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The Memo That a Russian Lawyer Took to the Trump Tower Meeting Is Finally Out

A four-page memo that has been a central focus of the Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian attorney has finally been released.

Foreign Policy magazine published the document, which Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya took into the June 9, 2016 meeting, which was arranged by Trump Jr. and attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The document, and the meeting, have become a focus for congressional and federal investigators looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. The meeting has raised questions about collusion because Trump Jr. accepted it after an acquaintance contacted him promising that a “Russian government attorney” would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton . . .

Veselnitskaya’s memo, which Foreign Policy obtained from a Russian news station that recently interviewed the lawyer, suggests that little information about Clinton was provided to the Trump campaign. (Read more from “The Memo That a Russian Lawyer Took to the Trump Tower Meeting Is Finally Out” HERE)

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Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets

The investigations into Russia’s role in the 2016 election are threatening to pry the lid off tech companies’ most prized possessions: the secret inner workings of their online platforms.

As the probes unfold into social media’s role in spreading misinformation, U.S. lawmakers are beginning to show an interest in the mechanics of everything from how Facebook weights news items to how Google ranks search results. The questions, which echo European regulators’ interventionist approach to technology, are a stark change for Silicon Valley companies accustomed to deference from U.S. officials on how they run their operations.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned Sept. 24 about “the use of Facebook’s algorithms and the way it tends to potentially reinforce people’s informational bias.” He added, “This is a far broader issue than Russia, but one that we really need to know more about.”

A source close to the Senate Intelligence Committee said staff investigators are eager to learn whether Russian elements used Twitter to boost disinformation in Google’s search rankings. While Google has previously said it uses Twitter and Facebook links in calculating search rankings for content, it hasn’t revealed specifics on how social media mentions factor into its algorithm. Google is famously closemouthed about how its immensely valuable search engine works, only parceling out small clues over the years.

Critics of the tech industry say the time has come for the companies to let policymakers take a closer look. (Read more from “Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets” HERE)

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Donald Trump Just Retaliated Against Russia. Here’s What He Did.

A common narrative presented by opponents of President Donald Trump is that he is, at best, too friendly with Russia, and at worst, actively working with the adversarial nation to further his own personal or business interests.

If that was ever the case, it doesn’t appear to be so anymore, as the Trump administration announced Thursday that Moscow will be required to shut down diplomatic posts in several major American cities in a continued tit-for-tat of Cold War-esque maneuvering between the two nations . . .

Why is the Trump administration doing this? Russian President Vladmir Putin ordered the expulsion of more than 700 U.S. diplomats after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia in July. Those sanctions were the result of Russian interference in the 2016 election, human rights violations, the annexation of Crimea and military operations in the Ukraine. (Read more from “Donald Trump Just Retaliated Against Russia. Here’s What He Did.” HERE)

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Russia Says War Games Are ‘Purely Defensive’

The Russian military dismissed Western concerns over a major war game that has underscored Cold War-style tensions in the Baltic Sea region, as the U.S. further beefed up its presence there.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Alexander Fomin said Tuesday the joint-Russian-Belarusian exercises, which will take place in September partly on Belarus’s border with NATO members Lithuania and Poland, would be of “a purely defensive nature,” testing the ability of troops to respond to a hypothetical adversary.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials have warned the maneuvers, planned amid a military buildup in the region by the alliance and Russia, could serve as a screen for Russia to deploy more military equipment and heighten the risk of an accident or miscalculation that could touch off a crisis.

The U.S. has deployed a tank brigade to Central and Eastern Europe, part of a larger deterrent force covering NATO’s eastern flank. On Tuesday, it sent seven F-15C Eagle fighter planes from a base in the U.K. to Lithuania to take over NATO’s Baltic air policing mission from Poland, a larger-than-normal deployment of aircraft. (Read more from “Russia Says War Games Are ‘Purely Defensive'” HERE)

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The Other Russia Story We Need to Talk About Is Adoption

The Russian government uses orphans as political pawns.

The story of thousands of innocent Russian children in need of adoption has been lost amid the daily flood of news about Russia and the hyped-up debate over whether “adoption” is some kind of code for “sanctions” when it comes to high-level Russian-American meetings . . .

