Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist and campaign CEO, once called a now-famous meeting among Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a group of Russians “treasonous,” according to accounts of an upcoming book.
Bannon is being quoted making the remarks in Fire and Fury, a book about the Trump White House by journalist Michael Wolff. After The Guardian cited an advance copy of the book (which is being released next week), news of Bannon’s comments quickly spread.
The meeting took place in June 2016, but it wasn’t publicly revealed until last summer. Discussing it with Wolff, Bannon reportedly said, “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Wolff quotes Bannon as saying, “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” according to The Guardian.
The Trump Tower meeting has been a focal point in reports about the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into Russia’s attempts to influence last year’s U.S. election.
Discussing the president’s son and the investigation’s potential path, Bannon reportedly told Wolff, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
When Goldstone contacted Donald Trump Jr. about the potential for dirt on Clinton, Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
After news of the meeting became public, Trump Jr. said the Russians had not produced any “meaningful information.”
Rather than having a high-profile sit-down, Bannon said, according to The Guardian, the Trump group should have restricted it to “a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people.”
The Justice Department has produced evidence that Russian agents “began reaching out to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as early as March 2016,” as NPR reported in October.
The figures from Trump’s campaign or administration who have been accused of federal crimes as a result of Mueller’s investigation range from Manafort (on money-laundering charges) to former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos (both of whom pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents).
I think I discussed a while ago that this whole thing of collusion with Russia goes a lot deeper than just the Chump and his merry band of misanthropes and traitors,
A bunch of Republicans in Congress received Russian help in their elections in exchange for…We don’t know what yet.
Putin’s favorite Bi&)*h in Congress is Republican Dana Rohrabacher, to takes orders directly from the Kremlin.
If he and Flynn were meeting during the election it opens up another path of communications between the Russians and the Chumph campaign.
Looks like lots more Republicans are going to be resigning…and/or going to jail.
I would not be surprised to learn of Flynn Indictments tomorrow.
The Washington Post reported in May that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, also a California Republican, was secretly recorded telling other party members, in what seemed to be a joke, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rohrabacher offered Trump a deal that to protect Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks, which released emails damaging to Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election, from legal peril. In return for not prosecuting him for his group’s 2010 leak of State Department emails, Assange would allegedly provide proof that Russia was not the source of the hacked Democratic emails. The intelligence community has pointed to Russia as the secret provider of the email trove to WikiLeaks.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators is looking into a pre-election meeting that took place in 2016 between then-Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who has often been described as “Putin’s favorite congressman.”
NBC News is reporting that “the meeting allegedly took place in Washington the evening of September 20” last year and “was arranged by his lobbying firm, the Flynn Intel Group.”
NBC News’ report does not have any information about the nature of the meeting, although it says that it is reviewing emails sent from Flynn’s firm to Rohrabacher’s staff thanking them for arranging the meeting.
Putin’s Congressman – Rorenbacher
Rohrabacher, a California Republican who has become notorious for his efforts to advance Russian interests as a member of the United States Congress, recently had his travel privileges restricted over fears that he has been compromised by Russian intelligence officials.
The Daily Beast reported earlier this year that Rohrabacher was given instructions by Russian intelligence officials on how to alter sanctions legislation and to set up “a virtual show trial on Capitol Hill” last June, right at around the time that Donald Trump Jr. and key members of the Trump campaign met with Russian nationals who claimed to be representatives of the Russian government’s efforts to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Rohrabacher’s original plan was to have a show trial in Congress of anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder in which he would “confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.”
Suspects arrested in the 1983 slaying of a black man in Georgia were angry that he was socializing with a white woman, Spalding County District Attorney Benjamin Coker told CNN.
Timothy Coggins, 23, was found stabbed to death on October 9, 1983, near a high-tension power line in Sunny Side, a town about 30 miles south of Atlanta.
The 34-year-old cold case, which broke in October with the arrest of four men and a woman, was widely believed to be racially motivated, though no suspects or motive had previously been uncovered.
