Congress Can’t Verify Trump-Russia Dossier, Gives Up And Hands Off To FBI Special Counsel Mueller

The Senate Intelligence Committee has thrown in the towel trying to verify the contents of the notorious Trump-Russia “pissgate” dossier – passing it to FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of raging Democrat investigators.

If you recall, the Trump-Russia investigation spawned from three separate claims; a report on the DNC server hack created by largely discredited IT security firm Crowdstrike, salacious accusations made in a now-infamous 34 page ‘pissgate’ dossier (which 4chan users claim to have had a hand in creating), and former FBI director James Comey’s mysterious memo in which he alleged that Trump asked him to lay off former National Security advisor Mike Flynn. Of course, nobody got to see the actual memo…

Also recall that the uncorroborated ‘low confidence’ pissgate dossier was used as the basis for a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page – an international financier specializing in Russia’s oil and gas markets, and who had a very limited role on a Trump campaign foreign policy advisory committee last March. This means that while the FBI felt the dossier’s claims weren’t solid enough to pay for, they turned around and used it as evidence of probable cause for a September FISA warrant request to spy on Carter Page (which presumably included ‘incidental’ surveillance of anyone he spoke with).

So the FBI used ‘low confidence’ information to fool the FISA court into issuing a Surveillance warrant…

And what exactly were the portions of the discredited dossier used to justify probable cause?

A July 19 memo from Steele’s dossier alleges that the Trump campaign used Page as an intermediary in a “well-developed conspiracy” to help Trump during the election. The source of that claim has since been identified as Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman who has a history of exaggerating his business ties.

Another July 19 memo from the dossier alleges that Page, a low-level adviser on the campaign who never met Trump, met secretly with Kremlin officials and Igor Sechin, the president of Russian oil giant Rosneft, to discuss relaxing Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.

Page, an energy consultant, has denied having the secret meeting and says he has never met Sechin. –Daily Caller

Thirdly – recall that the James Comey’s FBI had a $50,000 arrangement with Steele which the New York Times revealed the agency couldn’t corroborate. 

Why would Steele leave $50K on the table if all he had to do was prove the claims in the dossier? And now, the Senate Intel Committee has “hit a wall” and thrown their hands up trying to verify its claims – which they’ve passed to Mueller, James Comey’s BFF and picnic buddy.

FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

A woman dressed as the Monopoly man sat behind former CEO of Equifax, Richard Smith, while he testified in front of the Senate on Wednesday.

Amanda Werner, arbitration campaign manager for the progressive advocacy group Public Citizen, was decked out in a suit, top hat, monocle, and trademark white mustache during the Senate Banking Committee hearing investigating the massive Equifax hack affecting over 140 million Americans.

At one point, the “Monopoly Man” allegedly pulled some money out of a giant bag with a dollar sign and wiped his brow.

I definitely want to know more about the plans of this man sitting behind the Equifax CEO in Sen. banking hearing in a monopoly man outfit. pic.twitter.com/dwfukJJTA7

— Hannah Levintova (@H_Lev) October 4, 2017

I don't have video of it (yet!) but the Monopoly Man at the Equifax hearing allegedly wiped his brow with a dollar bill earlier pic.twitter.com/Ocuy80hnFL

— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) October 4, 2017

In a statement, Public Citizen said the “Monopoly Man” appeared to bring attention to forced arbitration clauses they say Equifax uses to avoid punishment and exploit customers – a “get out of jail free card.”

“Make no mistake: Arbitration is a rigged game, one that the bank nearly always wins,” Werner said. “Shockingly, the average consumer forced to arbitrate with Wells Fargo was ordered to pay the bank nearly $11,000. Bank lobbyists and their allies in Congress are trying to overturn the CFPB’s rule so they can continue to rip off consumers with impunity.”

Equifax came under fire for including a clause in their TOS which barred victims of the hack from suing the company if they utilized a free credit monitoring service – a policy the company quickly clarified did not apply to those affected by the breach.

The inevitable response to any terrorist incident is to force everyone to go through a new and convoluted gauntlet of security measures in order to prevent future attacks. From taking off our shoes at the airport because of one asshole to the cancer-clustering Orwellian backscatter x-ray machines created after 9/11 which I refuse to go through, it seems like the response always assumes that the next attack will be a repeat.

Naturally, following last Sunday’s shooting at the Mandalay Bay casino which left 59 dead and 515 injured, Las Vegas is already starting to boost security for its nearly 43 million visitors / year.

How can businesses keep guests safe while keeping Vegas fun? They probably can’t – which means that new security measures are going to need to be as minimally invasive as possible.

