Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So if this is true, and it's a damn big if considering the subject matter is Julian Assange, then the Trump regime offered him a full pardon in exchange for denouncing the DNC email hack was Russian in origin.

A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Donald Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were hacked by Russian operatives.

The claim that Rohrabacher acted as an emissary for the White House came during a pre-extradition hearing in London.

Assange has argued that he should not be extradited to the U.S. because the American case against him is politically motivated. He spent almost seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in Central London claiming that he would be jailed in the U.S. if he wasn’t granted asylum. He was kicked out of the embassy last year.

His lawyers told the court that Trump’s alleged offer to pardon Assange proved that this was no ordinary criminal investigation.

Edward Fitzgerald, who was representing Assange in court, said he had evidence that a quid pro quo was put to Assange by Rohrabacher, who was known as Putin’s favorite congressman.

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s personal lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, included a description of “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Rohrabacher weighed in on Wednesday afternoon, insisting he never spoke to Trump about Assange prior to his personally-funded “fact finding mission” to London. He said he told Assange that he would “call on” Trump to pardon him if he was able to say who gave him the hacked emails.

“I was not directed by Trump or anyone else connected with him to meet with Julian Assange,” he said in a statement. “At no time did I offer Julian Assange anything from the President because I had not spoken with the President about this issue at all.”

Rohrabacher said he spoke briefly with then chief of staff John Kelly after the trip to let him know that Assange would provide information about the hacked DNC emails in exchange for a pardon. “No one followed up with me including Gen. Kelly and that was the last discussion I had on this subject with anyone representing Trump or in his Administration,” he said.

50% of me says this is absolutely Russian disinformation.  50% of me says this is all true and Assange has been sitting on this for years waiting for the right moment to shove the knife into Trump.  I don't know which, and America needs to know pretty much right away as to whether or not it's true.

Because if it is true, it's time to impeach this orange asshole again for pardon quid pro quo.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

White supremacist terrorist groups are popping up like weeds in the Trump era, riding through major US cities like Washington DC with masks and armed to the teeth in vulgar displays of power, groups like III Percent, Oath Keepers, and Molon Labe are growing in number and new groups are openly recruiting on the internet.  The latest such movement is "boogaloo", a funny meme name for a armed militia gathering members on Facebook and social media, with the very real goal of a second Civil War.

An anti-government movement that advocates for a violent uprising targeting liberal political opponents and law enforcement has moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream in recent months and surged on social media, according to a group of researchers that tracks hate groups.

The movement, which says it wants a second Civil War organized around the term “boogaloo,” now includes groups on mainstream internet platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit as well as fringe websites including 4chan, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an independent nonprofit of scientists and engineers that tracks and reports on misinformation and hate speech across social media.
While calls for organized and targeted violence in the form of a new Civil War have previously circulated among some hate groups, the emergence of the term “boogaloo” appeared to be a new and discrete movement. NCRI researchers analyzed more than 100 million social media posts and comments and found that through the use of memes — inside jokes commonly in the form of images — extremists have pushed anti-government and anti-law enforcement messages across social media platforms. They have also organized online communities with tens of thousands of members, some of whom have assembled at real-world events.

The report “represents a breakthrough case study in the capacity to identify cyber swarms and viral insurgencies in nearly real time as they are developing in plain sight,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general and current director of the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University, wrote in the report’s forward.

The report comes as U.S. law enforcement officials and researchers at various levels have issued warnings about the growing threat posed by domestic extremists motivated by fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Joel Finkelstein, NCRI’s director and a research scholar at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, said the report had been sent to members of Congress and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, among others.

Paul Goldenberg, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said the report was “a wake-up call.”

“When you have people talking about and planning sedition and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously,” said Goldenberg, who is also CEO of the security consulting company Cardinal Point Strategies.
Goldenberg said the report had “gone viral” within law enforcement and intelligence communities since its limited release last week. People are reading it and distributing it “far and wide,” he said.

