Interview with Pizzagate Hacker, plus Saudi arrests

This week was a big one for updates on the Pizzagate story. What? That thing is still alive? Well, yeah.

First we have an interview with the Comet Ping Pong hacker. He should be famous, but you've probably never even heard of him, or his story. The MSM did a good job at creating a strawman to debunk. No, there was never a sex trafficking ring working out of the basement of the pizza place. The only ones who ever alleged that were the people trying to disprove the story.

The *only* allegation ever made, in addition to the creepy ass murals, was that the Comet Ping Pong website was a clearinghouse for kiddie porn, and someone had to have made those movies.

Since the interview is over an hour long, I'll give you the TL-DW of it. BigFish as he'll be known was following the Podesta email story and like many others thought the references to 'pizza' and 'cheese' was code for something. This brought the focus to Comet Ping Pong where he found a login and members area of the website. He hacked the password and accessed the back end where he found images, movies, zip files, you name it. A trove of kiddie porn, spread out over 9 servers across the globe. It was unclear whether it was a place for members to upload and share their crimes, or a place to purchase files. There was a shopping cart that used bitcoin, so definitely a commercial component to it.

One thing I'll say about our hacker, he was thorough and persistent when contacting the law. DCPD blew him off at first. So did the FBI. Right after contacting the FBI, Edgar Maddison Welch entered the premises and shot off a round from an assault rifle. That bullet magically pierced the hard drive of Comet Ping Pong's server. Quite a shot for a guy who fired into the floor of a building that had no basement.

Edgar Welch was already in big trouble. About a month earlier, he intentionally drove his car into a group of pedestrians. Vehicular assault, perhaps attempted murder. The records from this case, and the CPP case, are unavailable through FOIA requests.

After the shooting, DCPD appeared to take interest in our hacker's story, but eventually the detective assigned to the case went dark and stopped responding to emails. By the way, do you know what they do to police officers who beat their wives and pass out drunk on the sidewalk with their service revolver exposed? In DC, they make him police chief.

About this time, BigFish came home one day to find his mail opened. Then his company vehicle got T-Boned while parked in his quiet cul-de-sac. A guy was at his window and ran off when he approached. Then one night his neighbor calls the cops because there's a guy in full camo and a ski mask hiding in his bushes. The cops said he was breaking into cars, but he lived two states away.

Despite BigFish's persistence in verifying that the detective had received his information and was still working the case, a FOIA request returned no information regarding an investigation into Comet or James Alefantis.

This week, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS and the acronym lovers say) just arrested 11 members of the royal family in what is called an anti-corruption crackdown. Notably arrested was Prince Alaweed bin Talal, one of the world's richest investors. He owns a larger share of Twitter than @jack does, and also the Four Seasons Las Vegas, which is located on the top floors of -wait for it - Mandalay Bay.

The alt-right underground is claiming these stories, as well as the Las Vegas shooting and 9/11, are connected. The allegation is that the Saudi corruption includes human trafficking, the guilty parties are in league with the main characters from the Pizzagate cabal, and Trump cut a deal with the ascendant prince to engage the wheels of justice. If the story is to be believed, the players involved have been too powerful to take down. The only way it could begin is with the radical first step of arresting members of the Saudi royal family. The Saudi economy is in big trouble, and President Trump could have made a deal giving them economic stability in exchange for the arrests.

In related news, the Podesta Group announced it will be closing by the end of the year.

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bondibox's picture

Donna Brazile has recently confirmed an allegation made during the campaign, that Hillary had called her "a lazy water buffalo."

But also alleged at the time, is that Hillary then turned to John Podesta and shouted "If that fucking bastard wins, we all hang from nooses!"

And now the noose tightens...

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F the F'n D's

The Aspie Corner's picture

Not a single one of them will see jail time. They are all in on it. Bill, Hillary, Puppet Trump, all of them. Anyone who believes that Dipshit Trump is anything more than a god damned patsy needs to have their head examined.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

studentofearth's picture

I do not recall the source, but the time period was within 2 weeks of the 2017 election. A quote or author opinion writing basically:

The lap top from Anthony Weiner contained explosive information that reached into the hierarchy of multiple governments, entertainment and non-government entities. It was too big to prosecute with law enforcement and would disrupt the western democracies. If Trump was elected we would see appearingly unrelated purges, prosecutions and government overthrows. Would probably take 2 years to move through the process.

