90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Yovanovitch used a Soros tool to illegally monitor U.S. conservatives

The State Department utilized a powerful Facebook-owned social media tracking tool linked to leftist billionaire George Soros to unlawfully monitor U.S conservative figures, journalists and persons with ties to Donald Trump, according to an agency source, Judicial Watch reported.

The source — a State Department veteran — identified Crowdtangle as the tool used to closely watch more than a dozen U.S. citizens, including the president’s son, personal attorney and popular television personalities such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, among others, Judicial Watch reported.

Disgraceful former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama embed, enlisted a Ukraine agency to conduct the unlawful monitoring using the search terms, Biden, Giuliani, Soros, and Yovanovitch, according to a Judicial Watch investigation.

This week Judicial Watch filed another FOIA request for information related to the State Department’s use of Crowdtangle.

Crowdtangle is used to monitor more than five million social media platforms [the Sentinel is one of them]. It’s only offered to select groups.

A leftwing, Soros-funded organization called Social Science Research Center (SSRC) is charged with determining who is granted access to Crowdtangle.

Earlier this year Facebook announced that SSRC will pick researchers who will gain access to its cherished “privacy-protected” data. Only SSRC, not Facebook, decides who directs the findings or conclusions of the research.

SSCRC’s researchers claim they use the Facebook data to “study the platform’s impact on democracy worldwide.” The nonprofit describes itself as an international organization guided by the belief that “justice, prosperity, and democracy all require better understanding of complex social, cultural, economic, and political processes.” In 2016 Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave the SSRC nearly $500,000 for a Latin America human rights and public health initiative and a...

I For One Didn't Need Any Clues...

All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan

The evidence suggests John Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details to the FBI. It suggests they fabricated events completely.

Last weekend, NBC News reported that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”

However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia collusion. And it all started with Brennan.

That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision to target the Trump campaign.

The Real Story Is Different

But as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller report made clear, it wasn’t merely Papadopoulos’ bar-room boast at issue: It was “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” that the DOJ and FBI, and later the Special Counsel’s office investigated.

And who put the FBI on to those supposedly suspicious contacts? Former CIA Director John Brennan.

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about,” Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee back in 2017. Whether or not there was collusion with Russia, Brennan didn’t profess to know, but he passed on the information to...

'Guard said he’d ‘f**k each and every one of us’ – released gun activist Butina recalls humiliation in US prison

The US penal system takes lives away from female inmates and turns them into constantly humiliated slaves, Maria Butina, who returned to Russia after spending more than a year in an American prison, said.

Butina, who was charged with failing to properly register as a foreign agent, spent a month in solitary confinement before pleading guilty to the charges. The Russian said she only did it because she knew that her persecution was politically motivated and a fair trial was impossible.

“The worst thing is the US Marshals Services where they humiliate you; forbid you from going to the toilet for 16 hours; deny you water or food,” Butina said as she talked to RT and Sputnik news agency on a plane that was taking her from the US back to Moscow. After that a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida seemed like “paradise” for her as she was allowed to go for walks and got a lot better rations.

“I was just a stack of bones,” she recalled, but daily jogging and other exercises helped a lot. “I had problems with my memory, but it returned to me. My eyesight also improved.”

However, it’s still a very tough environment where humiliation of inmates is widespread as some officers treat prisoners “absolutely terribly.”

Butina recalled that just one day before she was to be released, a guard, who became unhappy with how the prisoners were executing their duties in the kitchen, warned them: "If you will do that again I will f**k each and every one of you."

When a guard is cursing at you in the most obscene words possible… It just shouldn’t be like that. We’re women after all.

At first, the relations with fellow inmates were “tense” after she was transferred from Alexandria to a correctional facility in Tallahassee because “everybody watched the news” where she was portrayed as a villain, the 30-year-old recalled.

But that changed quickly when people got to know her. The activist said that a newspaper article in her defense was also passed on inside the prison and after some time “even some guards were telling me: ‘It seems that they lied to us on this one.’”

When she returned to her block after being handed the “shocking” 18-month sentence the girls hugged her, saying “It’s OK. You’ll get through this.”

“We had good relations with the other inmates,” Butina said, also adding that many in prison simply called her...

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is believed to have been killed in a U.S. military operation in Syria, sources in Syria, Iraq and Iran said on Sunday, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepared to make a “major statement” at the White House.

The United States had put up a $25 million reward for the capture of Baghdadi, who has led the group since 2010, when it was still an underground offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that Baghdadi was targeted in the overnight raid but was unable to say whether the operation was successful.

He was believed to have been killed in a raid in the early hours of Sunday involving helicopters, warplanes and a ground clash in the Syrian village of Barisha near the Turkish border, according to a commander of a militant faction in the northwestern province of Idlib.

Baghdadi was long thought to be hiding somewhere along the Iraq-Syria border. His self-declared “caliphate” will be remembered for atrocities against religious minorities and attacks on five continents in the name of a fanatical interpretation of Islam that horrified mainstream Muslims.

Two Iraqi security sources and two Iranian officials said they had received confirmation from inside Syria that Baghdadi had been killed.

“Our sources from inside Syria have confirmed to the Iraqi intelligence team tasked with pursuing Baghdadi that he has been killed with his personal bodyguard in Idlib (province) after his hiding place was discovered when he tried to get his family out of Idlib towards the Turkish border,” one of the Iraqi officials said.

Iraqi state television broadcast footage from the raid, including daytime images of a crater in the ground and what appeared to be the aftermath of a clash, with torn and blood-stained clothes on the ground. It also showed night-time footage of an explosion.

The broadcaster quoted an expert on terrorism saying Iraqi intelligence agencies had helped pinpoint Baghdadi’s location.

U.S. magazine Newsweek, which first reported the news, said it had been told by a U.S. Army official briefed on the raid that Baghdadi was...

US attorney reportedly 'very interested' in interviewing former CIA Director Brennan and former DNI Clapper

John Durham, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, is expected to seek an interview with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, following an expansion of his investigation.

It was reportedly the meetings that Durham and Attorney General William Barr recently had in Rome—where they obtained new evidence—that were the impetus for the broadening of the scope of the probe.