#UkraineGate: The CrowdStrike Angle

Posted on | October 10, 2019 | Comments Off on #UkraineGate: The CrowdStrike Angle

In his telephone conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump requested Ukraine’s help in getting “to the bottom of” the Russian collusion narrative and the role of CrowdStrike, a private computer security company, in propagating that story. Lost in the volcanic eruption of faux outrage and condemnation aimed at the president by the Democrats and their wholly owned media subsidiary, this reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the Justice Department’s investigation of the counterintelligence operation against candidate and president-elect Trump may be hot on the trail of exposing what could well be a seminal lie that the Democratic National Committee’s computer server was hacked by Russian operatives. To understand why, consider the following:
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release stolen computer files that pertained to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Two days later, CrowdStrike, which was working for the DNC, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC’s computer server. . . .
In their breathless coverage of the Russian hacking story, the media downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative victim. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server.
But the DNC refused.
Why would the purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Was it hiding something? Was it afraid the server’s contents would discredit the Russia-hacking story? . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.

Category: Democrats, Ukraine

BREAKING: Giuliani Ukrainian Associates Charged in Campaign Finance Case

Posted on | October 10, 2019 | Comments Off on BREAKING: Giuliani Ukrainian Associates Charged in Campaign Finance Case

The Wall Street Journal story is behind a paywall, so I’ll have to give the report to you from NBC News:

Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, two foreign-born donors who gave money to a political action committee supporting President Donald Trump, were arrested Wednesday night and face charges tied to campaign-finance violations, two law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News.
The pair are expected to appear in federal court Thursday.
Fruman and Parnas worked with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, Giuliani has previously said, as part of his dealings in Ukraine that involved efforts to encourage the nation to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Parnas is Ukrainian, while Fruman is Belarusian, according to the indictment unsealed Thursday. . . .
Fruman and Parnas are charged with making $325,000 in illegal straw donations to a Trump super PAC, according to the indictment, as well as giving $15,000 to a second committee.
In May 2018, the two men gave $325,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC American First Action through an LLC, the group confirmed to NBC News. . . .
House committees involved in the recently launched impeachment inquiry sought documents and depositions from Parnas and Fruman. Parnas was requested to appear before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight Committees Thursday, while Fruman was requested to appear Friday.

What’s happening here? It’s very simple: If you are connected to Trump in any way, you will become a target of investigation.

The Deep State wants to make it a crime to be a Republican.

Category: Ukraine

In Georgia Divorce Case, Lesbian Claims Her Same-Sex Marriage Wasn’t Real

Posted on | October 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

Lee Kyser (left) and Lawrie Demorest (right) with Nancy Pelosi in 2007.

A major LGBT activist who now faces a divorce filing from her longtime lesbian partner is claiming their marriage was never legally valid:

Atlanta attorney Lawrie Demorest has devoted tremendous energy and earnings to the fight for LGBTQ equality, but in response to an atypical divorce action brought by her lesbian partner, the former co-chair of the board of directors for the Human Rights Campaign has tried to legally nullify a relationship she once said should be treated the same as a marriage.
In some ways, Demorest is arguing against her younger self in a case that involves an expired marriage statute, the reach of Obergerfell v. Hodges and whether a national leader on LGBTQ rights abandoned the spirit of marriage equality in her personal life.

In 1998, hundreds attended Demorest’s “wedding” ceremony with her partner Lee Kyser at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and Kyser subsequently quit her job to care for the twin infants the lesbian couple adopted. In 2004, they sued Atlanta’s prestigious Druid Hills Golf Club for discrimination, claiming they were not being treated equally to heterosexual couples, but now Demorest argues they never were:

