Will Orange Julius use the Manson defense?

[Henry Whalley]

Charles Manson didn't murder anyone with his own two hands. His followers murdered people at his behest.

"There were good people on both sides."

[jcole]

Didn't they get Manson with conspiracy charges? I don't think would fly in an impeachment; don't know how anyone else could be charged unless it was another political official.
I've thought this through.

Charles Manson didn't murder anyone with his own two hands. His followers murdered people at his behest.

"There were good people on both sides."

[Meddle]

The current charge of incitement has more than been proven for a legitimate jury. But this jury is comprised of cult followers. It's like Van Houten and the others are sitting on the jury at Chuckie's trial.

Will it ever get to a real jury in front of a real Judge?

Stay tuned.

[Henry Whalley]

But this jury is comprised of cult followers. It's like Van Houten and the others are sitting on the jury at Chuckie's trial.

And it's possible that Charles Manson would have been a better president than Orange Julius.

[Richard]

The current charge of incitement has more than been proven for a legitimate jury. But this jury is comprised of cult followers. It's like Van Houten and the others are sitting on the jury at Chuckie's trial.

Will it ever get to a real jury in front of a real Judge?

Stay tuned.

ummm look at your cult,not only did you get suckerd into supporting a fake Russian collusion theory,you did not learn and got suckered into a fake Ukrainian conspiracy,fake impeachment,the most secure election in the history of the United States history,and now another fake impeachment conspiracy.

To make matters worse,the whole time you were being fed fake news,and even after it was proved to you it was fake news and you still believed it.

What would you call that ? Slow learners?

You guys have spent the last 4 years throwing everything against the wall that you could find,shamelessly,and even after he is out of office,still grasping at straws.

Ever think just maybe he was not the problem and you were?

Let me guess,you have some bombshell evidence provided to you from a 4th party un-named witness who wishes to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak about it.

That is the only “evidence “ that you guys have presented in the last four years,all ending in the same.

Interesting how he still lives in the heads of some,charging him rent yet?

[Dumpling]

ummm look at your cult,not only did you get suckerd into supporting a fake Russian collusion theory,you did not learn and got suckered into a fake Ukrainian conspiracy,fake impeachment,the most secure election in the history of the United States history,and now another fake impeachment conspiracy.

Just that first item on your " "fake news" that all of us have been
suckered into" list, the collusion theory, has a fifty page
article on Wikipedia. I won't go into it at length AT ALL
except to point out that it's there. As a Wikipedia article,
it can be edited or commented on or more can be added
to the extensive documentation at the end of the article if all
of the relevant information has not yet been provided.

Wikipedia editors wouldn't tolerate fifty pages of something
completely fake and made-up. We COULD go to the sources
cited at the end, one by one, and assess why the material
for each one is real or why it is fake. But, picking up on a
little scrap of information found within that fifty page article...

According to the materials in some Justice department
complaints, the Russian operation to interfere the
United States election system was codenamed "Lakhta".

From other sources, Lakhta was begun in about 2014
with approval from Putin.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/russi...litical-system

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/russi...aud-conspiracy

From the second link, in case it goes 404pagenotfound some day:

"Today's charges allege that Russian national, Artem Lifshits,
conspired with others to steal Americans' identities and use
them to open fraudulent bank and cryptocurrency accounts,"
said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John
C. Demers. "Lifshits participated in this fraud in order to
further Project Lakhta's malign influence goals and for his
own personal enrichment. This case provides a clear illustration
of how these malicious actors fund their covert foreign
influence activities and Russia's status as a safe-haven for
cyber criminals who enrich themselves at others' expense."

The attachment at the bottom of the second link above is
as follows. It has extensive background information on the
alleged activities of the named defendant and of Lakhta.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-re...15491/download

We may have Lakhta to thank for the record high voter
turnout in the 2020 presidential election.

[Richard]

I believe you are confusing two different claims

Russia interfered with the 2016 election in order to alter the results in favor of Trump.

Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the 2016 election.

That was the charge by the democrats in 2016,Trump colluded with the Russians in order to steel the election.

Remember the months of investigations that ended up proving nothing other then it was actually the democrat party that was colluding to alter the 2016 election.

Personally I am going to wait until all the facts are in regards to the 2020 election.