Then-investigator Larry Campbell told the local newspaper at the time that there were bloodstains and tire tracks in the field where Coggins’ body was found. Both his lungs had been punctured, he said.
“He had been worked over with a knife pretty well,” Campbell told the Griffin Daily News. “He had defense wounds where he’d thrown up an arm and so forth.”
At a Wednesday bond hearing for suspects Frank Gebhardt, 59, and William Moore, 58, Corker accused them of acting brutally and having racist intentions.
“The murder of Timothy Coggins was due to Coggins socializing with a white female and that Coggins had been stabbed multiple times and drug behind a truck by Franklin Gebhardt and William Moore Sr.,” Coker told the court, according to CNN affiliate WSB-TV.
From left, Bill Moore Sr. and Frankie Gebhardt have been charged with murder in Coggins’ death, while Gregory Huffman, Lamar Bunn and his mother, Sandra Bunn, have been charged with obstruction, police say.
The suspects — who are charged with murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, aggravated battery and concealing a death — were denied bond.
Calls and emails to Gebhardt and Moore’s lawyers were not returned.
Three other individuals charged with obstructing the investigation into Coggins’ death remain out on bond, Coker said. Two of the suspects were working in law enforcement at the time of their alleged crimes, police say.
Coker’s statement in court Wednesday is in line with the recollections of Coggins’ niece.
Heather Coggins told CNN last month that most of her uncle’s friends were white, which might not have sat well with some folks in middle Georgia during the early 1980s.
Former Chumph Campaign Head Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates charged with a conspiracy to launder money, illegal work for a foreign government and tax evasion.
Can you say 50+ years in the hoosegow?
These criminal two are the fist to go down in the CHumph criminal cartel.
Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a Russian professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.
Mr. Papadopoulos admitted that in a January interview with the F.B.I., he lied about his contacts with a Russian professor, whom he knew to have “substantial connections to Russian government officials,” according to court documents. Mr. Papadopoulos told the authorities that the conversation occurred before he became an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. In fact, he met the professor days after joining the campaign.
The professor took interest in Mr. Papadopoulos “because of his status with the campaign,” the court documents said.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign official Rick Gates surrendered Monday to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.
Gates, 45, is a longtime business associate of Manafort, 68, having worked together since the mid-2000s, and served as his deputy on the campaign. The two were indicted under seal on Friday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The indictment against the two men contains 12 counts: conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
The charges do not cover any activities related to the campaign, though it’s possible Mueller could add additional charges.
Manafort arrived at the FBI’s Washington field office Monday morning. The two are being processed separately, according to a law enforcement official. They will later be transported to federal district court in Washington later Monday morning.
Last December, the U.K. government was reportedly given extensive records of Trump campaign officials’ interactions with the Kremlin.
The Guardian reported former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was first given to the UK intelligence services. These documents reportedly contain records of payments from the Trump campaign to banks of Russian cyber trolls tasked with spreading disinformation ahead of the 2016 election.
Court filings confirmed earlier this month that Steele passed along the information because he felt it was “of considerable importance in relation to alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election.”
Steele outlined how four Trump campaign representatives traveled to Prague in the Czech Republic in August or September to have “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers.” The group discussed how they would pay hackers for breaking into the Democratic Party’s computers and developing a “contingency plans for covering up operations.”
The memo reported that hackers were paid by the Trump Organization, however, the hackers were under the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is said to have attended the meeting in Prague, though he has described the memo as “totally fake, totally inaccurate.” He also claimed he’d never been to Prague.
Steele produced 16 memos using Russian sources to describe the web of collusion between Trump aides and Russian intelligence or other officials. A copy of the memos was given to the news outlet Fusion but instructed them not to disclose the material to anyone without approval. They agreed and Steele agreed to provide a copy to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) after McCain learned the memos existed from the UK ambassador to Moscow.
