90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Report exposes FBI agents’ key interview 2 months before election. It’s about to change everything.

In September 2016, FBI agents approached Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to ask about allegations President Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with the Russian government to influence the election, according to a new report.

Deripaska, who was at his apartment in New York City for the interview, waived the three agents off of the collusion theory, saying there was no coordination between the Trump team and Kremlin, The Hill reported Monday.

The agents, one of whom Deripaska knew from a previous FBI case, said they believed former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was involved in the conspiracy, an allegation made in the infamous Steele dossier.

“Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious,” Adam Waldman, a former lawyer for Deripaska, told The Hill. “So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false.”

“You are trying to create something out of nothing,” Deripaska told the agents, according to Waldman.

The dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele wrote and Democrats funded, alleges Manafort used Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, to coordinate with Russian operatives to help influence the election.

The FBI and Justice Department used the unverified dossier to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Page, an energy consultant. Page has vehemently denied the allegations in the dossier and says he has never met Manafort.

Deripaska knows Manafort from past business dealings. During the campaign, they were in a dispute over $19 million Deripaska claimed Manafort pilfered from a failed business deal.
The Hill’s report establishes for the first time that the FBI contacted Russian nationals prior to the election about the collusion allegations. It is also an indicator of how they investigated some of the allegations made in the dossier.

The Hill also cites sources who said the FBI approached Deripaska again at some point in 2017.

Deripaska, an aluminum magnate who has close ties to Vladimir Putin, has a long and complicated history with the U.S. government. In 2006, the State Department blocked him from traveling to...

A new story in this weekend’s Sun-Sentinel exposes more dark secrets hidden within the Broward County School system, including the depths of the behavior issue inside its schools and why the school district allowed misbehaved children to return to normal classrooms with little to no repercussions.

Unfortunately, what the paper discovered leads to more questions than answers.

What did the paper reveal?

The most alarming discovery the paper made was that Broward County Schools, including superintendent Robert Runcie and other district administrators, appear more concerned with public relations and how their schools look rather than addressing misbehaving students and ensuring the safety of students. The paper reported:

The culture of leniency allows children to engage in an endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th time may be treated like it’s the first

Indeed, in a review of Broward’s disciplinary policies, the Sun-Sentinel discovered students are often considered “first time offenders” even if they are not and the district’s claims of successfully reforming bad behavior are “exaggerated.” That exaggeration gives Broward schools a “PR benefit,” the newspaper reported, namely in allowing officials to claim safer schools with lower disciplinary rates and higher graduation rates.

Former teachers told the Sun-Sentinel that Broward School officials have cultivated an environment that allows misbehaving students to thrive. They explained they were often told to not report disruptive students to school administrators because doing so could “tarnish” the school’s image.

“It was so many things. I had three students bring knives to my classroom. One was out of the classroom for one day. Another had so many things on his record, he was gone for five days. None were expelled,” Mary Fitzgerald, who taught in the district for 37 years, said. “My principal basically would tell me it was his job to market the school. He was adamant about not looking bad.”

What about the PROMISE program?

Runcie revealed last week, after he had previously denied it, that February’s mass killer was placed in the PROMISE program, a program that allows students who commit misdemeanors to avoid jail by attending an alternative school where they are counseled.

Runcie told the Sun-Sentinel the program, which he implemented, has been highly successful, even seeing a 90 percent success rate. However, Runcie’s figure is highly distorted because the district does not consider students re-offenders as long as they do not commit the same offense in the same year. In addition, students are offered...