Wheels
AH ambassador
Manafort was indicted by Mueller in October, 2017. Manafort/Gates have since been found guilty of breaking FARA rules. ie: Not registering as a foreign agent.
Tony Podesta shut down his lobbying and consulting firm immediately after the Manafort indictment. Manafort and Podesta have worked together with Ukraine, representing Ukrainian interests in America. John and Tony Podesta have both gone to ground in the last year and a half. Occam's Razor would suggest that the Podesta's have issues with FARA regulations as would every organization within the "Deep State" that has taken money from foreign interests to lobby and effect change within America without registering.
If the Podesta's are big fish. Greg Craig is an untouchable within the deep state. Guess what? Craig has been indicted for lying about FARA. Craig served as Obama's in house counsel in the early years. His law firm, of which he served as a partner, Skadden Arps, looks to have flipped on Craig by paying a $4.6M fine and agreeing to cooperate.
It has been known along K Street for years that foreign interests have paid publishing and news organizations along with reporters to write articles favorable to various causes. Middle East countries and China being the main culprits. ie: 1)Qatar paying Khashoggi/ Washington Post to write articles favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. 2) How a horrible massacre against Muslim's in Christchurch gets national media for days and horrible massacre's against Christian's (or if you prefer, Easter worshipers) in Sri Lanka gets a passing mention and is over within 24 hours.
For a few months I have wondered if FARA regulations could/would be used against the MSM. Brian Cates is certainly more in-tune than me. This is an excellent read on what may be facing the MSM over the next few years.
Remember how Al Capone was taken down for income tax evasion? Will FARA be the MSM's kryptonite?
(Reading unrolled twitter feeds isn't always the easiest thing to do, but this read is worth a little effort)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1120431446710214656.html
Brian Cates
@drawandstrike
2 days ago, 41 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
Thread by somebody who knows what he's talking about.
Walks the reader thru [with some links] how Ted Kennedy & Greg Craig were key players in kickstarting what has become the modern day DC foreign bribery industry:
1) #GregoryCraig was Obama's White House Counsel. He was recently indicted for crimes relating to his Ukraine work with #PaulManafort. Now is a good time to look at Craig's career after he helped would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley get off on an insanity plea.
Here's my column from just 2 weeks ago about that modern day foreign bribery industry in DC, which puts American foreign and even domestic policy up for sale to the highest bidder:
You Can't Put America First Until Washington's Foreign Bribery Industry Has Been Shut DownCommentary Many people are wondering where things go from here, now that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has ...https://www.theepochtimes.com/you-cant-put-america-first-until-washingtons-foreign-bribery-industry-has-been-shut-down_2866597.html
In case you want to see an example of foreign cash being used to publish propaganda in our 'news' media disguised as editorial opinion, here's one for you from just yesterday:
Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & AnalysisBreaking news and analysis on politics, business, world national news, entertainment more. In-depth DC, Virginia, Maryland news coverage including traffic, weather, crime, education, restaurant revie…https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/we-should-let-china-spy-on-us/2019/04/20/985dc970-63d1-11e9-bf24-db4b9fb62aa2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.42aa031ada4e
These foreign governments/factions don't just pay bribes to our politicians for favorable policy; they give money to media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post - and those are only the print media. Also networks take this $.
Here's why President Trump is so confidently predicting most of the Fake News media is going to be out of business in just six years:
When ad revenues dropped and subscriptions dropped back in the mid 2000's, they discovered a lucrative new revenue stream.
Many top Fake News outlets are now very, very dependent on the cash they get paid to publish stories from paying clients.
Here's my column from a few months ago about that:
"The Paid-Propaganda-As-News Scam"
The Paid-Propaganda-as-News ScamCommentary One of the biggest dirty secrets of the DNC Media Complex is that, for some time now, ...https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-paid-propaganda-as-news-scam_2802974.html
Many of these Fake News outlets would not survive if they suddenly lost access to the paying clients who have been shelling out big $ to publish propaganda in their outlet disguised as news coverage.
I'm about to drop a huge bomb.
Are you ready?
FARA isn't just about *politicians* doing illegal lobbying. Anybody can do illegal lobbying for a foreign country.
Greg Craig is a LAWYER.
Manafort was never elected to any public office.