We are now 12 months into the described time period. Don't know if it is true, but it is an interesting time.

Thanks for the update provided.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

snoopydawg's picture

@studentofearth

for his sexting an underaged girl, yet Epstein admitted raping more than 30 underaged girls and he was only sentenced to 18 months and only served 13. But get this. He was allowed to leave the prison every day and go to his job. How do others whose only crime was smoking pot get a deal like that? Here is our two Americas again.

Epstein got such a sweet deal because he promised not to name names about the other high profile men who had gone to his parties at his apartment and his island. Names like the Clintons, Trump, Prince Andrew and many other people that also raped the girls.
The 30 victims weren't notified about that deal until after it was made.

New documents reveal Palm Beach billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's 'sweetheart deal' with prosecutors

The motion refers to the deal was “one of the most extraordinarily lenient plea arrangements in American history.”

“There is good reason to believe that if the prosecutors had exposed their dealings to scrutiny by Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2 and other victims, they would not have reached such a sweetheart plea deal,” the motion says. “Despite the fact that this case has been in litigation for more than seven years, spanning several hundred pleadings, the government does not write even a single sentence explaining why it entered into an NPA (non-prosecution agreement) with a sex offender who had committed hundreds of federal sex offenses against young girls.”

The Palm Beach Police identified numerous underage victims in 2005 and turned the case over to federal authorities in November 2006. By May 2007, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had prepared an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a 53-page indictment against Epstein and his co-conspirators.

*On Sept. 24, 2007, the non-prosecution agreement was signed, resolving all federal crimes committed by Epstein and co-conspirators.

*For the next nine months, the U.S. Attorney’s Office – “doing Epstein’s bidding” – concealed the non-prosecution agreement’s existence from the victims.

Apparently, his attorneys had so much power over the persecution that they got to set the terms of the sentence. How does this work?
Meanwhile, a lot of men got away with rape, get to go blissfully on with their lives, while 30 women have to live with what happened to them. Oh well, they got paid for it, right?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

And how is it that the prosecutor and judge got away with letting this guy off easy for NOT naming names of other perps when it's generally the other way around, where in order to protect kids and get these guys put away where they can't harm others, a deal is offered for them TO name names?

How is it that corruption is so ingrained that there's not even any pretense of justice or of protecting even children in so many cases?

Oh, right, America... my sympathy...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

snoopydawg's picture

@Ellen North

it's obvious that the PTB will protect anyone in their group from being held accountable for their actions, even for rape. It doesn't seem to matter what their crimes are, they get away with it time after time after.....

I don't understand why his lawyers had so much power over the prosecutors. The lawyers seem to have set the rules for how Epstein was prosecuted, not the other way around.
Plus he got off from the federal charges and his plea deal was that he didn't name his coconspirators which was probably Bill Clinton. He ditched his security detail 26 times according to various reports I've read. Hillary was also said to have flown on Epstein's jet too.

I would think that being known to have participated in these types of events would be shameful, but look at how many people came to Bill's defense when republicans brought impeachment charges against him after he lied to the country about Monica Lewinsky.

I don't have an opinion on pizzagate, but I won't dismiss that it could have happened. This is a sick country when it throws the most vulnerable away. But I'm not saying anything that people don't know.

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bondibox's picture

@snoopydawg The way these people work is they compromise you early, and then you're a pawn the rest of your life. Take DC Police Chief Newsham. Raging alcoholic, wife beater. It seems he is not in a good mental place, as if he's distraught by decisions he made that can't be undone. And yet he keeps rising in power and influence, as if guided by an invisible hand.

