Why Did Trump Hire McMaster in the First Place?

Posted on March 23, 2018March 23, 2018 by Denise Simon

Much has been written about Trump’s now former National Security Counsel advisor H.R. McMaster who at one time was General Petraeus’ ‘go-to’ tank operations expert in Iraq. The 3-star general from the outset never really gelled in a cohesive policy relationship with President Trump and the chatter for months in DC was that his time at the White House was going to be short.

McMaster Worked at Think Tank Backed by Soros-Funded Group ...

Question is who recommended McMaster to Trump in the first place and who did the background investigation such that Trump accepted and confirmed him to lead the National Security Council?

“After 34 years of service to our nation,” the lieutenant general said, “I am requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer, after which I will leave public service.” A White House official told VOA that the president and McMaster had mutually agreed upon McMaster’s resignation, after discussing it for some time. The official said the president asked McMaster to stay on until mid-April to ensure a smooth transition, and McMaster agreed. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, known as West Point, McMaster earned a Silver Star for leadership during the Persian Gulf War when, as a cavalry commander, he led a small contingent of U.S. tanks to destroy 80 Iraqi tanks and other vehicles. More here.

Well, the Daily Caller did some remarkable deeper work on McMaster spelling out how Trump never should have brought him on board in the first place. The other question remains on why the Pentagon did not advise McMaster on terminating his outside relationship especially with some rogue nations.

Outgoing National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster worked for a foreign-based think tank for 11 years before assuming his post

The think tank has ties to Russia, China, the Uranium One deal and Bahrain

Career armed forces officers spoke out against the arrangement

Outgoing National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster served for more than a decade as a consultant to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, a foreign-based think-tank that has received funding from hostile foreign governments to include Russia and China, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

The career soldier ended his employment at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in February 2017 after President Donald Trump tapped him to serve as his national security adviser following the resignation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

McMaster is planning to leave the NSC in April, to be replaced by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The outgoing NSC official said in a statement, he was “requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer after which I will leave public service.”

The general, who did not leave the Army to assume his NSC post, was one of only two White House national security chiefs who retained active duty status while working at the White House. The other general was Gen. Colin Powell.

McMaster never publicized his decade-long outside consultant work with the foreign-based think tank that often supported a globalist agenda opposed by Trump. IISS often espoused foreign and military policies that served as the centerpiece of the Obama presidency, including support for the former president’s Iran nuclear deal.

While his 11 years at the institute were never part of his official military biography, former military officers who learned of it were harshly critical of his unusual moonlighting.

Veteran military officers expressed disbelief at McMaster’s consulting work at a foreign-based think tank that receives funding from hostile governments. They called the arrangement “unethical” and “unprecedented.”

IISS operates offices in the Bahrain, Singapore and Washington, D.C. It generally reflects a globalist “realist” Eurocentric view of foreign and military postures that’s at odds with Trump’s foreign policy. The think-tank was a major advocate of former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

IISS receives funding from friendly Western sources such as aerospace firms and even the British army, but is also has received funding from the Russian Federation, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the governments of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, according to the IISS website.

During McMaster’s time at IISS, the think tank also received $700,000 from George Soros’s Open Society and $140,000 from Ploughshares, the pacifist organization that aggressively pushed for Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

The organization’s council — its board of directors — also is filled with people who have ties to the Kremlin, to the Qatari emir who has been accused of supporting terrorists, to people associated with the Uranium One scandal, and with a Russian investment bank that paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a single speech.

“This is bizarre,” retired Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin said in an interview with TheDCNF. “If that kind of information was available to The Trump administration before they selected him, the question is: Would they have selected him for this very job?”

The Army told TheDCNF that from 2006 when he first joined IISS as a “senior research associate” until he left in 2017, he did file annual financial disclosure forms notifying the Army of payments he received from the institute.

McMaster’s office did not respond to a DCNF request for his current financial disclosure form, which he was required to submit in 2017 as a White House employee.

Retired Rear Adm. James “Ace” Lyons, who served 35 years in the Navy, including a stint as commander of the Pacific Fleet, told TheDCNF McMaster’s consulting role at the think tank was “absurd.”