The Wynn began scanning visitors with metal-detector wands and inspecting bags after Sunday’s massacre – creating a 10 minute wait to get inside. That’s not going to work for most people who like to get drunk and wander from casino to casino pretending they’re ballers.

Bloomberg reports:

Casinos and entertainment venues are going to have to take a more holistic approach to security, thinking about rooftops and other potential shooting perches — considering the possibilities for an attack from all angles, said David Shepherd, a former FBI special agent in counterterrorism who later was the security director for Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Venetian resort.

UK readers can say goodbye to 4chan…

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced that people who watch ‘terrorist content online,’ including ‘far-right propaganda’ will face the full force of the law – up to and including a 15 year jail term.

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions will face the full force of the law,” said Rudd.

“Changes will enable police and the security service to keep pace with modern patterns of internet use and intervene earlier in an investigation given the speed with which online radicalization is taking place.”

A defense of “reasonable excuse” would be given to academics, journalists and others who ostensibly have a legitimate reason to view said material.

The new laws regarding “terrorist material” are part of the UK’s counter terrorism strategy following a sharp increase in terrorist attacks in Britain in 2017. Since September 1 2016, ISIS supporters have sent nearly 67,000 tweets in English to promote propaganda, according to the Home Office.

Encryption under fire as well

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference on Tuesday, Rudd also ramped up her calls for Google, Facebook, and other technology companies to stop online extremism – singling out WhatsApp specifically for developing encrypted software which she claimed was being used by criminals.

“We also know that end-to-end services like WhatsApp are being used by pedophiles. I do not accept that it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement.

“We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency.”

Say no to acid, kids

Rudd also told the conference that selling acid or other highly corrosive substances to people under 18 will also be made illegal.

“Acid attacks are absolutely revolting. You have all seen the pictures of victims that never fully recover. Endless surgeries. Lives ruined. So today, I am also announcing a new offence to prevent the sale of acids to under 18s.”

I can just picture young jihadis waiting outside the pool supply store while a homeless guy buys them acid.

In the wake of the massive Equifax hack which exposed social security numbers and other sensitive data of over 143 million Americans, the White House is exploring alternative methods of identifications for U.S. citizens, according to Job Joyce, Special assistant to the President and White House cybersecurity coordinator.

“I feel very strongly that the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness,” Joyce told attendees at a cyber conference hosted by the Washington Post. “Every time we use the Social Security number, you put it at risk.”

Joyce’s comments echo those of former Equifax CEO Richard Smith, who testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding the massive hack.

“The concept of a Social Security number in this environment being private and secure — I think it’s time as a country to think beyond that,” Smith said. “What is a better way to identify consumers in our country in a very secure way? I think that way is something different than an SSN, a date of birth and a name.

Further into the Matrix…

Proposed solutions to a social security number are all digital. Bloomberg reports:

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, said one possibility could be giving individuals a private key, essentially a long cryptographic number that’s embedded in a “physical token” that then requires users to verify that the number belongs to them. It could work like the chip in a credit card that requires the owner to enter a pin allowing use. He pointed to Estonia where they have deployed such cards that people use to validate their identity.

“Your pin unlocks your ability to use that big number,” he said. The challenge is how to create the identifiers and how to distribute the keys. “It’s very promising” and “it’s possible to technically design something like this” but it could be expensive to design and disseminate such material to each American, he said. “This is a pretty big endeavor.”

The administration is also participating in discussions Congress is having about the requirements of protecting personal data and breach notifications for companies.

Another solution would be to use blockchain technology currently employed in cryptocurrencies, to create a sort of digital DNA fingerprint which would be “mathematically impossible” to duplicate. Instead of a SSN, each citizen would receive a ‘blockchain hash,’ a kind of algorithm unique to the individual.

Out with the old… 

Harvard’s Bruce Schneider, a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government thinks that Social Security numbers are antiquated – and were only useful when it was the only number available to identify a person.

“They appeared at an age when we didn’t have other numbers,” Schneier said in an interview. “Think of this as part of our aging infrastructure” from roads and bridges to communications. “Sooner or later we as a society need to fix our aging infrastructure.”

Schneier pointed to India’s use of the Aadhaar card – a unique number provided to the country’s 1.2 billion citizens after collecting their fingerprints, an iris scan, demographic data, and other identifying information.

Laws would need to change

In order to accept the mark of the beast, “you’d need to change a lot of existing public law” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington – an advocate of reducing SSN use. “There would need to be extensive hearings and study about the consequences. It’s a complicated issue.”

The failure of the Social Security number is that there’s only one for each person, “once it’s compromised one time, you’re done,” Bob Stasio, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and former chief of operations at the National Security Agency’s Cyber Operations Center.

