The post Biden Scraps Green Fuel Rules In Bid To Slow Skyrocketing Gas Prices appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Rohrabacher supposedly conveyed interest from President Trump in having Assange deny Russian involvement in the Democratic National Committee email leaks of 2016 in exchange for clemency from the United States. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham stated that President Trump has not only expressed zero offers to Mr. Assange, but that he doesn’t even particularly know Mr. Rohrbacher to begin with. The former Congressman has also been quick to release statements that he had no involvement in this supposed scheme, telling The Daily Beast, “At no time did I offer Julian Assange anything from the President because I had not spoken with the President about this issue at all.”

Last Thursday he also provided an explanation regarding his August 2017 visit to the Ecuadorian embassy, during which he tried to convince Julian Assange to hand over information regarding the source of the leaks. In exchange, Mr. Rohrabacher said he would implore President Trump for pardon of all U.S. criminal charges. He met with fellow Congressional official Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) soon after, with the intent to discover Wikileaks’ sources on the aforementioned 2016 email leaks, but Assange quickly shut down any notion of caving in on Twitter.

Assange was arrested in April 2019 by Metropolitan Police after 7  years in exile under asylum of the Ecuadorian government, functionally trapped within the confines of their London embassy. Since then, he has been imprisoned in the United Kingdom, found guilty of violating bail, and is awaiting further trial set to begin next week.

As it stands, it seems Mr. Rohrabacher was only providing opportunity to Mr. Assange as a deal-broker for pardon, rather than an agent of the President. Regardless of the claims of either side, this information has actually been deemed admissible as evidence in court for Assange’s case. What happens next could prove to be further international scandal for President Trump should it actually become a facet of proceedings.

More:
Assange Arrested Under US Extradition Warrant Over Hacking Charges
WikiLeaks’ Assange Sentenced To 50 Weeks In Jail For Jumping Bail In 2012

The post Assange Pardon Deal Evidence Accepted by Court. Trump, Rohrabacher Deny. appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chuck Ross

Four federal prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., withdrew from Roger Stone’s case on Tuesday amid turmoil surrounding a prison sentence recommendation for the longtime Trump confidante.

Aaron Zelinsky, who handled several of the most prominent cases in the special counsel’s probe, and Jonathan Kravis, an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., filed notices of their withdrawals with Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who oversaw Stone’s trial. Prosecutors Adam Jed and Michael Marando also withdrew.

Zelinsky said in his filing that he “resigned effective immediately” as a special assistant U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. According to CNN, he remains a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore, where he worked before joining the special counsel’s team in 2017.

Kravis said in his filing, which he submitted shortly after Zelinsky, that he “has resigned as an Assistant United States Attorney and therefore no longer represents” the government in the Stone case.

Hours before the dual withdrawals, a senior Justice Department official told reporters that the agency plans to revise federal prosecutors’ recommendation that Stone serve up to nine years in prison on false statements and witness tampering charges.

Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., recommended that Stone serve between 87 and 108 months in prison on the charges.

President Donald Trump blasted the recommendation in a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, and indicated he is considering a pardon for Stone.

He called the recommendation “disgraceful,” and said he “cannot allow this miscarriage of justice.”

A Justice Department official issued a surprising rebuke of the D.C. attorney’s offices’ recommendation, calling it “extreme, excessive and grossly disproportionate.”

The official also said the recommendation was “not what had been briefed to the Department.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about Zelinsky and Kravis’s withdrawals from the Stone case.

Zelinsky worked on several components of the sprawling special counsel’s probe. He was involved in the prosecution of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. In the Stone probe, Zelinsky interviewed and investigated Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, two Stone associates who prosecutors suspected might have been a link between Stone and WikiLeaks.

Witnesses and attorneys who dealt with Zelinsky described him to the Daily Caller News Foundation as among the most aggressive prosecutors they dealt with on the special counsel’s team.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated with additional prosecutors who withdrew from Stone’s case. 

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Four Federal Prosecutors Withdraw From Roger Stone Case Amid Turmoil Over Prison Recommendation appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chuck Ross 

President Donald Trump blasted the Justice Department’s recommendation that GOP operative Roger Stone serve up to nine years in prison, and he indicated Tuesday that a pardon could be in the offing for his longtime associate.

“Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump wrote on Twitter, citing a Daily Caller News Foundation report on prosecutors’ prison recommendation.

“This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” he wrote.

Prosecutors recommended in a court filing Monday that Stone serve between 87 months and 108 months on charges that he made false statements and committed witness tampering in relation to the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation.

A Washington, D.C., jury convicted the 67-year-old Stone on Nov. 15, 2019. He will be sentenced on Feb. 20.

The special counsel ultimately found that nobody associated with Trump was involved in hacking or releasing the emails.

Though the special counsel found no evidence that Stone was involved in election meddling, prosecutors still cited the threat of foreign interference in their argument defending a hefty prison term for Stone.

They wrote that “[f]oreign election interference is the ‘most deadly adversar[y] of republican government.’”

Prosecutors also alleged that Stone threatened a longtime associate, Randy Credico, in order to convince him to avoid testifying to the House intelligence panel about their interest in WikiLeaks.

Stone sent Credico a text message in April 2018 that read: “Prepare to die cocksucker.”

Credico testified that he did not feel directly threatened by Stone. He also submitted a letter to Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Jan. 20 asking that she let Stone off without jail time.

Prosecutors dismissed Credico’s plea in their filing and said that Stone’s threat justified more jail time.

“Stone may point to the letter submitted by Credico and argue that he did not have a serious plan to harm Credico or that Credico did not seriously believe that Stone would follow through on his threats. But Credico testified that Stone’s threats concerned him because he was worried that Stone’s words, if repeated in public, might make ‘other people get ideas,’” prosecutors argued.

“In any event, it is the threat itself, not the likelihood of carrying out the threat, that triggers the enhancement,” they added.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Image: YouTube

The post ‘Cannot Allow This Miscarriage Of Justice’: Trump Suggests A Pardon For Roger Stone After DOJ Recommends 9-Year Prison Term appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The Northern Sea Route Development Plan—known as Plan NSP—marks a 15-year effort by Russia to strengthen its involvement in the Arctic by focusing on developing the Northern Sea Route.

Plan NSP, approved by former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Dec. 21, “includes as many as 84 points and covers a wide range of priorities, from the development of needed infrastructure and building of new ships to the mapping of natural resources and launch of new satellites and meteorological equipment.”

The plan, designed to make Russia more mobile, resourceful, and powerful in the Arctic, calls for starting the project this year and completing it by 2035.

The plan states that it is in accordance with the decree of the president of Russia, dated May 7, 2018, which declares that Russia needs to increase cargo flow through the Northern Sea Route by at least 80 million tons.

In 2018, 18 million tons travelled across the coastline—an 80% increase from 2017. In 2019, 26 million tons of cargo passed through the area. With Plan NSP in place, land, air, and sea routes will become available for the transportation of both goods and people.

This should not surprise anyone, because Russia in recent years has steadily increased its military and economic presence in the Arctic in search of economic opportunity and sought militarily to make the Arctic its own. In 2007, the Russians even planted their flag at the bottom of the Arctic Sea under the North Pole.

In addition, Russia has either renovated or built from scratch at least seven military bases in the region. It broadcast that Siberian huskies would be trained to pull military personnel and equipment into areas where military vehicles cannot handle the terrain and disclosed it planned to install an “air defense dome” made of S-400 missiles all across the region.

Although much of Russia’s Arctic progress in the last few years has been dedicated to security, Plan NSP focuses heavily on the potential for greater economic involvement in coming years. The plan calls for a Northern Sea Route, which Russia hopes will become a boon to a stagnant economy.

According to the plan, within the first half of this new decade, the Russian government will decide whether to continue building several rail lines across the country. By the end of 2022, the decision will be made whether to continue the Belkomur railway line that would link Perm in the Ural Mountains to the Arctic port city of Arkhangelsk.

It also will decide on rail lines from Sosnogorsk to Indiga, from Sabetta to Novyj Urengoj that also could serve to boost Arctic commerce, as well as one that would run across the River Ob to Novy Urengoy and Nadym. The government also plans to finish the Murmansk Transport Hub, with a 46-kilometer railway and several port facilities all along the west of Kola Bay, by December of 2021.

Four civilian airports will be upgraded in the coming years: Amderma in the west and Pevek, Chersky, and Keperveyem in the east. Additionally, a dredging operation in the Gulf of Ob, scheduled to be completed in December 2021, will allow for larger vessels to pass through.

Finally, perhaps the most significant aspect of the plan is the launch of at least 40 new Arctic vessels, including eight nuclear-powered icebreakers and 16 rescue and support ships by 2035. Some of these ships will be Lider-class ice breakers, allowing them to break through extremely thick Arctic ice and open wide enough shipping lanes for large commercial ships.

Plan NSP also includes plans to upgrade several nuclear icebreakers and nuclear materials special-purpose vehicles.

The United States and its Arctic allies would do well to closely follow not only Russian militarization of the Arctic, but also planned economic investments in the high north. The plan is an ambitious effort to expand Russia’s presence in the Arctic, but how much of that plan comes to fruition remains to be seen.

What is clear is that the way the Arctic continues to drive Russian strategic thinking should concern the U.S. and its allies.

Republished with permission from The Daily Signal.

Image: Flickr

The post Russia’s Plan to Move on the Arctic appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chuck Ross 

The government’s star witness in the trial against Roger Stone said he feels “horrible” that the longtime Trump confidant was convicted in federal court Friday.

“I hate to see the guy go to jail because of me,” Randy Credico told Yahoo! News’s Michael Isikoff moments after a jury in Washington, D.C., convicted Stone on seven separate felony charges.

“I feel horrible that this happened. This is not a day to rejoice.”

Credico, a left-wing radio host, testified earlier in November about his interactions with Stone during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as in 2017 and 2018 regarding the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

Stone was convicted on five counts of making false statements to the House panel in September 2017. He was also convicted on an obstruction charge, and a witness tampering related to Credico.

Prosecutors said Stone threatened Credico to prevent him from cooperating with House investigators as well as the special counsel’s team.

They pointed to text messages that Stone sent Credico pressuring him to plead the Fifth in order to avoid testifying to Congress. Prosecutors also cited a text message that Stone sent Credico on April 9, 2018, in which he said he would “take that dog away from you” — a reference to Credico’s 12-year-old therapy dog, Bianca.

Credico testified that he did not perceive Stone’s remarks about his dog as a threat, and that he knew Stone as a “dog lover.”

“I know he wouldn’t have ever touched that dog. It was hyperbole by him,” Credico testified. He also said Stone was one many associates, including his attorneys, who urged him to plead the Fifth.

Credico disputed Stone’s claims that he was a back-channel to WikiLeaks. Stone told House investigators that Credico was his source for tips about WikiLeaks’ plans to release information damaging to the Clinton campaign.

Credico vehemently denied the claim, but Stone released text messages Nov. 14, 2018, that showed that Credico indicated he had insight into WikiLeaks’ plans.

“Hillary’s campaign will die this week,” he wrote Oct. 1, 2017, days before WikiLeaks began releasing emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Two days later, Credico provided other insight into WikiLeaks’ activities and asked Stone to “please leave my name out of it.”

“Off the Record Hillary and her people are doing a full-court press they keep Assange from making the next dump,” he wrote, adding, “That’s all I can tell you on this line.”

Credico also told Stone that he knew of the plans because “I’m best friends with [Assange’s] lawyer and leave it at that and leave it alone.”

Credico testified Nov. 8 that he is best friends with Margaret Kunstler, who served as a lawyer for WikiLeaks.

Credico has been reluctant to speak publicly about his links to Kunstler. He told Isikoff, the Yahoo! reporter, on April 13, 2018, that he did not know any of Assange’s U.S.-based lawyers. Credico has also acknowledged in interviews that he fed Isikoff with “disinformation” for a book he co-wrote about the Russia collusion investigation with David Corn, of Mother Jones.

“I put together phony emails, gave it to them. I did all this stuff, and he’s going to put it in his book. I can’t wait,” Credico said of Isikoff in an interview Feb. 13, 2018.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Image credit

The post Star Witness At Roger Stone Trial Says He Feels ‘Horrible’ About Guilty Verdict appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chuck Ross 

Lawyers for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard are accusing Hillary Clinton of defamation over her remarks last month that the Hawaii Democrat is Russia’s preferred Democratic presidential candidate.

Gabbard’s attorneys are calling on Clinton to retract her statement publicly, including on Twitter, according to a letter released Monday by Gabbard’s campaign.