And now I wonder what happened to the Judge and the Prosecutor in their lives…

I myself got into a strange situation when I was 20. I pissed off a guy who turned to black arts to get his revenge. He enlisted someone to help him. I could feel the pressure on me, I know my home was broken into only to instill fear in me. And somehow I knew that I had an out - I too could enlist the help of someone, but I would pay a lifelong price for it. All in my mind? You'd think so, until Nancy Rosanoff did a reading for me and confirmed the conflict was real.

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F the F'n D's

@snoopydawg

Laws, rules, civilized values and human standards of decency Do Not Apply To Those Who Matter, as they would in a democracy, with equal treatment for all...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Big Al's picture

"wheels of justice". That's a laugh, the alt right is stuck so far up Trump's ass they really can't see their hypocrisy.
The Saudi thing is a power grab, of course, and a prelude to more war against Lebanon and Iran. The only deal Trump has made is with Zionist Israel and Netanyahoo to proceed with the last phase of the middle east project.

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Wink's picture

to a jail cell. It just keeps getting better and better.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Pluto's Republic's picture

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton is in 'secret negotiations' with ex-British spy Christopher Steele to buy SECOND 'dirty dossier' on Trump's romantic englements with Russian women, claims Clinton author

• Ed Klein, author of four books on the Clintons, claims Hillary's minions are in secret talks with Russian dossier author Christopher Steele, in an attempt to end his 'illegitimate presidency'

• The second dossier will allegedly contain evidence that Trump had 'romantic involvements with Russian women' connected to the Kremlin's spy apparatus

• The original Russian dossier has been discredited

• '[Hillary's] convinced that Trump made business deals with Russians with ties to the Kremlin in return to offer them favorable trade conditions,' a source tells Klein

• Hillary has been described as 'completely unrepentant' about funding the first dossier, and 'adamant' about releasing a second

• Klein's new book, All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump, reveals Hillary's never-ending crusade against the president

Hillary personally authorized her campaign chairman, John Podesta, to acquire the first controversial Russian dossier, according to a senior Clinton campaign strategist who worked for Hillary in both her 2008 and 2016 presidential bids. Hillary approved Podesta's decision to pay for that dossier by funneling campaign funds through Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney who represented both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

'She is completely unrepentant about financing the first Russian dossier, despite it's being widely discredited,' said the campaign strategist.

According to multiple sources in the Clinton political orbit, Hillary still believes that the most outlandish charges in the original dossier are true, including that Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin.

'This second deal with Christopher Steele isn't going through Marc Elias and Perkins Coie,' said a Clinton source. 'Perkins Coie got badly burned with the first dossier, and they don't want any part of the second one,' the source added.

A close legal adviser to Bill Clinton adds: 'Bill is horrified about all this. He thinks this will blow up in Hillary's face once the charges in the second dossier are proven to be as false as the charges in the first dossier. He's also worried that she may be called to testify under oath before a congressional committee how she got the new dossier.

'Hillary has said that she'll do whatever it takes to make sure Trump's 'illegitimate presidency', as she constantly refers to it among friends and campaign associates, ends in ashes.

I could be wrong, but I think the timeline goes like this:

After Hillary got the first dossier, she put it on the Clinton Foundation server, where it was promptly hacked off by one of the Guccifers. Then it fell into James Comey's hands, who passed a copy off to John McCain, who gave it to Buzzfeed, who promptly published it. Meanwhile, Comey walked it over to Trump Tower and confronted Donald Trump with it. This was shortly before the Inauguration.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
WoodsDweller's picture

@Pluto's Republic
end the Trump/Pence regime "in ashes", I'll be forced to take back 1% of the bad things I've said about Her.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

@WoodsDweller

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Pluto's Republic Oh for fuck's sakes! I don't care who that disgustoid sleeps with!

There's only a few situations in which I could be compelled to care about Donald Trump's sex life, and I'm not going to state them in public space; if I did, I might be giving some piece of crap political consultant some juicy ideas (on the unlikely chance a piece of shit consultant lurked or posted here).

Can't someone turn down the volume on this noxious shit!