Their plight stems from the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russia in response to human rights abuses by Russian officials. President Vladimir Putin retaliated by imposing a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children.

For years until then, American families had labored through an onerous process to adopt an average of 3,000 Russian children annually.

But the cold-hearted action of Putin, labeled a dictator by many of his critics, dramatically decreased the chance for thousands of orphans to have a family and left hundreds of Americans, who were in the midst of the adoption process, in complete despair. (Read more from “The Other Russia Story We Need to Talk About Is Adoption” HERE)

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Hersh: Here’s Who Invented Russia ‘Collusion’

The entire Russia collusion story was a fiction made up by intelligence chiefs who lied about President Trump, and lied to President Obama and the media, according to a person on a just-released audio recording who is almost certainly legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Further, the person who recorded the audio is almost certainly financier Ed Butowsky, who hired private investigator Rod Wheeler to investigate the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last July.

Wheeler filed a defamation lawsuit against Butowsky and Fox News on Tuesday over a story the network retracted about the investigation.

The text of Wheeler’s lawsuit described a conversation between Hersh and Butowsky in which the reporter said: “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy.”

WND did some digging and discovered those identical words appear on the audio recording, apparently verifying they were spoken by Hersh and taped by Butowsky. Judging by a report in the Washington Post, the conversation happened during, or before, February. (Read more from “Hersh: Here’s Who Invented Russia ‘Collusion'” HERE)

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Russia Wasn’t the Only Foreign Country to Target Clinton Campaign Emails

North Korean hackers attempted to infiltrate the Hillary Clinton campaign’s email systems, according to a report circulated within the campaign last year.

That’s according to an interesting report published by CyberScoop, a cybersecurity website.

According to CyberScoop, North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) attempted to break into Clinton campaign systems by targeting a group of outside advisers working on East Asia policy for the campaign.

Using an attack method known as spearphishing, which attempts to wrangle users’ passwords, the hackers were able to infiltrate the email accounts of outside Clinton campaign advisers who work for an unnamed Washington, D.C. think tank. (Read more from “Russia Wasn’t the Only Foreign Country to Target Clinton Campaign Emails” HERE)

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Bombshell Dropped on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ Mantra

. . .How far has Russia fallen off the media’s radar? So far, that, in a jaw-dropping role-reversal, it is actually the White House now pushing the story on the media . . .

At the end of Thursday’s daily press briefing, a visibly bemused White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders chided reporters, “You guys love to talk about Russia, and there’s been nonstop coverage. And the one day that there might have been a question on Russia, there wasn’t.”

So she raised the topic herself, noting, “[T]here was public testimony that further discredited the phony dossier that’s been the source of so much of the fake news and conspiracy theories. And we learned that the firm that produced it was also being paid by the Russians.”

That revelation didn’t just chill mainstream media interest. The Democrats also suddenly stopped uttering their Russia mantra.

That’s because Thursday’s testimony indicated the entire Russia collusion story may be turned on its head in fantastic fashion. (Read more from “Bombshell Dropped on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ Mantra” HERE)

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Russian Leader: US Isn’t Strong Enough to Be Perceived as a Threat to Russia

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, gave a rare interview to a US outlet that aired [this week]. In speaking to HBO’s “Real Sports,” he denied that gay people are humans, that they exist in his region, and that his government regularly detains or tortures them, despite ample reports to the contrary. . .

Kadyrov, known for his forceful style of speaking, said: “America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia. We have a strong government and are a nuclear state.

“Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind.”

The New York Times points out that Russia built a system in the 1980s that could do what Kadyrov described, known as the Perimeter System. Essentially, if there were a nuclear attack to destroy the government of Russia — or anything a 1980s-era system would perceive as an attack — an automated system would empty Russia’s missile silos in a counterattack.

Bruce Blair, the former US nuclear officer who broke the story of the Perimeter System for The Times in 1993, told Business Insider that the system works when it detects nuclear explosions. Only a small crew, deep in a bunker, has a hand in the otherwise automated system, according to Blair. (Read more from “Russian Leader: US Isn’t Strong Enough to Be Perceived as a Threat to Russia” HERE)

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The Left Is a Greater Threat to America Than Putin

Last week, I tweeted, “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”

To my surprise, the tweet went viral. And while there were more likes than dislikes, 99 percent of the written reactions were negative.

