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U.S. President Donald Trump has invited the leaders of the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Saint Lucia to his Florida resort on Friday to discuss Chinese "predatory economic practices" and the crisis in Venezuela.
Also to be discussed is security cooperation and potential opportunities for energy investment, the White House said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
No invitation was extended to Trinidad and Tobago.
nick639v2 wrote:T&T blanked as Trump invites Caribbean leaders to meeting
https://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/lo ... user-shareU.S. President Donald Trump has invited the leaders of the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Saint Lucia to his Florida resort on Friday to discuss Chinese "predatory economic practices" and the crisis in Venezuela.
Also to be discussed is security cooperation and potential opportunities for energy investment, the White House said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
No invitation was extended to Trinidad and Tobago.
As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/20/19 07:30 PM EDT
After nearly three years and millions of tax dollars, the Trump-Russia collusion probe is about to be resolved. Emerging in its place is newly unearthed evidence suggesting another foreign effort to influence the 2016 election — this time, in favor of the Democrats.
Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.
The leak of the so-called “black ledger” files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years.
Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian's release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton's campaign.
The parliamentarian also secured a court ruling that the leak amounted to “an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko said the tape recording is a serious enough allegation to warrant opening a probe, and one of his concerns is that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency involved had frequent contact with the Obama administration’s U.S. embassy in Kiev at the time.
“Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information,” Lutsenko told me.
Lutsenko, before becoming prosecutor general, was a major activist against Russia’s influence in his country during the tenure of Moscow-allied former president Viktor Yanukovych. He became chief prosecutor in 2016 as part of anti-corruption reforms instituted by current President Petro Poroshenko, an ally of the U.S. and Western countries.
Unlike the breathless start to the Russia collusion allegations — in which politicians and news media alike declared a Watergate-sized crisis before the evidence was fully investigated — the Ukraine revelations deserve to be investigated before being accepted.
After all, Ukraine is dogged by rampant corruption. It is a frequent target of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dirty tricks. And it is a country that, just last year, faked a journalist's death for one day, reportedly to thwart an assassination plot.
But the chief prosecutor, a member of parliament and a court seemingly have enough weight to warrant serious scrutiny of their allegations and an analysis of the audio tape.
Furthermore, the mystery of how the Manafort "black ledger" files got leaked to American media has never been solved. They surfaced two years after the FBI investigated Manafort over his Ukraine business activities but declined to move forward in 2014 for lack of evidence.
We now have strong evidence that retired British spy Christopher Steele began his quest in what ultimately became the infamous Russia collusion dossier with a series of conversations with top Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr between December 2015 and February 2016, about securing evidence against Manafort.
We know the FBI set up shop in the U.S. embassy in Kiev to assist its Ukraine/Manafort inquiry — a common practice on foreign-based probes — while using Steele as an informant at the start of its Russia probe. And we know Clinton’s campaign was using a law firm to pay an opposition research firm for Steele’s work in an effort to stop Trump from winning the presidency, at the same time Steele was aiding the FBI.
Those intersections, coupled with the new allegations by Ukraine’s top prosecutor, are reason enough to warrant a serious, thorough investigation.
If Ukraine law enforcement figures who worked frequently with the U.S. embassy did leak the Manafort documents in an effort to influence the American election for Clinton, the public deserves to know who knew what, and when.
Lutsenko’s interview with Hill.TV raises another troubling dynamic: The U.S. embassy and the chief Ukrainian prosecutor, who America entrusts with fighting corruption inside an allied country, currently have a dysfunctional relationship.
In our interview, Lutsenko accused the Obama-era U.S. embassy in 2016 of interfering in his ability to prosecute corruption cases, saying the U.S. ambassador gave him a list of defendants that he would not be allowed to pursue and then refused to cooperate in an early investigation into the alleged misappropriation of U.S. aid in Ukraine.
Lutsenko provided me with a letter from the embassy, supporting part of his story by showing that a U.S. official did in fact ask him to stand down on the misappropriation-of-funds case. “We are gravely concerned about this investigation for which we see no basis,” an embassy official named George Kent wrote to the prosecutor’s office.
