As many of us know, Hollywood is much like a roach motel, good ideas check in but rarely check out. Studios buy the rights to all kinds of books and other stories but few get to the big screen. They get stuck in “development hell”. Trying to line up the director, script, studio, funding, marketing, etc.
The other complaint about Hollywood is that they are rarely faithful to the source material. Often they keep character names, scrap the plot, and create a film that has no resemblance to the story for which they purchased the film rights. Case in point is almost any “true story” made into a film. Often Hollywood admits this with a caption “based on actual events” at the beginning or end of a film. Other times they aren’t so honest. The Chronicles of Narnia movie Prince Caspian is nothing like the book. The movie created all kinds of stuff not in the book and moved the few scenes retained into a different order which further distorted the point of the whole story. The moral lessons that C.S. Lewis so painstakingly crafted into his story are completely lost long before the script was in its final draft.
Similarly, Robert Mueller had the opportunity to tell the true story of what shenanigans were played leading up to the 2016 Presidential election. Instead he opted to retain the names of a few characters and then try to substitute his own script with the caption “based on actual events” to smooth over his application of creative license.
Mueller’s rewrite was leaked to the media yesterday and it really stinks. The plot of his story is so lame as to be laughable except for the fact that he has carte blanche to subpoena folks and send them to jail in order to affect the outcome of his story. Instead of investigating the facts and following them wherever they lead, Mueller has written the script and tried to backfill it with will dupes to connect the dots. After yesterday’s revelations, it is clear that he was gunning to undo the results of the 2016 election and that he has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to do just that.
Mueller’s story goes like this:
Paul Manafort, who briefly worked as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, is alleged to have contacted Julian Assange to coordinate the release of Democrat emails hacked by Russians so WikiLeaks could release them to do the maximum damage to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential aspirations.
That in a nutshell is his story. Based on what I read yesterday on this story, Mueller is looking at three individuals as the pipeline of information from the Trump campaign to WikiLeaks. After two years of investigating, that’s all he has which is bupkis.
Here are some reasons that I know this is wrong:
Julian Assange has repeatedly stated that he did not get the information from the Russians. Julian Assange has never released or said anything false about his document dumps on WikiLeaks so it is not reasonable that he lied in this instance.
When I resigned as Ambassador to blow the whistle on UK/US complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition, I had a number of official documents I wished to leak to prove my story. They were offered to WikiLeaks through two friends, Andrew and Jonathan. WikiLeaks declined to publish them because they could not 100% verify them.
Their reasons were firstly that they were suspicious of me and whether I was a plant; British ambassadors are not given to resigning on principle. Secondly a few of the copies were my own original drafts of diplomatic communications I had sent, not the document as it printed out at the other end.
That is how scrupulous they are. I can vouch for the fact that their record for 100% accuracy is no fluke, it is safeguarded by extreme caution and careful checking.
The person most likely in a position to release the Democrat emails to WikiLeaks was murdered shortly after they were published. Since this man’s death, no further leaks of Democrat communications have surfaced.
The report refutes Democrat politicians’ claims that it was Russia that hacked into DNC computers and released the emails. Instead, an unnamed federal investigator told Fox News that Democrat staffer Seth Rich sent the cache of internal emails to Gavin MacFayden, a London-based WikiLeaks director. WikiLeaks published the highly-damaging emails that detailed DNC leadership’s favoritism of Clinton over Sanders just 12 days after Rich’s death.
Seth Rich died under suspicious circumstances. He was shot in the back twice but not robbed. His cell phone, jewelry, and wallet were on him when he died leading most to suspect foul play.
Murdered Democratic Party Staffer Seth Rich sent DNC emails to WikiLeaks
The only Russian involvement ever alleged at the time of the election was via Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who paid for Christopher Steele’s dossier.
And so, on a warm day last June, Christopher Steele, ex-Cambridge Union president, ex-M.I.6 Moscow field agent, ex-head of M.I.6’s Russia desk, ex-adviser to British Special Forces on capture-or-kill ops in Afghanistan, and a 52-year-old father with four children, a new wife, three cats, and a sprawling brick-and-wood suburban palace in Surrey, received in his second-floor office at Orbis a transatlantic call from an old client.
“It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele would recall in an anonymous interview with Mother Jones, his identity at the time still a carefully guarded secret. But over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary’s territory, he found himself following a trail marked by, as he then put it, “hair-raising” concerns. The allegations of financial, cyber, and sexual shenanigans would lead to a chilling destination: the Kremlin had not only, he’d boldly assert in his report, “been cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump for years but also had compromised the tycoon “sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.”