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

snoopydawg's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

was having sex with a person who was connected to the Russian government.
The whole dossier was to show his connection to Putin and the point for whole damn propaganda was to keep him for trying to repair our relationship with Russia.
The MICC had been blaming a lot of things on Putin so they could restart the Cold War.

Our government overthrew the Ukraine government and blamed the fighting on Russia. Same with the Syrian war. After Obama decided to play regime change on Assad, Russia was invited to help stop it.

Our military and NATO have been putting troops and military equipment into countries that surround Russia for over two years now and the daily propaganda is to get people behind their upcoming war with Russia.

Hillary was calling Trump Putin's puppet during the debates so just in case he won, this "treasonous behavior" of Trump would be in place.

After Hillary lost, the FBI took control of the Steele dossier so they could keep this going.

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@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

His sex life is personal, thank FSM! These slimeballs always go for sex scandals and never for anything real, in case their own corruption is revealed, but I suppose that since a fair bit of Her corruption has already been revealed, with more coming out all the time, Her feels safe in probably discovering that TRUMP!!! and the BERNIEBROS!!! sold 20% of America's strategic uranium supplies to THE RUSSIANS!!! when he was Secretary of State and this was never anything to do with Her, just a vast right-wing conspiracy against Her!

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal he is even capable any more.

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Mary Bennett

Deja's picture

@Nastarana
I wonder how many people stuck with someone like him would like to go back to the days before that pill was developed.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Pluto's Republic To put it another way, when will somebody make her stop this endless crap!

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Pluto's Republic's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

She's not done with us yet.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

Steele dossier and what their goals were for taking it after Herheinous lost. It says that Her and her campaign tried to hide their involvement in it so people wouldn't think negatively about her campaigning. Like that would have made a difference. People already thought negatively about her..

Is Hillary Just the “Fall Guy” for the Intel Agencies and their Moneybag Bosses?

Clinton wasn’t asked why her campaign tried to obfuscate their role in financing the dossier or whether she felt any remorse for the way the Russia hacking allegations had ballooned into 4 major investigations on Capitol Hill. She wasn’t even asked to comment on the motives of the people who continued to fund the dossier after the DNC terminated their contract in November 2016. Wasn’t she suspicious that these new financiers might have more nefarious objectives in mind, after all, who continues a smear campaign after the election is over, unless, of course, they intend to inflict even more damage on the two main targets, Trump and Russia? Wouldn’t Hillary have figured that out?

But, why? Why would Hillary persist with the “hacking-collusion” meme after she had already lost the election and had nothing to gain by smearing Trump?

That’s not a question that can be easily answered, but I suspect it has less to do with Hillary’s presidential ambitions than it does with the way her campaign found common cause with powerful members of the intelligence community who wanted to use the hacking narrative to pursue their own geopolitical strategy of isolating, punishing and demonizing Russia.

“…the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved….

>. Yahoo

Trump was laughed at when he accused Obama of wiretapping his campaign and his Trump towers apartment. But two years later we find out that he had been telling the truth.
This is why after over two years we are still being subjected to this Russian trope.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@snoopydawg

...because everything Hillary touches turns to shit. Libya and Benghazi case in point.

She blew this bullshit up and now it has taken on a life of it's own:

During news-dump Friday, the DNC was subpoenaed by BuzzFeed for information related to the Democratic hack — its latest salvo in the media company’s efforts to defend itself against an ongoing libel suit connected to its publication of the infamous Steele dossier.

From my notes:

Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive, has sued BuzzFeed for libel for its decision to publish a series of memos authored by the former British spy Christopher Steele. Those memos — part of a so-called “dossier” of information about President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, include claims that Gubarev's companies were recruited by the Kremlin’s security organs to break into Democratic Party computer systems ahead of the 2016 election. Gubarev has strongly disputed that claim, and is now suing both BuzzFeed and Steele.

BuzzFeed is seeking “technical information and data obtained during the investigation into the Democratic Hack, including all host-based and network-based artifacts.” It is also seeking “non-public” analysis and reports into the DNC hack, and copies of the malware that was allegedly used in the attack.

[This is what we have all been clamoring to see.]