The Guardian reports that the court documents revealed Steele continued to get “unsolicited intelligence” on the links between Trump and Russia. As a result, Steele drew up another memo from Dec. 13. He turned that memo to a senior British national security official and gave encrypted versions to Fusion to give to McCain.
Court statements argue Steele was under an obligation to give the information to the UK and US “at a high level by persons with responsibility for national security.” However, Steele said he never gave a copy to any news organizations, merely off-the-record briefings about the dossier to some journalists in the fall of 2016. They argue they had no involvement in BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the document.
The dossier wasn’t delivered to former President Barack Obama and then-President-elect Donald Trump until January.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn likely broke the law by failing to disclose foreign income he earned from Russia and Turkey, the heads of the House Oversight Committee said Tuesday.
Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said they believe Flynn neither received permission nor fully disclosed income he earned for a speaking engagement in Russia and lobbying activities on behalf of Turkey when he applied to reinstate his security clearance, after viewing two classified memos and Flynn’s disclosure form in a private briefing Tuesday morning.
“Personally I see no evidence or no data to support the notion that General Flynn complied with the law,” Chaffetz told reporters following the briefing.
“He was supposed to get permission, he was supposed to report it, and he didn’t,” Cummings said.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they want an independent, non-partisan commission instead of Congress to investigate Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Seventy-three percent of respondents prefer the independent investigation, versus 16 percent who pick Congress.
Still, a majority of Americans — 54 percent — believe that Congress should investigate whether there was contact between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, which is essentially unchanged from February’s NBC/WSJ poll.
That includes 84 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independents who want to see this congressional investigation, but just 21 percent of Republican respondents who want it.
Yet a combined 61 percent of Americans say they have little to no confidence in Congress conducting a fair and impartial investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.
Only a combined 39 percent say they have “some” or a “great deal” of confidence in Congress conducting a fair and impartial investigation.
These numbers come as committees in both the House and Senate are looking into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. But the House investigation erupted in controversy after House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, R-Calif., suggested that Trump and his associates may have been monitored by U.S. intelligence officials during the transition.
Nunes stepped aside from the investigation earlier this month.
Not sure why the Chumph’s team thought they could get away with communicating with Russian spies – but according to this guy, conversations between Trump and his Campaign Cartel are on FBI tapes. The intercepts in this case being made by other countries.
If true – that will remain classified for about 8 minutes after the FBI tells Congress.
The other question is, if the FBI had such information – why didn’t they move on it before the election?
Conspiracy theorist and national security blogger Louise Mensch asserted that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page took a recording to Russia of Donald Trump personally authorizing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to hack the 2016 election.
In a column over the weekend, Mensch alleges that “sources with links to the intelligence community” believe that “Carter Page went to Moscow in early July carrying with him a pre-recorded tape of Donald Trump offering to change American policy if he were to be elected, to make it more favorable to Putin.”
The report claims that Page “was authorized directly by Trump to request the help of the Russian government in hacking the election.”
Mensch comes to the conclusion that Page, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former aide Boris Epshteyn were “were all acting in concert as agents of the Russian state first and foremost, and Trump staffers second.”
“Because the provision of such a tape to Putin would clearly be the ultimate in kompromat on a future American President (far worse than any sexual blackmail tape),” Mensch notes.
The Washington Postreported last week that the FBI obtained a secret court order allowing agents to spy on Page as part of an investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Mensch writes: “[T]he point is that intelligence sources say that Page, Manafort and Epshteyn, possibly also with Trump, are on tape discussing how Page should carry a recording of Donald Trump to Moscow, offering his bona fides in exchange for Russia’s help hacking the election.”
“[M]ultiple foreign intelligence services, among them the UK, Germany and Ukraine, have a tape of this; and that finally, in October, the FBI was able to listen to that tape.”
Putin employed more than 1,000 hackers and trolls to get his Bitch into office over Hillary Clinton. They used fake news, lies, and distortions eagerly sucked up by useful fool, brainwashed Chumph supporters, playing to their racism and psychopathic, irrational hatred of Obama and Clinton. Fed lies for years by the “conservative” media and Republican party they were easily manipulated. Fueled by a love of the supermarket tabloid type salacious stories, these people were easily duped into believing even the most outrageous lies. Putin couldn’t have asked for a more willing and compliant group to commit treason against their own country.
The Russian disinformation campaign gained tremendous traction because the white wing’s chief candidate, was also it’s biggest useful fool. The Chumph seized on the Russian propaganda like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline, giving authority and legitimacy to the lies destroying his country. Even after becoming president, the Chumph tweeted, gave authenticity, and defended to the ramparts Russian planted propaganda, which were diaphanous transparent works to any semi-critical observer such as the Obama wiretapping claims.
The Chumph is Putin’s Bitch, and Putin used him again and again like a worn out sock puppet.
Putin OWNS the Chumph. Putin’s crime syndicate has been using him for years in money laundering, and profiteering schemes around the world, To do so, they have poured hundreds of millions into the Trump Scam to keep it afloat, and to carefully train their sock puppet to do their bidding. The so-called “Trump Name” is nothing more than branding for money laundering.
Trump is a traitor, and a member of the world’s largest international crime syndicate. A perfect tool for the Russian Mob, in that he is too fucking stupid to know he has been used.
This POS needs to go down, and locked away in one of those “Super-Max” prisons for treason, never again to see the full light of day. His accomplices, who unlike him, were smart enough to know what they were doing and who was paying them, need to go down too. Perhaps at the end of a rope.
A former FBI agent testified that President Donald Trump helped spread fake news by embracing the stories against his opponents.
Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election.
“What really concerns me [are reports] there were upwards of 1,000 paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets that can generate news down to specific areas,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He appeared Wednesday with GOP intel chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) at a press conference before committee hearings began.
The revelations reflect the results of a Huffington Post investigation this month, which found Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had faced a “tsunami” of misinformation during his presidential campaign.
Warner said in the latest case, the paid trolls apparently focused on swing states in an attempt to influence votes there — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where people were “reading during the waning days of the election that “‘Clinton is sick,’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”
Warner said it’s crucial that investigators determine if voting results were actually affected. Each of the three states narrowly fell to Trump.
“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hijack the most critical democratic process, the election of a president, and in that process, decided to favor one candidate over another,” Warner said.
Burr said that he and Warner were committed to getting to the bottom of Russian interference in the election. He accused Russia of blatant attempts to also impact elections in Germany and France. “We feel part of our responsibility is to educate the rest of the world,” he said.
By the end of the first day of hearings Thursday, no one had yet testified about the 1,000 trolls, but the investigation is just beginning.
“Through the end of 2015 and the start of 2016, the Russian-influenced system began to push themes and messages seeking to influence the result of the presidential election,” Watts said.
“Russian overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adverse views towards the Kremlin,” he added. “They were in full swing during both the Republican and Democratic primary season, and may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed.”
Watts said more details about the targeting of Rubio would be included in his written report to the committee.
Watts told the committee to “follow the dead bodies” to learn more, referring to several Russians connected to Kremlin fake news who have died in the past few months.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday dismissed allegations of Kremlin interference in the U.S. elections as “fictional, illusory, provocations and lies.”
Sort of like Watergate…It ain’t the crime, but the coverup which lands your ass in jail.
We now know that two individuals within the Whites Only House passed classified intelligence to Congressman Nunes, who promptly turned it over to the Press to cover-up Putin’s Bitch treason.
Congressman Nunes has now officially committed a crime, along with the guilty parties in the White House, and if there were more than a half dozen Republicans in Congress who gave a damn about America, the Constitution and/or our Laws… He ought to be doing a quick walk out of Congress bracketed by a couple of the Sargent at Arms, followed by a perp–walk to jail.
Now that Flynn has officially flipped to State’s evidence for the Congressional Committees, and will testify against the Chumph…
All hell is getting ready to break loose.
