American Kompromat

 

...... the top lawyer for the National Security Council, and his depty, Michael Ellis, inappropriately shared classified intelligence files with House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA).

At the time, the House Intelligence Committee was investigating Trump's ties to Russia, and the episode, while perfectly legal, was an early indication that when it came to overseeing Trump's transgressions, Nunes and other House Republicans were delighted to do trump's bidding.

Eisenberg later tried to cover up Trump's extortion phone call to Zelinsky by ordering that the transcript of the call be moved to a highly classified server. He was subpoenaed to testify before the House, but declined to appear. Kirkland & Ellis attorneys also worked with Alexander Acosta - another Kirkland alumnus, and then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and a Republican - to get Epstein out of the sex trafficking charges, despite the testimony of over 50 trafficked girls, and, instead, he ended up serving a few months in jail for procuring prostitutes. His jail term included 16 hours a day where he could be outside the prison facility, doing whatever he wanted. (You have to read this book!)

American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein … and a lot we just don't know

A new book on the old president is titillating but scattershot, a compendium of wild stories and salacious accusations

Donald Trump, Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago club, February 2000. Photograph: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images

Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.

Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?

“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”

And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.

This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?

Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”

On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”

Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.

There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.

Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory.

LINK 


Devin Nunes resigned from Congress to run TRUTH SOCIAL. Being investigated.

He was a CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN congressman who ran on claims about his family's California dairy farm....except it moved to IOWA and hired undocumented immigrants.

Devin Nunes liked to SUE including a COW that posted on TWITTER.

***This is a MUST WATCH:
Nunes cannot sue Twitter over accounts posing as his mother and a cow, judge rules
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/devin-nunes-twitter-lawsuit-cow/index.html

https://www.facebook.com/devinnunescow/

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-20/abcarian-sunday-column

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23471864/devin-nunes-family-farm-iowa-california/