In addition to the DNC, Buzzfeed has also subpoenaed the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which investigated the breach at Democratic Party headquarters, for technical information related to Russian hacking attempts.

As part of its efforts to stave off the lawsuit, BuzzFeed has served subpoenas to several federal agencies attempting to depose officials at the CIA, FBI, and other agencies believed to be tied to the commissioning or review of the now-infamous dossier.

[It turns out that the FBI was paying Steele for the Dossier for some of the time, as well.]

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia overlaps with allegations made in the dossier. This is now discovery, according to an application to the British court that also seeks testimony from Steele on, among other issues, payments he received, the reasons for the dossier’s creation, sources and methods for its preparation, and information on who it was distributed to, including media organizations.

Lawyers for Steele argue that making him testify in the U.S. court case against BuzzFeed is simply a way of getting information for use in a separate British court case that Gubarev is pursuing against Steele and his U.K.-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence.

After that, it's a free for all. Loads of people are poised for a full attack on CrowdStrike. They didn't cover their tracks completely. It could be a fairytale ending.

Meanwhile, Hillary, like a Mrs MaGoo, is driving cluelessly right through the middle of this situation, chasing down Steele to buy Dossier #2. Oh brother.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@snoopydawg I agree with the conclusions of that article about the security state and their motivations, but like snoopydawg, I believe that those motives were always intertwined with the Hillary '16 campaign. In other words, up until sometime last summer, when WaPo started printing criticisms of Hillary, there was no daylight whatsoever between the security state's geopolitical aims and Hillary's presidential ambitions.

But there's something else going on here as well.

"Who continues a smear campaign after the election is over?" Someone who doesn't intend to fold their campaign, but intends to make their campaign, and its rhetoric, a permanent status quo. It's like how we are always at war, now. There's no such thing as being at peace and then declaring war and being at war, and then declaring a peace and being at peace again. Similarly, there's now no such thing as election season followed by non-election season followed by election season. The frenetic wail of the media centrifuge is going to keep putting out Hillary 2016's campaign messages until enough of the security state and its industrial and financial allies finally decide to pull her off the stage with a cane, and when they do that, they will replace her with someone else putting out campaign messages.

Think about it: why would these people have any regard for the results of an election? We already know they believe in neither democracy, republicanism, nor the rule of law. Elections don't bring an end to operations; elections are just puppet theater--except that they didn't get the result they planned for out of the puppet theater, and that's chafing their butts mightily, not because they dislike Trump that much, but because Trump in that office implies their control is not absolute.

Only achieving the desired goal could bring an end to operations, and maybe not even that, because it's possible that, like the war machine, the propaganda machine is now self-justified and operates not to achieve goals, but merely to enrich its owners and highest-level employees. It's also possible that this is not so; that the propaganda machine still exists to achieve an end, but that end is total global dominance by the people directing the propaganda machine. They are looking for absolute control. Absolute control can only be achieved by destroying the object of control. Unfortunately, that means the wailing centrifuge will continue spinning its poisonous compounds until we've had a nuclear war, or global warming has caused civilization to collapse, whichever comes first.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

is that right instead of might will prevail. I hope all of them end up with a noose around their necks. I doubt it, but I'd support it.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

arendt's picture

I think there was definitely some kind of sub-text in all the pizza emails. Of course, it has been effectively deflected by a manufactured counter-narrative. In addition, as part of the whole Wikileaks package that HRC and the Dems continue to try to hush up, Pizzagate is doubly damned from public view.

Nevertheless, the whole idea of child porn has been lurking in the background in DC for decades. For example, the 1989 Franklin scandal. Then there is Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein's "Lolita Express".

Being blackmail-able seems to be a requirement to attain high office in this country; and what better blackmail than child porn/molestation? You get what you select for. We have selected for sleaze. Why should anyone be "shocked" to discover that sleaze?

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@arendt Whaddya mean "we?"

As a Gen-Xer, I haven't been given a say. Neither has anybody younger than me.

Those of you who are older started losing your say sometime in the 80s, and it's been getting worse and worse since.