Neither was Gates or Van Der Zwaan.
Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, the two Russian Fusion GPS operatives at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting were both doing illegal lobbying against the Magnitsky Act because neither had ever registered as a foreign agent.
NV is a lawyer. RA is a 'consultant'.
Let me tell you now the dirty secret that has *smart* Fake News reporters all over the DNC Media freaking out right now.
They took MONEY from foreign governments/factions to publish their propaganda disguised as 'news coverage' to sway public opinion & affect US foreign policy.
Many in the DNC Media Complex didn't just become paid political hacks for one certain US political party; they became FOREIGN AGENTS working for foreign clients and using their influence to publish stories and LOBBYING on behalf of their foreign clients.
Bob Mueller and his Merry Crew just spent 2 years proving what A Very Bad Thing it is to become a foreign agent without publicly disclosing this and filing as a foreign agent under FARA.
What's that hand I see there?
"But Brian, doesn't the FIRST AMENDMENT give them cover for doing this kind of thing? Doesn't free speech & the freedom of the press allow them to take this foreign money and..."
Why no.
It doesn't.
There's no press exception clause in the FARA act.
"You can totally collude with foreign clients & publish their propaganda from your news outlet to try to influence American policy without disclosing you are now a foreign agent because you are a news media outlet."
So it's not just the smart lawyers and the lobbyists and the consultants in DC who have figured out where this is all now going.
Editors & 'journalists' at many news outlets who became paid foreign agents long ago are suddenly waking up to the danger.
And it's too late. Sessions had Horowitz & Huber & others collect all that evidence long ago. They already know which DNC Media outlets took how much money from which foreign source to publish what propaganda story.
So two things are about to happen:
Many DNC Media outlet's relationships with foreign governments/factions are about to be exposed & charges for not filing as foreign agents are going to be made against top media people.
When that happens, the flow of foreign $ ends.
This exposure of what these Fake News outlets were doing, taking $ from foreign sources to publish propaganda and then fooling their audience by disguising it as news coverage, will cause many of their audience to abandon them at last.
That subscription drop/ratings drop from losing most of the audience they had left plus the spigot of foreign cash being turned off will cause many of these outlets to crater and go bust.
This is what Trump means when says in six years the Fake News Media will be gone.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
The New York Times Sanctuary Cities/Immigration story today was knowingly wrong on almost every fact. They never call to check for truth. Their sources often don’t even exist, a fraud. They will lie & cheat anyway possible to make me look bad. In 6 years they will be gone........
If Qatar *openly paid* some popular media figure to put a propaganda newspaper/network show out there shilling for their interests above American interests to try to sway public opinion, there would be nothing wrong with that.
Everybody would know 'that newspaper/tv show represents Qatar, they are supposed to be giving the Qatarian point of view on stuff and trying to lobby/convince people to give Qatar's gov't what it wants.'
But what WOULD be wrong & illegal is if Qatar under the table pays a supposedly neutral truth-tellin' media outlet to publish/air their Qatarian propaganda *without* disclosing they are now paid agents working on behalf of Qatar.
There are a whole host of countries out there who have discovered it's an effective way to get the American policy they want if they adopt a two pronged approach:
1) illegally lobby the politicians who write the laws thru people like Podesta, Manafort, Craig, etc.
and
2) illegally influence the American public who vote for the politicians by paying media outlets under the table to pimp their positions disguised as news coverage.
There is an entire vast middleman industry that's sprung into existence since the days Kennedy/Craig got the illegal foreign lobbying game going back in the 1980's.
Firms like Fusion GPS & many, many others who put media outlets in contact with foreign clients.
Imagine you are someone like General Flynn or former NSA head Mike Rogers.
You know what the vulnerabilities are to our American system, what steps need to be taken to put American interests and security first.
You spend years watching corruption take hold & grow.
You keep making recommendations to fix the problems, but you soon come to learn many of the politicians who drive American foreign policy don't listen to you because foreign powers using illegal bribery are PAYING them not to listen to you.
So as the problems and dangers and vulnerabilities mount and continue to get worse, you spend years watching the elite political class both in DC and in the Fake News media gorge themselves on the big $ they are taking in from their *real* bosses.
Would that not piss you off? Wouldn't it make you exceedingly angry to watch this?
And if your expertise is counter intelligence, where you entrap and expose/capture foreign spies, what kind of plan might you put in place to fix this terrible situation?
Might you not, say, come up with a way to demonstrate just how bad illegal foreign lobbying is and set up a massive crackdown on it that spans not just the elite class in politics in DC, but also the Fake News media that works hand in glove with them?
As I've said several times, and will continue to say:
Whatever THEY thought they were doing or were going to accomplish, Mueller and his team were LED and GUIDED and DIRECTED into doing something else:
Willingly or not, wittingly or not they proved violating FARA = a big deal
Here's something I still believe that I haven't talked about much recently:
I believe Flynn *deliberately* made himself a target for certain hypocrites. He knew they'd come after him anyway, but he made SURE they came after him on something specific.
He created a door.
And then he tricked them into walking through it.
Have you not wondered in a 2 year long investigation that was supposed to stick to Russian election collusion & then obstruction of the investigation of collusion, all this 'dumb' stupid ILLEGAL LOBBYING stuff keeps cropping up?
"What the hell is this? ANOTHER illegal lobbying case springing out of the Mueller investigation?!" they cried!
It's *almost* as if somebody guided the investigation into....
Nah, couldn't be.
That's just my overactive imagination leading me into a wild conspiracy theory.....
Trump knows what he's doing.
He's always known what he's doing.
Over the next few months 2 years of careful preparation will begin paying off.
And the Fake News media is only JUST NOW awakening to how much trouble it's really in.
/end
ADDENDUM:
Many of the same Fake News media outlets that spent over TWO YEARS pimping a Trump/Russia collusion hoax they knew was FAKE all along have been taking MONEY from foreign governments to publish propaganda to influence American foreign policy.
All these Fake News outlets helped the SpyGate plotters launch a coup against a sitting President based on something they knew was a hoax.
They helped accuse Trump of fake foreign collusion while THEY THEMSELVES were making bank being foreign agents taking illegal bribes.
Try to grasp the full hypocrisy of this, if you can.
Fake News outlets taking big $ from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, Russia and other countries & *colluding* with them to affect our elections & our foreign policy accused an innocent President of doing WHAT THEY DO ALL THE TIME
Trump will expose all these people with absolute glee.
/end
Tony Podesta shut down his lobbying and consulting firm immediately after the Manafort indictment. Manafort and Podesta have worked together with Ukraine, representing Ukrainian interests in America. John and Tony Podesta have both gone to ground in the last year and a half. Occam's Razor would suggest that the Podesta's have issues with FARA regulations as would every organization within the "Deep State" that has taken money from foreign interests to lobby and effect change within America without registering.
If the Podesta's are big fish. Greg Craig is an untouchable within the deep state. Guess what? Craig has been indicted for lying about FARA. Craig served as Obama's in house counsel in the early years. His law firm, of which he served as a partner, Skadden Arps, looks to have flipped on Craig by paying a $4.6M fine and agreeing to cooperate.
It has been known along K Street for years that foreign interests have paid publishing and news organizations along with reporters to write articles favorable to various causes. Middle East countries and China being the main culprits. ie: 1)Qatar paying Khashoggi/ Washington Post to write articles favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. 2) How a horrible massacre against Muslim's in Christchurch gets national media for days and horrible massacre's against Christian's (or if you prefer, Easter worshipers) in Sri Lanka gets a passing mention and is over within 24 hours.
For a few months I have wondered if FARA regulations could/would be used against the MSM. Brian Cates is certainly more in-tune than me. This is an excellent read on what may be facing the MSM over the next few years.
Remember how Al Capone was taken down for income tax evasion? Will FARA be the MSM's kryptonite?
(Reading unrolled twitter feeds isn't always the easiest thing to do, but this read is worth a little effort)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1120431446710214656.html
Brian Cates
@drawandstrike
2 days ago, 41 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
Thread by somebody who knows what he's talking about.
Walks the reader thru [with some links] how Ted Kennedy & Greg Craig were key players in kickstarting what has become the modern day DC foreign bribery industry:
1) #GregoryCraig was Obama's White House Counsel. He was recently indicted for crimes relating to his Ukraine work with #PaulManafort. Now is a good time to look at Craig's career after he helped would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley get off on an insanity plea.
