Impeachment basis: Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.” ― Harry S. Truman

Let’s say the U.S. Government is a corporation.  Let’s say that the shareholders (voters) of that corporation are unhappy with the previous CEO and want the company to go in a new direction. Let’s say that the shareholders decide not to renew the contract of the previous regime and hire someone to take the company in a new direction.

Now let’s say that the middle managers that served under the previous CEO don’t want to go in a new direction and do everything possible to stymie the new CEO and do everything to have the new CEO removed and go back to the previous policies.  Let’s say the middle managers have been embezzling funds from the company for years and those funds were laundered through a third party “shell company” and if the books are ever opened they could all go to jail.

Let’s say the new CEO looks at the contracts that were made with the shell company by the previous CEO and sees that those contracts are bleeding the corporation dry and are of no benefit to the corporation, but in fact threaten to bankrupt the corporation.

Let’s say those middle managers conspire to go to the shareholders and claim they heard that the new CEO is conspiring to destroy the corporation by cancelling the contracts with the shell company.  Even though none of them heard the new CEO say this, they heard it by the water cooler and want that CEO charged with criminal sabotage and removed.   

In other words the basis for the removal of the new CEO is, “I heard if from a friend, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around.”  From RT:

Excerpt:

Transcript of US ambassador to Ukraine reveals leaked ‘smoking gun’ testimony based on hearsay & ‘fake news’ media

Impeachment testimony from former US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor reveals the fatal ’quid pro quo’ at the center of the probe rests on mere hearsay, even as Taylor’s words are held up as a smoking gun by Trump’s enemies.

In the course of his October 22 deposition, made public on Wednesday, Taylor explains it was his “clear understanding” that “security assistance money would not come” until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “committed to pursue the investigation” of natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s son was a director.

That understanding, however, came from being told by Trump adviser Tim Morrison that another ambassador – US envoy to the EU Gordon Sondland – had informed a Zelensky aide of the condition.

That fateful conversation appears to be the closest Taylor got to the alleged quid pro quo. It’s not clear exactly what was said between them, as Sondland hurriedly revised his own testimony on Tuesday to better match Taylor’s.

“What I know for sure,” Taylor testified, “is what Mr. Morrison told me that he must have heard Ambassador Sondland tell [Zelensky aide] Mr. Yermak. And as I said, this was the first time I’d heard [security assistance and corruption investigations] put together.” (p.189)

Taylor also admitted he was not listening in on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, and that he did not see the transcript until it was released in late September. He acknowledged he had never spoken to Trump, and when pressed by Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey), pinned the entire “drug deal” (the words of former national security adviser John Bolton, apparently) on Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani (p.260) – even though Taylor had never spoken to him either.

Giuliani, Taylor said, dominated an “irregular” policy channel alongside the wholesome, bipartisan way of doing things, a channel that ran “contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy” – or at least that was what Taylor “began to sense” (p.28) when the aid was held up.

At one point, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-New York) attempted to pin down exactly what Taylor’s relationship was to the events in question.

“This isn’t firsthand. It’s not secondhand. It’s not thirdhand. But if I understand this correctly, you’re telling us that Tim Morrison told you that Ambassador Sondland told him that the president told Ambassador Sondland that Zelensky would have to open an investigation into Biden?” Zeldin asks incredulously. (p. 298)

The New York congressman also got Taylor to admit that his sole source for his belief that Trump wanted Biden investigated in order to influence the 2020 election was an article in the New York Times – not exactly known for its accurate or sympathetic portrayals of the president.

The Ukraine affair is damning, all right – just not in the way you’re being told to think

Critically,  Taylor admitted that no one in the Ukrainian government knew military aid had been suspended until over a month after the Trump-Zelensky phone call, which was the source of the anonymous whistleblower’s complaint.

The ambassador’s opening statement was “leaked” before the House voted to make transcripts public, and has been held up by intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff (D-California) and other pro-impeachment Democrats as ‘proof’ that military aid was withheld “through a shadow foreign policy channel” until Ukraine agreed to follow through with the Biden investigation.

An examination of the transcript, however, reveals nothing of the sort. Taylor’s political convictions – that Russia must be kicked out of Ukraine, lest it blossom into a malevolent empire – appear to motivate his testimony more than any firsthand knowledge of what transpired between the American and Ukrainian heads of state.

That is what this whole impeachment inquiry is about, the establishment doesn’t like the direction that the new CEO wants to take the corporation.  They have all been embezzling funds for so long and if the books were ever scrutinized, they could all go to jail.  While it is not in the interest of the people of the United States to use Ukraine as a spring board to war with Russia, the Deep State agents are making a financial killing in Ukraine.  From Moon of Alabama:

Deep State wants War in Ukraine at all costs

Excerpt:

Trump And Zelensky Want Peace With Russia. The Fascists Oppose That.

NBC News is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats’ impeachment circus. But it fails to note what the conflict is really about:

It was substantive, but it wasn’t dramatic.  In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.

“It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression,” Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why Trump’s decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of Russian expansionism didn’t align with U.S. policy…

“In direct contravention of U.S. interests” says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares “it is clearly in our national interest” to give weapons to Ukraine.

But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?

President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama’s decision against U.S. national interest? Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?

Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. WHO DEFINES WHAT IS IN THE “NATIONAL INTEREST” WITH REGARDS TO FOREIGN POLICY? Here is a point where for once I agree with the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes:

[O]n the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions. But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.

We have made the very same point:

The U.S. constitution “empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries.”

The constitution does not empower the “U.S. government policy community”, nor “the administration”, nor the “consensus view of the interagency” and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that.

The president does not like how the ‘American policy’ on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. HE HAD STATED HIS OPINION ON RUSSIA DURING HIS CAMPAIGN AND WON THE ELECTION. It is not ‘malign influence’ that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.

 [I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve “at his pleasure” are there to implement them.

There is another point that has to be made about the NBC’s assertions. It is not in the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in his recent NYT interview:

Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine’s most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia.  ‘They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said, comparing Russia’s power to that of Ukraine. “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you” — America — “are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it.”

Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.

Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. “War against Russia,” he said, “to the last Ukrainian.” Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine’s economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass.

Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to divulge details because the Americans “will mess it up and get in the way.”  Kolomoisky’s interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes.

Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday’s clown show would certainly “mess it up and get in the way” if Zelensky would openly pursue the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they had used to arrange the Maidan coup:

Zelenskiy’s decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in light of this domestic opposition.

The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in western Ukraine…  Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports.

During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%.  By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.

Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate peace with Russia. (He should also investigate Biden’s undue influence.) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.

It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.

Hmm, yes that is what the testimony by Vindman, Kent and Yovanovitch was about, “the deep state of the United States wants to ignore the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate.”  If Ukraine ever normalizes relations with Russia the books will be flung open and all will see the massive corruption, theft, murder and graft perpetrated against Ukraine by the Deep State operatives who are now desperate to remove Trump from office and reinstate the status quo. 

The impeachment circus will resume next week.  What can we look forward to?  More, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around.