“Your statement is defamatory, and we demand that you retract it immediately,” Gabbard’s lawyers said in the letter, which was first reported by The Hill.

During a podcast interview in October, Clinton called Gabbard a “favorite of the Russians.”

“And I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far,” Clinton said.

Clinton was initially interpreted as saying that Russia was “grooming” Gabbard for a third-party run. Her spokesman, Nick Merrill, aided that interpretation in his reply to Gabbard’s response at the time.

Gabbard called Clinton “the queen of warmongers.”

“This is not some outlandish claim. This is reality,” he told CNN. “If the Russian propaganda machine, both their state media and their bot and troll operations, is backing a candidate aligned with their interests, that is just a reality, it is not speculation.”

Merrill later asserted that Clinton was saying that Republicans, and not Russians, were grooming Gabbard.

“Folks, listen to the podcast. She doesn’t say the Russians are grooming anyone. It was a question about Republicans,” he tweeted.

But Gabbard’s lawyers aren’t buying that explanation.

“It appears you may now be claiming that this statement is about Republicans (not Russians) grooming Gabbard,” they wrote to Clinton.

“But this makes no sense in light of what you actually said. After you made the statement linking Congresswoman Gabbard to the Russians, you (through your spokesman) doubled down on it with the Russian nesting dolls remark.”

Gabbard has repeatedly denied that she would run on a third-party ticket if she fails to win the Democratic nomination. She is currently polling in the low single digits in the crowded field. She has also said she will not run for re-election for her House seat in 2020.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Gabbard Demands Hillary Clinton Retract Russia Remarks appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia, under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, underwent a famine that killed between 500,000 and 1.5 million lives through the deadly mix of starvation and disease. This event wiped out somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the country’s population.

Russia experienced two famines in the 20th Century. From 1921 to 1922, roughly five million people died due to a combination of effects from the Russian Civil War and the economic disturbance caused by the Russian Revolution. A rail system that couldn’t distribute food efficiently further contributed to the widespread starvation. Seed-grain was eaten rather than sown, and peasants resorted to cannibalism.

The Soviets suffered a second famine between 1932 and 1933, with estimates reaching as high as 10 million deaths, 3.9 million of them the result of the reigning political party’s order to liquidate Kulaks as a class. The Kulaks were successful farmers and landowners, and their success at farming flew in the face of equality, so leadership had to act. When the Kulaks were deported, imprisoned, or executed, the grain harvest went as well.

Under the same guise of building a utopian society, China, under Mao Tse-tung, implemented policies that cascaded into famine. Between 1959 and 1961, the Great Chinese Famine killed 45 million. That’s a toll greater than the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined.

Mao Tse-tung wanted to transform China into a utopian socialist society in the vision of François-Noël Babeuf, the French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period, whose ideas have been emulated in virtually all socialist movements. At the heart of Babeuf’s utopia of equality is this philosophy:

The sole means of arriving at this [equality] is to establish a common administration; to suppress private property; to place every man of talent in the line of work he knows best; to oblige him to deposit the fruit of his work in the common store, to establish a simple administration of needs, which, keeping a record of all individuals and all the things that are available to them, will distribute these available goods with the most scrupulous equality and will see to it that they make their way into the home of every citizen.

Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened in 2006. Dikötter studied Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962 following Mao’s the Great Leap Forward. Through enslavement of the people, Mao intended to force China’s economy to match and then exceed the production capacity of England within just a few years.

In his 2010 book, Mao’s Great Famine, Dikötter explains the Great Leap Forward in the Chinese countryside:

People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end focusing upon giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experience ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.

Dikötter also noted that the communists wildly overestimated actual production, then punished the people for failing to achieve the fantasies of the planners. Grain output in 1958 was 200 million tons, but leadership claimed a bumper crop close to 410 million tons.

Chairman Mao, uncaring as to the incredible amount of death and suffering he inflicted on his own people said, “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death,” and later in 1959 he was quoted, “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Obviously, compassion and empathy were not cherished values for Chinese leadership, and the details of the Chinese peasants’ suffering were especially brutal. According to Dikötter:

Parents driven mad with hunger were led to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. There was a black market for human flesh along with everything else.

To this day, the Chinese government treats the three-year famine as a natural disaster and denies the true death toll out of fear of undermining the legitimacy of the Communist party.

The allure of socialism is the promise of a better world with equality of outcome for everyone. Socialism believes humans are perfectible. If we reward the right people, if we change the environment, have the right language, have the right approach, punish the right people, we can achieve paradise.

The only thing standing in the way of paradise is the deplorables.

[Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons- public domain]

This post Forced Equality Has a History of Genocidal Results was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Henschen.

The post Forced Equality Has a History of Genocidal Results appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Audrey Conklin 

Facebook announced Monday an effort to “protect the 2020 U.S. elections” by clearly marking fake news posts, offering protections to politicians’ accounts and offering more transparency.

The effort comes after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg defended the social media site’s new advertisement policies, which will effectively allow political campaigns to release misinformation to voters, in an Oct. 17 interview with The Washington Post because he doesn’t think “tech companies” should decide what is “100% true.”

“Elections have changed significantly since 2016, but Facebook has changed too,” Zuckerberg said in a Monday conference call, according to The New York Times. “We face increasingly sophisticated attacks from nation-states like Russia, Iran and China, but I’m confident we’re more prepared.”

Facebook’s plan will include an increased effort to identify and combat “inauthentic behavior,” increase transparency and reduce misinformation, according to a Monday news release from the company.

The social media giant removed four state-backed networks Monday — three of which originated in Iran and one of which originated in Russia — that were engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” according to another Monday release.

The tech company will start labeling state-run media outlets and introduced a “U.S. presidential candidate spend tracker,” so people can see how much money specific candidates are spending on ads, the release reads.

It is also introduced a program Monday called “Facebook Protect” that candidates, elected officials, staff of elected officials and others “who may be particularly vulnerable to targeting by hackers and foreign adversaries” can enroll in to further secure their accounts.

The social site will make pages more transparent by “showing people the Page’s primary country location and whether the Page has merged with other Pages.” Some pages Russian operatives ran before and after the 2016 election that touted U.S. election material, for example, appeared to be independently operated even though they originated in foreign countries.

Additionally, the company will label information posted on Facebook that fact checkers determine false as such.

Some pundits and commentators argue that voters elected President Donald Trump in 2016 largely because Russian operatives had attempted to infiltrate various social platforms and spread disinformation or propaganda through tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Representatives for Google, Facebook and Twitter attended three public congressional hearings on Oct. 31, 2017; Sept. 5, 2018 and Dec. 11, 2018 to discuss Russian election interference.

The House Intelligence Committee noted in 2018 that more than 126 million Facebook users could have been exposed to “organic content” between 2015 and 2017 published by pages owned by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — a Russian “troll farm,” or a state-sponsored, anonymous online-news brigade.

Ads expressed support for and opposition to 2016 candidates including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, The NYT reported.

They also covered a variety of issues from immigration to LGBTQ rights to strengthening black communities, many of which appeared to mimic images and memes seen on other popular U.S. social media accounts.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Facebook Announces New Effort To Clearly Mark Fake News Ahead Of 2020 appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Shelby Talcott

Russian President Vladimir Putin joked Wednesday that his country would “definitely” be interfering with the 2020 U.S. election.

NBC’s Keir Simmons asked Putin about former special counsel Robert Mueller’s belief that Russia would continue trying to meddle in upcoming elections during an energy forum in Moscow. Putin jokingly responded that his answer was “a secret.”

“I’ll tell you in a secret — yes, we’ll definitely intervene,” Putin said. “It’s a secret so that everybody can laugh and so we’ll go big. But don’t tell anyone, please.”

Simmons spoke to MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson Wednesday about his line of questioning and noted the Moscow crowd received the answer well. 

“And another thing, I pressed him on the question of how he would interpret if the administration published rough transcripts of calls between President Putin and President [Donald] Trump the way they have between President Trump and the leader, the new leader of Ukraine,” Simmons told Jackson, adding:

“He seemed pretty relaxed about this, and Hallie, a senior Russian official said to me if they published transcripts of the conversations between President Trump and President Putin, President Putin would look good, Hallie.”

The House of Representatives launched a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump on Sept. 24 after a whistleblower complaint accused the president of asking Ukrainian officials to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The White House released a transcript of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sept. 25.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Putin Jokes That Russia Will ‘Definitely Interfere’ With 2020 Election appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.