And we haven’t even gotten to the part yet about recorded conversations, between the CHumph’s staff and Russian spies…Or perhaps that of the Chumph hisself on the phone….Yet.
Manafort, looking at doing some hard time in a Ukrainian Prison…will likely be next.
News that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) received intelligence of possible surveillance of Trump administration officials from two people from within the Trump administration rocked the political world on Thursday — and one longtime GOP strategist thinks more explosive revelations are still to come.
GOP strategist Rick Wilson wrote a tweet storm on Thursday afternoon that connected the dots that link Nunes, White House officials Michael Ellis and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, White House political strategist Steve Bannon, and disgraced former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn.
“Two White House operatives — possibly improperly — accessed classified to pass it to Nunes as part of a political pushback operation,” Wilson began. “Who ordered it? Who asked for them to do so? If you think two lower-level guys took it upon themselves to make this play, I’ve got a Nigerian prince with $30 million dollars for you. Who is running the WH pushback operation on Trump’s Russia scandal? It rhymes with Beeve Stannon.”
From there, Wilson connected the entire story back to Flynn, who was ousted after it was revealed that he lied to the public and members about the Trump administration about the nature of his contacts with Russian government officials.
“Flynn’s stay-behind agent Cohen-Watnick was about to be shitcanned by [National Security Adviser H.R.] McMaster,” Wilson explained. “Cohen-Watnick — the NSC intel director — was a Flynnite from DIA days. Flynn was gone but the channel was still open.”
However, Wilson noted that both Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner both personally pushed back on McMaster’s desire to fire Cohen-Watnick because he is “helping run the pushback operation on Russia with Nunes.”
“Strap in tight,” Wilson concluded. “It’s going to be a rough landing.”
Nikolai Gorokhov, a Russian lawyer who was a witness in a U.S. federal court case involving a Russian money-laundering scheme, plunged four floors from his apartment in Moscow on Tuesday, BuzzFeed News reports.
Gorokhov was set to be a witness in USA v. Prevezon, a cause that, until recently, was being prosecuted by fired U.S. attorney Preet Bharara. President Donald Trump ousted Bharara in a high-profile firing last week. As BuzzFeed reports, one of the attorneys reportedly on the shortlist to replace Bharara is US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who in the past defended Prevezon.
Gorokhov’s spokesman William Browder told BuzzFeed the lawyer was “thrown from the fourth floor of his apartment building.” The spokesman said Gorokhov’s name had been redacted from all of the documents surrounding the case because “the feds were very concerned for his safety.”
The bad news for the Chumph, is his lines were indeed tapped. The worse news is why. And Obama had nothing to do with it, other than being one of the recipients of evidence of Trump and his campaign selling out America to the Russians.
It works like this – Anytime you make a phone call to the Intelligence Services of a country considered to be an enemy of America…The NSA taps your ass.They got those numbers on permanent tap-dial on the lookout for American traitors like the Chumph, or spies. The really bad news? You call the CIA’s exchange for any other First World Country…
They got your dumb ass on tape, too. You make a call to you friendly Russian spy in the FSB, their version of the CIA and KGB all rolled into one…You are tapped.
The even worse news, is all of our allies have access to the same technology and recordings. So they all know you are a traitor, Chumph.
Sic Semper Proditores – Thus Always to Traitors
Now for the devastating news. Did Obama set you up?
Yeah he did.
He did it by making those intelligence reports of your treason available to every US Government official with clearance high enough to see it, and redacted versions to everyone else.
Meaning it is almost impossible to make that information disappear.
Everyone with a high enough clearance level in the US Government has a copy of the transcript of every conversation the Chumph, or his co-conspirators in Treason made with the Russians. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the information wasn’t distributed to our high level NATO allies. That means hundreds, if not thousands of people in the Government have the evidence to convict the Chumph of treason. And that includes the Military.
Even worse is evidence that at least 20 Republican Congressmen and Senators also were involved in the conspiracy, colluding with the Russians during their elections.