And in the aftermath of the publication of these explosive findings—as nothing less than the legitimacy of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was impugned; as congressional hearings and F.B.I. investigations were announced; as a bombastic president-elect continued to let loose with indignant tirades about “fake news”; as internal-security agents of the F.S.B., the main Russian espionage agency, were said to have burst into a meeting of intelligence officers, placed a bag over the head of the deputy director of its cyber-activities, and marched him off; as the body of a politically well-connected former F.S.B. general was reportedly found in his black Lexus—Christopher Steele had gone to ground.
So who interjected Russia into the WikiLeaks email dump, why the Old Gray Lady.
The release of a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee by WikiLeaks last month has raised a great many questions — about the role of the D.N.C. in trying to influence the primary and about the alleged interference of Russian intelligence in an American election.
As for Mr. Assange’s animus against Hillary Clinton — he has written that she “lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism” — that is evidence of bias, but no more than that. After all, many news outlets are clearly, and sometimes proudly, biased.
We still don’t know who leaked the D.N.C. archive, but given Mr. Assange’s past association with Russia, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was a Russian agent or an intermediary. Mr. Assange insists this is a mere distraction from the issue of D.N.C. interference, but the answer is also in the public interest. We should all be concerned (although hardly surprised) if it is that easy for the Russians to break into the D.N.C. and possibly United States government networks.
Meanwhile, Paul Manafort is threatening to sue the Guardian newspaper over reports he met with WikiLeaks’ Assange. Manafort categorically denies any such meetings, as does Assange.
WikiLeaks said on Twitter it was willing “to bet … a million dollars and the editor’s head” that the Guardian story was wrong and that the group is launching a legal defense fund.
As support for my arguments, this from Rush Limbaugh:
Limbaugh said Tuesday: “If anybody doubts the political nature of the Mueller investigation, all you have to do is take a look at the news today. For crying out loud, they really want us to believe that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times before WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails?”
He said if that story was true, Obama and his buddies would have known back when they “were spying on the Trump campaign.”
Then there’s the claim from Mueller that Manafort lied.
“I don’t think Manafort’s been lying about anything. What Manafort’s refusing to do is to compose evidence, make it up!” he said.
Limbaugh said: “All of this is a political trap. This is not about the execution of justice. It’s not about law and order. It’s not about trying to get to the bottom of what happened in the 2016 election. It’s about trying to overturn it. And short of being able to do that, it’s about discrediting the winner.”
So what’s with Russia?
When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.
We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election
I will stipulate that many world leaders had it in for Hillary. She was a major screw-up as Secretary of State. She helped to destabilize many regions of the world and many people died as a result of her (and President Obama’s) incompetency.
Only after the U.S. media began blaming Russia for the Democrat email dump did Vladimir Putin fan the flames of Russian conspiracy.
In early September, Putin said publicly it was important the DNC data was exposed to WikiLeaks, calling the search for the source of the leaks a distraction and denying Russian “state-level” involvement.
Last time I checked, Rahm Emmanuel was still saying “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”. So why should Putin?
Putin was a bigshot in the KGB. If he was up to no good, he certainly wouldn’t have his fingerprints on the operation. Heck, look what Willie Brown was able to do in California for many years. Nothing ever was traced to him even when you knew he was behind it. Willie is a poser next to Putin.
Also of note, in the government report quoted above, the National Security Agency—the folks in the best position to know what is going on in other countries because they are the only part of the government that listens—were the most skeptical of the Russia tampering narrative put forth by the CIA and FBI.
I think the hole analogy works best.
We often hear that the first rule of holes is to stop digging. However, the first rule of holes when your enemy is digging is to offer to hold his coat and tell him what a great job he is doing.
I think Putin was performing the second. He was encouraging his enemies to double-down on stupid behavior.
I still maintain that all you have to do to hurt Hillary Clinton is tell the truth about her.
As I’ve stated before, China gets a pass on election tampering because they give millions of dollars to Democrats. China’s election tampering and spying on the United States is so well documented that nobody seems to care as long as our cell phones keep letting us play Candy Crush and watch cute videos.
Anyway, Mueller is out of ammo and the last few days have proven that conclusively.
I hope Trump or one of his appointees put this witch hunt down once and for all.