Typical reactions were:

–“F— you.”

–“Move to Russia.”

–“Your very full diapers pose a very great danger, please change them.” That received 1,880 likes.

–“I’ve wiped s— off my shoes more trustworthy and patriotic than your sorry a–.” That received 606 likes.

You get the idea.

But it wasn’t the ad hominem insults that I found troubling. What was troubling was the low state of logical thinking that so many responses reflected.

This was exemplified by their reminding me how important a free press is to democracy (as if attacking the behavior of the media were the same as denying the need for a free press); their asking how many nukes the media have compared with Russia (as if a threat to lives were the same as a threat to a civilization); and their thinking that my tweet was about President Donald Trump (he was never mentioned, and the words were just as true when Barack Obama was president).

My tweet was about the Western left undoing Western civilization. My one regret is that I did not mention universities along with the media.

The tweet had nothing to do with the existence of a free press. Attacking what the media is doing is not the same as attacking the existence of the media—any more than attacking Trump is attacking the existence of the presidency.

With regard to Russia having more nukes than the media, those who noted this fact so missed the entire point of the tweet that it is almost breathtaking.

When one speaks about dangers to a civilization, one is speaking ideologically, not physically. Of course, if Russia were to unleash its nuclear weapons against the West, it would kill vast numbers of Westerners.

However, that would no more mean the end of Western civilization than the Holocaust meant the end of Jewish civilization. Civilization connotes a body of ideas and a value system.

Furthermore, a Russian nuclear attack threatening the West’s physical existence is an utterly remote possibility. Russian leaders, just as Soviet leaders before them, fear what is known as MAD (mutually assured destruction).

The real nuclear threat comes from North Korea and, above all, Iran, which constantly announces its intent to exterminate Israel. But while The New York Times cannot stop writing about the threat Russian President Vladimir Putin poses, it accuses Trump of “demonizing” Iran.

The real threat to Western civilization is Western civilization ceasing to believe in itself. And, in that regard, Russia poses no danger, while the left-wing-dominated media and universities pose an existential threat.

That’s why the most depressing of the negative reactions were those from people calling themselves conservatives. If conservatism isn’t about conserving Western civilization first and foremost, what is it about?

Students in college have voted the American flag off their campus. Where did these students learn their unprecedented contempt for America and patriotism, if not from their schools and the media?

European countries continue to welcome in millions of Muslims, adding to the tens of millions of Muslims already in Europe—many of whom, if not most, have no interest in adopting Europe’s values.

Do the critics of my tweet conclude nothing about the left’s role—meaning the role of Western media and academia—in promoting multiculturalism, the doctrine that holds that no cultural, religious, or value system is superior to any other?

At the University of Pennsylvania, its left-wing English department has removed its long-standing portrait of Shakespeare because he was white and male. Is that not a direct hit on Western civilization?

The left-wing prime minister of Canada has proudly announced, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and that Canada is “the first postnational state.”

What produced him? Putin?

Is it Putin who is removing American flags from American campuses?

Is Putin destroying the notion of male and female?

Has Putin convinced half of America’s millennials that socialism is preferable to capitalism?

Did Putin convince Pope Francis that Islamic terrorists are no more of a threat to Europe than baptized Catholics who kill their girlfriends?

Is Putin the reason Oxford University students voted that Israel is a greater threat to peace than Hamas?

Putin is indeed a murderous quasi dictator. But all this contempt for Western civilization comes from the Western media and the Western universities.

The smoking gun was provided just two weeks ago in the media’s reactions to Trump’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, in which he called for protecting Western civilization.

Virtually the entire Western media said it was a call to protect white racism—because the media deem Western civilization to be nothing more than a euphemism for white supremacy.

That’s what my tweet was about. (For more from the author of “The Left Is a Greater Threat to America Than Putin” (For more from the author of “The Left Is a Greater Threat to America Than Putin” please click HERE)

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