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Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

All the other crazy stuff we talk about. Politics, Science, News, the Kitchen, other hobbies.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#31

Post by ti-amie »

Adam Klasfeld
@KlasfeldReports
The White House press release awarding Devin Nunes a presidential medal of freedom attacks the press, FBI, the Intelligence Community, and the so-called "Deep State."

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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#32

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WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Mental Unraveling Drives U.K. Judge to Block Extradition to United States
ADAM KLASFELD Jan 4th, 2021, 9:57 am

Blocking Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, a U.K. judge found on the Monday that the WikiLeaks founder’s psyche may not be able to handle the possibility of imprisonment for the rest of his life.

“I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the United States were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding,” Assange’s psychiatrist Michael Kopelman is quoted as saying in the 132-page judgment.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser decisively rejected Assange’s depiction as the target of a politically motivated prosecution, but she had been troubled by reports that the WikiLeaks founder told his psychiatrist he thought about suicide “hundreds of times a day.”

“The auditory hallucinations were much less prominent and less troubling and the somatic hallucinations had been abolished,” the judgment continues. “His symptoms in December 2019 included loss of sleep, loss of weight, impaired concentration, a feeling of often being on the verge of tears, and a state of acute agitation in which he was pacing his cell until exhausted, punching his head or banging it against a cell wall.”

If extradited and convicted, the 49-year-old Assange could spend the rest of his natural life in a United States prison. He faces 17 charges related largely to a massive cache of military and diplomatic files disclosed to him by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

The Department of Justice said that it will continue to seek Assange’s extradition on appeal.

“While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,” the department said in a statement. “In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial, and freedom of speech.”

Press-freedom advocates have warned that prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act for disclosing what was the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history would criminalize what has long been a standard journalistic practice.

“We welcome the fact that Julian Assange will not be sent to the USA, but this does not absolve the UK from having engaged in this politically-motivated process at the behest of the USA and putting media freedom and freedom of expression on trial,” Amnesty International wrote in a statement.

But U.S. prosecutors claim that Assange’s actions went beyond journalism, such as conspiring with Manning and other sources to hack into private databases.

“This court trusts that upon extradition, a US court will properly consider Mr. Assange’s right to free speech and determine any constitutional challenges to their equivalent legislation,” the judge wrote.

For Judge Baraitser, Assange’s alleged journalist-source relationship with Manning “went beyond the mere encouragement of a whistle-blower.”

Citing arguments by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, the judge found it legitimate to attempt to punish the allegedly knowing disclosure of the identities of U.S. informants whose lives were uprooted by the leaks.

“As Mr. Kromberg points out, well over one hundred people were placed at risk from the disclosures and approximately fifty people sought and received assistance from the U.S.,” the judgment states. “For some, the U.S. assessed that it was necessary and advisable for them to flee their home countries and that they, their spouses and their families were assisted in moving to the U.S. or to safe third countries. Some of the harm suffered was quantifiable, by reference to their loss of employment or their assets being frozen by the regimes from which they fled, and other harm was less easy to quantify.”

At Manning’s court-martial, a U.S. general conceded that none of the leaks led to any deaths, but those identified had to be shuttled to safety.

When prosecutors first unsealed charges against Assange in 2019, the first public indictment’s computer intrusion charge focused on revelations from Manning’s trial that the two allegedly discussed cracking a password to obtain anonymous access to the Net Centric Diplomacy database, which held the hundreds of thousands of State Department cables sent to WikiLeaks.

At the time of her leaks, Manning had lawful access to that database, but prosecutors said at her court-martial that she and Assange sought illegal access to evade detection. That alleged conspiracy, disclosed during Manning’s trial, is part of Assange’s indictment.

Judge Baraitser found that would be for the U.S. judiciary to decide.

“Whether or not it was possible for Ms. Manning to crack the passcode, and whether she was aware of the security issues, are in my judgment matters for a trial,” the U.K. judgement states.

Shortly after her arrest, Manning was found have been suicidal and a noose was found in her prison cell, leading to highly restrictive pretrial conditions that a military judge found to have been excessive. Assange cited Manning’s attempted suicide, according to the WikiLeaks founder’s psychiatrist.

This past June, U.S. prosecutors widened the scope of their computer-intrusion charges, saying that Assange also asked a teenager to steal audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials of a NATO country, including a member of its parliament.

The superseding indictment also charges that Assange played a hands-on role in connection with hacks by collectives Anonymous, Gnosis, AntiSec, and LulzSec. Their targets included a cyber security company, two hundred U.S. and state government email accounts, the private intelligence firm Stratfor and multiple law enforcement associations.

Jeremy Hammond, one of the the key figures behind the Stratfor intrusion who also broke into Boston and Alabama police databases, was sentenced to a decade imprisonment in 2013. WikiLeaks published his disclosures under the name “Global Intelligence Files.”

Assange’s charges larges focus on conduct spanning back a decade.

Former President Barack Obama’s administration declined to prosecute based on reported concerns about the First Amendment precedent that Justice Department officials at the time described as a “New York Times problem,” meaning that legal theories deployed against Assange now could be used against the paper of record later.

The Trump administration backpedaled, leading Assange’s defense team to argue there was a political vendetta.

But Baraitser noted that Trump is hardly antagonistic to Assange, whose publication of Democratic National Committee emails were a central part of the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“First, there is little or no evidence to indicate hostility by President Trump towards Mr. Assange or Wikileaks,” the judge noted. “His reported comments suggest that he was well-disposed towards them both.”

