rashbre central: build a crazy wall to map the conspiracy?

Friday 31 March 2017

build a crazy wall to map the conspiracy?


With Mike Flynn apparently asking for immunity as he prepares to proffer information about Trump and the Russians, it becomes interesting to see whether anything new will really emerge.

The situation has already been decried as #fakenews by Flynn's son, in any case, so as with most of the so-called news from America it is almost impossible to tell what is really happening.

Flynn would need to add something new that can join a few of the dots, although much of the base information has been around for ages.

We knew last year that Trump's erstwhile head of campaign Paul Manafort had a long term and well-paid linkage with Putin's billionaire buddy Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium magnate. It was ten years ago, however. Perhaps Manafort did only receive payments of $10 million to further the UC Rusal cause in the United States, but the fees go back far enough to be well and truly salted away now in far flung places.

Similarly for former senator Bob Dole and congressman Earl Pomeroy, who appear to have had lobbying interests via Alston & Bird, again to promote Russian interests in Washington.

Then there has been the PR lobbying for Russia and Russian state organisations such as Gazprom, from PR companies like Ketchum.

In fairness, Trump did relieve Manafort of his campaign role last August, and the sketchiness of Trump's inconsistent on-camera discussion of Russia (even when he was pretending to have proper conversations with Putin) make it look as if the Russian events were happening around him.

There's still the strenuously denied innuendo of an Ismailovskaya Brotherhood (aka mob) linkage of Deripaska and his bust-up with Manafort over the Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable.

Then there have been the fancy bear and cosy bear hacks against the Democrat party, purportedly from the ГРУ, which is the Russian GRU or Main Intelligence Agency. Homeland security named the attacks Grizzly Steppe.

So we get a few public data points but insufficient information to really fathom what has been happening.

I wonder whether outside of any conspiracy theories, Flynn would really have the key to it all?

Even with one of those string diagrams they use in TV crime series and the movies, I'm doubting whether there will really be a way to unpick these well-paid but secretive relationships.

Somehow, using a crazy wall for any kind of Trump conspiracy seems some how almost futile.

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