Yes you were suckered into the Russian collusion conspiracy,because they told you it happened,you believed it because you wanted to.

Nobody was actually interested in waiting for the facts to come out,they followed what they wanted to.

Do not need Wikipedia for that,just read the Trump sucks thread,it all unfolds there.

Russians interference with our election process is just the way they operate,they to do not care about republicans or democrats,they care about disrupting democracy.

Kinda like everybody else in the world interferes with everybody else’s election process,including the US.

New York Times finally admits that 17-intelligence agencies Russian hacking narrative was a complete lie.
Democrats have turned the “17 Intelligence Agencies” Russian hacking narrative into a mantra. It is has become the go to phrase when explaining some kind of nefarious Trump-Russia collusion.
Hillary Clinton’s loser campaign manager John Podesta repeated the “17 Intelligence Agencies” Russian hacking talking point just the other day on Fox News.

https://thedailycoin.org/2017/07/01/...ive-fake-news/

The FBI official who ran the investigation into whether the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election privately admitted in newly released notes that a major New York Times article was riddled with lies, falsehoods, and “misleading and inaccurate” information. The February 2017 story was penned by three reporters who would win Pulitzers for their reporting on Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/new-fbi-notes-re-debunk-major-nyt-story-highlight-media-collusion-to-produce-russia-hoax/

Anybody really think that all of the sudden the media has decided to become the purveyors of factual news or party propaganda machines?

[Dumpling]

I believe you are confusing two different claims

The February 2017 story was penned by three reporters who would win Pulitzers for their reporting on Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/new-fbi-notes-re-debunk-major-nyt-story-highlight-media-collusion-to-produce-russia-hoax/

Anybody really think that all of the sudden the media has decided to become the purveyors of factual news or party propaganda machines?

From your Pulitzer link, I picked out this Washington Post article...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.de89dfcd5b89

read it...then the one about President's Trump's reaction to the
hacking revelations...and now I am wondering if the Russians
ever did get their two compounds back.

I would like to grant you that for 2016 most of the American
electorate thought that neither Clinton nor Trump were
ideal candidates. Also, most of the American electorate
did NOT see anything during that campaign that directly
suggested Russian interference, and further, there was great
camaraderie amongst Trump supporters more so than
Clinton supporters. They were [[and are) quite the vocal
[[if alt-right) community.

To reach a conclusion of Russia-Trump collusion, one must
first look at quite a bit of the gathered intelligence starting from
2014. Russian social media election interference is a certainty.

A further step of collusion would be reached [[if at all)
after studying the roles of Trump campaign advisers who
had connections to Russia.

[Richard]

I doubt it because after more evidence came out with the Mueller report Trump added more sanctions.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trum...ry?id=53768648

It shows that the Cold War is still continuing as it always has.

The worst part is their involvement of trying to hack into the power grid,intelligence has been warning about the power grid vulnerabilities fir years,but much of the east coast grid starts in Canada,so that is a nightmare.

There are so many layers going on that we only see what they want us to see.

Cannot really blame Russia because we have overthrown complete governments in order to spread democracy,so it continues to be a game of cat n mouse.

[bust]

I would like to grant you that for 2016 most of the American electorate thought that neither Clinton nor Trump were ideal candidates. Also, most of the American electorate did NOT see anything during that campaign that directly suggested Russian interference...

Agree, and agree.
In the first case I was among the majority.
However it was obvious to some of us even during the 2016 campaign that Russia was involved. There's more than ample proof in this forum.

I was among those pointing to Russian interference already then. I pay attention. We were a tiny minority, for sure. Richard, and a handful of others, were among the tiny minority repeatedly posting links to Russia Today and other Russian propaganda sites.

He still does, but now they're better hidden behind layers of abstraction.

The FSB had [[and still has) a prominent and well-funded social media and internet propaganda operation. According to well-researched reporting during the 2016 election they called it "Operation Infektion."

Many forget "fake news" originally referred to disinformation in news costume written to sabotage Clinton and Dems.

At one point, after I called Richard to task for repeatedly steering this forum in that direction he offered [[I paraphrase), "I sorta like Russians."

I haven't often publicly wondered whether he's one of them for no reason.