Yet, in an affidavit Demorest filed as part of her attempt to dismiss a Complaint for Divorce filed by Kyser in DeKalb County, Georgia, Demorest said she didn’t have “any inkling” that Kyser would one day pretend their relationship had been a marriage.
“I just can’t get over her blindness,” Kyser told LGBTQ Nation. “How did she get to [a place] where she really talked herself into believing that she can advocate for equality and have this tremendous reputation, and then turn around and try to exit our relationship in this way, which is totally contradictory to fairness and equity. To have built up such a reputation professionally and politically, and to then turn and handle her own relationship and family like this just tears it down.” . . .
In her complaint, Kyser evoked both the Obergefell ruling and common law marriage, which was abolished in Georgia in 1997. Her attorneys have argued these combined principles retroactively date the start of Kyser and Demorest’s marriage to July 1996, when Kyser moved into Demorest’s home. . . .
In a motion to outright dismiss Kyser’s standing to file a divorce, Demorest said the couple began cohabitating because Kyser wanted to rent out her home while the summer Olympics were in Atlanta.
“When I agreed for Lee to move in with me in 1996, I never considered whether this would impose any long term legal obligations on me … because they were not available to us as a same-sex couple,” Demorest said in a sworn affidavit. “I never knowingly took on such legal responsibilities and never expected any legal implications to arise from our dating relationship or our agreement to live together.”
However, over the next two decades, Demorest and Kyser co-mingled their finances, brought property together, agreed that Kyser would scale back her psycholgical practice in order to raise the infant twins the couple adopted, and fought on behalf of same-sex couples, including jointly giving more than $175,000 to HRC.
When Demorest told Kyser she was leaving the relationship in December 2017, Kyser said her ex-partner proposed they each walk away with what was titled in their own names, despite having agreed decades earlier that Demorest would be the family’s breadwinner. Kyser’s only source of income at the time was social security, and she accused Demorest of setting her up for “an undignified retirement.”

Well, isn’t this an ugly little sequel to “marriage equality”? And I wonder how their adopted twins are dealing with this trauma . . .

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

— (((WJJ Hoge))) (@wjjhoge) October 10, 2019

Category: Gays, Marriage

Ukraine Official Says Joe Biden Got Paid $900,000 to Lobby for Burisma

Posted on | October 9, 2019 | 2 Comments

Reported by Cristina Laila at Gateway Pundit:

Former Vice President Joe Biden was personally paid $900,000 for lobbying activities from Burisma Holdings, according to Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach.
Derkach publicized the documents at a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency Wednesday as he said the records, “describe the mechanism of getting money by Biden Sr.”
“This was the transfer of Burisma Group’s funds for lobbying activities, as investigators believe, personally to Joe Biden through a lobbying company. Funds in the amount of $900,000 were transferred to the U.S.-based company Rosemont Seneca Partners, which according to open sources, in particular, the New York Times, is affiliated with Biden. The payment reference was payment for consultative services,” Derkach said.
He also publicized sums that were transferred to Burisma Group representatives, in particular Hunter Biden, a son of the former U.S. vice president.
“According to the documents, Burisma paid no less than $16.5 million to [former Polish President, who became an independent director at Burisma Holdings in 2014] Aleksander Kwasniewski, [chairman of the Burisma board of independent directors] Alan Apter, [Burisma independent director] Devon Archer and Hunter Biden [who joined the Burisma board of directors in 2014],” Derkach said.
“Using political and economic levers of influencing Ukrainian authorities and manipulating the issue of providing financial aid to Ukraine, Joe Biden actively assisted closing criminal cases into the activity of former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, who is the founder and owner of Burisma Group,” he said.
“Biden’s fifth visit to Kyiv on December 7-8, 2015 was devoted to making a decision on the resignation of [then Ukrainian Prosecutor General] Viktor Shokin over the case of Zlochevsky and Burisma. Loan guarantees worth $1 billion that the United States was to give to Ukraine was the point of pressure. Biden himself admitted exerting pressure in his speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in January 2018, calling Shokin ‘son of a bitch who was fired’,” Derkach said.

Question: Do I know this to be true? No, but what Derkach is saying matches what is known about Hunter Biden’s role in Rosemont Seneca:

Hunter Biden co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners in 2009 with Christopher Heinz, stepson of John Kerry, the former secretary of state, and scion of the Heinz processed food fortune, and Devon Archer, a financier and former Abercrombie & Fitch model who attended Yale with Mr Heinz.
In 2014, Rosemont Seneca was involved in an attempted $1.5bn fundraise for a new fund launched by Harvest Fund Management and Bohai Industrial Group, the Chinese asset manager, according to a Wall Street Journal report at the time. The Bank of China International Holdings was one of the biggest stakeholders in Bohai at the time.
Mr Archer first connected with Mykola Zlochevsky, co-founder of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, in 2014 when he travelled there to pitch a Rosemont-linked real estate fund that he managed. Mr Archer joined Burisma’s board in 2014. Hunter joined soon after.

If what Derkach is saying is true, then Rosemont Seneca served as a pass-through by which this Ukrainian bribery was laundered, creating “plausible deniability” for Joe Biden, who can claim that the money he got from his son’s partnership had nothing to do with the Ukraine deal. But we shall wait to see if this story is further confirmed.