Indeed, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there aren’t recordings of back-door conversations between Putin and Trump.
And I have no knowledge of what is in those Intelligence reports other than what has been made public.
In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
The disclosures about the contacts came as new questions were raised about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s ties to the Russians. According to a former senior American official, he met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, twice in the past year. The details of the meetings were not clear, but the contact appeared to contradict testimony Mr. Sessions provided Congress during his confirmation hearing in January when he said he “did not have communications with the Russians.”…More Here…
Bunch of strange stuff has been going on in High-Tech for the last 5-10 years. I have discussed previously the use of H1 Visa employees from other countries to steal American engineering jobs, paying H1’s half or less than what a qualified American Engineer would get. Resulting in several hundred thousand American kids who did the right thing, and got a college education in the Tech field…Being unable to get a job.
Then there was the outright age/salary discrimination against experienced and older workers. Resulting in the strange situation where the very guys who invented much of the current technology in the first place…becoming pariahs in the view of company HR.
If that wasn’t criminal enough, now we find that some of the biggest names in the Tech business have participated in a conspiracy, the result of which is to eliminate the ability of American workers to find a new job.
One of the things Unions did back in the days of the Robber Barrons was to break this sort of “restraint of free trade” up. One of the reasons conservatives are so anxious to destroy unions is they know if Unions move from the manufacturing of physical devices into the High-Tech development world…
Theirr clients won’t be able to get away with this shit.
In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”
Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”
These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billioneffectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit.
In a related but separate investigation and ongoing suit, eBay and its former CEO Meg Whitman, now CEO of HP, are being sued by both the federal government and the state of California for arranging a similar, secret wage-theft agreement with Intuit (and possibly Google as well) during the same period.
The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of the railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.
Shortly after sealing the pact with Google, Jobs strong-armed Adobe into joining after he complained to CEO Bruce Chizen that Adobe was recruiting Apple’s employees. Chizen sheepishly responded that he thought only a small class of employees were off-limits:
I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees…. I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree.
Jobs responded by threatening war:
OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?
Adobe’s Chizen immediately backed down:
I’d rather agree NOT to actively solicit any employee from either company…..If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know.
The next day, Chizen let his folks — Adobe’s VP of Human Resources — know that “we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and visa versa.” Chizen was worried that if he didn’t agree, Jobs would make Adobe pay:
if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent…and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing). Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things which have really escalated in the past few years has been the cost of Lawyers. Believe me, I’m in the middle of a lawsuit right now, paying from $375 – $575 an hour for Lawyers. One of the things which has happened in this country is to make it financially impossible for many individuals and small companies to pursue legal remedies – meaning a further tilting of the playing field in the favor of the wealthy.
One of the issues I expect to surface in the next few years is accountability for Lawyers, as the system of capitalistic competition seems to have (once again) failed at controlling costs.
An attorney claims a judge and two lawyers involved in a long-running dispute over civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks’ estate conspired to drain the estate’s cash.
Attorney Stephen G. Cohen said in court papers Tuesday that Wayne County Probate Judge Freddie Burton Jr. conspired with John Chase Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr. to rack up more than $507,000 in mostly unnecessary legal fees. Cohen claims the estate is $88,000 in debt.
Jefferson told The Detroit News the court action was a “great fabrication.” Burton declined to comment to the Detroit Free Press. An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to Chase.
A hearing is May 22.
Parks left almost all her estate to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, which Cohen represents. Relatives challenged Parks’ will after her 2005 death.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn likely broke the law by failing to disclose foreign income he earned from Russia and Turkey, the heads of the House Oversight Committee said Tuesday.
Conspiracy theorist and national security blogger Louise Mensch asserted that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page took a recording to Russia of Donald Trump personally authorizing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to hack the 2016 election.
Nikolai Gorokhov, a Russian lawyer who was a witness in a U.S. federal court case involving a Russian money-laundering scheme, plunged four floors from his apartment in Moscow on Tuesday, 
Btx3's Blog 