“It is really absurd that an active duty military officer, particularly one of flag rank, is a consultant to a foreign organization that is taking money and contributions from questionable countries that are known enemies of the United States,” Lyons told TheDCNF in an interview. “This to me seems to be outside the bounds of what we’re committed to. This is atrocious.”

“I’ve never seen this kind of thing before,” said Boykin, a 36-year veteran who served as under secretary for defense intelligence for President George W. Bush.

Boykin said he was convinced any commanding officer would have rejected McMaster’s proposed consulting work at IISS. “I cannot believe that the ethics people of the U.S. Army would approve of him doing that, and I can’t believe that any responsible person he worked for in the Army would have agreed to that.”

William J. Sharp, a public affairs civilian attached to U.S. Army Headquarters, told TheDCNF the Army accepted McMaster’s proposed consulting work at IISS without any prior approval because they regarded the think tank as not falling under the category of a “prohibited source.”

The term “prohibited source” relates to a company that seeks a business or other formal contractual relationship from the Department of Defense. Using that limited standard, the Army concluded IISS was not a prohibited source and McMaster did not need to obtain prior approval from military superiors.

“IISS is not a prohibited source for Army personnel,” Sharp told TheDCNF in an email. “Therefore, LTG McMaster was not required to obtain approval prior to consulting for IISS.”

“I’m surprised at this,” Boykin said. “I find this in my view and in my experience of 36 years to be unprecedented, and I would love to see an authorization. And if it’s an open-ended authorization — if there’s one at all — then I would be willing to bet you it was an error on the part of whoever provided that authorization. You just can’t do this on your own,” he told TheDCNF.

Retired Special Forces Col. James Williamson told TheDCNF he considered it “very unusual” for an active duty officer to serve for a decade at any educational institution. “It’s very unusual for a general officer on active duty to have that type of affiliation over that timespan,” he said. “I’ve had friends that have gone to Harvard or the Fletcher School at Tufts, but they’re U.S.-based.” He said most terms were for a short duration — usually six months to a year.

In fact, the military approves and even encourages active duty officers to seek temporary assignments with American educational institutions and think tanks. But those assignments are very short and rarely extend for more than a year.

Williamson said active duty military officers have plenty of private sector and think tank opportunities after they leave military service. “We have other people who served in London, but they’re not on active duty. They’re retired officers and there’s no problem with that,” he said.

Williamson, a counter terrorism specialist who served with NATO and U.S. Southern Command, said he regarded McMaster’s work as posing a basic “conflict of interest” in light of funding from hostile governments. That funding “would almost make it a de facto conflict of interest in my eyes.”

Retired U.S. Air Force Col. James Waurishuk, who also worked at the NSC, agreed. “I would be concerned about the work he’s doing and how it applies in relation to a think-tank that’s taking money from perhaps adversarial foreign governments. That would be of concern to me,” he said.

Williamson also shared the same view and added that even working at a London think tank poses problems. “Even our closest allies don’t have the same agendas and priorities that we do,” he said.

During his 11 years with IISS, the group promoted McMaster’s activities. A review of previous IISS websites by TheDCNF shows he was highlighted between six and 10 times each year.

IISS praised McMaster when he joined the Trump White House. Jonathan Stevenson, an Obama NSC official who also is a senior fellow at IISS, wrote a fawning opinion piece about McMaster in The New York Times. He called him a “compelling choice: a scholar-warrior” and “both a proven cavalry officer and a formidable defense intellectual.” Stevenson wrote McMaster could save Trump, and the general’s appointment, “should augur at least a fleeting period of stability at the dysfunctional National Security Council.”

Igor Yurgen has been on the IISS Council since 2010. He is chairman of Rennaissance Capital Group, which awarded Bill Clinton $500,00 in speaking fees.

Russia Today, a pro-Kremlin news organization, once described Yurgen as “one of Russia’s most influential experts close to [former] President Dmitry Medvedev.”

“He is remarkably skilled at combining public, business and political careers,” according to RT.

Another council member is Michael Rich, an executive vice president of the RAND Corp. But significantly, he is co-chair of the board of overseers of a project called the RAND Qatar Policy Institute.

The Qatar Policy Institute is also part of the Qatar Foundation, started by Qatar’s former emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, and his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser.

Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states accuse Qatar of supporting Islamic terrorism. Al Thani has supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, militias in Libya, and the Muslim Brotherhood, The New York Times reported in 2014. The Emir personally traveled in 2012 to the Gaza Strip, where he received a hero’s welcome as he pledged to work with the terrorist group Hamas. Al Thani also founded Al Jazeera, the pro-Muslim Brotherhood television news channel.

Badr Jafar, another current council member, is the son of Hamid Jafar, who founded the biggest private equity firm in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Badr is the CEO of Crescent Enterprises who, with his father Hamid Jafar, engineered an oil exploration partnership between their Emirates-based company, Crescent Petroleum with the Boris Kovalchuk, CEO of the Russian company of Inter Rao UES.

News agencies in the United Arab Emirates hailed the 2010 financial deal between Crescent and Moscow. “Russian state news agencies began their coverage of the recent high-level meeting in Moscow between Crescent officials, the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and the Iraqi former prime minister Dr Ayad Allawi by linking the names of Hamid Jafar and Mr Putin,” according to the National Business report.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed that all shares of Inter Rao UES be transferred to the Russian state-owned atomic energy agency called Rosatom. Kovalchuk is a Kremlin confidant who served as a vice president of Rosatom. Americans know about Rosatom because of its purchase of Uranium One, which was made possible by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support for the Russian acquisition.

While McMaster was a consultant at IISS the organization was a strong, unwavering supporter of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Mark Fitzpatrick, its director for non-proliferation and disarmament was the most outspoken IISS director for the nuclear deal calling it in 2015 a “a potential game changer in many ways, opening a path to better relations with Iran that has been closed for more than 35 years.” Fitzpatrick said the deal “makes it demonstrably less likely Iran will become nuclear-armed now and in the future.”

IISS also entered domestic American politics by defending the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential campaign. It flatly stated following the release of emails from the Democratic National Committee it “revealed no evidence of significant wrongdoing within the Democratic Party.”

IISS also has been criticized for the secrecy of its activities and its routine denial of visas for reporters seeking to attend its overseas events, particularly its annual event in Bahrain where human right groups accuse the government of silencing critics and keeping journalists away.

BahrainWatch, a human rights group published an investigation in December 2016 claiming that even well known American journalists have been barred from its Bahrain conferences called the “Manama Dialogue.”

“New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof has openly called for an invitation since 2011, though his media visa was once again rejected last year. Wall Street Journal journalist Yaroslav Trofimov was also denied a visa.

Waurishuk concluded that McMaster’s relationship with IISS raises too many alarms.

“There’s too many red flags that kind of go up,” he said.

Neither IISS Washington nor IISS London returned repeated queries about McMaster.

POTUS and Omnibus, No Line Item Veto?

Posted on March 22, 2018March 22, 2018 by Denise Simon

2232 pages of stupid and everyone should take the time to just scan the $1.3 trillion spending bill. I got to page 184 last night and went to bed mad. There is no line item veto but there should be. President Trump can veto the whole truck load of crap and should. In place of the line item veto, he can wield his pen and sign an Executive Order eliminating countless crazy spending things or suspend some of the acts for the rest of his term. Something like the Food for Progress Act. And we are still bailing out the healthcare insurance companies…. anyway…there is also $687 million to address Russian interference. Just what is that plan?

How about the Cloud Act? Foreign governments get access to our data? WHAT? 2. Okay how about Trump’s “wall funding.” It’s not a wall. It’s repairs, drones and pedestrian fencing – no construction. 3. Then we have the House Freedom Caucus with their letter to President Trump: So…need more? Conservative Review has these 10 items for your consideration.Here are the top 10 problems with the bill:
1) Eye-popping debt: This bill codifies the $143 billion busting of the budget caps, which Congress adopted in February, for the remainder of this fiscal year. This is on top of the fact that government spending already increased $130 billion last year over the final year of Obama’s tenure. Although the Trump administration already agreed to this deal in February, the OMB put out a memo suggesting that Congress appropriate only $10 billion of the extra $63 billion in non-defense discretionary spending. Now it’s up to Trump to follow through with a veto threat. It’s not just about 2018. This bill paves the road to permanently bust the budget caps forever, which will lead to trillions more in spending and cause interest payments on the debt to surge past the cost of the military or even Medicaid in just eight years.