Category: Corruption, Joe Biden, Ukraine

In The Mailbox: 10.09.19

Posted on | October 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Sad State Of Disaster Planning
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #768
EBL: Samantha Guthrie’s Not Happy With Matt Lauer
Twitchy: “A Line Has To Be Drawn, And I’m Drawing It” Ethnic Chinese Gamer Mark Kern Goes On Rampage Over Blizzard’s Cowardly Cave To Chicoms
Louder With Crowder: Dakota Meyer On Your Problems vs. Your Inconveniences

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: No Man, No Plan, No Van
American Greatness: There’s No Middle Ground With Today’s Democrats Or The Deep State, also, The Ukraine Hoax Is About Protecting The Side Hustle
American Power: Homelessness In San Francisco
American Thinker: Elizabeth Warren – Leading Liar In The Party of Liars
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Che Guevara Becomes A Good Communist 52 Years Ago Today
BattleSwarm: The Kurdish Conundrum
Camp of the Saints: Trans Revolution, Using The Original Definition Of Revolution
Cafe Hayek: Some Links
CDR Salamander: A Small Measure In Support Of China’s Uighurs
Da Tech Guy: Impeachment Strategy, also, What I Saw During A Side Visit At CPAC 2018 Is Finally Showing Up In Polling
Don Surber: Post-Drudge Conservative News
First Street Journal: President Trump’s Best Ever Address
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I’m So Old…
Hollywood In Toto: Comics Maron, Oswalt, & Waititi Defend Cancel Culture
Joe For America: Hillary Tells Trump “Don’t Tempt Me” To Run In 2020
Legal Insurrection: Fartacus Rides To Joe Biden’s Defense As The Veepstakes Begin, also, Liz Warren Doubles Down, Fundraises Off Pregnancy Discrimination Lie
Michelle Malkin: Surrendering To SPLC’s Lazy Media Lemmings
The PanAm Post: Venezuelan Soldiers Can’t Take On The US
Power Line: Trump Refuses To Participate In Impeachment Farce, also, Leo Baeck – Berlin, 1935
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Calls Out ESPN, NBA For Kowtowing To Chicoms
Shot In The Dark: Potemkin Mall
The Political Hat: Death Of Europe
This Ain’t Hell: AF Colonel Pleads Guilty To Child Porn Charges, also, Too Crude Or Not Too Crude
Victory Girls: PG&E Cuts Power To Millions To Save California From Wildfires
Volokh Conspiracy: Sixers Fans Ejected From Preseason Game For Supporting Hong Kong
Weasel Zippers: Hillary Does A Stacey Abrams, Claims She Won In 2016, also, Did Clapper Just Admit Obama Ordered Him To Go After The Trump Campaign?
Mark Steyn: She’s With Her, also, Toss Another Virgin In The Climate Volcano

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Crime: The Facts Are Racist

Posted on | October 9, 2019 | 2 Comments

Murder suspect Randy Rodriguez Santos was arraigned Sunday.

Reporting about crime is one of the most basic forms of journalism. When I was starting out in the journalism business more than 30 years ago, every daily newspaper had one reporter assigned to the “cops and courts” beat, covering arrests and trials, and the mentality of local TV news was “if it bleeds, it leads.” Every evening at dinner time, the TV news broadcast from a city of any size began with a story about murder, rape or robbery. There was no chance for bias to affect this kind of news, because the daily deadline pressure — the hurry-up to get the story finished — squeezed out any opportunity for political considerations.

Quality crime reporting is good for business. People love that stuff, and there’s a reason why A&E Network’s Live PD is consistently one of the highest-rated shows on cable TV. For some reason, however, within the world of journalism, political reporters have all the prestige, and the snobs in the D.C. press corps look down their noses at the grubby local cops-and-courts reporter. As I explained Saturday (“Who Is Murdering Whom? And How?”) decisions about what sort of crimes deserve national coverage are affected by liberal media bias in a way that local news generally is not. So even the New York Times can do a fairly straightforward murder story:

The man accused of bludgeoning four homeless men to death on Saturday had a history of violence and strange behavior leading up to the horrific attacks, which have shaken the homeless community and renewed awareness of the dangers faced by people living on the street.
The accused killer, Randy Rodriguez Santos, 24, was himself homeless, bouncing from a shelter in Brooklyn to his mother’s apartment in the Bronx and even to a squalid, abandoned building next door to her building.
Mr. Santos was formally charged with four counts of murder on Sunday, but did not speak or enter a plea. . . .
Early Saturday morning, Mr. Santos, walked through Chinatown stalking men who lay on the ground. He swung a three-foot, 15-pound metal pipe at their heads, killing four men, including 83-year-old Chuen Kwok, whose surname is sometimes spell Kok. Another man was critically injured. . . .
Two passers-by witnessed the last attack and called the police, who arrested Mr. Santos at about 2 a.m. at Canal and Mulberry Streets, still carrying a metal bar with blood and hair sticking to it.
People who knew Mr. Santos in the Bronx neighborhood where his mother lives said he appeared to be unraveling mentally in recent weeks. . . .
Mr. Santos had previously been accused in a string of violent assaults targeting random people.
Much of his record is sealed, but he had most recently been arrested in May, when he was kicked out of a men’s shelter in East Flatbush. He pummeled another 24-year-old shelter resident in the face. That case was dismissed.
A year ago, Mr. Santos choked a 55-year-old man and bit his breast at an employment agency in the garment district in Manhattan, the police said. He had leapt across the counter to attack the man. Four days later, he was on a northbound Q train, between Canal Street and Union Square stations, when he yelled out, “We need to stop it!” and punched a 33-year-man in the eye.
He was charged with both assaults.
There were more incidents this year. On Feb. 25, police officers spotted Mr. Santos enter the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Brooklyn through an exit gate without paying and arrested him. At the precinct, he spat on the floor toward a sergeant, the police said.
Less than a week later, he was arrested on a charge of groping a 19-year-old woman at the front door of her apartment building in Jamaica, Queens.
His family in the Bronx had kicked him out. His mother, Fioraliza Rodriguez, told The Daily News she was afraid of him. “I never thought he would kill someone,” she said. “I was afraid of him, though, because he punched me. That’s when I told him to get out of my house.”
The Daily News also reported that Mr. Santos broke his grandfather’s nose in 2016, and sneaked into the family’s home last week and stole a watch, a phone and three phone chargers. . . .
Mr. Santos most recently worked in construction, a job he lost because of excessive drug use, said Nelson Reyes, also a neighbor of Ms. Rodriguez.
“He started smoking crack,” said Mr. Reyes, 39, in an interview with The Times. “Then he started losing his mind.”

If these murders had been committed by a deranged white man, the story would be getting wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, the killer portrayed as a Trump-inspired perpetrator of a “hate crime.” But the suspect is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and so . . . crickets chirping.

Heather Mac Donald paints the larger picture:

[In September], the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points.

John Derbyshire, who was purged from National Review for Thoughtcrime in 2012, calls attention to this underreported reality:

Black on white violence has always been far more common than white on black; and the disproportion is getting worse. And remember, this is by victim reports, not arrests or convictions.
As Heather says, this reality is utterly at odds with the official narrative of vicious “white supremacists” hunting down and assaulting helpless black bodies.

Does our national media establishment imagine that they can simply ignore this reality, and foist upon the American people a fraudulent narrative of black victimhood? Or do you suppose, as I do, that the media’s hostility to truth — facts are racist! — will only serve to further exacerbate the public’s already profound distrust of the news media?

Category: Crime, Media Bias, Racism

‘Chuck Todd Is a Disgrace’

Posted on | October 8, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Chuck Todd Is a Disgrace’

During an interview Sunday on Meet the Press, NBC’s Chuck Todd interrupted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, accusing Johnson of promoting “Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff.” What Johnson had been trying to explain, of course, was how the investigation of Ukraine-connected corruption is related to the origin of the “Russian collusion” hoax the Obama administration perpetrated against Trump.

Monday morning on Fox & Friends, Dan Bongino erupted:

“I’m telling you right now, he should have walked off that set. Chuck Todd is a disgrace to human kind. How this guy pretends still to be a journalist to this day is an embarrassment. Calling out this network, hey, guys, I usually don’t do props here. Here’s an article here, let me read you the headline here. ‘Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.’ That says ‘Politico.’ That doesn’t say Fox News. What’s the date on this? January of 2017. Chuck Todd needs to resign in absolute disgrace. He should issue a full-throated apology to Ron Johnson and no credible Republican should appear on that network again. And let’s just get one thing straight here. Chuck Todd, who works for NBC of all places, the network that hosts Roswell Rachel, who for two years hosted people swearing the collusion hoax was real — we’re the conspiracy theory network, the network that actually nailed this story from day one? We are the conspiracy theory network? And what about this new ‘Politico’ story in Ukraine? What about this story?”

(Hat-tip: Misanthropic Humanitarian at AOSHQ.)

Chuck Todd is, and always has been, a partisan Democrat (just like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos). Todd began his political career working on the 1992 presidential primary campaign of Tom Harkin. No one has ever accused Chuck Todd of being an objective journalist, and his fellow partisan operatives in the media celebrated Todd’s interview with Johnson as a triumph of their (Democrat) cause. It’s disgusting.