So there ain't no "we" that has selected for sleaze; in fact, sleaze being a desirable political characteristic, so as to facilitate blackmail, seems to be a good indicator, though not proof, that intelligence operatives have a fairly large share of say in who's selected. Putting away data for future blackmail purposes, if needed, is a staple of the way they think.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

arendt's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

All I meant was that the US is now run by blackmail-able clowns. How we got there is a story too long to tell here.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@arendt Sorry. It's a pet peeve of mine. Lots of people--not you--can't wrap their heads around the fact that we've had no influence over the government for at least the past twenty years. "Our" inability to integrate that fact into the rest of our political analysis results in a lot of wasted time (primarily spent on self-flagellation and largely misguided recriminations which increasingly resemble religion rather than politics).

If people want to start a new religion, or a different version of the old Protestant Christianity based loosely on what used to be left-wing politics, that's fine with me, I guess; I don't care what faiths people hold privately. But I do object to religion replacing politics; it not only creates political error but also parks people's private faith squarely in the middle of the public square, where it takes up all the oxygen. It's like someone screaming through a megaphone so you can't hear the people who are trying to have an actual conversation on the other side of the park.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

arendt's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

I understand.

I appreciate your hammering on the point that politics is, and has been, Kabuki theater.

It started to go south as soon as Reagan got in via the October Surprise, followed by Iran Contra. When Weinberger and the rest of them got pardoned by GHWB, I knew the intelligence community and the MIC were completely untouchable. A huge number of honest politicians and decent people bailed out of politics in the 1992 elections. Pat Schroder is the one I remember.

Politics has been a complete joke since then. And, as you point out, religion has been creeping deeper and deeper into government. Mike Pence is a glassy-eyed nutbag who would order your murder for blasphemy faster than you could blink your eye. The left is moribund, derailed by the Identity Politics that Clinton introduced and Obama and Hillary continued. And, IP has totally buried any attempts at class-based political analysis. Look at how they crucified Bernie as a condescending racist for saying that blacks had economic problems.

The only legitimate politics that can get traction at the retail level is to get control of the banks, tax the cosmopolitan corporations and billionaires, and stop the endless waste of money on the MIC. But, if there is a political party with that program, I don't hear a word about it.

Again, I hear you. Just remember, everyone alive is in the same shitty boat. They keep trying to get the oarsmen chained on the port side to fight with the oarsmen chained on the left side. I don't buy it.

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ggersh's picture

@arendt https://www.rt.com/op-edge/180616-british-home-secretary-child-abuse/

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

arendt's picture

@ggersh

the fact that they lost a whole bunch of records was a CT?

I'm unclear which part of this was labeled CT. Did the loss of records allow people to say Saville was the victim of CT?

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to the police, having them ignore it, and then having odd and criminal activity take place in your yard.
We are so conditioned to not question that the connection between Tamal and Mandalay Bay is just a coincidence. You are a CT nut job if you even scratch your head about the...possibilities.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

arendt's picture

Edgar Maddison Welch entered the premises and shot off a round from an assault rifle. That bullet magically pierced the hard drive of Comet Ping Pong's server. Quite a shot for a guy who fired into the floor of a building that had no basement.

I'm not getting what happened. Is it claimed that he fired at the floor (presumably concrete if there was no basement) and it "accidentally" richocheted into the server? Is the implication that the guy went there to destroy the hard drive, and that the rest of his act was pure "crisis acting"

I just don't get the implications here.

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@arendt @arendt

Edit: I'd suspect that that must have been the suggestion. Sounds like something Clinton-related, dosn't it?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Amanda Matthews's picture

FISC for all their snooping.

On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant noncompliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices had not been previously disclosed to the Court. Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government made a written submission regarding those compliance problems.

This comes in the wake of revelations that in June 2016, the FISA Court had refused to issue a warrant for broad surveillance of Trump-connected figures suspected by some Obama officials of improperly colluding with Russians. A much narrower FISA warrant reportedly limited to surveillance of one U.S. person, Carter Page, was ultimately approved in late Summer or Fall of 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa...

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa