At the time this podcast was released the House was introducing two articles of impeachment against the nasty guy. That timing prompted Kendzior to start off by discussing several other things the nasty guy should be impeached for: obstruction of justice (as laid out in the Mueller Report), abuse of migrants at the border, abuse of the pardoning power, and more. She laments how much time has been wasted before we got to this point and how much danger that puts us in:
The Trump crime cult did not waste that time. They used it to pack courts, purge agencies, create propaganda narratives, target private citizens, form stronger relationships with other autocratic regimes, and exploit every Democratic weakness and flaw, including the Democratic donor classes' blind trust in institutions and their refusal to think of the American people first.Chalupa thinks the Democrats are doing something right with narrow articles of impeachment, even though books can be written about the multitude of crimes for which the nasty guy should be impeached. What the Dems are doing right is speaking the enemy’s language. Conservatives have been united behind strong support for democracy in Ukraine. It is a good move to focus impeachment on a violation of that support. So when Republicans, contrary to their earlier steadfast support of Ukraine, now start spouting Kremlin talking points they are admitting to the crime of being a Kremlin patsy.
This is a very sad day for our country, not just for the damage that has been done, but for how much of it was predictable and therefore somewhat preventable.
Kendzior is skeptical because this does not get at the root of the crisis in that the nasty guy is tied to the Russian mafia.
However, says Chalupa, the focus on Ukraine can be used to get at the rest of the story. The Dems can hold hearings on such things as how blood money works in Ukraine. Then go on about the strength of the rule of law, how the Kremlin takes advantage and weakens our national security, how political parties are being co-opted by the Kremlin, how golden handcuffs work, how much money is hidden abroad, and more. It’s enough to keep hearings going until just before the 2020 election. It should be a televised marathon on how our own corruption was used against us.
Chalupa adds that the Dems don’t want to do that because they benefit from the same system, though not nearly as much as the GOP.
About these continuous investigations Kendzior said:
The goal should be transparency. The goal should be rooting out corruption. The goal should be preserving election integrity. It should be delivering the truth, the full truth, to the American public because they deserve it. You deserve the truth. Don't settle for crumbs.
A new report by the inspector general of the Department of Justice says that Paul Manafort was under FBI investigation since the spring of 2016. Manafort has been a significant Kremlin tool in hijacking American democracy and became the nasty guy’s campaign manager in July 2016. It was appropriate for the FBI to be investigating Manafort back then because his crimes, including money laundering and tax evasion, go back decades. So the question: Why did the FBI allow a known Kremlin associate to be the manager of a campaign for president? Why was James Comey, head of the FBI at the time, not holding press conferences about that and instead going after Hillary Clinton, who had a private server because she knew government servers were getting hacked. This was a massive intelligence failure.
Another aspect of that is troubling: A number of former FBI directors, including Louis Freeh and William Sessions, went on to represent the Russian Mafia and its main players. Kendzior has a book coming out in April about some of these crimes, but she says we would need a book a month to cover each participant in this transnational crime syndicate. That shows the extent of this network and the magnitude of their crimes.
All that stuff on Manafort was in the public domain. Chalupa started tweeting about him in 2013 based on information on his Wikipedia page. Shortly after that Ukraine invited the FBI to investigate what happened to the tens of billions of dollars that deposed president Victor Yanukovich stole on his way out the door. If one is investigating Yanukovich, one is also investigating the people around him, such as Manafort.
Putin has made it known for quite a while now that in his opinion he is allowed to meddle in the affairs of any other country. But no one is allowed to meddle in Russia’s affairs. So like a despot. That idea is being extended to the nasty guy. And Attorney General William Barr and his henchmen are now acting like enforcers against what’s left of our intelligence agencies: if you dare to do anything that might remotely hold the Trump Crime Family accountable, we’ll come after you. And this intimidation is being done in plain sight.
We’re in this current mess because of the savior syndrome. If things are really that bad someone must be doing something about it. Which means the world is being destroyed because everyone assumes somebody else is saving it. So stand up for yourself. No one is coming. There isn’t a magical fix. Even if the nasty guy is removed there is still the corrupt GOP, the packed courts, the purged agencies and the gutted State Department, the Kremlin, and Saudi Arabia. That transnational crime network is still out there.
A way out of the savior syndrome is to talk to a teen. They see the current situation – climate change and the nasty guy – more clearly, they don’t have false expectations.
I’m three quarters of the way through the transcript before I get to the part that gave this episode its title. Christopher Steele is best known for the Steele Dossier. I got lost in exactly what this podcast says what that was. So I looked it up.
Steele is a counterintelligence specialist and a former head of the Russia Desk for British Intelligence MI6. Steele wrote a 35 page compilation of raw intelligence about the cooperation between Russia and the nasty guy campaign in 2016. The report was written for the private investigative form Fusion GPS, which had been contracted to do opposition research on GOP candidates. It was published by *BuzzFeed News* on January 10, 2017, only 10 days before the inauguration. Some of the allegations in the report have been verified, such as Putin actively favored the nasty guy over Clinton, others not. Details (lots of details) here.
Steele was accused of being biased against the nasty guy. He said that was ridiculous because he had a personal relationship with a member of the Trump family. We now know that member was Ivanka.
Ivanka’s job at the moment has two parts: (1) actually keep the crime syndicate running in preparation for taking over from her father and (2) gloss over all this crime by looking and sounding non threatening. She’s been doing rather well escaping scrutiny.
So Steele and Ivanka first met around 2007 and stayed in touch since then (though Steele is in hiding now). From what’s known now it seems Ivanka considered recruiting him, but then figured he couldn’t be turned to the dark side. She saw he would eventually get her in trouble. And he did.
Kendzior reminds us to be wary of the term Russian oligarch. These people have no loyalty to Russia, only to the Kremlin. What we are facing with Russia isn’t a battle of nation-states.
This is a battle between a tiny group of billionaire elites with sadistic impulses, highly involved in money laundering from over all the world.It is up to us to unravel this mess. So stay engaged.
This is not a group that you can track by ethnicity or even by country of origin or anything like that. They work together. It is a transnational crime syndicate and its victims are everyone else. Its victims are governments. Its victims are private citizens. Its victims are ordinary people just trying to live their lives. That is what the West missed when the collapse of the Soviet Union happened. They got very cocky. They assumed they won. They assumed that Russia and other dictatorships from the newly-independent states of the former Soviet Union would seek to emulate the West in the same way that, for example, the Baltic states genuinely did. That was not true. Instead, they saw total lawlessness.
They saw an opportunity to carry out crime in plain sight and call it hyper capitalism, call it getting used to a new way of doing things.
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