https://kennedysandking.com/articles/ma ... -and-trump
Saturday, 12 October 2019 22:17
Mark Zaid, JFK, and Trump
Written by James DiEugenio
* Print
Jim DiEugenio discusses Mark Zaid's connection to the whistleblower investigation against Trump and his earlier role in spreading misinformation about the JFK assassination.
A few weeks ago, after the Robert Mueller attempt to impeach President Donald Trump more or less fizzled, the Democrats in Congress stumbled upon a gift horse. After escaping Mueller’s two-year inquiry and the fabrications of British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and his so-called dossier, President Trump was poised to take a victory lap. He could have now shown that Steele had been first paid by his Republican rivals, who wanted to stop his insurgent candidacy for president. When that effort bore little or no fruit, it was then taken over by agents of the Democratic Party acting as stand-ins for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was further beginning to look like the FBI was out to ensnare President Trump in a net of manufactured “Russian collusion” charges. (Click here for an example)
In fact, Trump had now begun an effort to expose what he thought was a “Deep State plot”. One that was designed to terrorize and smear his presidency from the start—perhaps from before its start. He had entrusted Attorney General William Barr and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to now begin to round up the culprits, whoever they were and wherever the information on them could be attained. If they needed to consult with governments as far away as Australia, so be it.
But in reaction, it appears that Trump overreached himself. Like Richard Nixon, it appears that he played into the hands of those who wished him ill. By his own actions he now gave the likes of Democrat Adam Schiff—who had been reduced to blowhard status by Mueller’s stumbling congressional performance—the means to actually impeach the president. Even that perpetual fence sitter, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, now decided to back Schiff’s latest effort. Perhaps the establishment did not want to see the exposure of their ersatz Russia Gate scandal?
Trump has now endangered his very presidency by giving the Democrats a much more real reason to remove him. By doing so, Pelosi has now given the keys to the kingdom to an attorney who others have thought for years was a part of that rather murky and ill-defined Deep State. His name is Mark Zaid.
But before we get to Mr. Zaid, let us fill in some necessary background to this impending crisis.
What appears to have happened is that Trump made a call—perhaps more than one—to the president of the war-torn country of Ukraine. This happened on July 25, 2019. The call was made to the victorious new president Volodymyr Zelensky to congratulate him on his election in April. But an anonymous official, suspected of being a CIA employee, filed a whistleblower complaint about the call on August 12. Allegedly, the complaint says that although this person was not actually in the room when the call was made, several others were, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The call occurred days after President Trump had delayed hundreds of millions in military aid to Ukraine. Democrats like Schiff argue that this is one of the most compromising aspects of the incident.
The complaint alleges that Trump used the power of his office to try and get Zelensky, the head of a foreign country, to influence the 2020 election. Further, the complaint allegedly says that the officials who heard the call were disturbed by what Trump had said and attempted to “lock down” the actual call and conceal its details. As of today, the actual call and/or verbatim transcript has yet to be released.
What allegedly happened is that Trump urged Zelensky to investigate corruption allegations against former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The idea that Trump had was this: Joe Biden had urged the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, because he was investigating a company which had Hunter on its board of directors. The fact that Joe Biden was, at that time, the front runner in the polls on the Democratic side is not insignificant. The current prosecutor in Ukraine says there was no reason to investigate Hunter, since the real corruption had taken place before he was appointed to the board. It was not being dealt with, which is why Joe Biden wanted the previous prosecutor removed. To most legal experts, soliciting influence from a foreign government to help impact an American election would be an impeachable offense.
There is a back story to all this of course. And it should be sketched in to give the present episode some depth and texture and, also, to add in the usual American brand of hypocrisy. The main reason that Ukraine needs so much military aid is that the USA backed to the hilt the overthrow of the elected president of that country. This was the violent and forceful overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Although made to look like a homegrown revolution, it was done with much aid by certain elements of the European Union and the USA. That uprising unleashed some ugly and frightening fascist forces that had been dormant on the Ukraine scene since after World War II. Under threat of death, Yanukovych had to flee the country with the aid of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The overthrow and its aftermath caused the murders of literally scores of innocent people by the neo-Nazi perpetrators, who the American diplomats on the scene were backing completely. The reason for this was that Yanukovych was portrayed as being too close to Russia and American personages, like the infamous Victoria Nuland, favored anyone—and I mean anyone—who was not. The all too accommodating American media decided to play this tune with no questions asked. And for me and others, like the late Robert Parry, this was the real beginning of the anti-Putin mania that would soon engulf our country. There were very few outlets who thought the anti-Putin spin was a slanted view of what was happening. (For an alternative perspective, click here)
During the 2016 election, candidate Donald Trump voiced a different attitude about Russia and Putin. Since Hillary Clinton had been for the Yanukovych coup, she began to attack Trump as being too sympathetic to Putin. Then came the discredited Steele Dossier, which it appears that many in the FBI actually bought into. After Trump was elected, he decided to fire FBI Director James Comey and this gave others who were likeminded in the Bureau and the Justice Department the excuse to appoint a special prosecutor. After two years, Robert Mueller’s probe came up embarrassingly empty. And he made a very weak witness before the (now) Schiff-controlled House committee. The irony in all of this baseless anti-Russia bombast was this: there were many legitimate policy issues the Democrats could have used to go after Donald Trump. For example, his disgraceful tax cut for the rich and his concurrent attempt to give even more money—which we do not have—to the Pentagon. But yet, it is this issue, plus Trump’s attempt to stay out of a war with Syria, which has seemingly enraged people in both parties against him and which tells the reader a lot about the present state of our political system. An almost too perfect example of this is a 2017 tweet by neocon flack Bill Kristol: “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” That makes it kind of clear.
