Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

I call it a national cognitive dissonance because the whole nation seems to have accepted a set of facts — a state of reality — that just doesn’t reconcile with any morality or legality or simple sense of right and wrong.

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It happened on May 10, 2017, three months after Trump took office. It was shocking at the time that U.S. reporters were banned from the meeting, but Russian Tass reporters and photographers were allowed into the Oval Office. It was equally shocking to learn several days after Trump’s private confab with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. that he had “shared secrets about Israel” with the two Russian officials.

The Washington Post at the time reported that Israel had not given permission for the secrets between the U.S. and Israel to be shared with anyone, much less the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. “This is code-word information,” a U.S. intelligence official told the Post, referring to one of the highest classification levels for secrets used by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. The source told the Post that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

We know much more today than we did in May of 2017 about Trump’s loose handling of national security secrets. But even in 2017, we knew that Russia had plans to seize Ukrainian territory, because Russian soldiers wearing uniforms with no insignia had occupied parts of eastern Ukraine and Russia had seized the entirety of Crimea and declared it part of Russia in 2014. A Russian Buk missile had been used to shoot down Malaysian Air Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew members.

We knew that Russian President Vladimir Putin was no friend of Israel’s and indeed no friend of Jewish citizens of his own country. Here is a July 2015 headline from Radio Free Europe: “Jews Are Fleeing Russia Because of Putin.” The story tells of 4,685 Jewish Russian citizens emigrating to Israel in 2014 alone. “Spooked by Russia’s actions in Ukraine and by the increasingly stringent punishments for anyone deemed critical of the Kremlin, Russians of Jewish descent have been fleeing in droves over the past 18 months,” Radio Free Europe reported.

So, with that background, with the plight of Jews in Russia well known to the State Department—some of the Russian Jews were relocating to the U.S.—what was Donald Trump doing in a private meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and ambassador telling them secrets about Israel that were so classified that they were marked in code, not in English?

The next year, Trump met privately with Putin in Helsinki at a summit. There was no U.S. translator or note-taker present at the meeting. Afterwards, Trump told the media that he trusted Putin over his own intelligence agencies. We have no idea how many times the two men may have talked on the phone. As it became known after Jan. 6, Trump had a habit of ordering that the fact that he made certain phone calls not be registered by the White House switchboard.

Even with Trump’s indictment on espionage charges for his mishandling of top-secret documents at his home, Mar-a-Lago, we have no way of knowing what other secrets Trump may have shared with Russian officials during his four years in office and afterwards in retirement, given the number of national security documents he took with him when he left office.

Trump was a threat to our national security when he served as president, and it must be considered that with his open hostility to NATO and his blackmailing of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, he was a threat to the security of other nations as well, among them Ukraine and Israel.

Former Rep. Tom Suozzi is jumping into the race for his old congressional seat, aiming to take on incumbent Republican George Santos, who is currently under federal indictment for money laundering and fraud charges.

In an announcement on the social media platform X on Tuesday morning, Suozzi said, “The madness in Washington, D.C. and the absurdity of George Santos remaining in the United States Congress is obvious to everyone.”

“You know me. I’ve never sat on the sidelines,” the statement from the Democrat continues. “From cost-of-living to immigration, crime, climate change, combatting terrorism in the Middle East and globally, and simply helping people, we need more common sense and compassion and less chaos and senseless fighting.”

Suozzi, who previously represented the 3rd Congressional District in eastern Queens and the North Shore of Nassau County for three terms before unsuccessfully running for governor, said he would file the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to set up a congressional campaign committee on Tuesday. He also plans to hold a formal campaign launch event after the November elections. He joins a growing crowd of Democrats and Republicans looking to challenge the embattled congressman.

When asked about Suozzi entering the race, Santos said in a text message to Gothamist that his predecessor “won’t clear his primary. He pissed off every New York Democrat by running against Kathy [Hochul] and smearing her.”

“The only person in NY that likes him is Jay Jacobs. Don’t forget he lost Nassau county in the primary,” Santos added, referencing the chair of the state Democratic Party.

While Suozzi enters the field with heightened name recognition, he will likely face a primary contest next June from fellow Democrats. Among his challengers is former state Sen. Anna Kaplan, who announced plans to run for the seat last May, when Santos was indicted on 13 charges related to duping campaign donors and filing false statements with the FEC.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday accused Rep. George Santos of engaging in multiple fraud schemes including identity theft, wire fraud and making false statements as part of a conspiracy to mislead donors, the Federal Election Commission and his constituents.

The set of 10 new criminal charges were included in a superseding indictment filed on Tuesday by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York and come on top of the 13 charges Santos already faced in May. At the time, he pleaded not guilty to those charges.

The new indictment also comes less than a week after Nancy Marks, his former campaign treasurer, accepted a plea deal where she admitted to working with Santos to make his campaign appear to be more successful at raising money than it actually was.

“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said in a statement. “Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen. This Office will relentlessly pursue criminal charges against anyone who uses the electoral process as an opportunity to defraud the public and our government institutions.”

Santos did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His attorney, Joseph Murray, declined to comment.

In the new indictment, prosecutors alleged that Santos engaged in two distinct fraud schemes.

The first involved Santos and Marks agreeing to file documents with the FEC that purported to show that 10 of their family members made donations to the campaign, even though those individuals did not make the contributions, prosecutors alleged.

The goal was to secure additional funding for the Santos campaign from a program administered by the national party committee by falsely showing the campaign had raised more than $250,000 from third-party donors, the indictment alleged. Santos and Marks also filed fraudulent statements with the FEC that showed that Santos loaned himself $500,000. Prosecutors alleged at the time that Santos only had $8,000 in his bank account.

In the second scheme, Santos was accused of stealing the identities and financial information of contributors to his campaign and then repeatedly charging their credit cards without their permission. Prosecutors cited one instance where Santos allegedly attempted to rack up more than $44,000 in charges on one contributor's card, and then masked the donations as contributions from himself and family members.

In another instance, prosecutors alleged Santos ran up $12,000 on a contributor’s card and funneled that money into his own personal bank account.

It just occurred to me that there's a real marketing opportunity if if they recover a wrist watch that is still working.

US Coast Guard recovers remaining parts from imploded Titan submersible

It just occurred to me that there's a real marketing opportunity if if they recover a wrist watch that is still working.

Funny as a crutch.

Can Hitler and his war on the Jews be funny, especially to Jews? Just ask Mel Brooks.

He mocks the Nazis and fascist pretentiousness.