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American politics
- Thread starter Danishfurniturelover
- Start date
I think she's potentially a bit devisive, being from California is a bit like being from London in that lots of people in other areas of the country have a general distrust of them. She was also quite aggressive towards Biden in the debates - gives Trump plenty of ammo. She's a good debater though - will destroy Pence.
thfcsteff
Terry Dyson
It's a counter-point law and order thing IMO. I also have this feeling that The Lincoln Project are somehow involved; they are the key to Trump getting ousted IMO, and they will have found Harris a very strong, attractive VP to help them in their mission to oust Trump. Given everything, it is his smartest play.
awesome dawson
Mitchell Thomas
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/was-the-pee-tape-a-lie-all-along-
Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along?
Not necessarily: despite what his critics say, Christopher Steele’s ‘dossier’ has not been ‘discredited'
12 August 2020, 7:10pm
Sir Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, famously said that at times she’d felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Over the past four years, perhaps American voters have felt the Volga lapping at their feet. There’s been no escape from Russia and even the Mueller inquiry did not put the matter to rest. Before Mueller’s inquiry a year ago, the headlines were about whether President Trump had conspired – or ‘colluded’ – with the Kremlin; the news now is all about Trump’s revenge for what he calls a conspiracy ‘bigger than Watergate’. This Russia conspiracy has the intelligence agencies cooking up a fake story about collusion in order to investigate Trump and overturn the result of the presidential election. In Trumpworld, this all began with a phoney ‘dossier’ from a former British spy.
So expect to hear about Christopher Steele all the way to the US presidential election in November. Trump’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, has published a declassified summary of the FBI’s interview with the most important contributor to Steele’s dossier. This was his ‘primary sub-source’ who collected information from several other sources. Graham said the summary showed ‘how unsubstantiated and unreliable the Steele dossier was’. Steele’s main source wasn’t ‘some well-connected… Russian official’ but a researcher paid by him to go to Moscow and who got ‘second and third-hand information and rumour at best’. Even then, Graham said, this source ‘did not know where some of the information attributed to him… came from’. It didn’t take long for the internet to figure out that the ‘primary sub-source’ was a Russian analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, Igor – or Iggy – Danchenko.
Danchenko had been arrested for public drunkenness, according to a court filing. Or as one pro-Trump website put it, he was a Russian national whose past included personal baggage. But this is being either prissy or disingenuous. An intelligence source with ‘personal baggage’?! ‘I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here’ (as the police chief in Casablanca says while closing down Bogart’s casino). It is also unfair to Danchenko, who was a gifted researcher. His boss at Brookings, Fiona Hill, says in her biography of Vladimir Putin that Danchenko ‘gained notoriety’ as the only person to get hold of Putin’s doctoral thesis, finding that large parts had been plagiarised from a University of Pittsburgh textbook. Steele likes to show friends the page from Hill’s book where she writes about ‘Igor’s remarkable ability to locate sources and material that other researchers considered totally inaccessible’. Did Steele put things in the dossier that Danchenko never said? The inspector general at the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, made that accusation when he released his report into ‘Crossfire Hurricane’, the FBI’s collusion inquiry. But he later published a correction: Danchenko had told the FBI he ‘couldn’t recall’ saying some things to Steele, rather than denying he’d said them – an important distinction.
Steele has five other sources for the ‘golden showers’ story. One is the hotel manager, another a maid. Neither had first-hand information, the manager agreed it might have happened, the maid relayed gossip among the housekeeping staff. One is ‘an American’ who supposedly saw a row in the hotel reception about whether a group of prostitutes could go up to Trump’s suite. This American is not Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, who told a Congressional committee he had ‘stopped’ five prostitutes from trying to visit Trump. Another source was a friend of Danchenko, described as a Russian with a ‘wide social network’, who said the story was common knowledge around the Kremlin. Finally, there was another Danchenko contact, a ‘former senior intelligence officer now a Kremlin official’. This was later said to be no less than a former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence services. This source did not talk specifically about the ‘pee tape’ but, Danchenko told Steele, he said they had sexual kompromat on Trump going back years. ‘We’ve got him over a barrel.’