The current boogaloo movement was first noticed by extremism researchers in 2019, when fringe groups from gun rights and militia movements to white supremacists began referring to an impending civil war using the term boogaloo, a joking reference to “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a 1984 sequel movie about breakdancing.

The term is used to describe an uprising against a seemingly tyrannical or left-wing government, often in response to a perceived threat of wide-spread gun confiscation. For many, the term boogaloo — silly on its face — is used jokingly, or ironically, but for others, the boogaloo memes are shared alongside violent text and images, seemingly to inflame an eventual confrontation.

In the last three months, boogaloo-related conversation has grown rapidly, according to the researchers, who found that use of the term has increased nearly 50 percent on platforms like Reddit and Twitter over the last few months. Increased exposure, the researchers warn, carries the danger of indoctrination.

It's real, it's dangerous, and in the Trump era it's the latest domestic terrorism virus spreading openly across the country.  Again, these are people that want to start openly killing folks.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

I have to say, here's some more expert trolling from the Trump regime and Attorney General Bill Barr.

Attorney General William P. Barr has told people close to President Trump — both inside and outside the White House — that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

So far, Trump has defied Barr’s requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Barr had made his posture known directly to Trump. The administration officials said Barr seemed to be sharing his position with advisers in hopes the president would get the message that he should stop weighing in publicly on the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigations.

“He has his limits,” said one person familiar with Barr’s thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, to discuss internal deliberations.

Late last week, Barr publicly warned the president in a remarkable interview with ABC News that his tweets about Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Trump, White House officials said, is not entirely receptive to calls to change his behavior, and he has told those around him he is not going to stop tweeting about the Justice Department. They said Trump considers highlighting what he sees as misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department as a good political message.

This is the equivalent of GOP Sen. Susan Collins and her perpetual "concern" over Donald Trump.  Barr isn't going anywhere, but this will defuse the criticism this week from both former Justice Department employees and from the Federal Judges Association.

Trump is playing along as well.

Trump was quick to agree when asked by a reporter Tuesday about whether his tweets make it difficult for Barr to do his job in a way that appears impartial.

“I do make his job harder, yes, I do agree with that. I think that’s true,” Trump said. “He’s a very straight shooter. We have a great attorney general and he’s working very hard. He’s working against a lot of people that don’t want to see good things happen, in my opinion. That’s my opinion, not his opinion. You’ll have to ask what his opinion is.”

Trump then added that social media has been “very important” to him because “it gives me a voice” that he doesn’t get in the media.

When asked if he makes it hard for Barr to do his job with integrity, Trump said “oh yeah” given how Barr is “a man with incredible integrity.”

“Just so you understand, I chose not to be involved,” Trump said. “I’m allowed to be totally involved. I’m actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country. But I’ve chosen not to be involved. But he is a man of great integrity. But I could be involved if I wanted to be.”

This is grade A quality horse manure, all of it.  Crocodile tears of fake contrition are going to wash away the criticism.  It would be funny if I wasn't absolutely sure that Trump was lying, as he always does lie, and the country wasn't at stake.

And again, even if Barr magically did resign, he'd only be replaced by somebody even more awful.

StupidiNews!

• A new UNICEF report on the healthiest countries to raise children finds the US ranks 39th out of 180, and 173rd out of 180 in sustainability of carbon emissions.
• Even though the Wuhan coronavirus has surpassed 2,000 deaths, World Health Organization doctors are calling for calm as the virus itself is less deadly than SARS 20 years ago.
• Utah's measure to decriminalize polygamy among consenting adults has passed the state's Senate in a unanimous vote, but the bill faces stiffer odds in the Utah state House.
• Michael Bloomberg's campaign says if elected president, he will sell his Bloomberg news company so as to not profit off of it "like Trump does now".
• A US-based natural gas facility was shut down for more than two days after being crippled by ransomware, according to the DHS and Department of Energy.