Here's my column from just 2 weeks ago about that modern day foreign bribery industry in DC, which puts American foreign and even domestic policy up for sale to the highest bidder:
You Can't Put America First Until Washington's Foreign Bribery Industry Has Been Shut DownCommentary Many people are wondering where things go from here, now that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has ...https://www.theepochtimes.com/you-cant-put-america-first-until-washingtons-foreign-bribery-industry-has-been-shut-down_2866597.html
In case you want to see an example of foreign cash being used to publish propaganda in our 'news' media disguised as editorial opinion, here's one for you from just yesterday:
Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & AnalysisBreaking news and analysis on politics, business, world national news, entertainment more. In-depth DC, Virginia, Maryland news coverage including traffic, weather, crime, education, restaurant revie…https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/we-should-let-china-spy-on-us/2019/04/20/985dc970-63d1-11e9-bf24-db4b9fb62aa2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.42aa031ada4e
These foreign governments/factions don't just pay bribes to our politicians for favorable policy; they give money to media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post - and those are only the print media. Also networks take this $.
Here's why President Trump is so confidently predicting most of the Fake News media is going to be out of business in just six years:
When ad revenues dropped and subscriptions dropped back in the mid 2000's, they discovered a lucrative new revenue stream.
Many top Fake News outlets are now very, very dependent on the cash they get paid to publish stories from paying clients.
Here's my column from a few months ago about that:
"The Paid-Propaganda-As-News Scam"
The Paid-Propaganda-as-News ScamCommentary One of the biggest dirty secrets of the DNC Media Complex is that, for some time now, ...https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-paid-propaganda-as-news-scam_2802974.html
Many of these Fake News outlets would not survive if they suddenly lost access to the paying clients who have been shelling out big $ to publish propaganda in their outlet disguised as news coverage.
I'm about to drop a huge bomb.
Are you ready?
FARA isn't just about *politicians* doing illegal lobbying. Anybody can do illegal lobbying for a foreign country.
Greg Craig is a LAWYER.
Manafort was never elected to any public office.
Neither was Gates or Van Der Zwaan.
Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, the two Russian Fusion GPS operatives at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting were both doing illegal lobbying against the Magnitsky Act because neither had ever registered as a foreign agent.
NV is a lawyer. RA is a 'consultant'.
Let me tell you now the dirty secret that has *smart* Fake News reporters all over the DNC Media freaking out right now.
They took MONEY from foreign governments/factions to publish their propaganda disguised as 'news coverage' to sway public opinion & affect US foreign policy.
Many in the DNC Media Complex didn't just become paid political hacks for one certain US political party; they became FOREIGN AGENTS working for foreign clients and using their influence to publish stories and LOBBYING on behalf of their foreign clients.
Bob Mueller and his Merry Crew just spent 2 years proving what A Very Bad Thing it is to become a foreign agent without publicly disclosing this and filing as a foreign agent under FARA.
What's that hand I see there?
"But Brian, doesn't the FIRST AMENDMENT give them cover for doing this kind of thing? Doesn't free speech & the freedom of the press allow them to take this foreign money and..."
Why no.
It doesn't.
There's no press exception clause in the FARA act.
"You can totally collude with foreign clients & publish their propaganda from your news outlet to try to influence American policy without disclosing you are now a foreign agent because you are a news media outlet."
So it's not just the smart lawyers and the lobbyists and the consultants in DC who have figured out where this is all now going.
Editors & 'journalists' at many news outlets who became paid foreign agents long ago are suddenly waking up to the danger.
And it's too late. Sessions had Horowitz & Huber & others collect all that evidence long ago. They already know which DNC Media outlets took how much money from which foreign source to publish what propaganda story.
So two things are about to happen:
Many DNC Media outlet's relationships with foreign governments/factions are about to be exposed & charges for not filing as foreign agents are going to be made against top media people.
When that happens, the flow of foreign $ ends.
This exposure of what these Fake News outlets were doing, taking $ from foreign sources to publish propaganda and then fooling their audience by disguising it as news coverage, will cause many of their audience to abandon them at last.
That subscription drop/ratings drop from losing most of the audience they had left plus the spigot of foreign cash being turned off will cause many of these outlets to crater and go bust.
This is what Trump means when says in six years the Fake News Media will be gone.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
The New York Times Sanctuary Cities/Immigration story today was knowingly wrong on almost every fact. They never call to check for truth. Their sources often don’t even exist, a fraud. They will lie & cheat anyway possible to make me look bad. In 6 years they will be gone........
If Qatar *openly paid* some popular media figure to put a propaganda newspaper/network show out there shilling for their interests above American interests to try to sway public opinion, there would be nothing wrong with that.
Everybody would know 'that newspaper/tv show represents Qatar, they are supposed to be giving the Qatarian point of view on stuff and trying to lobby/convince people to give Qatar's gov't what it wants.'
But what WOULD be wrong & illegal is if Qatar under the table pays a supposedly neutral truth-tellin' media outlet to publish/air their Qatarian propaganda *without* disclosing they are now paid agents working on behalf of Qatar.
There are a whole host of countries out there who have discovered it's an effective way to get the American policy they want if they adopt a two pronged approach:
1) illegally lobby the politicians who write the laws thru people like Podesta, Manafort, Craig, etc.
and
2) illegally influence the American public who vote for the politicians by paying media outlets under the table to pimp their positions disguised as news coverage.
There is an entire vast middleman industry that's sprung into existence since the days Kennedy/Craig got the illegal foreign lobbying game going back in the 1980's.
Firms like Fusion GPS & many, many others who put media outlets in contact with foreign clients.
Imagine you are someone like General Flynn or former NSA head Mike Rogers.
You know what the vulnerabilities are to our American system, what steps need to be taken to put American interests and security first.
You spend years watching corruption take hold & grow.
You keep making recommendations to fix the problems, but you soon come to learn many of the politicians who drive American foreign policy don't listen to you because foreign powers using illegal bribery are PAYING them not to listen to you.
So as the problems and dangers and vulnerabilities mount and continue to get worse, you spend years watching the elite political class both in DC and in the Fake News media gorge themselves on the big $ they are taking in from their *real* bosses.
Would that not piss you off? Wouldn't it make you exceedingly angry to watch this?
And if your expertise is counter intelligence, where you entrap and expose/capture foreign spies, what kind of plan might you put in place to fix this terrible situation?
Might you not, say, come up with a way to demonstrate just how bad illegal foreign lobbying is and set up a massive crackdown on it that spans not just the elite class in politics in DC, but also the Fake News media that works hand in glove with them?
As I've said several times, and will continue to say:
Whatever THEY thought they were doing or were going to accomplish, Mueller and his team were LED and GUIDED and DIRECTED into doing something else:
Willingly or not, wittingly or not they proved violating FARA = a big deal
Here's something I still believe that I haven't talked about much recently:
I believe Flynn *deliberately* made himself a target for certain hypocrites. He knew they'd come after him anyway, but he made SURE they came after him on something specific.
He created a door.
And then he tricked them into walking through it.
Have you not wondered in a 2 year long investigation that was supposed to stick to Russian election collusion & then obstruction of the investigation of collusion, all this 'dumb' stupid ILLEGAL LOBBYING stuff keeps cropping up?
"What the hell is this? ANOTHER illegal lobbying case springing out of the Mueller investigation?!" they cried!
It's *almost* as if somebody guided the investigation into....
Nah, couldn't be.
That's just my overactive imagination leading me into a wild conspiracy theory.....
Trump knows what he's doing.
He's always known what he's doing.
Over the next few months 2 years of careful preparation will begin paying off.
And the Fake News media is only JUST NOW awakening to how much trouble it's really in.
/end
ADDENDUM:
Many of the same Fake News media outlets that spent over TWO YEARS pimping a Trump/Russia collusion hoax they knew was FAKE all along have been taking MONEY from foreign governments to publish propaganda to influence American foreign policy.
All these Fake News outlets helped the SpyGate plotters launch a coup against a sitting President based on something they knew was a hoax.
They helped accuse Trump of fake foreign collusion while THEY THEMSELVES were making bank being foreign agents taking illegal bribes.
Try to grasp the full hypocrisy of this, if you can.
Fake News outlets taking big $ from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, Russia and other countries & *colluding* with them to affect our elections & our foreign policy accused an innocent President of doing WHAT THEY DO ALL THE TIME
Trump will expose all these people with absolute glee.
/end