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared certain to win the 2016 election, Assange reportedly told Trump’s son that he should refuse to concede the race. Though he is not currently charged with any conduct related to that election, Assange’s name came up repeatedly in the Mueller investigation and the prosecution of Roger Stone, whom Trump since pardoned.


https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/wi ... ed-states/

There is a copy of the judgement at the above link.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#33

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Biden's Attorney General choice becomes more and more important with every passing day doesn't it?
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#34

Post by patrick »

Not according to Peter Navarro.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#35

Post by ti-amie »

patrick wrote: Mon Jan 04, 2021 6:13 pm Not according to Peter Navarro.
Silly wabbit. You mean Ron Vara right? :D
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#36

Post by ponchi101 »

ti-amie wrote: Mon Jan 04, 2021 5:59 pm Biden's Attorney General choice becomes more and more important with every passing day doesn't it?
It will be the crucial person in the next administration. And Assange is the least of issues. Handling Tiny, finding out what was it that Tiny had on L. Graham, dealing with the moles that will be implanted before Tiny leaves. It will be a monumental task.
About Assange: yes, freedom of press. And leaks. But why did you never publish anything on Russia? China? Even the EU? Never. Only things about America. I would like to hear why.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#37

Post by patrick »

patrick wrote: Mon Jan 04, 2021 6:13 pm Not according to Peter Navarro.
This comment was in response to the 10 day audit. Wrong thread by me.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#38

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Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1
Raffensperger adviser to Politico: "It's nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he's claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this."
Bar0n_TheGrey @Bar0n_TheGrey
Replying to @kylegriffin1

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Ben Rhodes @brhodes

Lindsey Graham, who asked a government official to throw out legally cast ballots, is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee - charged with confirming judges and overseeing the rule of law in this country. It's a truly extraordinary level of corruption.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#39

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Adam Klasfeld @KlasfeldReports
Brad Raffensperger Claims Trump's Lawyers May Have Violated Professional Rules in Infamous Call https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/b ... mous-call/ via @lawcrimenews

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This is the Georgia professional rule that Raffensperger's claim Trump's counsel violated during that call, by effectively blindsiding their client by not notifying his counsel.

"The maximum penalty for a violation of this Rule is disbarment."

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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#40

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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#41

Post by ponchi101 »

I just cracked up. So right!
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#42

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Ginni Thomas’ Facebook Page Disappears After Media Reports on Her Support for Pro-Trump Rally that Turned into Attack on U.S. Capitol
COLIN KALMBACHER Jan 8th, 2021, 1:39 pm

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (R) and Virginia Thomas arrive for the State Dinner at The White House honoring Australian PM Morrison on September 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. Prime Minister Morrison is on a state visit in Washington hosted by President Trump.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, attorney and wife of right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is being heavily criticized for her role in promoting President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C.—a rally that resulted in the president’s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol Complex on Wednesday, leaving at least five dead.

Several supportive messages authored by the former Thomas, previously public, are now unavailable–along with her public-facing Facebook profile.

This development occurred during the process of writing the present article. It is unclear whether those specific messages were deleted, whether her overall profile was deleted, whether she simply changed the privacy settings for her social media account or whether Facebook itself took down Thomas’s page.

Thomas previously identified herself as a verified Facebook “Public Figure,” according to an Internet Archive screenshots via the Wayback Machine.

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“GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING,” Thomas added in a second post.

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Those two messages, roughly 15 minutes apart, were posted during the early morning hours of the instantly infamous day. Interspersed between those two supportive messages was an apparently indirect show of solidarity by way of a quote from Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” the Bedtime for Bonzo actor and eventual president said in support of then-GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

(Technically a post, but not a status update, Thomas appeared to put Reagan’s imprimatur on the pro-Trump movement by updating her Facebook cover photo with an image of The Gipper appended to the quote from the speech known to Reagan fans as “The Speech.”)

After the “MAGA crowd” turned violent and overtook the U.S. Capitol Complex on Wednesday, however, Thomas has kept her posting to a minimum–only chiming in to edit her two status updates with the following: “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]” and “[Note: written before the violence in the US Capitol].”

Law&Crime surveyed Thomas’s Facebook page on Friday morning. The edit history of those two posts show that the immediately above edits were made during the late Friday morning hours–roughly sometime between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Criticism of Thomas went widespread late Thursday and into Friday morning when Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern shared screenshots of the posts via Twitter. The thread was shared several thousands of times and quickly went viral–resulting in what is known as a “Trending Topic” under the microblogging website’s “Politics” section.



In other words, Thomas updated her posts following a wellspring of criticism online.

Stern appended a series of recent news stories to his thread in an attempt to reflect Ginni Thomas’s general political outlook:

Israel’s oldest continuously published newspaper and the country’s paper of record, Haaretz, accused Thomas of antisemitism over her embrace of those far-right George Soros conspiracy theories.

Thomas is widely known to be a member of the far-right movement and developed a reflexive goodwill relationship with the Trump administration.

In May 2020, the 45th president appointed Thomas a member of the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, according to Fox News.

Thomas is also a vociferous opponent of the the Black Lives Matter movement, according to the Washington Post.

Law&Crime reached out Facebook and the Supreme Court for comment and clarification on this article. No response was forthcoming at the time of publication.

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/gi ... s-capitol/
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#43

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“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#44

Post by ponchi101 »

Am I happy? Am I sad?
In all seriousness: these people also must be prosecuted. These circle of violence must stop.
Graham has been spineless and shameful. But he still deserves to be able to sit at an airport in peace.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#45

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Fri Jan 08, 2021 8:42 pm Am I happy? Am I sad?
In all seriousness: these people also must be prosecuted. These circle of violence must stop.
Graham has been spineless and shameful. But he still deserves to be able to sit at an airport in peace.
They did the same thing to Romney the other day.
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