Public and private keys — long strings of code — could help validate identities. For instance, the government could issue each person a public key and private key. If people were to open a bank account, for instance, they could provide their public key — instead of a Social Security number — and the bank would send a message that could only be decrypted using their private key. If the private key gets compromised, the government could easily issue another one.

King Felipe of Spain lashed out against Catalan authorities on Tuesday in a rare televised statement, following the protest of a police crackdown on citizens following a hotly contested independence referendum.

“With their decisions, they have systematically undermined the rules approved legally and legitimately, showing an unacceptable disloyalty towards the powers of the state — a state that represents Catalan interests,” Felipe said.

Hundreds of thousands of Catalonians took to the streets after Spanish officials tried to prevent the ‘banned’ vote from taking place – with up to 700,000 gathered in Barcelona.

Protesters in Barcelona said they were motivated by rampant police violence during the vote – which resulted in 893 people injured while riot police raided polling stations – dragging away voters and spraying the crowd with rubber bullets.

U.S. automakers may have sold vehicles at the fastest pace since December, according to industry reports.

The bump in sales (predicted by Fly) follows Hurricane Harvey, which likely damaged more cars than any storm in history.

GM, Toyota and Ford each said the auto industry likely sold more than 18 million vehicles in September – blowing out analyst estimates of 17.4 million from a Bloomberg News survey.

Via Bloomberg: 

General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. led all major carmakers that have reported results for the month in exceeding analyst estimates. Both said the industry may have sold vehicles at the fastest pace since December.

For all the destruction wrought by Harvey, the storm may have been a shot in the arm for an auto market that’s been shrinking following record sales last year. While analysts had projected the industry would have its best annualized selling pace in six months, those estimates look like they were too conservative. Buyers will keep returning to showrooms in Texas for months to replace waterlogged vehicles, giving a boost to bigger models including the Toyota RAV4 crossover, Ford F-Series pickups and Chevrolet Traverse SUV.

“People headed right to the dealer as soon as the storm cleared,” Michelle Krebs, an analyst at car-shopping website Autotrader, said by phone. “We expect this will go into October and possibly continue in November.”

Shares in automakers surged after the Tuesday announcement – with $GM jumping as much as 3.7 percent – on track for its second consecutive record close. Ford ($F) is up nearly 3 percent on the news.

General Motors is overbought in the iBankCoin Exodus algorithm

The stock has decent stats in the algo – rising an average of 5.31% after 10 days of flagging oversold, 5 out of 5 times.

CBS fired one of its top lawyers after she said she’s “not even sympathetic” to victims of the Las Vegas shooting since “country music fans often are Republican gun toters.” Attorney Hayley Geftman-Gold wrote the hateful words in a now-deleted Facebook post captured by The Daily Caller.

“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” wrote Geftman-Gold on Facebook, perhaps referring to Sandy Hook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

A @CBS legal exec thought the Las Vegas victims had it coming. pic.twitter.com/YjeSyAox59

— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) October 2, 2017

The network issued the following statement to Fox News:

“This individual, who was with us for approximately one year, violated the standards of our company and is no longer an employee of CBS. Her views as expressed on social media are deeply unacceptable to all of us at CBS. Our hearts go out to the victims in Las Vegas and their families.”

Geftman-Gold, a Columbia Law grad who had been with CBS just over a year has since issued a statement of her own:

“Earlier today I posted an indefensible post in a Facebook discussion thread concerning the tragic Las Vegas shooting, a statement I sincerely regret. I am deeply sorry for diminishing the significance of every life affected by Stephen Paddock’s terrorism last night and for the pain my words have inflicted on the loved ones of the victims. My shameful comments do not reflect the beliefs of my former employer, colleagues, family, and friends. Nor do they reflect my actual beliefs — this senseless violence warrants the deepest empathy. I understand and accept all consequences that my words have incurred.”

Her attorney, Carrie A. Goldberg busted out the victim card: “In the last few hours my client, her family and friends have been bombarded by online death unimaginable in quantity and detail. We beg people to show love and support to survivors and loved ones — in Las Vegas and their own lives — instead of creating more violence.”

Last night’s tragedy in Las Vegas has left many wondering why Stephen Paddock – a man with very little internet footprint to give us clues as to his motivation – would commit the deadliest mass shooting in US history shortly before midnight Sunday, leaving 59 dead and 527 injured at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

What we know is that he was positioned on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay hotel and casino, and fired hundreds of bullets for roughly 10 minutes into the crowd.

More than 19 rifles were found in the hotel room, including two mounted on tripods at the window – along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Infowars is reporting that ISIS and Antifa literature was found at the scene, and while that has yet to be officially confirmed, ISIS has taken credit for the attack – claiming Paddock was “its soldier,” and a recent convert to Islam.