CIA’s six ways from Sunday regime change coup in America

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” ~ Senator Chuck Schumer D-NY

The Liberal Democratic Party does not exist, the Conservative Republican Party does not exist. One party exists, it is a War and Terrorism Party consisting of Oligarchs controlled and run by Wall Street and London banks and their enforcement arm’s the CIA, FBI and MI6. Anyone who dares to drain America’s filthy, deadly CIA swamp beware.  The CIA has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

 Long ago the GOP infested with CIA backed figures, purged its party of real conservatives; it was right around the time the CIA attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan and install his Vice President and ex-CIA Director George H.W. Bush. 

Reagan survived but during his tenure, the CIA worked with Vice President Bush within the Reagan Administration to enact a CIA agenda of regime change coups, assassinations, death squads, and rampant terrorism across the globe.  One such CIA black op was the Iran-Contra Affair where arms were sold to Iran to fund illegal regime change and terror across Central America. 

Reagan was an unwitting tool of the CIA that had infested his Republican Party.  When Reagan left office George H.W. Bush’s CIA ran America’s foreign policy unabated which fulminated in Bush pardoning members of the CIA’s criminal enterprise.

When Governor of Arkansas, William Clinton announced his run for presidency against the sitting CIA backed president George H.W. Bush, Bush’s FBI Director, Louis Freeh sent two hundred agents to Arkansas dig up dirt on the Governor and end Clinton’s campaign.  All they found was Jim McDougal who had been charged with check kiting, i.e. (writing worthless checks from multiple accounts and depositing them into those accounts).  This had nothing to do with the Clintons but McDougal had been a partner in an investment with Hillary years earlier called Whitewater, an investment that had lost money.

After Clinton was elected president defeating the CIA’s Bush, Clinton was encouraged to fire FBI Director Freeh as he was hell-bent on impeaching Clinton.  Unlike Trump, who recognized the corruption of FBI Director James Comey and fired him, Clinton retained Freeh.  The CIA backed Senators in the Democratic Party, many who are now pushing for Trump’s impeachment, i.e. Schumer and Biden, eagerly went along with the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate Hillary’s Whitewater investment with the preordained goal of impeachment.

The first Special Prosecutor, Robert Fiske found the Clintons innocent of the charges:

Allegations surfaced during the investigation, which was led by special prosecutor Robert B. Fiske, that Clinton pressured David Hale—former president of a small business investment firm—into making a loan for the Whitewater deal.

Other allegations came out, implying Clinton's gubernatorial campaign debts were paid off by Madison through McDougal. Fiske issued a grand jury subpoena to President Clinton and his wife for documents related to Madison Guaranty. While the Clintons initially reported the records as missing, THE DOCUMENTS WERE EVENTUALLY FOUND, CLEARING THE CLINTONS OF ANY WRONGDOING.

When Special Prosecutor Fiske exonerated the Clintons dashing the hopes for impeachment, the CIA controlled Democrats and Republicans demanded a new investigation into President Clinton and a new Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was appointed.  Starr, a rightwing religious zealot, was obsessed with finding impeachable offenses.  Starr investigated the Clintons for four years until he uncovered a sexual dalliance that provided the basis for impeachment.

Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath.  But there is a difference when you lie under oath to spare your family and loved ones public humiliation and pain like Clinton did and when you lie under oath to undermine National Security like Comey, Clapper and Brennan repeatedly did.  No matter, the CIA backed Democrats and Republicans impeached him but were unable to remove him from office because of public outcry.

Now that Special Investigator Robert Mueller has exonerated President Trump of Russia collusion, the CIA controlled House and Senate have decided to conduct their own investigation with the preordained conclusion of impeachment.  From LaRouche publication:

Excerpt:

The Tentacle of ‘Perfidious Albion’ Behind the Impeachment Drive

While embarking on a different project, I happened upon an article by the inimitable Lyndon LaRouche, published in EIR January 15, 1999, concerning the Clinton impeachment. It’s called “To Defeat Impeachment, You Must Defeat the New Confederacy.”

And it struck me, just how apropos that article still is today: The strategic situation bears some striking similarities; only the uniforms of the partisan players have changed. This should tell you that something is controlling the process over and above those in partisan uniforms, something that controls the partisans.

One of the things that is different is that this President is taking on those out to get him on something other than a steamy sexual setup. They already tried that with him, and it landed with a resounding thud, as cheap reruns tend to do. And President Trump has called them out by name, the military-industrial complex, serving imperial aims, the globalists, and declared war on them with substantial public support.  

That is really very, very different. But the enemy is not different. So, I’ll give you some of LaRouche’s insights on the impeachment, which he penned on January 1, 1999, before beginning our discussion on the ongoing Ukrainegate.

THE CONSTITUTION IS THREATENED

LaRouche begins his article by asking: “Will the United States survive this impeachment side show?” And his answer is to call you out. He says, the impeachment is “A British style parliamentary coup d’état,” while noting that the impeachment process was only one among several crucial battlefields in a much wider war. He says, “Whoever thinks only of one issue at a time—one battlefield, or one mass-media week—has made a commitment to losing this war, at the start.”

He noted that the global financial system, run by the City of London and its British Commonwealth appendages, had begun its inevitable collapse, a rolling mudslide. That mudslide culminated in the 2007-2008 collapse from which we have not recovered. Now, a similar bubble has been built up, and there are signs all over the world that its collapse is imminent…

LaRouche said that replacing Bill Clinton with Al Gore would ensure that the neo-liberal and neo-conservative hawks who then controlled Washington would have their way and that it would have become almost inevitable that they would recklessly create a nuclear war. Is replacing Donald Trump with Mike Pence any less a fear-and-panic producing proposition?

He then said, most importantly, “For us, in the United States, the central feature of our war is a fight against treason in our nation’s political establishment, like that treason that led to the Civil War of 1861-1865.” Treason perpetrated by President Lincoln’s London-centered and Wall Street-centered enemies.

He said the British aim has been to “tear up the Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” and then to integrate a shattered United States as a vassal state into the British Commonwealth under conditions of the economic collapse of the world’s economy.

He emphasized that if the President were to be impeached and removed from office, this would create such horrific conditions, that it would be as if the United States lost the Civil War. Under these circumstances, LaRouche stated, the U.S. would either fight a war against that treason or it would be finished as a nation.

But he cautioned sternly, once again, this is a war against the British Empire, which functions throughout the world…  He asserted that this is not an internal U.S. political affair; it is a global affair in which every leading government of the world is vitally interested and will be playing a hand of its own for its own vital strategic reasons…

American System Solution

LaRouche spoke of the bankrupt policies of the world’s central bankers at the time of Clinton’s impeachment, writing:

All of these and related conditions combine to create an explosive political-economic mixture in each and all of these and other nations. We have come into the kind of a time in history, once again, in which wars, revolutions, and terrible dictatorship tend to erupt as if on the order of the day.

And we do see that across the globe today. He added:

Behind every war there is an issue of choice. Contrary to the self-styled geopolitical variety of loonies, such as Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, or Zbigniew Brzezinski, terrain does not cause wars; it is conflicts over choices of response in the political and economic and cultural terrain, which prompt serious warfare. Geopolitics happens to be one of those delusions which tends to cause loonies to choose wars.

He then located the fundamental conflict as that between the American System’s view and the British Monarchy’s view of humankind, writing:

The American System views each man and woman as made in the image of the Creator, as each endowed at birth with a divine spark of a creative power of reason lacking in all lower forms of life. For us, that is the principle of natural law which must underlie all rightful government, axiomatically, as our Leibnizian Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of our Federal Constitution express this commitment to such principles of natural law.