The State Department on Wednesday issued a statement declaring that it no longer financially supports Lutsenko’s office in its corruption-fighting mission and considers his allegation about the do-not-prosecute list “an outright fabrication.”
My reporting, however, indicates Lutsenko isn’t the only person complaining about the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
Last year, when he served as House Rules Committee chairman, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) wrote a private letter asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to recall the current U.S. ambassador, alleging that she made disparaging statements about President Trump.
The ambassador “has spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current administration in a way that might call for the expulsion” of America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, Sessions wrote.
Such dysfunction does not benefit either country, especially when Russia is lurking around the corner, hoping to regain its influence in the former Soviet republic.
Investigating what's going on in the U.S. embassy in Kiev, and whether elements in Ukraine tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election to help Clinton, are essential steps to rebooting a key relationship.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.
redmanjp wrote:https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/will-democrats-finally-admit-the-obama-doj-and-fbi-lied-to-the-fisa-courtWill Democrats finally admit the Obama DOJ and FBI lied to the FISA court?
by Margot Cleveland
| March 20, 2019 01:06 PM
The recently released transcript of Department of Justice lawyer Bruce Ohr’s congressional testimony confirms what conservatives have long been saying: The DOJ and FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process to obtain a court order to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Page served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser for then-presidential candidate Trump from March 2016 until he stepped away from the Trump campaign in late-September 2016, following a Yahoo News report that U.S. intelligence officials were investigating alleged meetings between Page and senior Russian officials. Shortly after Isikoff’s article ran, the DOJ and FBI filed the first of four FISA applications, seeking court approval to surveil Page. The FISA court granted all four surveillance requests.
While the FISA applications remained sealed before the secret FISA court, in early February 2018, then-House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, R-Calif., released a four-page memo detailing abuse by the DOJ and FBI in seeking to surveil Page. Then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., soon countered with his own memo, which did nothing to dispel concerns. Later, the four FISA applications themselves were released which, though heavily redacted, added to the mosaic of abuse.
As the media so often say, conservatives pounced. “Look,” they seethed, “at the government’s abuse of power.” The list was long and the evidence strong. The DOJ and FBI sought a court order to surveil an American citizen based on the unverified, and largely unbelievable, ramblings of the Steele dossier. As evidence of a supposed crime, the FISA applications relied solely on double or triple hearsay from unverified sources.
The FISA applications also failed to inform the court that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign had partially funded the Steele dossier. Also missing from the applications was any mention of dossier author and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s statements demonstrating his bias, such as that Steele was “desperate” to prevent Trump from becoming president.
As new facts continued to emerge over the last year, more signs of abuse appeared. For instance, while the FBI acknowledged interviewing former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos twice and Papadopoulos’ supposed Russian-connection, Joseph Mifsud, once, the FISA applications did not appear to be updated to inform the court of these interviews or the details gleaned from the FBI’s chats with the duo.
We also learned that Trisha Anderson, the deputy general counsel for the FBI, did not read the FISA application for Page before signing off on it. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also apparently signed the final FISA renewal application without reading it and without being fully briefed on the details.
Notwithstanding this overwhelming evidence of FISA abuse, Democrats continued to reject suggestions that the DOJ and FBI acted inappropriately in conducting the Russia collusion investigation. But now we have solid evidence establishing that the FISA applications, sworn to by multiple Obama Administration officials and career DOJ and FBI agents, included at least one false statement: The FISA applications expressly stated that the FBI had “suspended its relationship with” Christopher Steele.
The recently released transcript of the testimony before the House Judiciary Committee of DOJ lawyer Bruce Ohr refutes this statement. Ohr testified that after Steele’s supposed suspension, the former British spy continued to pass intel on to the FBI using Ohr as the conduit. The FBI not only knew of this arrangement, but helped further this work-around by providing Ohr a dedicated agent to whom he could pass on Steele’s latest gossip, making the government’s representation to the FISA court that the FBI had suspended its relationship with Steele untrue.
