monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

FBI investigators have a simple reason for believing Jared Kushner can help them determine whether President Trump's campaign helped Russia influence the presidential election: Kushner met with senior Russians during the campaign.

And while it's not weird for presidential campaigns to meet with foreign officials, under this context, it was.

Right around the time Trump's son-in-law and top adviser held a meeting with the Russian ambassador to the United States last spring, the CIA director started to notice something weird: The Russians were talking about actively, aggressively trying to influence the U.S. presidential election against Hillary Clinton.

John Brennan, who was CIA director at the time, then started to notice that the Russians were reaching out to Trump campaign officials. His “radar” went off. Here's what he told Congress in a hearing about Russian meddling on Tuesday:

“Having been involved in many counterintelligence cases in the past, I know what the Russians try to do. They try to suborn individuals, and they try to get individuals, including U.S. persons, to try to act on their behalf, either wittingly or unwittingly. And I was worried by a number of contacts that the Russians had with U.S. persons. And so therefore, by the time I left office on January 20, I had unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the campaign or not to work on their behalf, again, either in a witting or unwitting fashion. And so, therefore, I felt as though the FBI investigation was certainly well-founded and needed to look into those issues.”

In other words: When the Russians want to spy or meddle in other nations' affairs, their go-to move is to find people from that nation to cuddle up with — or to blackmail, if it gets to that.

When the director of the CIA realized that the Russians wanted to influence the U.S. election, he knew to keep an eye out for Russians reaching out to people tied to the election. And sure enough, Brennan said, Russian officials started holding meetings with members of the Trump campaign.

Michael Flynn. Kushner. Now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. They all met with Russian officials at some point, and CNN and the New York Times, respectively, have reported that Sessions and Kushner did not disclose their meetings with Russians on their security-clearance forms. A security clearance is required before a person can be privy to the nation's top secrets. Other members of Trump's campaign already had deep ties to Russia, among them former campaign manager Paul Manafort and adviser Carter Page.

And it's fair to say that U.S. investigators would have been very intrigued to see then-candidate Trump's son-in-law, one of his closest advisers, receiving meetings with Russians. This is a member of Trump's inner circle, as close as you can get without meeting with the candidate himself. Not to mention that Kushner is family. Going back to April 2016, we know Kushner met at least twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and a Moscow banker.

That's not to say meeting with the Russians equates to colluding with the Russians.

Brennan emphasized to the House Intelligence Committee: “These are contacts that might have been totally, totally innocent and benign as well as those that might have succumbed somehow to those Russian efforts.”
“Many times they know that individuals may be Russian officials,” he said later, speaking broadly about how Russians use people, “but they don't know that there is an intelligence connection or an intelligence motive behind it.”

The US government takes full responsibility for the leaked information on the police investigation into the Manchester bombings, Rex Tillerson has said.

The American Secretary of State made a snap visit to the UK after the intelligence dispute between the two countries threatened to escalate into a diplomatic row.
...
"We take full responsibility for that and we obviously regret that that happened," Mr Tillerson said as he met with Boris Johnson.

I've been out with a stomach flue just 24 hours, I miss a lot it seems.

WE COULD HAVE BEEN CANADA
Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda.

InfraBlue wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

Now, there's the revelation that he instructed his director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and his director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, to publicly deny the existence of evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Really? Where does this claim come from?

According to the article that I linked, the claim comes from "two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president."

1. Interesting that the NYT has the memo yet keeps it hidden rather than printing it.

2. Unnamed sources. That proves it's true.

US has so many foundational myth stories whereas Canada has really almost nothing of the sort. We have nothing like "the redcoats are coming!", the Tea Party rebellion, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, "I regret I have but one life to give for my country", Johnny Appleseed, etc etc.

I don't think I agree with all that.

And if they quote any other section of that memo, you won't believe them anymore than you believe the section they quoted. Got it...

Our foundation myths really are that. Joseph of Arimathea sailed to Glastonbury with Christ and the Holy Grail. You can visit King Arthur's grave and the Glastonbury thorn that came into being when Joseph's staff suddenly took root.

Then there's London, established by Brutus, or Brute of Troy, a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas.