America's Russia Derangement Syndrome

"From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered

By David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg

• July 18, 2018 WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html

Yet Trump still licked Putin's boots.

 

This Mueller:

And this isn't the only time the government had to pay out for a Mueller screw up.

Rod Rosenstein, such an upstanding civil servant that he refuses to turn over documents that could prove wrong doing by our own government. We will soon see if he like Holder can ignore the law and get away with it.

 

The first two come from the same LA Times article, and the last one from CBS had nothing to do with Mueller. It was part of the Whitey Bulger case, which took place decades ago. In fact you could say that if Mueller was head of the FBI than that he finally did the right thing in the wake of the Bulger case and what the Boston office of the FBI did in conjunction with Bulger.

 

It's not necessarily a school for problem kids. That would be a reform school.

 

The New York Military Academy is/was a school for troubled teens. I'm not sure it exists anymore.

 

Are you saying Mueller wasn't involved in the Whitey Bulger case and that he didn't send innocent men to prison? Would you also deny he was head of the FBI while Hillary was selling US Uranium to the Russians?

 

Me, "Mueller wasn't involved in the Whitey Bulger case, and he didn't send those innocent men to jail."

 

In fact I know why Trump went to that Academy and he said his father was right to send him there. It really is no secret.

But he did very well there and then went on to get a very fine education and his family was rightly proud. He went on to an amazing business career and raised a beautiful family himself.. You, like every other leftist. just want to take cheap shots.

 

You just keep getting it wrong don't you. I'm a Republican.

 

You can read much of the history here. Many living in Boston at the time all knew, or suspected, what Mueller was up to.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usne...ia-murders-uranium-one-and-other-fbi-scandals

 

Yeah, like Mueller and Rosenstein are Republicans.

 

You can read the truth here:

"
Ms. Gertner is a retired federal judge.

Was Robert Mueller, the special counsel, complicit in one of the worst scandals in the F.B.I.’s history — the decades-long wrongful imprisonment of four men for a murder they didn’t commit?

This question, which has been raised before, is being addressed again — this time by some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right, especially Fox News’s Sean Hannity but also Rush Limbaugh and others. My friend Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law School professor, has also weighed in.

In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.” Mr. Mueller, he said, was “right at the center of it.” Mr. Bulger was a notorious crime boss in Boston, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, and also a secret source for the F.B.I.

There is no evidence that the assertion is true. I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. He was never even mentioned.

The case wasn’t about Whitey Bulger but another mobster the F.B.I. was also protecting, the hit man Joseph Barboza, who lied when he testified that the four men had killed Edward Deegan, a low-level mobster, in 1965. Mr. Barboza was covering for the real killers, and the F.B.I. went along because of his importance as an informant.

But the evidence — or rather, lack of it — hasn’t stopped the piling on against Mr. Mueller, particularly by Mr. Hannity. In a March 20 broadcast, he said, “Robert Mueller was the U.S. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison while certain agents in the F.B.I. under Mueller covered up the truth.”

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He returned to this theme on April 9, noting the Catsimatidis interview with Professor Dershowitz, and said: “Four men went to jail. Mueller was involved in the case. Two of them died in jail. They were all later exonerated.”

He made the same case two days later on a show that was promoted by a tweet by President Trump — “Big show tonight on @seanhannity.” Mr. Hannity laid out his case for “Deep State crime families trying to take down the president,” including the “Mueller crime family.” Among Mr. Hannity’s accusations: “During Mueller’s time as a federal prosecutor in Boston, four — four men wrongfully imprisoned for decades framed by an F.B.I. informant and notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, all while Mueller’s office looked the other way.”

Rush Limbaugh added his own variant on April 13. “The men would have been cleared but Mueller and the prosecutors withheld evidence from the court,” he said, adding, “Thirty years in jail, four innocent people, from the man of impeccable integrity inside the establishment swamp.”

The record simply doesn’t support these assertions. As I explained in my decision, because of the gravity of the accusations made by the imprisoned men, I analyzed the evidence “with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions.”

That said, I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. I named names where the record supported it. I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

Mr. Barboza, like Mr. Bulger and one of Mr. Deegan’s killers, Vincent Flemmi, was in the Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program started in 1961 by J. Edgar Hoover. The program, as I noted in my opinion, “was strictly confidential, which not only meant that its existence would be kept secret from the general public and other divisions within the federal government, but also from state law enforcement agencies.” Mr. Barboza’s F.B.I. handlers, Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico, and their superiors, knew that Mr. Barboza had perjured himself and that he was protecting Mr. Flemmi, but they withheld that information from state prosecutors because of his importance as an informant and to protect the informant program.

They continued to withhold the truth during commutation hearings for the men; each time the F.B.I. could have disclosed Mr. Barboza’s lie, it did not. In fact, the agency lobbied against clemency.

Much has been made about an assertion made by Michael Albano, the former mayor of Springfield, Mass., who served on the Massachusetts Parole Board in the 1980s. He has said repeatedly that he saw a letter from Mr. Mueller, written during the period while he was in the United States attorney’s office in Boston, opposing the release of one of the four men.

But no copy of that letter has ever been produced, and Mr. Dershowitz now says in a statement that several days after making his remarks on the Catsimatidis show, The Boston Globe “revealed for the first time to my knowledge that no such letter has been found. I never repeated the allegation after that.” Still, he said, “further investigation seems warranted, since absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, especially in government files.”