Since then, I’m told that Steele has had ‘new reporting’ about another Trump sexual encounter in the Ritz Carlton: just one woman this time, it’s claimed, allegedly there the evening after the supposed bevy of urinating hookers. Like many other journalists, I have tried to get at the truth of the ‘pee tape’ story. I found three sources, all claiming to have seen a Trump sex tape. One is a former US intelligence officer, who said a senior official in eastern Europe had shown him stills from ‘one of the tapes’. The second source is in one of Russia’s most feared mafia groups, who said they were the ones who had filmed Trump. He said the gang’s leader joked about Trump to Putin: ‘I gave you that putuch’ – Russian criminal slang for the ‘bottom’ in prison sex. The third is a former colonel in Russia’s intelligence services. He described the Kremlin elite gathering in a villa outside Moscow to watch the ‘pee tape’, tears of laughter streaking their faces. ‘That is our candidate for President of the United States!’
These different sources might be saying the same thing because the story is true – or because of a clever disinformation campaign by the Kremlin. Danchenko’s old boss at Brookings, Fiona Hill, told a Congressional committee that Steele had been ‘played’ by the Russians. I’m told that he now believes we may never know the exact details of what happened behind the closed doors of Trump’s suite at the Ritz Carlton. But he is apparently convinced that the Russians have sexual kompromat of some kind on Trump, enough to blackmail him. Steele had ‘20 to 30’ sources for the dossier and in two decades as a professional intelligence officer he had never seen such complete agreement by such a wide range of sources. He thinks it impossible the Kremlin could get so many people to lie so convincingly. He tells his friends and supporters that the dossier was a ‘damn good’ piece of intelligence work that will be vindicated.
Steele was first to warn that Russia was mounting a covert operation to elect Donald Trump. Fusion GPS – his partners in Washington DC – have called this the dossier’s ‘foundational initial assertion’ and it was correct. Much later, the Mueller inquiry would state that ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.’ Steele wrote about what was happening as early as June 2016, his investigation costing a grand total of $169,000 (£130,000). The US intelligence agencies – annual budget, $63 billion (£48 billion) – did not publish their findings until December 2016, too late to prevent the effort to influence the election.
Steele has issued similar warnings about Britain. He told the inquiry on Russia by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that the Kremlin had tried to interfere in the Brexit referendum. He said there had been disagreements within the Russian government about this, the effort stopping and starting according to who was winning the argument. I’m told this was based on information from Steele’s confidential sources and is part of a classified appendix to the Committee’s report. But the rest of his submission is public and can be found on his company’s website. It’s worth reading in full.
Steele writes that the Kremlin has ‘an obsession’ with the UK. ‘Putin and his cronies have a love-hate relationship with Britain. They firmly believe that if they can bully, embarrass and humiliate the UK, this will cow others in Europe and elsewhere to tolerate, and in some cases further, their corrupt and amoral agenda.’ This agenda consists largely consists of measures to allow a ‘corrupt political elite… to protect its ill-gotten gains’ but also – as he said in the Trump dossier – to divide and weaken the West. He believes that Russia has become a ‘powerful rogue state’ with a growing appetite for ‘asymmetric warfare: hacking, fake news, infrastructure attacks and the corruption of national politics through dirty money’. He says: ‘The failure of the West… to deter the regime has allowed this to happen.’ If so, little has changed since 2016, when Steele wrote his dossier.
WRITTEN BY
Paul Wood
Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along?
Not necessarily: despite what his critics say, Christopher Steele’s ‘dossier’ has not been ‘discredited'
12 August 2020, 7:10pm
Sir Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, famously said that at times she’d felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Over the past four years, perhaps American voters have felt the Volga lapping at their feet. There’s been no escape from Russia and even the Mueller inquiry did not put the matter to rest. Before Mueller’s inquiry a year ago, the headlines were about whether President Trump had conspired – or ‘colluded’ – with the Kremlin; the news now is all about Trump’s revenge for what he calls a conspiracy ‘bigger than Watergate’. This Russia conspiracy has the intelligence agencies cooking up a fake story about collusion in order to investigate Trump and overturn the result of the presidential election. In Trumpworld, this all began with a phoney ‘dossier’ from a former British spy.
So expect to hear about Christopher Steele all the way to the US presidential election in November. Trump’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, has published a declassified summary of the FBI’s interview with the most important contributor to Steele’s dossier. This was his ‘primary sub-source’ who collected information from several other sources. Graham said the summary showed ‘how unsubstantiated and unreliable the Steele dossier was’. Steele’s main source wasn’t ‘some well-connected… Russian official’ but a researcher paid by him to go to Moscow and who got ‘second and third-hand information and rumour at best’. Even then, Graham said, this source ‘did not know where some of the information attributed to him… came from’. It didn’t take long for the internet to figure out that the ‘primary sub-source’ was a Russian analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, Igor – or Iggy – Danchenko.
Danchenko had been arrested for public drunkenness, according to a court filing. Or as one pro-Trump website put it, he was a Russian national whose past included personal baggage. But this is being either prissy or disingenuous. An intelligence source with ‘personal baggage’?! ‘I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here’ (as the police chief in Casablanca says while closing down Bogart’s casino). It is also unfair to Danchenko, who was a gifted researcher. His boss at Brookings, Fiona Hill, says in her biography of Vladimir Putin that Danchenko ‘gained notoriety’ as the only person to get hold of Putin’s doctoral thesis, finding that large parts had been plagiarised from a University of Pittsburgh textbook. Steele likes to show friends the page from Hill’s book where she writes about ‘Igor’s remarkable ability to locate sources and material that other researchers considered totally inaccessible’. Did Steele put things in the dossier that Danchenko never said? The inspector general at the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, made that accusation when he released his report into ‘Crossfire Hurricane’, the FBI’s collusion inquiry. But he later published a correction: Danchenko had told the FBI he ‘couldn’t recall’ saying some things to Steele, rather than denying he’d said them – an important distinction.
Steele has five other sources for the ‘golden showers’ story. One is the hotel manager, another a maid. Neither had first-hand information, the manager agreed it might have happened, the maid relayed gossip among the housekeeping staff. One is ‘an American’ who supposedly saw a row in the hotel reception about whether a group of prostitutes could go up to Trump’s suite. This American is not Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, who told a Congressional committee he had ‘stopped’ five prostitutes from trying to visit Trump. Another source was a friend of Danchenko, described as a Russian with a ‘wide social network’, who said the story was common knowledge around the Kremlin. Finally, there was another Danchenko contact, a ‘former senior intelligence officer now a Kremlin official’. This was later said to be no less than a former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence services. This source did not talk specifically about the ‘pee tape’ but, Danchenko told Steele, he said they had sexual kompromat on Trump going back years. ‘We’ve got him over a barrel.’
Since then, I’m told that Steele has had ‘new reporting’ about another Trump sexual encounter in the Ritz Carlton: just one woman this time, it’s claimed, allegedly there the evening after the supposed bevy of urinating hookers. Like many other journalists, I have tried to get at the truth of the ‘pee tape’ story. I found three sources, all claiming to have seen a Trump sex tape. One is a former US intelligence officer, who said a senior official in eastern Europe had shown him stills from ‘one of the tapes’. The second source is in one of Russia’s most feared mafia groups, who said they were the ones who had filmed Trump. He said the gang’s leader joked about Trump to Putin: ‘I gave you that putuch’ – Russian criminal slang for the ‘bottom’ in prison sex. The third is a former colonel in Russia’s intelligence services. He described the Kremlin elite gathering in a villa outside Moscow to watch the ‘pee tape’, tears of laughter streaking their faces. ‘That is our candidate for President of the United States!’
These different sources might be saying the same thing because the story is true – or because of a clever disinformation campaign by the Kremlin. Danchenko’s old boss at Brookings, Fiona Hill, told a Congressional committee that Steele had been ‘played’ by the Russians. I’m told that he now believes we may never know the exact details of what happened behind the closed doors of Trump’s suite at the Ritz Carlton. But he is apparently convinced that the Russians have sexual kompromat of some kind on Trump, enough to blackmail him. Steele had ‘20 to 30’ sources for the dossier and in two decades as a professional intelligence officer he had never seen such complete agreement by such a wide range of sources. He thinks it impossible the Kremlin could get so many people to lie so convincingly. He tells his friends and supporters that the dossier was a ‘damn good’ piece of intelligence work that will be vindicated.