When the original Mueller missile misfired, Trump made a mistake. As Richard Nixon characterized his missteps during Watergate, “I gave them a sword.”
As people like former CIA officer John Kiriakou and former congressman Norman Solomon have written, if there is a Deep State plot against Trump, it could not have picked a more fascinating antagonist than Mark Zaid. He is the Washington lawyer who is representing two of the anonymous whistle blowers in the case against Trump. Former CIA officer Kiriakou has written that he is surprised that Zaid is still practicing law. John was the former CIA operations officer who alerted the country to the torture process known as waterboarding. For that, and confirming information about who was involved in that torture, he was indicted on five counts. In a ridiculous kangaroo court legal proceeding—described at length in the film Silenced—Kiriakou was forced to plead guilty to one count and he spent over two years in prison, while the actual torturers stayed free. (For a brief summary of his case, click here)
In an interview I did with John, he repeated the information he wrote about in an article at Consortium News. He told me that once he was indicted in 2007, one of the lawyers who briefly represented him was Mark Zaid. He found him to be impetuous and confrontational, so he let him go. Yet, during the grand jury hearings, it was Zaid and the reporter he talked to, a man named Matt Cole, who testified against him. He filed a complaint for the apparently unethical practice of a lawyer testifying against his former client. But since it was filed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, it was ignored. (Author’s Interview with Kiriakou, October 6, 2019) The Federalist Society should look to its laurels in stacking certain courts.
In that interview, the former CIA officer told me about another case that Zaid was involved in. That one concerned Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling ended up being convicted for allegedly giving away secrets the CIA had concerning their secret operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, codenamed Merlin. As with Kiriakou, the Sterling case could have been brought under the George W. Bush administration. It was not. It proceeded under the Obama administration, which tried more whistleblower cases than all prior administrations combined. In my interview with John, he told me that Zai
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/nation ... story.html
Black woman dies in Fort Worth after police officer shoots her in her home, officials say
By TIM BALK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
OCT 12, 2019 |
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/nation ... story.html
British female prison officer sentenced to year in jail after sex with inmate in cleaning cupboard
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politi ... story.html
Bill Gates had much cozier relationship with ‘intriguing’ Jeffrey Epstein than he admitted: report
https://www.thewrap.com/agc-oliver-ston ... -betrayed/
AGC Television Acquires Worldwide Rights to Oliver Stone Doc ‘JFK: Destiny Betrayed’
New documentary to shed new light on what really happened in 1963
Umberto Gonzalez | October 12, 2019 @ 11:00 PM
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny ... story.html
NYPD officer menaced Queens karaoke waitress with gun, threatened to shoot her if she didn’t hang out with him
https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/nypd-cop- ... t-lawsuit/
NYPD cop was working US Open during road rage incident: lawsuit
https://www.yahoo.com/news/philippine-p ... 47908.html
Philippine police chief resigns amid drug allegations
Associated PressOctober 13, 2019
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/5 ... ce-request
5 rappers dropped from NYC festival at request of police
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-lo ... 1570806358
The FBI Lost Our Son
Billy Reilly worked in counterterrorism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, penetrating radical groups online with false identities. Then he disappeared.
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/lega ... babe5.html
WV Supreme Court upholds firing of parole officer who's home was raided by FBI
https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/cops-in- ... XmbnilD6A/
Texas Cop Arrested for Stealing 30 Pills from Nurse's Office at a Middle School
https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/war-on-p ... F5jXUaajQ/
Chicago Cops Taser Man Four Times in Front of his Kids for Recording them
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/jus ... ntability/
HOW THE SECRETIVE “DISCIPLINE” PROCESS FOR FEDERAL PROSECUTORS BURIES MISCONDUCT CASES
Brooke Williams, Samata Joshi, Shawn Musgrave
https://www.madcowprod.com/2019/10/13/j ... zed-crime/
Jerry Falwell, Wally Hilliard, & Transnational Organized Crime
By Daniel Hopsicker -
October 13, 2019
1
114
Kurds are being slaughtered in Syria, there’s a tsunami in Japan, hundreds of ISIS fighters have escaped from jail, and Attorney General Bill Barr, who according to numerous witnesses while working for the CIA enabled cocaine trafficking through Mena, Arkansas during the 1980’s, was delivering a speech at Notre Dame blaming “the decline of religion” and the “destruction of moral order” in the U.S. for the drug abuse he helped create.
So why should anyone care about the latest corrupt conservative Christian evangelical, Jerry Falwell Jr., President of Liberty University, his wife, and a pool boy in Miami? Or give a second thought to the imbroglio over his continued leadership of the influential Bible college in Lynchburg, Virginia?
Two reasons: Falwell is currently instrumental in shoring up Donald Trump’s base of evangelicals, eighty-one percent of whom still plan on voting for Donald Trump, despite his flouting of their “traditional values.”
Falwell is also backing Trump’s ‘controversial’ decision to abandon the Kurds. He said Trump was simply “keeping his promise to keep America out of endless wars.”
“The president has got to do what’s best for the country, whether it helps him with this phony impeachment inquiry or not,” Falwell said in an interview.
Moreover, evangelical Christians have been among Trump’s most loyal supporters. They stood with him through the “Access Holl
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne89 ... g-arrested
Hong Kong Protester Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by Police After Being Arrested
“Do you know the body-search room in San Uk Ling is all dark? Do you know I am not the only one who suffered sexual violence by the police?"
https://bangordailynews.com/2019/10/13/ ... ays/?amp=1
Climate change threatens half of Maine’s birds with extinction, report says
