World crisis: Raiders of the lost files

Those who identify the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago as a crisis of the Republic are quite correct, and I am gravely concerned it’s a bigger crisis than anyone is thinking. 

The reason for that is what ensued a few hours after the raid, which reportedly occurred in the “pre-dawn” hours of 8 August 2022 in Palm Beach.

Numerous TV news commentators pointed out Monday evening that nothing like this raid on the former president’s home has happened before in U.S. history.  Americans aren’t the only ones who know that.  We’re also not the only ones who know that proper procedure was ignored by the raiding team, according to witnesses.  The FBI team should have allowed Trump’s lawyers to be present everywhere items were seized, but didn’t (the lawyers were reportedly excluded altogether);

The fetid swamp of “integrity”: The initiative that scurried from the spotlight

The recent articles showing that erstwhile U.S. Administrator of Truth Nina Jankowicz was connected with the shadowy, government-funded British group Institute for Statecraft (and its offshoot Integrity Initiative project) have reopened a can of worms far too numerous to herd into a single post.

Indeed, they’re so numerous it’s hard to keep track of them from one online search to the next.

So this won’t be an in-depth treatment of “IfS/II” and its squirming, hydra-headed mass.  Rather, it’s a few notes on what Ms. Jankowicz was doing in the period when an IfS/II document reflects a connection to her.  Plus some bonus observations about IfS/II.

As far as I’ve discerned at this point, one document out of quite a few – all of which were hacked and exposed by Anonymous in 2018 and early 2019 – identifies Jankowicz as explicitly linked to the Integrity Initiative’s “UK Cluster.”*

A work-in-progress timeline surrounding Feb 2017 Daniel Jones meeting, including the ‘Trump’s insurance broker’ angle

With a great deal happening, it’s important to move some things out there before they are fully developed and analyzed, largely because some of the event dates are remarkably coincident with known events from the Spygate timeline. 

The anchor point for this rough-condition timeline is early February 2017, when on successive days Michael Sussmann met with officials at the CIA to urge on them his trove of purported Alfa Bank-Trump data (9 February 2017), and John Podesta met with Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, along with former Dianne Feinstein staffer Daniel Jones (on 10 February 2017), who in the same timeframe started a non-profit that hired Fusion to continue its anti-Trump work from 2016.

These dates are of particular interest, and not only because John Durham has discussed the Sussmann-CIA meeting in his court filings in the Sussmann false-statement case.

Easter greetings from The Optimistic Conservative

Heartfelt wishes to all for a blessed and happy Easter.

Keeping it simple this year with a hymn to rejoice by.

Alleluia!

He Is Risen.

Also, I failed earlier to get a separate Passover greeting posted.  Here’s what was on social media.

The unclubbable Mr. Trump: China, Ukraine, and a surprise banking oversight action

On 20 March, we checked in with a story from the period 2014-2016, when the French bank BNP Paribas was, initially, greenlighted by the Obama administration to do business with Iran, as sanctions were relaxed, and then months later was hit by U.S. government authorities with the biggest settlement forfeiture in banking history for a prior record of sanctions violations (including sanctions on Iran).

In the interim between the first development (January 2014) and the second (June 2014), BNP Paribas flagged – to UK officials – a suspicious transaction by the owner of Burisma, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.  The date of the notification, March 2014, fell in the period when Vice President Joe Biden was holding frequent phone conversations with top Ukrainian officials as the “Maidan Revolution” crisis expanded.  About a month after BNP Paribas alerted the UK to Zlochevsky – who had fled Ukraine in February 2014 – Hunter Biden and Devon Archer joined Burisma’s board, and payments from the company began flowing to them.