Perhaps. But an accusation of such gravity demands more. I found no such letter from Mr. Mueller in the commutation files in the court record. Neither did the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ms. Balliro, who has a complete copy of the parole board files of all four men, which were produced in response to a subpoena before the trial. Other letters from federal prosecutors are in those files. But there was nothing from Mr. Mueller.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that another federal judge, Mark Wolf, held hearings that revealed the F.B.I.’s refusal to inform the United States attorney in Boston that Mr. Bulger and his confederate Stephen Flemmi, brother of Vincent, were informants. In a report by the House Committee on Government Reform, which looked into the F.B.I.’s use of secret informants, the only reference to Mr. Mueller was a favorable one. He offered, as F.B.I. director, to work with the committee to reform the agency’s informant practices.

When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have. If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/opinion/robert-mueller-smearing-complicit.html

 

I'm just like Mueller. Are you saying you're a vacuous conman like Trump?

 

It appears Mueller tried to cover up FBI wrong doing.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/05/mueller-fbi-wrongful-conviction-case/
much as Rosenstein is doing now.

 

Read what I posted on the Bulger/FBI-informant-program case.

 

Bless.

Enjoy your naïveté while it lasts, I guess.

 

How do Hannity’s attempts to link Mueller to ‘Whitey’ Bulger hold up?
By Shelley Murphy GLOBE STAFF APRIL 13, 2018

Fox News host Sean Hannity, an ardent critic of Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, has recently cast aspersions on Mueller’s tenure as a federal prosecutor in Boston decades ago.

...................................So what’s Hannity talking about, and is what he said true? Here is what we know about Mueller’s record on those matters during his time in Boston.



What involvement did Mueller have with Bulger?

None. Mueller served in the US attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, as chief of the criminal division, first assistant US attorney, and as acting US attorney for more than a year. During that time, Bulger ran a sprawling criminal enterprise and got away with murders because he was a longtime FBI informant who corrupted his handlers. The FBI and the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, a prosecutorial unit that worked independently of the US attorney’s office and reported directly to the Justice Department, used Bulger to build cases against the Mafia and gave him a pass on his own crimes. The FBI’s corrupt relationship with Bulger was exposed after he was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1995 and became a fugitive. He was captured 16 years later .



Were four men framed by an FBI informant and wrongfully imprisoned for years, while two died in prison?

Yes, but that informant was not Bulger. Mob hitman-turned-government witness Joseph “The Animal” Barboza testified in a 1968 trial that led to the wrongful convictions of Joseph Salvati, Peter J. Limone, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo for the 1965 slaying of a small-time hoodlum named Edward “Teddy” Deegan. Tameleo and Greco died in prison. The men proclaimed their innocence, but members of the FBI, the US attorney’s office, and the Suffolk district attorney’s office vigorously lobbied against clemency for them throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Their case drew scrutiny after details of the FBI’s corrupt relationship with Bulger and his sidekick, Stephen Flemmi, began to emerge in 1998, triggering an investigation into the agency’s mishandling of informants dating to the 1960s. In 2000, a Justice Department task force uncovered secret FBI documents indicating Barboza framed the four men, while protecting one of the real killers — Flemmi’s brother. Limone was freed in 2001, and Salvati had been pardoned in 1997.



Did Mueller know the four men had been wrongly convicted and look the other way?

There’s nothing linking Mueller to that case, according to several attorneys for the men, voluminous court records, and a former federal judge who presided over their wrongful imprisonment trial. In 2007, then US District Judge Nancy Gertner found that the FBI deliberately withheld evidence that the four men were innocent and that the bureau helped cover up the injustice for decades. She ordered the government to pay the men and their families $101.7 million.

“Absolutely nothing in the record that I saw suggested Mueller’s involvement in any way in either the initial acts that led to the four men’s imprisonment, or the acts that ended in their continued imprisonment and denying them parole or the coverup,” Gertner said Friday.



Was Mueller among the prosecutors who wrote letters to the Massachusetts parole board opposing the release of the four before evidence emerged that they had been framed?

No, according to Gertner and Limone’s attorney, Juliane Balliro, who scoured copies of the parole board records for the four men. There were no letters from Mueller in the files and his signature “never appeared on anything I ever saw or can recall,’’ Balliro said................

...................................After the FBI was found responsible in 2007 for framing the men, Mueller, then the FBI director, characterized the case as a debacle.



Martin Finucane of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...er-don-hold/kDPSq2ek8xDTFiPZix4yoL/story.html

 

It's very refreshing to read what you've written, Seth. I agree that a very large volume of ordinary Americans fall for this sort of codswallop all the time; they are so obviously uninformed yet also obviously opinionated in their ignorance, and I find that very frustrating.

So it's good to see you bringing some balance and objectivity.

 

And yet several links I read said he was involved in the probation process. Now to find out who is telling the truth.

 

That's correct. NY Military Academy was for troubled boys, but not all military boarding schools.

 

From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

continued

 

We're all being suckered by the very people we voted into office. And that's on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

So, how complex can Facebook ads be?

 

Well the 'hacking' ( ) might have swayed a few FB regulars I suppose . . . maybe as many as 7 or 8?

 

And aren't we all so grateful.