Raid of Paddock's house in Reno expected; no entry yet.#RJnow pic.twitter.com/JYOi40N0lJ

— Ben Botkin (@BenBotkin1) October 2, 2017

Officially, the motive is unclear, and officials have stated that they have not found any Islamic material or evidence Paddock was radicalized. Paddock’s brother has stated that the gunman was a multimillionaire with investments in real estate, and was not under financial strain.

Upon a search of the gunman’s home

SWAT officers outside Reno home of shooter.#RJnow pic.twitter.com/gaUYYuqxXx

— Ben Botkin (@BenBotkin1) October 2, 2017

Police found a giant cache of firearms, explosives and ammunition in his Mesquite, Nevada home, according to AFP. Sherrif Joseph Lombardo announced the recovery of “in excess of 18 additional firearms, some explosives and several thousand rounds of ammo, along with some electronic devices we’re evaluating at this point.”

Several pounds of an explosive called tannerite were also recovered at Paddock’s home, as well as ammonia nitrate – the type of fertilizer commonly used in bombings, such as the Oklahoma City attack by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. 

As always with these incidents, developing… 

A gunman opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas Sunday night, killing more than 20 people and wounding over 100 with an automatic rifle before being shot and killed by police, according to officials.

Update: 

BREAKING: Las Vegas police say over 50 dead, over 200 injured after gunman opens fire at Mandalay Bay Resort

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 2, 2017

The suspected gunmen in the Las Vegas shooting has been identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock from Mesquite, Nevada, according to NBC News.

ABC NEWS: Las Vegas police say more than 20 people are confirmed to have died "at this point," more than 100 injured pic.twitter.com/mdLD4tKqij

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 2, 2017

EYEWITNESS: Chilling footage of moment active shooter opened fire on concert goers near Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas pic.twitter.com/7OfAwg0ReO

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 2, 2017

Las Vegas police responded to a report of an active shooter targeting concertgoers at the Route 91 Country Music Festival at approximately 10 p.m. Around an hour later, police confirmed that at least one suspect was down – calling the scene “an active investigation.”

The shooter – a Las Vegas resident – is thought to have acted alone or with a possible accomplice. Police are currently looking for a suspect named Marilou Danley, who is thought to be the wife or roommate of the shooter.

Las Vegas PD looking for this woman. pic.twitter.com/9dpFYxQNIx

— Morgan Loew (@morganloewcbs5) October 2, 2017

Another eyewitness, however, claims a Hispanic woman warned people they were “all going to die” earlier in the evening.

Eyewitness describes Hispanic woman who told people "everyone is going to die tonight" #LasVegas #mandalaybay pic.twitter.com/Wn3NchE8fA

— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) October 2, 2017

The NY Post reports:

Professional poker player and Instagram star Dan Bilzerian, who was at the concert, said on his IG story that he saw the shooting unfold and witnessed a girl getting shot right in front of him.

“Holy f–k this girl just got shot in the f–king head,” Bilzerian said. “So f–king crazy…So I had to go grab a gun, I’m f–king heading back…Some kind of mass shooting…Guy had a heavy caliber weapon for sure…Saw a girl f–king get shot in the face right next to me, her brains f–king hanging out.”

Dan Bilzerian, running from shooter at concert near Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, says “a girl just got shot in the f*cking head.” pic.twitter.com/FaS0VfeF7I

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 2, 2017

Another witness, who spoke to News3LV, recalled how “bullets were flying everywhere” and concertgoers were running.

“They were firing from somewhere high and they were unloading clip after clip after clip after clip,” the man said.

A female concertgoer added, “we all got on the floor, crawling out, rushing.”

Witnesses reported seeing muzzle flashes coming from the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay casino — across from where the convert venue was — and the sound of automatic gunfire.

 VIDEO:

(Muzzle flash can be seen in the clip below)

Video from a man along the sidewalk. You can hear what sounds like gunshots. pic.twitter.com/jRMS2G9mYE

— Blake Apgar (@blakeapgar) October 2, 2017

#activeshooter and Mandalay Bay during #route91harvest

Stay safe people?? #vegas pic.twitter.com/krspytnnOT

— Seth King (@SethKing85) October 2, 2017

NBC NEWS: Concert goers take cover, dive to the ground inside VIP tent as shooter opens fire at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas pic.twitter.com/KsmJL6ZqMs

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 2, 2017

Witnesses tell me people were getting shot around them #LasVegas @news3lv pic.twitter.com/xUOELxFupH

— Nathan O'Neal (@NateNews3LV) October 2, 2017