Lowering The Barr, Con't

It's becoming more and more apparent that the Trump regime is counting on a massive October Surprise that involves the possible indictment of several Obama administration officials, and the people responsible for it, Attorney General Bill Barr and US Attorney John Durham, are now facing pushback from their own people who see the writing on the wall.

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned from the U.S. Justice Department probe - at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham’s office, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.

Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.

Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, withing weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr - who appointed Durham - to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something - perhaps some sort of report - before the presidential election in November.

The fix is in, folks. The Durham investigation is a sham. 

This is somebody John Durham went out of his way to get back on to his team, and 18 months later she has resigned knowing exactly what the appearance of her doing so would mean. She could have stuck around and said nothing in order to support her boss.

But she resigned.

This is a message, and the message is Bill Barr is planning to use the Durham investigation to win the election in the next few weeks.

Florida Schools Go Viral

Several school districts in Florida are outright defying GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's executive order to remain silent on COVID-19 infections among schoolchildren as parents, teachers, and school administrators realize they could never keep this under wraps.

Florida school districts are defying Gov. Ron DeSantis and publicly reporting new Covid-19 cases among students and staff that the state government considers confidential.

The state Department of Health has tried to directly quash reporting on the virus in some instances, after DeSantis said K-12 testing data “needs to be put in the right context.”

With no statewide standard, local leaders are left to decide on their own how and when to report Covid-19 cases in their districts. The result is a mix of differing daily and weekly reports and digital dashboards at school districts across Florida, with some counties not reporting any data to the general public.

In Bay County, for instance, school officials are aiming to produce three coronavirus reports a week. The district initially held off reporting anything to parents and the community as it watched the Department of Health’s response to counties that had built online dashboards to track the virus.

“We don’t want to get into any trouble, but we think transparency is the best way to go,” Bay County Superintendent Bill Husfelt said in an interview.

In a message to his school district, Husfelt noted that the Department of Health had asked some districts to take down their Covid-19 dashboards. In northeast Florida, Flagler County said the state forbid its local health department to release coronavirus data tied to schools. The DeSantis administration delivered a similar message to other counties, leading the state’s largest teachers union to blast the Republican governor in ads airing in Orlando and Tampa.

The state and local showdown over coronavirus messaging is the latest example of how state health officials have aided in the Republican governor’s plan to keep schools open during the pandemic. The state health department was “notably absent” when local school boards sought advice for closing classrooms during the pandemic, essentially forcing them to reopen, a circuit court judge wrote in an Aug. 24 ruling.

DeSantis and the Florida Education Association, a teachers union, have tangled in court over the state’s hardline school reopening policy. About 1.6 million students have returned to school for in person classes, while some 1.4 million students are beginning the year online, according to the state.

It's the week after Labor Day and schools are now open across America, but it's only a matter of time now before COVID-19 cases skyrocket in the weeks ahead and schools are forced to shut down campus instruction and go to all virtual classes later this fall.

It's possible that the infections can be contained by masks and measures in place, but I just don't see it holding as flu season gets underway.  We're going to have a lot of sick kids, sick parents, teachers and educators, and we're going to then have a lot of casualties as a result, heading into the election.

This could have been prevented six months ago.  Trump knew and actively chose not to do it.

Now we have to actively choose.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Looks like Rudy Giuliani is being hung out to dry as the Trump regime has designated his main source of Ukranian evidence against Joe Biden as a Russian agent.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday placed sanctions on a member of Ukraine’s parliament for running an “influence campaign” against former vice president Joe Biden, dubbing the lawmaker “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who has maintained “close connections with Russian intelligence services.”
The sanctions against Andriy Derkach — who in an attempt to tarnish the Democratic nominee for president released pilfered and edited phone conversations that Biden had years ago with Ukraine’s leadership — come less than two months before the 2020 presidential election and mark the most aggressive public action the U.S. government has taken to date to stanch foreign interference ahead of the vote.

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has met at least three times with Derkach since late last year and publicized the Ukrainian lawmaker’s claims on his podcast and elsewhere, elevating what the Treasury Department has now characterized as a foreign interference campaign by an active Russian agent aimed at influencing the 2020 election. Giuliani met Derkach in Kyiv late last year, just as the House prepared to impeach Trump over a pressure campaign orchestrated by Giuliani to induce the Ukrainian government into announcing probes of Biden. Derkach later visited Giuliani in New York, months before he began releasing the tapes of Biden at news conferences in Kyiv.
Derkach “and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

The Treasury Department said Derkach had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

“Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference,” the department said in a statement. “This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated.”

Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice explains the scam.

What the Treasury Department’s press release does not say is who, exactly, Mr. Derkach is partnered with in his activities against the United States as a Russian Intelligence Services officer. We know the answer to that because Derkach and his American accessories have been very up front about their activities. Derkach’s two main partners in his endeavors, which The Department of the Treasury has now stated unequivocally are the endeavors of the Russian Intelligence Services, are Rudy Giuliani and Chanel Rion, the far too credulous reporter from One America News Network (OANN).

Rion has her own issues, which I won’t get into here, but quite simply she is the poster girl for the counterintelligence concept of MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Rudy Giuliani is definitely one of the poster boys for MICE! He’s constantly chasing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle and pay alimony; his ideology has been all over the map for years, but basically comes down to whatever benefits Rudy Giuliani; he’s carried on multiple affairs and tries to keep them secret and he’s constantly chasing shady security consulting contracts in the post-Soviet states and the Middle East, so there’s a lot of compromising information on him out there; and his ego is ginormous!

What the Treasury Department makes clear today in their press release announcing the imposition of sanctions on Derkach, is that both Rudy Giuliani, who is the President’s personal lawyer, and Chanel Rion, who is one of his favorite reporters, have both been compromised by a Russian Intelligence officer and are being used by him to interfere in the 2020 US election to the benefit of Russia. It is important to keep in mind that both Giuliani and Rion most likely believe that they are using Derkach, not being used by Derkach, though the reality is the direction of control runs the other way. The Russians have watched and assessed exactly what bait they needed to use to attract Giuliani and Rion, as well as others like Congressman Nunes and his catspaws Derek Harvey and Kash Patel, the latter of whom is now embroiled in the new DHS whistleblower allegations just as he got himself wrapped up in the Ukraine phone call when Nunes placed him on the National Security Staff during 2019. All of these people are convinced of their own superior intelligence and the righteousness of their cause and they are desperate to be important and be world changing figures, which makes them ripe for manipulation and easy to control.

It also means that the cornerstone of the President’s impeachment defense was supplied by the Russian Intelligence Services via Derkach to and through Giuliani as the President’s pro bono personal lawyer and Rion and her reporting. And which is also being used by Senators Johnson, Grassley, and Graham in their attempts to use their Senate committees to dirty up VP Biden prior to the election.

Rudy Giuliani – America’s Mayor, Mr. a Noun, a Verb, and 9-11, the first name in cybersecurity, coveter of the position of Secretary of State, and the President’s pro bono personal lawyer – is being run as an asset by Andrii Derkach, a US identified Russian Intelligence officer who is overseeing an ongoing, active measures campaign to subvert the 2020 US election to the advantage of Russia in a war that Putin believes Russia has been fighting against the US since at least 2014. Rudy Giuliani has betrayed his country. Rudy Giuliani is currently acting against the United States on behalf of Russia’s Intelligence Services. Rudy Giuliani is a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Keep in mind also that this is happening on the same week as 9/11, where Rudy comes out of his gopher hole every year and reminds everyone that he's really famous for being in charge when thousands of people died 19 years ago.

He's also a Russian agent's pawn and active traitor, in a clear plot to interfere with the election, one so obvious that even the Trump regime is putting an end to it.

This should be the absolute end of Trump's camapign and a Biden landslide, but of course it won't be.

We've fallen that far in four years.  We have to climb out in November with Joe Biden, or we're all lost.

StupidNews!

• CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques of mining giant Rio Tinto has resigned in the wake of the destruction of a 46,000-year-old indigenous cultural heritage site in Australia to expand an iron mine.
• A federal judge has rejected the Trump regime's plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the US Census as a violation of "constitutional responsibility" to count all persons in a district.
• Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be in Pennsylvania and New York today to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America.
• Voters in Russia go to the polls for regional elections this week as Moscow is demanding access to Putin critic Alexey Navalny in Germany, insisting the regime can prove he was not poisoned.
• Donald Trump says Chinese social media app TikTok will not get an extension from its Tuesday deadline to be sold to an American firm or to be banned in the US as a national security risk.