The British monarchy’s system, on the contrary, views the majority of the nation’s and world’s population not as citizens, but as mere subjects of an hereditary, willful, essentially parasitical authority, the which is embodied in institutions controlled by a ruling, imperial financier oligarchy, typified by the pagan tradition of the Venice-modelled Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy.

Under conditions of crisis, the British oligarchs will produce movements and ideological formations geared toward one thing, preserving their form of “order.”

Right now, advocates of the American System, as revived and revolutionized by LaRouche—those who believe in the human creative ability of the individual citizen—would say, let’s cauterize the bubble before it pops with Glass-Steagall; let’s create a national banking system that can issue credit for real development and modern infrastructure; let’s make sure our capital intensive expenditures result in the high wages and living standards necessary to an advanced population; let’s develop fusion as an energy source and take off to the next frontier, space, in search of scientific breakthroughs and understanding nature’s laws.

It is collaboration on the last of these initiatives—fusion, space, discovery of the actual workings of our universe, which can form the basis of collaboration between nation-states and through which—as LaRouche made clear in his November 29, 2004 study, The Coming Eurasian World, published in EIR Vol. 31 No. 49—mankind will experience a higher and more creative culture than any we have now.

We would also be saying, let’s replace the present international system with new fixed exchange-rate credit mechanisms, developed by the four nation-states of China, India, Russia and the U.S., with the potential, jointly, to survive and prosper despite the coming City of London and Wall Street instigated collapse.

The fact that President Trump leans in these directions, is the reason why the same Anglo-American apparat and its controlled lynch mob of the day is after him.

A different variety of controlled lynch mob impeached but did not convict Bill Clinton, based on a sexual scandal that erupted right after Clinton said the world needed a new financial architecture. And the choices we have to make now in this war, LaRouche’s solutions, are the only sure way to defeat them and outflank them worldwide…

Yep, President Trump is a fighter and if he goes down he will go down fighting taking many scalps with him.  A couple of interesting points from that article are:

1) “One of the things that is different is that this President is taking on those out to get him on something other than a steamy sexual setup. They already tried that with him, and it landed with a resounding thud, as cheap reruns tend to do.” And

2)  The “controlled lynch mob impeached but did not convict Bill Clinton, based on a sexual scandal that erupted right after Clinton said the world needed a new financial architecture.”

Wall Street and the London Banking Center are behind this impeachment side show accommodated by the Oligarchs in the American Congress and enforced by the CIA and MI6. From Chris Hedges at Truthdig:

Excerpt:

Death by Oligarchy

Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. I saw these distortions among my rich classmates as a scholarship student at prep school and at Harvard University, an institution designed, like all elite schools, to perpetuate the plutocracy. Living in privilege spawns callousness, even cruelty, to those less fortunate and feeds a bottomless greed.

The repugnant characteristics of the rich are skillfully masked by armies of lawyers and publicists, a servile and intimidated press, good manners and the fig leaf of philanthropy. Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Jimmy Wales, Peter Thiel, John Mackey and the late Steve Jobs and David Koch—whatever their carefully packaged public image—champion or championed economic and social models that are designed to create a new form of serfdom for the working class and further consolidate the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the oligarchs. When a society falls into the death grip of an oligarchic class, the result is always catastrophic.

Oligarchs, because they live insulated lives surrounded by obsequious courtiers that cater to their bottomless narcissism and hedonism, wield power based on fantasy. They propagate ruling ideologies, such as neoliberalism and the intellectually and morally bankrupt writings of Ayn Rand, which are not economically rational but justify their privilege.

Their mantra, first uttered by a notorious serial killer and enthusiastically embraced by Rand, is: “What Is Good for Me Is Right.” All our institutions—the press, the courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and academia—have been perverted to serve the oligarch’s narrow, selfish interests while an oppressed citizenry, struggling to survive, is seething with mounting rage and frustration. The corporate coup orchestrated by the ruling oligarchs over the past few decades gave us Donald Trump. If this coup is not reversed, far worse will follow…

“We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social and cultural transition—but we don’t know which way we’re headed,” writes Lisa Duggan in “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.” “The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelicals pull the strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand...”

This spirit of meanness corrupts the far right and the far left. It defines the Christian fascists and the alt-right as it defines many in antifa and the black bloc, although unlike their fascist opponents the far left in the United States is a marginal, poorly organized, ideologically bankrupt and ineffectual political force…

No battle to accrue profit is too small for oligarchs. The election for City Council in Seattle saw Bezos, the world’s richest man, spend $1.5 million to flip the council to serve his business interests. Bezos was incensed by a council decision last year to tax Amazon, which in 2018 paid no federal income tax, and other businesses to help provide housing for the city’s 11,000 homeless. AMAZON GOT THE CITY’S TAX REPEALED WITHIN A MONTH.

Bezos in this election targeted his nemesis, the socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who thankfully was re-elected, and pushed a slate of pro-business candidates for the council. Bezos failed, this time, to seize control of the council. No doubt, the next round of elections will see him triple or quadruple his investment. The 2016 elections had a price tag of $6.5 billion, but as Hamilton Nolan points out in the Guardian, “for a group that exercises total control over a federal budget of more than $4 trillion, that’s a real bargain.”

Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich. This forces an underfunded government to borrow from the banks, further enriching the oligarchs, and impose punishing austerity programs on the public.

They privatize traditional government services, including utilities, intelligence gathering, large parts of the military, the police, the prison system and schools to make billions in profits. They create complex financial mechanisms that ensure usurious interest rates on mortgages, personal and student loans. They legalize accounting fraud and suppress wages to keep the public trapped in a crippling debt peonage. They loot trillions in taxpayer money when their speculative bubbles burst.

They are no longer capitalists, if we define capitalists as those who make money from the means of production. They are a criminal class of financial speculators that rewrite the laws to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They are parasites that feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. THEY PRODUCE NOTHING. THEY MAKE NOTHING. THEY MANIPULATE MONEY. And this gaming of the system and seizure of political power by finance capital is why the wealthiest 1% of America’s families control 40% of the nation’s wealth.

Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase with an estimated worth of $1.4 billion, is the poster child for corporate greed and criminality. He directed JPMorgan Chase to underwrite fraudulent securities in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crash. He overcharged members of the military on mortgages and mortgage refinancing transactions. He overcharged customers for overdraft fees.

He manipulated bidding on California and Midwest electricity markets. He overcharged homeowners for flood insurance. He billed customers for nonexistent credit card monitoring services. He charged minorities higher rates and fees on mortgages than those paid by white borrowers. He failed to pay overtime to company workers.  Yes, JPMorgan Chase had to pay more fines than any other financial institution in the country, but the profits more than offset its fraudulent and criminal activity.

It is Dimon, along with fellow oligarchs Gates and the billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who has recently led the attack on Warren. Dimon chastised her for her “wealth tax” plan and for allegedly vilifying “successful people.” Cooperman accused Warren of seeking to wreck the American dream. Gates also denounced her wealth tax plan, although if he did have to pay the tax, he would still be worth $6 billion. When questioned, Gates refused to say whether, if Warren becomes the Democratic nominee, he would support Trump.