So, the question is: Will Democrats finally admit to the FISA abuse that is plain for all to see?
redmanjp wrote:No collusion. No indictments. Dems going to be disappointed.
bluefete wrote:The bigger picture is that there are a whole series of investigations being conducted by different agencies.
Trump will have to seriously lawyer up whenever he demits office.
bluefete wrote:The bigger picture is that there are a whole series of investigations being conducted by different agencies.
Trump will have to seriously lawyer up whenever he demits office.
shogun wrote:bluefete wrote:The bigger picture is that there are a whole series of investigations being conducted by different agencies.
Trump will have to seriously lawyer up whenever he demits office.
Oh Gorsh! let the Trumplings have their moment nuh? Been a while for them. Bigger picture? From Tuner's right-wingers?
Watch for these same people to be distancing themselves from their comments in the future. Kinda like le Honourable no longer posting/praising Dear Leader Trump on North Korea.
The_Honourable wrote:I was and will post about that, is just ED took over the ched busy courting you
The_Honourable wrote:Well that is what the left is going to focus on now. Some believe that these separate investigations were started in case the Mueller investigation didn't go their way so that it would dog him all the way into 2020.
shogun wrote:The_Honourable wrote:Well that is what the left is going to focus on now. Some believe that these separate investigations were started in case the Mueller investigation didn't go their way so that it would dog him all the way into 2020.
Just watch the lengths they have to go to convince themselves.
You're aware that Mueller is a lifelong Republican, i hope? And that HE personally had those investigations NOT under his purview handed off? So who are you referring to when you say "their way?" Democrats had nothing to do with that? These conspiracies are golden.
Sadness ³
The_Honourable wrote:Yes the conspiracies that MSNBC and CNN peddle for 2 years are golden indeed
Come nah man Shogun, i know you not thinking straight and probably in a lil denial after that Mueller bomb drop. Their way meaning the democrats way. They were hoping the Mueller Report would have sink Trump which meant sure impeachment. Now they are hoping for these other investigations to be fruitful so they can impeach or at least use for 2020. They also having hopes on the word "exonerate" from the report to justify more investigations.
Collusion failed, so what now? Obstruction? and Cover up?
Sign up and give me money so i can go after Trump and the Mueller Report? LOL!
2020 is going to be interesting.
shogun wrote:
When bluefete's chess game is better than yours, you know you're in trouble. The amount of convoluted garble you typed there is a humorous read. You damn well know you're not making much sense inno? Go back and reread the nonsense you typed in that previous post. Also, I asked a serious question and thaz the best you could reply with hours later? You opted for the Ole faithful "iz MSNBC and CNN fault" BS?? Two 24 hour media outlets who's single operative is to cover, editorialize ad-nauseum about any story that gets traction? Especially when both those very networks (especially CNN) also covered the Clinton Foundation, email gate, Uranium One, Hillary's Parkinson's, Seth Rich and every other Republican manufactured NON stories, for the last 4/5 years? And which brought absolutely ZERO payoff for Republicans? Not ONE single solitary indictment and cost the US taxpayers millions of dollars?... not ONE. Where was your indignation then? Then you have the nerve to say I'M not "thinking straight?" How long you practice that one in the mirror, right winger? Youi fail to realize that Manafort and Gates were on the FBI's radar long before Trump's campaign.... and when Trump decided to bring them into his campaign, it raised alarm bells with the intelligence community? Or maybe you just fully well know that, but know it won't fit into that narrative in your head? Look, I know you're trying to save face, but it not the left's fault that you people on the right have a penchant for getting infatuated with terrible leaders.
Failure? lol. If Trump had just left Comey alone and quietly move him, when a convenient time arose and then not simultaneously gone on national television and say he fired Comey because of the "Russia thing" he could have avoided this whole thing. Now investigators have tentacles into almost all of his affairs. Yup, total fail.
redmanjp wrote:
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