[Dumpling]

The featured closed Russian compound at Centreville,
Maryland was originally built by the man who invented
GMAC, John Jakob Raskob. At the time of the following
article, four years ago, the compound could either remain
as a State Department property or it could be sold, with the
proceeds of the sale going to Russia.

https://wtop.com/maryland/2017/10/ru...aits-its-fate/

According to the above article Trump imposed sanctions only after
facing a veto override in Congress.

[Dumpling]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pionee...%20York%20City.

According to this Wikipedia article [[to be sure it could contain
erroneous material) the estate was to be returned to the Russians.

I guess there might be a touch of schadenfreude in this
opinion about the eviction of the Russians at that time.

https://www.delawareonline.com/story...cted/96544190/

I haven't looked too hard, but it would be nice to read a
followup on the Russians moving back into their old nine
million dollar estate there [[maybe with a touch of
schadenfreude at Obama and the FBI having to sit
there and take it).

[Richard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pionee...%20York%20City.

According to this Wikipedia article [[to be sure it could contain
erroneous material) the estate was to be returned to the Russians.

I guess there might be a touch of schadenfreude in this
opinion about the eviction of the Russians at that time.

https://www.delawareonline.com/story...cted/96544190/

I haven't looked too hard, but it would be nice to read a
followup on the Russians moving back into their old nine
million dollar estate there [[maybe with a touch of
schadenfreude at Obama and the FBI having to sit
there and take it).

There are other references to it being returned but behind paywalls,they also kicked our people out in retaliation,it becomes a balance between allowing our spies on their soil by allowing them to keep their spies on our soil so we can keep an eye on them.

I would be willing to bet if the Russians returned to that estate it had another 3000 pounds of surveillance equipment hidden in there somewhere.

Under the previous administration China killed 43 of our spies,so I guess when it comes to that world,the US and Russia is at least a bit amicable about it.

We just kick them out,we do not bury them.

[Dumpling]

Agree, and agree.


He still does, but now they're better hidden behind layers of abstraction.

The FSB had [[and still has) a prominent and well-funded social media and internet propaganda operation. According to well-researched reporting during the 2016 election they called it "Operation Infektion."

Quote from Infektion's attached Reddit thread: [[NYT Adam)
"You never win the war on disinformation, but you will lose if you stop
fighting."

[bust]

Quote from Infektion's attached Reddit thread: [[NYT Adam)
"You never win the war on disinformation, but you will lose if you stop
fighting."

Don't remind me. [[っ ಡ ﹏ ಡ )っ
I've spent so long here trying to counter it.
Just don't have the time.

I've said it before:
I wish the admin would ban those whose overwhelming purpose is disingenous.

[Dumpling]

...but then the Trump administration changed his mind
and to date the property has not been returned to the
Russians...the specific date being October 1, 2019.

https://www.commonsenseeasternshore....-eastern-shore

Background item on the compounds not being given back
as of July 2017:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/l...n-talks/21074/

The Maryland compound was apparently used at some
time in about 1989 and earlier to intercept military
communications.

[Henry Whalley]

...and to date the property has not been returned to the Russians.

If we're talking about Melania, I hope the Russians take her back

[bust]

Double agents are disposed when no longer useful.
A high cost lower than had they not cooperated.
By her refusals even to hold his hand, she wasn't one.
Full disclosure: I have no idea.

[bust]

Trump's foreign entanglements are vast and most will be exposed-- if too late for the the vast damage he's already done.

Here's just a partial, and dated, analysis.

Since many of us can't afford the subscription, I'm posting the article in its entirety. [[Support great journalism as best you can!)

Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal.
Shell companies put figures from Putin’s Mafia into Trump Tower. Should that be worrying?

Collusion or not, President Trump and the Russians are thick as thieves.

What I mean is that for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.

Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal.

Robert S. Mueller III, of course, is a prosecutor. His job as special counsel, now complete, was to decide whether to indict. But what if some of the most egregious and corrupt offenses are not illegal? Russian President Vladimir Putin has long insisted that American democracy itself is corrupt. Under his aegis, the Russians have methodically studied various components of the American body politic — campaign finance, our legal system, social media and perhaps especially the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find.

As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” Where Americans cracked down on the Italian American Mafia, Putin dealt with the Russian mob very differently. He co-opted it. He made it an integral part of his Mafia state. Russian gangsters became, in effect, Putin’s enforcers. They had long and deep relationships. According to a tape recording made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s.