GREED IS BOTTOMLESS. IT IS THE DISEASE OF THE RICH. The more the oligarchs accumulate the more they want. This is the dark side of human nature. It has always been with us. All societies are plagued by social inequality, but when those on the bottom and in the middle of the social pyramid lose their voice and agency, when the society exists only to serve the greed of the rich, when income inequality reaches the levels it has reached in the United States, the social fabric is torn apart and the society destroys itself.

Aristotle warned about the danger of oligarchies nearly 2,500 years ago. We stand on the cusp of social and political disintegration, bequeathed to us by oligarchs who have seized total power. The ruling oligarchs will stymie all attempts at reform. This makes a crisis inevitable. Once we enter this crisis, the oligarchs will become the most potent enablers of despotism.

Trump is a direct threat to the American and British Oligarchs because he has taken on their Spook agencies, exposing them like cockroaches in the sunlight of day.   Every political rally turns into another exposé of the corrupt media who serve as CIA/FBI stenographers.  Their time is limited as Trump stirs up the masses and turns them against the Deep State and they know it and they are running scared.  From Russia Insider:

Excerpt:

CIA, FBI Fight for Their Lives as RussiaHoax Implodes

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments.

They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war…

None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.

They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery. A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were.

Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee?

Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employer, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden.

This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle.

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER MESSERS BARR & DURHAM HAVE THE COJONES TO CATER THE BANQUET OF CONSEQUENCES THAT THIS HUGE CAST OF CHARACTERS SHOULD BE MADE TO FEAST FROM.

Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

My, my, my.  Sounds like the Spook agencies have really gotten their tit caught in the ringer.  As the article says “Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele?”  While the CIA/FBI media stenographers push the Russian collusion meme, the real culprits of a coordinated election interference have thus far been protected.  From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Excerpt:

Why Is Christopher Steele Still a Thing?

The ex-spy and infamous “dossier” author posits yet another elaborate theory of foreign infiltration

Fresh evidence has also emerged of attempts by the Kremlin to infiltrate the Conservatives by a senior Russian diplomat suspected of espionage, who spent five years in London cultivating leading Tories including Johnson himself…  The committee’s report is based on analysis from Britain’s intelligence agencies, as well as third-party experts such as the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele…

Christopher Steele became famous in the United States as the author of a “dossier” that claimed Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump “for at least 5 years.”  Now Steele is back, claiming that the Russians have been cultivating the Tories and Boris Johnson for… five years.

You can’t make this stuff up. The only thing comparable would be Ahmed Chalabi lobbying for a sequel invasion after the WMD hunt in Iraq came up empty, and having the same humiliated media figures and politicians reach for pom-poms all over again.  

Steele first appeared in connection with the Trump story as a “well-placed Western intelligence source” in a 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff. The piece claimed a Trump aide named Carter Page was discussing the lifting of sanctions with Rosneft chief Igor Sechin.

Steele, in fact, was a private opposition researcher hired by the “premium research” firm Fusion-GPS, on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Yahoo story came out on September 23, 2016; it would be over a year before Steele’s status as a paid Clinton researcher would be made public.

After Isikoff’s piece came out, the Clinton campaign released a statement about how it was “chilling” to learn that “U.S. intelligence officials” were “conducting a probe into suspected meetings between Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page and members of Putin’s inner circle.”

If the merry-go-round trick of commenting gravely about a story you yourself planted sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the tactic used by Vice President Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, when he went on Meet The Press to comment about “a story in the New York Times this morning” regarding Saddam Hussein’s aluminum tubes. Press figures denounced such chicanery then.

Steele’s report came out in full during the transition, in a sleazy series of maneuvers by outgoing intelligence officials, who presented the incoming president with a synopsis of Steele’s work.

When details of this meeting leaked, news outlets that previously had been sitting on Steele’s report because it was unverifiable suddenly had a “hook” to release news about the briefing: Intelligence chiefs relayed “allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.”  The resulting viral furor spurred Buzzfeed to publish the entire dossier, so Americans could “make up their own minds.”

In this way, the dossier was published without ever going through a vetting process. For all the talk of hacking, this was a true Trojan Horse penetration of the American news media system (not that most media companies minded, of course).

Enthusiasts now cling to the idea that the “dossier” was merely a “starting point,” and remains “neither proved nor disproved” (the New York Times translation for “unmentionable until published by someone less reputable”), but the whole shooting match should have ended once the world got a chance to read Steele’s reports. Any sane person’s Malcolm Gladwell-Blink reaction to these memos would be that they were lunatic conspiratorial horseshit on the level of Avril Lavigne dying and being replaced by a clone named “Melissa.”

  

Steele’s most boffo-sensational charge was Russians having a tape of Trump getting off to prostitutes peeing on a Moscow hotel bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama. This, he said, “enabled” the Russians to blackmail Trump “if they so wished.”  However, per Steele, Putin chose instead to offer a “regular flow” of “lucrative” real estate deals that Trump for “some unknown reason” kept declining, even though Steele simultaneously reported Trump was “exploring the real estate sector in Petersburg as well as Moscow…”

Meanwhile Trump — who at the outset of the alleged conspiracy was issuing reality TV challenges to heavyweights like LaToya Jackson, Meat Loaf, and Jose Canseco — was supposedly feeding Putin information about Russian oligarchs in America, through Russian émigrés “living in the U.S. as cover” (read: Russian immigrants). These middlemen were paid through the “mechanism” of Russian pension “disbursements.”

“TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WERE INVOLVED,” WROTE STEELE, ECHOING DR. EVIL.

Finally, after “at least” five years of “well-developed conspiracy,” when Russia’s prize asset at last became the nominee of the Republican Party, Putin according to Steele withheld a secret kompromat file on Hillary Clinton that was being personally run by spokesperson Dmitry Peskov (because who doesn’t put a press chief known to half the world’s foreign correspondents in charge of a secret intelligence file?)…

Devastating revelations? Not to Trump’s Team, who Steele claimed was “relaxed” about Russia stories appearing in the press, as those only “deflected media and Democrats’ attention” away from the real story, i.e. the “substantial… bribes and kickbacks” in China. Steele said these would have been “very damaging” to the Trump campaign if revealed, though Steele didn’t know what they were well enough to reveal them…

Trump aides Carter Page and Paul Manafort, named as key conduits, managed to keep their conspiracy to act as intelligence go-betweens hidden even from secret FISA monitoring, the vast Chinese swindles never emerged, and no one ever found those cutout consular officials, whom Steele in an interview with a State Department official seemed to have believed were being paid out of a nonexistent Russian consulate in Miami.

If you read this and thought it was silly, you weren’t alone. In early 2017, CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote to Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith in a snit, complaining that Smith had been “irresponsible” and “uncollegial” when he published the dossier. Was Tapper upset that Smith had broken with ethical tradition by publishing unverified material, defaming a string of named human beings as traitorous spies without evidence?

Nope. Tapper was mad that Smith had defamed the story by showing where it came from! “I think your move makes the story less serious and credible,” he wrote, in an email produced as part of a lawsuit against Buzzfeed. “I think you damaged its impact.”

Tapper apparently liked the Steele tale better when it was coming out in bits, through more politically astute sources like his buddy and future co-worker, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, one of the four Sneaky Petes who presented Trump with the Steele synopsis…

America didn’t lose its mind for the two ensuing years because of Russian hacking, but rather because of the widespread belief that the new president was a long-cultivated Russian agent who would be found out at any moment, across years of “tipping points” and “beginnings of the end.”

The original source of this madness was Steele, and the media and political figures who leaned with all their might into this phony narrative — especially the ones who knew it originated as Clinton campaign research — should be as embarrassed as the newspapers and news networks who pushed the WMD hunt.

This obviously hasn’t happened, as the instinct instead has been to apply the Scarlet Letter of conspiracy theory to those who didn’t buy this nonsense, usually on the grounds that any effort to “discredit” Steele is just pro-Trumpism by another name.  This has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with restoring controls that are supposed to exist to prevent the press from leading the public off the deep end.

The WMD affair showed what happens when we don’t require sources to show us evidence, when we let political actors use the press to “confirm” their own assertions, when we report on the journey of rumors instead of the rumors themselves, and most especially when we lionize intelligence and law enforcement figures, who usually turn out to be just as craven and unreliable as the rest of us.

When we let stuff like this go, the public sees us as fools, at which point it doesn’t matter whether what we write is for or against any politician, because nobody believes us anyway. Is this really the industry standard we’re gunning for? Are we never going to own up to this one?

Yep, that is the media parlor trick, publish unsubstantiated explosive allegations from an unnamed “high ranking official” and then that unnamed official goes on all the CIA controlled media to cite those media published allegations as evidence that it is true.  But the whole kit and caboodle is coming crashing down because President Trump is a fighter.  Trump has the bully pulpit and as Matt Taibbi pointed out, “the public sees us (the media) as fools and it doesn’t matter what we write because nobody believes us anyway. 

Now our entire intelligence apparatus and media mocking bird media are under fire, they are desperate to discredit the Trump Administration and impeach Trump before the truth can come out.  Enter stage right, Attorney General William Barr and his appointed prosecutor John Durham.  From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

Will Durham Investigation Tank Impeachment Efforts?

If the recent moves by prosecutor John Durham are any indication, some important people have cause to be worried. After the investigation into the origin of the Russia probe became a criminal matter, many have speculated as to who might be in Durham’s crosshairs.

Sources familiar with Durham’s investigation recently told Fox News the prosecutor likely has evidence that crimes were committed. So who is guilty of wrongdoing, and how will the progressive left, who championed the failed Russia collusion narrative, react?

Indictments On The Horizon?

Durham recently elevated his investigation to criminal status, which broadens the powers of the authorities looking into the matter. It means he can subpoena witnesses, call a grand jury, and take other actions. Fox News’ source indicated that the prosecutor might know already who engaged in illegal activities.

“You do not impanel a grand jury at this point unless you are going to indict,” the source said. “Durham is at a point where he knows he has crimes and now the question is how many people were involved and they have a pretty good idea of that group of people and what the charges can be and whether or not they can get some cooperators.”

If the source is correct, it means Durham possesses much of the information he needs to issue indictments. Perhaps elevating the investigation gets him closer to uncovering the rest of the crimes. If this is true, Durham’s probe is likely to send the progressive left into a tizzy; they did not expect to be on the receiving end of this strategy. So how will the Democrats and their close allies in the corporate press react if the prosecutor files indictments and makes arrests? It seems they have already given us a clue.

How Will The Left React?

The Democrats have already placed Durham in their sights, and the leaders are rushing to condemn Attorney General William Barr for daring to investigate government officials for potential wrongdoing. With no sense of irony, they accuse the Justice Department of conducting a politically motivated investigation to harm Trump’s political opponents. This is what a lack of self-awareness looks like, folks.

William Barr

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) issued a joint statement, lashing out at the attorney general. “The Department of Justice under AG Barr has lost its independence and become a vehicle for President Trump’s political revenge,” they whined. “If the Department of Justice may be used as a tool of political retribution or to help the President with a political narrative for the next election, the rule of law will suffer new and irreparable damage.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) claimed that Durham’s investigation is not warranted. He stated that the Senate Intelligence Committee “is wrapping up a three-year bipartisan investigation, and we’ve found nothing remotely justifying this.”

Apparently, the Democrats have embraced the “good for me but not for thee” policy over the past three years when it comes to investigations.

What About Impeachment?

In the midst of an attempt to impeach President Donald Trump, the arrests of government officials who began an obvious politically motivated investigation is the last thing the Democrats want. While they use the president’s phone call with Ukraine as a pretext to conduct yet another probe, it might not be a good look if Durham indicts other officials for doing the same.

Fox News also reported that the prosecutor is “very interested” in questioning former CIA Director John Brennan and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper. In fact, another source told Fox that Brennan was informed by his attorney that Durham might reach out to him. FBI agent Peter Strzok – a key member of the team investigating the Trump campaign – also might be a focus of the continuing investigation. He has been the subject of scrutiny since messages between himself and former FBI attorney Lisa Page revealed a distinct anti-Trump bias.

It is no secret that the Democrats have been planning to impeach Trump since five minutes after he won the election in 2016. The false Russia collusion narrative was supposed to be the kill shot to the president’s time in office. But special counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed that their efforts were based on utter falsehoods. Now, the left has replaced Russia with Ukraine, hoping to pound a final nail in the coffin. It is clear to anyone following politics that it is out to get Trump by any means necessary.

However, if Durham’s investigation results in indictments of prominent individuals who targeted the president during the 2016 campaign season, it might be yet another demonstration that Democrats are motivated by politics when it comes to removing Trump, not a sense of duty or altruism. It is one thing to lead an impeachment effort based on “Orange Man Bad;” it is quite another if the DOJ exposes left-leaning government officials who used illegal means to damage the president.

Support for impeachment is still high, but it is sinking. As time goes on, with no new compelling evidence against Trump, it will continue to decline. If Durham arrests political actors who worked against the Trump administration, the American public will see through the effort to unseat the president through the impeachment process. Then the Democrats will not have the support they need to push it through. Either way, it looks like the Democrats’ only hope for victory lies with the 2020 election, not the impeachment process.

Ouch, that’s the worst thing that can happen to the two-headed War and Terrorism Party.  “Their only hope for victory lies with the 2020 election.”  If that’s the case a stake has been driven through their black heart.

The Liberal Democratic Party does not exist, the Conservative Republican Party does not exist. One party exists, it is a War and Terrorism Party consisting of Oligarchs controlled and run by Wall Street and London banks and their enforcement arm’s the CIA, FBI and MI6. We were warned that anyone who dares to drain America’s filthy, deadly CIA swamp beware.  The CIA has six ways from Sunday to get even with you.  Turns out that the CIA is about as powerful as the Wizard of Oz hiding behind a curtains bellowing out scary threats.

Trump is fighting back and that’s bad news for the War and Terrorism Party.  They foolishly have put all their putrid eggs in one basket the impeachment basket believing they could continue to hide behind a media provided curtain of deceit.  God Bless President Trump for taking on the CIA and exposing rot that has permeated our government for too long and God Bless America.

Kaboom! Russia-gate probe reveals explosive evidence of Obama Administration and DNC massive corruption and theft in Ukraine

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” ― John Adams

“A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

The impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump committed high crimes or misdemeanors in requesting Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate whether Joe Biden or his son were involved in corruption in Ukraine is a sham.  After Attorney General Bill Barr launched an investigation into the origins of the highly dubious Russia-gate charges launched by the DNC, panic and desperation ensued.  Desperate to cover up the massive theft of taxpayer money and corruption of the Obama Administration Dems put impeachment on the fast track.

The so called whistleblowers are CIA spooks who were complicit in the massive crimes against the American taxpayers and the people of Ukraine.  The crimes were committed by Democrats in the highest levels in the DNC, CIA, State Department, Pentagon as well as the British MI6.   From The Unz Review:

Excerpt:

The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats

A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"

Mr. Tsarev with Israel Shamir in Crimea

Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts. The mysterious ‘whistleblower’ whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine’s presidency, Oleg Tsarev.

Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after President Yanukovych’s flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life.

During the failed attempt to secede, he was elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.

Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?

Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama’s administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.

It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption.

The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very little expenditure.

After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.

Burisma Gas Company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company’s board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko’s appetites. He had brought in Biden’s son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn’t help him.

Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these ‘stars’ between 50 and 150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. THIS IS ILLEGAL BY THE UKRAINIAN TAX CODE; IT CAN’T BE RECOGNISED AS LEGITIMATE EXPENDITURE.

At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ funds won’t pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, THE BURISMA OWNER, PAID BIDEN WELL FOR THIS CONVERSATION: HE RECEIVED BETWEEN THREE AND TEN MILLION DOLLARS, ACCORDING TO DIFFERENT SOURCES.

AG Shokin said he can’t close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash case.

What is Firtash Case?

THE DEMOCRATS WANTED TO GET ANOTHER UKRAINIAN OLIGARCH, MR FIRTASH, TO THE US AND MAKE HIM TO CONFESS THAT HE ILLEGALLY SUPPORTED TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN FOR THE SAKE OF RUSSIA. Firtash had been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin’s deposition to substantiate their claim.

For this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash’s funds helped Trump to win elections, an extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].

Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could give or withhold?

It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for “support of democracy”. First billion dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the “acting President”.

The Ukrainian constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, “the acting President” had no right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, BIDEN COUNTERSIGNED THE PAPERS SIGNED BY TURCHYNOV AND ALLOCATED MONEY FOR UKRAINE. AND THE MONEY WAS STOLEN – BY THE DEMOCRATS AND THEIR UKRAINIAN COUNTERPARTS.

Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.

As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for “Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers’ money”. Among the accused there are two consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, AND THREE US BANKS. The investigation caused the USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. AS TRUMP SAID, NOW THE US DOES NOT GIVE AWAY MONEY AND DOES NOT IMPOSE DEMOCRACY.

THE MONEY WAS ALLOCATED WITH THE FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF AMERICAN LAW. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.

Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have many friends who are Sam’s friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg.

IF TRUMP WILL CARRY ON, AND USE WHAT WAS ALREADY INITIATED AND INVESTIGATED, THE WHOLE HEADQUARTERS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WILL COME DOWN. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic Party are involved.

Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp.

And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats’ influence?

If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky’s side.

This man was (perhaps) a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk. He is also the man the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer’s best dollars. THE DOJ ISSUED AN ORDER FOR HIS ARREST. NATURALLY HE IS DEVOTED TO BIDEN PERSONALLY, AND TO THE DEMS IN GENERAL. I WOULD NOT TRUST HIS VERSION OF THE PHONE CALL AT ALL.

Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president’s administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan, who allegedly framed Daniluk.)

This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is Amos J. Hochstein, a protege of former VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen Andrew Favorov, the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive “reverse gas import” into Ukraine.

In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.

In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta, producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A TYPICAL DEMOCRAT SPOOK, NOW HE GETS PROFITS FROM UKRAINIAN ORE DEPOSITS.

One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius, the former Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for Statecraft, a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations, subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war. In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters.

The kills were ascribed to the Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In 1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence “had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings concerning the company’s vast debts”, in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.

In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who called himself the “acting President” and who countersigned Joe Biden’s billion dollars’ grant.

In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.

When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren’t destroyed by fire, they weren’t there in the first place.

Instead of being used to kill the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, THE HARDWARE HAD BEEN SHIPPED FROM THE PORT OF NIKOLAEV TO SYRIA, TO THE ISLAMIC REBELS AND TO ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).

THE LOSS WAS OF UKRAINIAN PEOPLE, AND OF US TAXPAYERS, WHILE THE BENEFICIARIES WERE THE DEEP STATE, WHICH IS PROBABLY JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR THE DEADLY MIX OF SPOOKS, MEDIA AND POLITICIANS.

The Democratic Party no longer exists, what has replaced it is a highly corrupt amalgam of crooks from the George W. Bush Administration and Obama Administration who have committed massive theft of the American taxpayers money.  They are what Tulsi Gabbard called “the rot that has infected the Democratic Party.”

Isn’t it rich?  The Democrats want Trump impeached for holding up funds they authorized for the government of Ukraine, money that will go directly into their own and their families’ pockets, with a little off the top for the corrupt Ukraine government cronies. 

These Democrats and their family members siphoned billions of taxpayers’ dollars that they funneled through the corrupt government they illegally installed in Ukraine after a CIA/State Department/MI6 coup.  The American taxpayers bear the burden of paying interest on the trillions the Federal Reserve Bank printed up to pay for it.  The politicians call the billions in interest payments to the Federal Reserve “an entitlement” therefore when they lump the interest owed to the Federal Reserve Bank with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid they tell the American people that entitlements are bankrupting the country. 

The Democrats are desperate to stop Barr’s investigation because if brought to light there will be no Democrats left.  From Larry Johnson atLaRouche Pub:

Larry Johnson Writes, Attorney General Barr Has ‘Pulled the Trigger’

Oct. 26, 2019 (EIRNS)—Writing on the “Sic Semper Tyrannis” website, Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who helped create the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), proclaims that the counterpunch against the attempted coup has been kicked into high gear under the direction Attorney General Bill Barr. Johnson writes:

“I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that these three events occurred late last night [Thursday night]:

“1. The investigation of the roots of the plot to destroy Donald Trump and his Presidency is now a criminal matter.

“2. A letter from Inspector General Horowitz announcing that his report on the FISA fraud would be out shortly with no major redactions.

“3. The Government caved to Honey Badger Sidney Powell and allowed her to fully expose criminal conduct by Michael Flynn’s prosecutors.

“What is going on? Two words. Bill Barr. The Attorney General has pulled the trigger and altered the landscape in the Russiagate saga. Having been granted full authority by the President to declassify information, including intel from the CIA and the NSA, he has now acted in a powerful, but low key way.

The announcement that this is now a criminal investigation means that anyone, including FBI agents and CIA officers, who try to hold back information or hide information will be vulnerable to obstruction of justice charges. Criminal penalties attach....

“Christopher Wray and his sycophants last night folded like a cheap tent in a hurricane in terms of blocking release of the Inspector General report on FISA abuses. They also withdrew the FBI objections to the Exhibits that Sidney Powell had attached to her brief explaining why the FBI had engaged in criminal activity against her client, Gen. Mike Flynn.

“When Durham goes to the CIA, the DIA and the NSA asking questions and demanding documents they must cooperate or face criminal charges. That is the gamechanger.”

Gamechanger indeed.  Let the impeachments begin, not of Trump but the Obama Administration, the DNC, CIA, State Department and all those involved.  The crimes committed should carry life sentences for the damage they caused the American people and the Ukrainian people and the people of Syria.  From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

The DOJ's Russiagate Probe Just Turned Into A Criminal Investigation

What began as an administrative review by the Justice Department into the origins of Russiagate has "shifted" to a criminal inquiry, according to the New York Times, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The move will allow prosecutor John H Durham the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, to impanel a grand jury, and to file criminal charges. Durham's progress has been closely monitored by Attorney General William Barr, who appointed the veteran investigator in May, tasking him with looking into FBI and CIA intelligence gathering operations surrounding the 2016 US election.

US Attorney John Durham

As the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross notes, Barr said on April 10 that he believed "spying" had taken place against the Trump campaign, and that he doesn't buy former FBI officials' version of how the collusion investigation began.  Little is known about Durham’s activities so far in the investigation. The Times report said it is unclear when the investigation took on a criminal element, or what specific crime Durham is investigating.

Durham accompanied Barr to Italy late in September as part of an inquiry into U.S. intelligence agents’ activities there during the 2016 campaign. They also inquired about Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious Maltese professor who established contact with Trump aide George Papadopoulos in 2016. -Daily Caller

Just over three weeks ago, the Times also reported that President Trump asked the Australian Prime Minister to help Barr uncover the origins of "Russiagate," a move which Justice Department officials said "would be neither illegal nor untoward for Trump to ask."

And according to NBC News, Durham has set his sights on former CIA Director John Brennan and former national intelligence director James Clapper.

Durham's investigation has been running parallel to a probe by Justice Department Inspector General (and registered Democrat) Michael Horowitz, who told Congress on Thursday that he expects his report to be "lengthy," but able to be made mostly available to the public.

The Durham probe is similar to a Justice Department inspector general’s investigation into the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page…

Horowitz has been investigating whether the FBI misled the foreign surveillance court in spy applications against Page. Investigators relied heavily on the Steele dossier in the applications, though information in that document was largely unverified. Unlike Durham, Horowitz has not had subpoena power, and cannot use a grand jury as part of his investigation. -Daily Caller

And of course, with Durham's administrative review turning into a criminal probe, the Times has already given away the predictable response from the left; Barr is investigating the Obama intelligence community to help Trump win in 2020. Nothing to see here folks, right?

Yeah, nothing to see here.  Barr is Trump’s puppet, Joe Biden and his son have been cleared of any wrong doing, that’s all you hear from the Mainstream Media.  Now we are being told, “how dare you challenge the brave whistle blowers, they are heroes.”  From David Stockman at Lew Rockwell:

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Deep State and It's Feeding the Anti-POTUS Mob

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Deep State and It's Feeding the Anti-POTUS Mob

The prepared statement of the latest UkraineGate whistle-blower is well worth the read. It tells you all you need to know about why the Deep State apparatchiks are coming out of the woodwork in a massive assault on America’s duly elected president.

They are deathly afraid Trump will begin to dismantle a far-flung Empire which has wreaked havoc around the world, bled America’s fiscal accounts dry, and fostered unspeakable prosperity among the beltway’s legions of empire-supporting agencies, contractors, think tanks, foreign lobbies, NGO’s and K-street racketeers.

Whether out of common sense, naiveté or just contrariness, the Donald has dared to question and disrupt the Empire’s core policy on the Ukraine/Russia file. And that’s apparently exactly why the whistleblower de jour, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, wrote his now ballyhooed memos.

He feared that Trump’s appropriate desire to get to the bottom of the well-documented Ukrainian involvement in the Obama Administration’s illegal spying on his 2016 presidential campaign would undermine the bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill for Washington’s utterly wrong-headed Ukraine policy.

Stated more crudely, Washington overthrew the duly elected government of Ukraine in early 2014 because its leader was deemed too cozy with Moscow. And in the vanguard of that illegal meddling in the governance of a sovereign foreign state was Obama’s state department led by neocon Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, Washington’s self-appointed roving proconsul John McCain and at length Vice-President Joe Biden.

After aiding a motley phalanx of ultra-nationalists, crypto-Nazi and political fortune seekers in overthrowing President Viktor Yanukovych, Washington has stood-up what are essentially puppet governments. The purpose has been to cause maximum abrasion with Putin and Russia; and at a cost of billions in aid from the US and other western agencies designed to prop up the economic basket case and cesspool of corruption which passes for the Ukrainian economy…

As it happens, Lt. Colonel Vindman is a vociferous partisan of Washington’s Big Lie about the Russian ogre, and was virtually a fifth column operative in the viper’s nest of neocons at the Donald’s national security council. In fact, Vindman reported to Russophobe Fiona Hill, who reported to the Walrus of Forever War himself, John Bolton.

So despite all the Democrats’ crocodile tears for the constitution and rule of law, Vindman’s beef wasn’t really about their whole abuse of power canard. Nor did it touch upon the risible Dem/MSM nonsense that in asking a foreign government to undertake a legitimate action (an investigation of the corrupt use of taxpayers money by the former Vice President) Trump was committing a violation of U.S. election laws.

To the contrary, the gravamen of the colonel’s concern was domestic politics and the possibility that in withholding the $380 million of pending Ukrainian AID (WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN ZERO IN THE FIRST PLACE) and pressing the Biden investigation, Trump would alienate Capitol Hill Democrats and leave the Deep State’s policy of using the Ukraine as an anti-Putin battering ram high and dry.

“…. I was worried about the implications for the US government’s support of Ukraine…. “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”

“This would all undermine US national security. Following the call, I again reported my concerns to NSC’s lead counsel.”

FOLKS, LT. COL. VINDMAN WAS NOT ELECTED TO NOTHIN’. If he’s a proud 20-year veteran of the US Army and diplomatic service as he claims, fine.  But his job is to implement policy as decided by the elected representatives of the people, not to free lance in the cause of the Empire group-think in which he is obviously and hopelessly steeped.

So let’s cut to the chase: The policy he feared the Donald might be jeopardizing by his pressure tactics with President Zelensky has been a travesty from start to finish. The Ukraine has no bearing on America’s homeland security whatsoever, and the policies of its government vis-à-vis Russia or any of its other neighbors are none of Washington’s cotton picking business.

You can’t be more emphatic about the utter irrelevancy of Ukraine to America’s homeland security. Even at the pre-coup peak in 2013 it had a minuscule GDP of $185 billion, which has since plunged by 30% to $130 billion. Even if Putin were foolish enough to annex the approximate 30 million Russian-hating Ukrainians outside of the Russian-speaking eastern Donbas region, which he surely is not, it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans in the strategic equation.

Ukraine amounts to just 8% of Russia’s pint-sized GDP and is actually worthless to the Kremlin. That’s because the cost of occupation and pacification of the non-Russian speaking majority of the country would vastly outweigh whatever industrial and material output it might steal from the Ukrainians.

Besides, what in the hell is wrong with Washington when it gets all hot and bothered about a no-count territory plagued with economic failure and which generates annually about two days worth of US output?

Moreover, even if you have warm and fuzzy regard for the rights and liberties of the Ukrainian “nation”, which has existed only infrequently as an independent state with wildly variant borders during the last 800 years, the question remains. Namely, how in the world can it be argued that its people were not better off in 2013 under an elected government of the Regions party that tilted toward Russia compared to the economic calamity which exits today and is only saved from complete collapse by US and European subventions?

So here’s where the Deep State’s hegemonic “sole superpower” world view comes in. Washington’s Ukraine policy has nothing to do with homeland security or prevention of military attack on American shores.

Instead, it is based on policing the world and demonizing the rump-state of Russia which emerged after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991. What was left was a decimated economy with half the former population and a current day GDP of $1.6 trillion, which is actually less than the GDP of the New York metro area.

Still, the Warfare State needs palpable “enemies” and adversaries – no matter how tendentious the case – to justify its massive fiscal drain ($1.1 trillion counting everything) on US taxpayers, both current and unborn; and it also needs expansive missions like spreading the blessings of democracy, prosperity and western culture to the far corners of the earth.

And that’s not our hyperbole in the slightest; it’s essentially the content of Vindman’s whistleblower testimony to Shifty Schiff’s Star Chamber proceedings today.  Thus, when it comes to the blatant lie that Russia is an expansionist power, Vindman’s purple prose would make even the late warmongering Senator from Arizona proud:

Since 2008, Russia has manifested an overtly aggressive foreign policy, leveraging military power and employing hybrid warfare to achieve its objectives of regional hegemony and global influence. Absent a deterrent to dissuade Russia from such aggression, there is an increased risk of further confrontations with the West. In this situation, a strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.

Wow! That’s just bellicose rubbish. A “frontline state and bulwark”my eye.  In fact, during the years since 1991 when Washington has invaded and virtually destroyed upwards of a dozen sovereign countries, Russia hasn’t invaded anyone!

But the reference to 2008 does tell you exactly where Vindman is coming from. He’s obviously referring to Russia’s thwarting of Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia in August 2008.  That incident has been spun by the Deep State ever since as Russian aggression when it was just the opposite.

To wit, it was an aggressive military invasion by Georgia designed to reclaim the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. The real culprit was its mercurial leader and Washington tool, Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been egged on by Senator McCain and the usual cast of neocons with the promise of Washington military help, which fortunately did not happen.

But a subsequent 1,000 page report by an independent EU fact-finding mission led by a renown Swiss diplomat makes clear that the Georgian accusations of Russian aggression were completely fabricated.

“It was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked (South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali” said Heidi Tagliavini, the mission head, in a statement. Although the EU commission tactfully avoided using the word “lie,” the report implies that Saakashvili did not tell the truth about how the war started.

The same is true of the so-called annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s support for the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine. 

As to the former, the population of Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian, and for 171-years from 1783 to 1954 it was an integral province of Czarist Russia. It got arbitrarily assigned to the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev after he won the post-Stalin power struggle in 1954 as a reward to his compatriots in Kiev – even though less than 15% of the population was Ukrainian.

After the US funded, supported and instantly recognized coup in Kiev in February 2014 and the immediate passage of virulent anti-Russian legislation by the putsch, the Russian-speaking population of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (87%) to return to Mother Russia. The so-called coercive annexation by Russia is a figment of War Party propaganda, and implies a willingness to use American money and arms to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium.

And the same story goes for the Donbas. The largely Russian speaking population of this industrial region, which is highly integrated with the Russian economy, wants to be separated from the Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev who have launched a vicious war to subdue them.  But if the Donbas were to be partitioned or even if it voted to join the Russian Federation, so what?

The honest truth of the matter is that Europe is flush with partitioned states. These include Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as the manifold offspring of Yugoslavia including North Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, which, at the insistence of Washington, got further carved up by the partition of Kosovo.

That is to say, once Washington upended the tenuous political/ethnic balance of post-Soviet Ukraine by supporting the nationalist coup, there was still no reason that the Yugoslav model of partition could not have settled the matter.

In fact, the 5-year war on the Donbas – which has killed upwards of 20,000 and brought economic and fiscal ruin to both the region and Ukraine as a whole – wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks without the promise of western economic and military aid and political support.

The needless tragedy there is not the fruit of Russian aggression. It’s the consequence of Washington meddling, including all the corruption which has flowered after Ukraine was turned into a Washington vassal and found it necessary to hire Washington lobbyists and racketeers like Hunter Biden and Devon Archer (then Secretary of State John Kerry’s former campaign bundler) to keep the cash flowing.

Needless to say, the Deep State slathers this toxic reality in a narrative that is pure hogwash. And Colonel Vindman has it down pat: Namely, under the tutelage, money and political and military cover of the Washington Imperium, Ukraine is to be brought into the “Euro-Atlantic community” as a splendid new democracy.

The bolded term, of course, is an undisguised euphemism for NATO:

In spite of being under assault from Russia for more than five years, Ukraine has taken major steps towards integrating with the West. The US government policy community’s view is that the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity.

The United States and Ukraine are and must remain strategic partners, working together to realize the shared vision of a stable, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine that is integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.

Here’s the thing. The expansion of NATO to the very doorstep of Russia was the most colossal mistake of the post-cold war period. And the War Party’s insistence that this should to taken all the way to the incorporation of Ukraine and Georgia – historic vassals of Russia – actually trespasses upon the very border of insanity.

Indeed, the father of containment and the intellectual architect of NATO in the late 1940s, the great George F. Kennan, hit the nail on the head when lightweight Clintonistas like Strobe Talbot and Madeleine Albright launched the NATO expansion process in the 1990s:

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.

This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.

Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was US Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.”

He couldn’t have been more right about the substance of what would happen. But little did even Kennan realize that once in motion any even tepid effort to question or stop it – per the Donald’s campaign rhetoric about the obsolescence of NATO – would actually provoke a Deep State assault on American democracy itself.

So there’s your Deep State at work. It isn’t some kind of sinister conspiracy lurking deep in the shadows of the national security machinery.  To the contrary, it’s right there in the broad daylight of the Imperial City.

It is populated by hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers like Colonel Vindman who make a career of drinking the Cool Aid, collecting a pay check from the state and propagating the policies of Empire First – policies which are immoral, illegal, unaffordable and have absolutely nothing to do with protecting America’s liberty, prosperity and security inside the great ocean moats, which once upon a time birthed a peace-loving Republic.

We have no illusions, of course, that the Donald is a peace-lover. He’s self-evidently first and foremost a Donald-lover.  Still, what is underway in Washington – first with the RussiaGate hoax and now with UkraineGate and impeachment – is an extra-constitutional political lynching, and one that has turned Washington’s desperate, mendacious Dem pols into complaisant handmaids of the Deep State.

So Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman isn’t some kind of whistle-blowing hero. He’s just another mindless cog in the wheel of Empire talking his own book and thereby abetting the political mob that is now threatening the very constitution he was sworn to uphold.

It’s on folks!  Having watched every minute of the Nixon impeachment on TV, I can tell you that this is going to be must watch TV.  Every minute is going to be as exciting as a roller coaster ride.  What’s even more exciting this time is that there is an election coming up and the DNC is ready to implode on live TV. 

This gives a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard a huge advantage as she is the only one who has been calling out the DNC for its massive corruption.  After the whole explosion that will take down the entire Democratic hierarchy Tulsi may be the only Democrat left standing.  So get your popcorn and beverages and get set because Kaboom!  Russia-gate probe has exposed explosive evidence of Obama Administration and DNC massive corruption and theft in Ukraine.