Steele was first to warn that Russia was mounting a covert operation to elect Donald Trump. Fusion GPS – his partners in Washington DC – have called this the dossier’s ‘foundational initial assertion’ and it was correct. Much later, the Mueller inquiry would state that ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.’ Steele wrote about what was happening as early as June 2016, his investigation costing a grand total of $169,000 (£130,000). The US intelligence agencies – annual budget, $63 billion (£48 billion) – did not publish their findings until December 2016, too late to prevent the effort to influence the election.
Steele has issued similar warnings about Britain. He told the inquiry on Russia by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that the Kremlin had tried to interfere in the Brexit referendum. He said there had been disagreements within the Russian government about this, the effort stopping and starting according to who was winning the argument. I’m told this was based on information from Steele’s confidential sources and is part of a classified appendix to the Committee’s report. But the rest of his submission is public and can be found on his company’s website. It’s worth reading in full.
Steele writes that the Kremlin has ‘an obsession’ with the UK. ‘Putin and his cronies have a love-hate relationship with Britain. They firmly believe that if they can bully, embarrass and humiliate the UK, this will cow others in Europe and elsewhere to tolerate, and in some cases further, their corrupt and amoral agenda.’ This agenda consists largely consists of measures to allow a ‘corrupt political elite… to protect its ill-gotten gains’ but also – as he said in the Trump dossier – to divide and weaken the West. He believes that Russia has become a ‘powerful rogue state’ with a growing appetite for ‘asymmetric warfare: hacking, fake news, infrastructure attacks and the corruption of national politics through dirty money’. He says: ‘The failure of the West… to deter the regime has allowed this to happen.’ If so, little has changed since 2016, when Steele wrote his dossier.
WRITTEN BY
Paul Wood
ShipOfTheseus
Clint Dempsey
Good article. Not sure anyone has ever genuinely doubted Steele’s competence as an analyst.
In January, Trump will be gone, and the Brexit sabotage will be irrevocable. At which point, it will become a lot easier for Johnson’s administration to be honest about this stuff.
In January, Trump will be gone, and the Brexit sabotage will be irrevocable. At which point, it will become a lot easier for Johnson’s administration to be honest about this stuff.
markysimmo
Johnny nice-tits
The US government has proposed changing the definition of a showerhead to allow increased water flow, following complaints from President Donald Trump about his hair routine.
Under a 1992 law, showerheads in the US are not allowed to produce more than 2.5 gallons (9.5l) of water per minute.
The Trump administration wants this limit to apply to each nozzle, rather than the overall fixture.
Consumer and conservation groups argue that it is wasteful and unnecessary.
The changes were proposed by the Department of Energy on Wednesday following complaints by Mr Trump at the White House last month.
"So showerheads - you take a shower, the water doesn't come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn't come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair - I don't know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect," he said
Under a 1992 law, showerheads in the US are not allowed to produce more than 2.5 gallons (9.5l) of water per minute.
The Trump administration wants this limit to apply to each nozzle, rather than the overall fixture.
Consumer and conservation groups argue that it is wasteful and unnecessary.
The changes were proposed by the Department of Energy on Wednesday following complaints by Mr Trump at the White House last month.
"So showerheads - you take a shower, the water doesn't come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn't come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair - I don't know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect," he said
milo
Jack L. Jones
what happends if he doesn't?
thfcsteff
Terry Dyson
It's a major, major disgrace and hopefully the country will wake up in time. How it cannot be charged as a criminal act I don't know...
thfcsteff
Terry Dyson
Pence is such a sad-sack tool. He sounds like a character from King Of The Hill.
Danishfurniturelover
the prettiest spice girl
I genuinely despise Trump and everything he stands for and is doing.
JerusalemMan
Johnny Morrison
The accord that he/his administration have just brokered between UAE and Israel does seem to be something worthy of high praise. The instant opening of full relations with Israel by an Arab nation.
Sadly, because of the toxic Trump 'brand', it'll be ignored or denigrated or played down in a way that would not have happened if (say) Obama, Theroux or Ardern had helped do exactly the same thing.
Hopefully it is a foundation for continued peaceful developments in the region, especially as countries look at Iran with more and more alarm.
Last edited:
Danishfurniturelover
the prettiest spice girl
I will accept that point, but i loathe the man.
Gilzeantoscore
Justin Edinburgh
There are men on the right more dangerous than Trump...Pence and Cruz are just two of them. Both Pence and Cruz are more fundamentally right wing than Trump and they are also a lot smarter.