as an “urgent” concern requiring transmittal to Congress.

 

 

Note the date. Also note the term ‘urgent’. Which didn’t keep Schiff from sitting on it for 5-6 weeks. And note that Schiff knew what was in the complaint, despite Politico reporting that “the confluence of factors led him to believe the complaint involved Trump or other senior executive branch officials.”

Okay, so why did he sit on the letter? Is it possible this has been a set-up all along? Snippet no. 2 became known on September 24:

Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public.

Here’s what the requirements looked like before the changes:

 

 

Why were the changes made? Who authorized them? Can anyone who hears something from their gossipy aunt now become a whistleblower? Can the aunt?

And then a few days ago there was this little tid-bit, snippet no. 3, which seems to fit right into a pattern:

Pelosi’s House Rule Changes are Key Part of “Articles of Impeachment”

Back in December 2018 CTH noted the significant House rule changes constructed by Nancy Pelosi for the 116th congress [..] With the House going into a scheduled calendar recess, those rules are now being used to subvert historic processes and construct the articles of impeachment. A formal vote to initiate an “impeachment inquiry” is not technically required; however, there has always been a full house vote until now.


The reason not to have a House vote is simple: if the formal process was followed the minority (republicans) would have enforceable rights within it. Without a vote to initiate, the articles of impeachment can be drawn up without any participation by the minority; and without any input from the executive. This was always the plan that was visible in Pelosi’s changed House rules.

Anyone can be a whistleblower, all it takes is for the intelligence community to express an interest in your aunt’s gossip. And then anything anyone says can be used to draw up an article of impeachment. Which can then be voted on by the Democrat majority in Congress, and accepted.

Which has no practical meaning, obviously, because there will be no Senate majority to actually impeach Trump. It’s pure theater. And anyway, impeached for what? For asking Ukraine assistance in investigating 2016 election meddling? Sure, you can rephrase that as “digging up dirt”, but isn’t that phrasing by now a purely partisan thing and hence worthless?

I see two options. A few days ago I wrote: “Pelosi called for impeachment without having seen the transcript or the complaint. That will forever be weird.” If that is true, as we’ve been led to believe by both the protagonists and the press, it is weird indeed. But now there is another option on the table.

Namely, that Pelosi has known the contents of the complaint since August 12, when the ‘whistleblower’ wrote to Adam Schiff, or soon thereafter. And that she, too, sat on it. Urgent or not. And then a few days ago went all-in for impeachment. No matter what the exact details here are, it very much looks like a well-prepared operation, step by step.

I started out with the term Twisted Pair for the US and UK, because both countries raise the question: how are they going to remain governable? Leave or Remain, GOP or Democrat, the trenches are being dug deeper fast. The only way forward appears to be even deeper divides. GOP and Democrats are a Twisted Pair all by themselves.

 

PS: I don’t get the attention for the whistleblower. The only interesting parties involved are the people who fed him/her their info. Are they also CIA by any chance? Let’s ask them.

 

 

 

 

Home Forums Twisted Pair 1 – US

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  • #50242

    Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1940   Two countries, the US and UK, both seem to barrel down towards great troubles, hence the title Twisted Pair. W
    [See the full post at: Twisted Pair 1 – US]

    #50245
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    While I can do comprehensive detailed analysis pretty well, I tend more and more to feature my intuition, which is to say a broad perspective that shows a scene but fuzzes the details like Impressionist painting.

    From that perspective, the thing that stands out to me from both the UK and USA political scenes (along with many other nations, I suppose) is how their legislative bodies, their parliaments and congresses, are busy writing new procedures to further their aims by side-stepping decades and centuries of tradition.

    In Britain, it seems right now more to be the executive branch (I wanna say king’s throne) that is rewriting/ignoring the rules for ultimately private and obviously dishonest means; in USA, it’s the legislature rewriting/ignoring laws in order to hound the presidency.

    Point being this: it’s reminiscent of how Nazi Germany came to be via such dishonest runarounds, including false flag atrocities and bumbling senile Hindenbergs* giving their approval to the radical prime minister or chancellor or whatever one calls the king’s seat these days.

    *(imagining Lindsey Graham as a senile Prussian autocrat in Boy Scout lederhosen is kinda fun)

    No, this is anything but Trump = Hitler. I’m not a kulturkampf kindergartner who believes that if we remove ‘dat bad bad man’ things will be okay. My focus is what fills the vacuum Trump is almost certainly to leave, probably from medical emergency if nothing else (and there are many elses poised and wanting to take him out).

    Our Hitler, if anyone fit that comparison, was a little creep named Dubya, a sad sick little fuck who deserves a cellroom and a live-in 3-way with Hillary and Clenis, with Al Gore as a butler who likes to watch, and Cheney as a taxidermied sneer-in-the-corner. But such comparisons are odious: USA is very different from Germany, more ruthless, younger, foolish, and so strung out on faux victory fumes it resembles a giant opium den… inviting comparisons with late 19th century China under the Dowager Empress.

    Hitler acted from a position of growing power. Trump from day one has had to act from a position of declining power. His saving grace in my eyes to date is that, while he preaches Make America Great Again to the throngs, in practice his entire life has been one strategic retreat after another, an act he’s awfully good at — and strategic retreat is the only sane course for the USA.

    Trump’s shtick is proclaiming victory and overall uber alles (along with other tautologies, I’m sure), while looking for a quick exit out the backdoor with his skin intact and a luxury escape yacht waiting at the dock.

    Bojo and Trump don’t worry me much. It’s what arises in their wake that I anxiously wonder about. The GOP already imploded, producing Trump. Now as the DNC implodes, I fear what will take its place… although it’s just possible that something good will arise. I, for one, would enjoy electing Charliehorse Two-Feathers as the first Native American president of our crumbling empire. I can see the campaign slogan now: We Told You So.

    Oh well. From the horizon’s sunset edge, most failing empires look more or less the same:

    Where the Sun Never Sets… but rather, falls.

    #50246
    zerosum
    Participant

    The whistleblowers do not have an expectation of a good future.

    #50247
    zerosum
    Participant

    The democrats have a secret weapon.
    A very knowledgeable running mate for VP that can defeat Trump.
    Here is a hint.
    The Republican are already attacking. Finding evidence before the running mate can be announced.
    If you cannot get the e-mails from a destroyed server, then find the e-mails on the servers that have not been destroyed.
    In case you forgot, “The truth is what I claim it to be”

    #50248
    Dr. D
    Participant

    This guy’s CIA. They’ll probably give him a tickertape parade and a position as dictator-for-life on CNBC at $1M/season. The CIA will just move the money through the corporate-state merger to back-fill them like usual, no need for profits and losses. So last century.

    Things fall apart. The center does not hold. However, it was never meant to centralize, it was never meant to hold. It was meant to re-localize and not be an empire, not be a dictatorship. It’s mean to run at the state and local level as legally ignored and legally required. And this “retreat” is indeed what Military Intel put Cheeto into office for. The gambit to take over the world by controlling (denying) oil in the Middle East and running China, while Russia was a failed-forever state and central Asia was again contained, failed predictably and catastrophically. So these traitors who stood by now can only retreat to America’s borders and salvage the nation, not the world. That’s what’s MEANT to happen. That’s why the Empire globalists at the CIA, CEO, and media are in a death cage with the Marines, NSA, and American people. Whoever loses will cease to exist for 100 years, if their plans would be the only loss they take.

    So there’s no “floating off” for anyone. Trump isn’t there for a joy ride. He loses 5-10% of the empire every year in office and if he loses he and his whole family will be harassed, imprisoned, and/or killed, one by one. Starting with Baron. They’ve said so publicly, right Peter Fonda? However, if no one in business and military stood up, the falling empire would land on the spine of the nation, so you make the best of it.

    The fake story gets stranger each day. What I can gather from this is that Trump has known about this new plan since Maguire got the call on the 12th. That’s why it was such a set-up since then. Shiff, the guy who arranged and leaked it, as he has leaked so many, many other things, eventually got frustrated and annoyed they were delaying the bait and struck out. Of course then tipping his hand that he knew all about it all along, somehow, while it was so urgent he also didn’t care. Since Trump staged the call and then leaked it specifically and wrongly (8x! Quid pro quo!) to make too tempting a bait, no doubt they’d been waiting for him.

    So I can imagine they just MIGHT know who took it upon themselves to change the whistleblower form to “Do you have any Tall Tale or hearsay story, however so wild you’d like to share? Then YOU TOO can be a whistleblower! Sign up today! America’s Got Talent!” So if they’re 4 weeks ahead of the CIA/Shiff team it should continue to be hilarious.

    The moment they impeach, Trump will call Powell and the ESF, drop the market 5,000 points, and blame the world collapse on the Democrats. Not saying that’s a great or honest idea, but sure would get people’s complete attention on the Joe and Hunter Biden tale, complete with CIA agents on the board of Burisma, and the billions signed out of China to his account. But I always loan $1B to a guy who can’t remember to remove his crack pipe from the rental car. We’ve all been there, amirite? There’s no corruption and I do not find that suspicious at all.

    I say investigate them both. To the nines, with unlimited subpoena and a million dollar budget. Oh wait: one of them already has. Oh well, the other one then.

    #50249
    kultsommer
    Participant

    Expressive portrait created with little pigment and water. Picasso and Matisse are only ones who could make muddied colors look great.
    Energized by fight of blonde and brunette over him in recent years he made him self much younger than 59, and more like himself few decades earlier, when he was married to ballerina Olga Khokhlova.

    #50252
    zerosum
    Participant

    UPDATE UKRAINE:

    Its not egg all over their face …. its shit!
    What part of the following do Nancy Pelosi and the news media not understand?

    https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/09/30/civil-war-on/#more-204884

    Has nobody noticed that there is treaty between Ukraine and the USA, signed at Kiev in 1998 and ratified by the US Senate in 2000. It’s an agreement on “Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.” Here, read the cover letter for yourself:

    EDIT: BACKGROUND INFO

    https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/09/look-whos-not-laughing.html#more

    —–

    #50254
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    It amazes me again and again how people cannot believe that Donald Trump simply *won* the election. (Looks to me like he did so merely by being the only comedian left standing at the podium.)

    To oversimplify, it’s difficult for me to imagine Trump as milintel’s darling when he has consistently held back from actually getting serious with the ‘NATO good/Russia bad’ mantra that has been Milintel Policy 101 since Christ was a corporal.

    There is a marked and decisive streak in Trump’s executive actions that has effectively stymied to date the military plan to Get Russia. It’s one of the very few things about which Trump has been consistent in foreign policy (or anything, I reckon).

    Oh, he has talked the Deep State’s game for them sometimes, but just as often talked against it, cuz that’s Trump: erratic. And he’s always willing to give the Pentagon all the money it wants. But when it comes to actually pursuing the Color Revolution pattern that has marked recent decades, Trump holds back. (He backs the Venezuela onsanity because it’s oil close to home that we want to continue selling USA dollars if at all possible, imo.)

    I wonder if anyone here thinks that we wouldn’t be gonads-deep in major military madness overseas, above and beyond the usual, if Hillary was in office? Yes, I know Trump has escalated our standard drone bombing nonsense, but the effect of his actions have time and again shown USA to be a paper tiger, and I’m hard-pressed to see how milintel wants that. To claim they need more money? That tune has been played to dust, and they don’t need help getting money: that’s what Congress is for, it seems.

    I see two consistent themes in Trump’s geopolitics:
    a) Trump doesn’t mess with Israel and Israel doesn’t mess with him;

    b) Trump likes Putin and Putin adroitly enjoy’s Trump’s easy manipulability. Those are the only consistent themes I’ve seen in Trump’s personal foreign policy stances.

    Most of us have a pretty good idea why Trump doesn’t cross Israel too hard; Jeffrey Epstein is one good example, not that I believe there’s much dirt on Trump, actually. A guy who talks openly about manioulating movie starlets by their crotch doesn’t sound too scared about sexual dirt in his closet.

    I’m not sure if I’ve heard anyone make any sense of Russia<>Trump relations. I’ve had to do that for myself, fwiw. Here goes:

    obviously, Putin didn’t rig the USA election although he meddled a bit like all major nations meddle with each other’s elections. Not in the clumsy way the DNC claims with phony dats as backing, but a little money here, a good word there, blah blah. No one “hacked” the election. What was hacked was what’s left of the USA populace’s ability to think anything but what they’re told to, and our gubmint did that to us, not foreign powers.

    But Trump was, it seems, seriously in hock to Kazakhstani oligarchs and some buddies from Putin’s preferred circle. After all, no Western bank would loan him any more money. iirc, Deutsche Bank was the only Euromerican bank willing to deal with Trump, which I assume is why the DNC is so rabid to get certain tax returns.

    There’s no doubt Putin preferred Trump; he said so. And he surely backed that with some illicit campaign financing. Like every candidate does these days if they can.

    Anyway, Trump being reliant during the 2016 election on Russian/quasi-Russian money during 2016 fits well with his solid working relationship with Putin and his curious resistance to the ever-popular themes of Liberate Ukraine! and Get Russia! He gave himself ample wiggle-room to deny this but his denials practically prove the point, for example here:

    Trump said in an interview on ABC that he personally had nothing to do with the change, but did not give a clear answer to whether or not his campaign was involved.

    George Stephanopoulos: “Then why did you soften the GOP platform on Ukraine?”

    Trump: “I wasn’t involved in that. Honestly, I was not involved.”

    Stephanopoulos: “Your people were.”

    Trump: “Yeah. I was not involved in that. I’d like to — I’d have to take a look at it. But I was not involved in that.”

    Stephanopoulos: “Do you know what they did?”

    Trump: “They softened it, I heard, but I was not involved.”

    As you can see, Trump says, “Yeah,” in response to a query that his campaign was involved. But it’s not clear if that’s the answer to a question or just Trump filling space.

    After these questions, Trump hints at why the platform may have changed.

    “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said.

    That last remark surely made Putin smile. One can find more on this if one digs. Curiously, during all this ‘Putin got Trump elected’ spinning, the issue of Trump’s involvement with Kazakhstan money-laundering never got any lift from the media nor either major political party. Brief mentions, then vanished.

    Meanwhile, Putin beats the living shit out of everything our military attempts…

    …and the CIA has always been a lousy intel operation except for “sigint”. They’re certainly not getting any foreign advantages from Trump in office, and Trump regularly attacks the CIAided-media as “fake news”. Trump has in fact weakened the media’s grip overall, which is hardly what the CIA wants.

    The CIA is mostly good at getting wars started where we want chaos to clear the way for greedy corporate assholes. It sucks at regime change also except for ham-fisted deals like Chile and Indonesia during the last century. If it wasn’t for social media amplifying the power of NGO-driven insurrections, the CIA would probably be reduced to flying drones into Muslim weddings as a hobby. It’s as inept and incompetent at espionage as the Pentagon is at spending defense budgets in a way that makes us stronger rather than weaker. (Which gives a dark perspective to Al Gore’s successful promotion of the internet, something I was rather close to back then when I sold telecom gear.)

    It seems that the CIA is better at spying on us than foreign powers, just as the FBI seems better at covering up foreign crimes than prosecuting American crimes.

    I really can’t find a decent cui bono for the notion of Trump being an intel pawn. This is the man who insisted on his private security over off-the-shelf Secret Service protection.

    Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Best I can tell, USA elected a crazy man president because USA is a crazy people. Best I can tell, the only consistent theme in USA gubmint at this point is that of Rome during its final centuries: blind arrogant ignorance and incompetence whose only tool of choice is blunt force. In the end, Rome was so lost it had to sell its ancient pantheon of gods in for that new-fangled religion that Christ dude’s followers cobbled together in His name.

    Trump seems able to outsmart the entire bunch, both DNC and GOP, by being just the right kind of crazy at the right point in time. He’s like Hitler in manipulating public opinion but barely pale shadow compared to Hitler’s success at shaping the nation to his will.

    Or, as some wiseguy on the internet said so well: “We deserve the leaders we put up with.”

    Moral: claiming military intel put Cheeto into office sounds as specious to me as the Dem baboon chorus that Putin Stole Our Election.

    But I’m always willing to listen to sound reasoning based on reasonably legit data.

    Let’s Discuss This Calmly and Reasonably

    #50255
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Well, he’s right. Being crazy is so much more fun when you can be right. Man is certifiably deranged, but apparently it takes a deranged mind to prevail in deranged times.

    All the Way to the Bank…

    #50256
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    The above refers to this link which I could swear I’d posted:

    Trump tweets quote warning that impeachment will cause ‘Civil War-like fracture’ in US

    #50257
    zerosum
    Participant

    JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER at

    Civil War On

    wrote
    Someone in Impeachmentville is not paying attention. Of course, diverting the rubes is exactly the point of the latest CIA operation to negate the 2016 election. Has nobody noticed that there is treaty between Ukraine and the USA, signed at Kiev in 1998 and ratified by the US Senate in 2000. It’s an agreement on “Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.” Here, read the cover letter for yourself:
    I’m listening to the news and they keep digging their hole deeper.
    I know that they read the blogs.
    Are they trying to pretend that the blogger are making up “fake news.”

    #50258
    VietnamVet
    Participant

    “Twisted Pair” is the perfect title. I think both countries are headed towards a Civil War 2.0. Brexit and Impeachment both don’t make sense; in no way are they middle class revolts like the Bolsheviks Revolution or the Reign of Terror. Instead they are the Elite clawing at each other. Much like the cavalier southern plantation owners verses northern industrialists in 1860. Oligarchs have tasked their incompetent toadies to bring it on. Impeachment will be the death knell for the Democratic “People’s” Party. Brexit likewise for the Labour Party. Neither has shown the slightest concern about the people’s future; just short term gain. Much like Saudi Arabia, with declining resources, incompetent leadership, and military that only loses wars; the UK and the USA are incapable of facing climate change. Both nations will splinter into pieces. My guess is that the last grasps for breaths and whimpers will be from the silos where the remaining humans retreated. Evolutionary Losers who failed to learn how to cooperate with each other.

    #50259
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Governmnts, being of men, are certainly capable of psychosis; that the U.S. and UK exhibit all the signs of such, leads me to conclude they are doomed to self destruction.
    What leaves me gobsmacked is the fact most citizens are buried in minutiae purposefully generated to do just that.
    My quite limited contact with Usian’s just reinforces that impression…

    #50272
    Joe Wazzzz
    Participant

    The continued downward spiral of American politics will never change as long as the underlying causes are purposefully not recognized. The comment that democracy is doomed to fail when the people understand that they can vote themselves largess from the treasury has been attributed to several people and it is almost certainly true in mono-cultural societies. We give much consideration to the eventual outcome of the debt, a debt that is the direct result of democracy and its politics. But in multicultural societies that event is superseded by lawmaking devolving into the exercise of pure politics at the expense of the people as a whole. Cultures have polarized. Multiculturalism will sift out the serious differences over time and bring them into conflict eventually, especially in times of economic distress and uncertainty. There will always be a dominate culture or group of cultures, sometimes working overtly and sometime working covertly. The dominate culture will always work to stifle the truth if it isn’t productive to the tenets of their culture and that will guarantee a social collapse in the end.

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