That criminals with ties to Russia bought Trump condos, partnered with Trump and were based at Trump Tower — his home, his place of work, the crown jewel of his empire — should be deeply concerning. It’s not hard to conclude that, as a result, the president, wittingly or not, has long been compromised by a hostile foreign power, even if Mueller did not conclude that Trump colluded or conspired with the Russians.

One person the Mueller report didn’t ‘exonerate’? Vladimir Putin.

Let’s go back to 1984, when David Bogatin, an alleged Russian gangster who arrived in the United States a few years earlier with $3 in his pocket, sat down with Trump and bought not one but five condos, for a total of $6 million — about $15 million in today’s dollars. What was most striking about the transaction was that at the time, according to David Cay Johnston’s “The Making of Donald Trump,” Trump Tower was one of only two major buildings in New York City that sold condos to buyers who used shell companies that allowed them to purchase real estate while concealing their identities. Thus, according to the New York state attorney general’s office, when Trump closed the deal with Bogatin, whether he knew it or not, he had just helped launder money for the Russian Mafia.

And so began a 35-year relationship between Trump and Russian organized crime. Mind you, this was a period during which the disintegration of the Soviet Union had opened a fire-hose-like torrent of hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital from oligarchs, wealthy apparatchiks and mobsters in Russia and its satellites. And who better to launder so much money for the Russians than Trump — selling them multimillion-dollar condos at top dollar, with little or no apparent scrutiny of who was buying them.

Over the next three decades, dozens of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other white-collar professionals came together to facilitate such transactions on a massive scale. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the United States since the 1980s, were shifted “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

The Trump Organization has dismissed money laundering charges as unsubstantiated, and because it is so difficult to penetrate the shell companies that purchased these condos, it is almost impossible for reporters — or, for that matter, anyone without subpoena power — to determine how much money laundering by Russians went through Trump-branded properties. But Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist, put it this way to me: “Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people. Crooks have two big advantages. First, they’re prepared to pay more money than honest people. And second, they will always lose if you sue them because they are known to be crooks.”

After Trump World Tower opened in 2001, Trump began looking for buyers in Russia through Sotheby’s International Realty, which teamed up with a Russian real estate outfit. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA Today. “They all wanted to meet Donald.” In the end, she said, she sold 65 units to Russians in Trump World Tower alone.

The condo sales were just a part of it. In 2002, after Trump had racked up $4 billion in debt from his disastrous ventures in Atlantic City, the Russians again came to his rescue, by way of the Bayrock Group. At a time when Trump found it almost impossible to get loans from Western banks, Bayrock offered him enormous fees — 18 to 25 percent of the profits — simply to use his name on its developments.

Putin wanted to interrogate me. Trump called it ‘an incredible offer.’ Why?

So how did all this go unchallenged? According to Jonathan Winer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, one answer may be lax regulations. “If you are doing a transaction with no mortgage, there is no financial institution that needs to know where the money came from, particularly if it’s a wire transfer from overseas,” Winer told me in an interview for my book. “The customer obligations that are imposed on all kinds of financial institutions are not imposed on people selling real estate. They should have been, but they weren’t.”

And without such regulations, prosecutors’ hands are tied.

All of which made it easier for the Russian Mafia to expand throughout the United States. As it did so, it grew closer to Trump. Even though Mogilevich had no known direct contacts with Trump, several of his associates did. Among them was Bogatin, who took part in a massive gasoline tax scam, and whose brother, Jacob [[Yacov) Bogatin, was indicted with Mogilevich in 2003 on 45 felony counts of stock fraud. [[Because there is no extradition treaty between the United States and Russia, they were never brought to trial in the United States.)

Another Mogilevich associate in Trump’s orbit was the late Vyacheslav Ivankov, a ruthless extortionist who became renowned as one of the most brutal killers in the annals of Russian crime. Mogilevich had sent him to New York in 1992 with a mandate to consolidate the Russian Mafia in the United States and to form alliances with the Cosa Nostra and other Mafias. Once he arrived, Ivankov became a regular at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and was widely thought to be based in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, where many Russian mobsters lived. But when the FBI came looking for him, it discovered that the head of the Russian Mafia in New York owned a luxury condo in the glitziest part of Manhattan — at 721 Fifth Avenue, in fact — Trump Tower. There is no evidence of personal interaction between Trump and Ivankov.

Yet another Mogilevich associate with ties to Trump was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, better known as Taiwanchik, whose relationship with Mogilevich dates back more than three decades. Indicted in 2002 for bribing Olympic figure skating judges, Tokhtakhounov was awarded the No. 5 position on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, two slots behind Mogilevich. In April 2013, two gambling rings that he allegedly ran were busted by the FBI on the 63rd floor of Trump Tower, resulting in the indictments of 34 members and associates of Russian organized crime. Among them was Tokhtakhounov, who fled the country to avoid prosecution, and appeared later that year at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Signs of Trump-Putin collaboration, starting years before the campaign?

These were just some of the Russian mobsters who gravitated toward Trump as they laundered money and cultivated politicians. Over time, they learned how to work the system. They paid large sums for the most powerful legal talent in the land — enough, at times, to woo the very men who had once been charged with pursuing them. In 1997, former FBI director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian Mafia. But 10 years later, he took on as a client the Ukrainian-born Mogilevich. At the time, the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating racketeering charges against Mogilevich over questionable energy deals between Russia and Ukraine. Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, also later represented Russian clients. All perfectly legal. In Freeh’s case, the client was Denis Katsyv’s Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings. Freeh helped Prevezon settle a money laundering probe by the U.S. government after the company was accused of laundering more than $200 million in a Russian tax fraud scheme in which an American hedge fund manager and his firm, Hermitage Capital, were said to have been framed by the Russians. The ensuing scandal culminated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage’s accountant, and led to the passage of the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned high-level Russian officials. Natalia Veselnitskaya, Prevezon’s defense lawyer, attended the much-discussed June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Manafort has been convicted of bank fraud, tax fraud and failure to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act by not reporting foreign income.

The special counsel’s report has not yet been released, only Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary with its finding of no collusion. But it’s clear that it was profoundly naive to think that a prosecutor would save the day and cure our diseased democracy of all that ails it. That’s because the problem behind this assault on the nation’s sovereignty far transcends the criminal arena. I’m no fan of Putin’s, but he was right about one thing: Swaths of American society are corrupt. If we want to protect our most precious institutions, we should examine new regulations in a wide range of sectors. The House Intelligence Committee, the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee have geared up for hearings and investigations. They had better move fast. We have a president who has a long, tangled history with figures connected to Russian organized crime — all of it, apparently, perfectly legal.

[Richard]

I could not get past the first sentence,let alone read a book.

Hmmmm,where have I heard that before,o yea

What have you got against organized crime? How well is Un-organized crime working out?

Ever been to Illinois,the state runs on organized crime in politics as does half of the countries in the world,it’s how things get done and a way of life.

People are so worried about Russia but yet support China while providing their own KY as they are getting ..... it’s China that has the means and power to rule the world as they have clearly stated their intentions.

In case people have not noticed,the Russian people are probably more Democratic then half of Americans.

[Gistok]

I could not get past the first sentence,let alone read a book.

I never laughed so hard.... you must be picking up your own scent...

[Meddle]

When nearly half the Jurors are co - conspirators, you need not worry about trifling things like facts.

[Dumpling]

I could not get past the first sentence,let alone read a book.

Hmmmm,where have I heard that before,o yea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Unger

The first sentence of that lengthy post was composed by
Bust so yea it would be a tough nut to crack. But the
bulk of the post, the remaining twenty five or so
paragraphs, seems to have been composed by Craig
Unger, who is a Harvard educated reporter who has
researched and written several books on his subjects.

So if you were to have kept on trucking thru the
post past Bust's first sentence you would have
gotten what Harvard educations get for you.

[Dumpling]

New terms I learned today while reading up on the former
USSR states' mafias. Apparently Georgia produces the
greatest share of mafiosos among those states; however, the
other states are not slouches either. The tendency is that
no matter how egregious a mafioso's crimes may be, the
jury will not vote to convict [[Orange Julius anyone).

Pratfall effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratfall_effect

Thief in law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law

[Richard]

When nearly half the Jurors are co - conspirators, you need not worry about trifling things like facts.

Yea ,I agree with you on that,maybe that’s why the house keeps losing every time,they always seem to have a shortage of facts.