Keep in mind that all the additional spending will be stuffed into just six months remaining to the fiscal year, not a 12-month period. A number of onerous bureaucracies will get cash booster shots instead of the cuts President Trump wanted.

Remember when Mick Mulvaney said the fiscal year 2017 budget betrayal was needed so that he could do great things with the fiscal year 2018 budget? Good times.

2) Bait and switch on the wall: Since this bill increases spending for everything, one would think that at least the president would get the $15 billion or so needed for the wall. No. The bill includes only $641 million for 33 miles of new border fencing but prohibits that funding for being used for concrete barriers. My understanding is that President Trump already has enough money to begin construction for roughly that much of the fence, and pursuant to the Secure Fence Act, he can construct any barrier made from any This actually weakens current law.

3) Funds sanctuary cities: When cities and states downright violate federal law and harbor illegal aliens, Congress’ silence in responding to it is deafening. Cutting off block grants to states as leverage against this dangerous crisis wasn’t even under discussion, even as many other extraneous and random liberal priorities were seriously considered.

4) Doesn’t fund interior enforcement: Along with clamping down on sanctuary cities, interior enforcement at this point is likely more important than a border wall. After Obama’s tenure left us with a criminal alien and drug crisis, there is an emergency to ramp up interior enforcement. Trump requested more ICE agents and detention facilities, but that call was ignored in this bill. Trump said that the midterms must focus on Democrats’ dangerous immigration policies. Well, this bill he is supporting ensures that they will get off scot-free.

5) Doesn’t defund court decisions: Some might suggest that this bill was a victory because at least it didn’t contain amnesty. But we have amnesty right now, declared, promulgated, and perpetuated by the lawless judiciary. For Congress to pass a budget bill and not defund DACA or defund the issuance of visas from countries on Trump’s immigration pause list in order to fight back against the courts is tantamount to Congress directly passing amnesty.

6) Funds Planned Parenthood: We have no right to a border wall or more ICE funding, but somehow funding for a private organization harvesting baby organs was never in jeopardy or even under discussion as a problem.

7) Gun control without due process: Some of you might think I’m being greedy, demanding that “extraneous policies” be placed in a strict appropriations bill. Well, gun control made its way in. They slipped in the “Fix NICS” bill, which pressures and incentivizes state and federal agencies to add more people to the system even though there is already bipartisan recognition that agencies are adding people who should not be on the list, including veterans, without any due process in a court of law. They are passing this bill without the House version of the due process protections and without the promised concealed carry reciprocity legislation. Republicans were too cowardly to have an open debate on such an important issue, so they opted to tack it onto a budget bill, which is simply unprecedented. The bill also throws more funding at “school violence” programs when they refuse to repeal the gun-free zone laws that lie at the root of the problem.

8) More “opioid crisis funding” without addressing the problem: The bill increases funding for “opioid addiction prevention and treatment” by $2.8 billion relative to last year, on top of the $7 billion they already spent in February. This is the ultimate joke of the arsonist pretending to act as the firefighter, because as we’ve chronicled in detail, these funds are being used to clamp down on legitimate prescription painkillers and create a de facto national prescription registry so that government can violate privacy and practice medicine. Meanwhile, the true culprits are illicit drugs and Medicaid expansion, exacerbated by sanctuary cities, as the president observed himself. Yet those priorities are jettisoned from the bill.

9) Student loan bailout: The bill offers $350 million in additional student loan forgiveness … but only for graduates who take “lower-paid” government jobs or work for some non-profits! This was a big priority of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Government created this problem of skyrocketing student debt by fueling it with subsidies and giving the higher education cartel a monopoly of accreditation, among other things. Indeed, this very same bill increases Pell grants by $2 billion. But more money is always the solution, especially when it helps future government workers.

10) Schumer’s Gateway projects earmark: Conservatives had a wish list of dozens of items, but it’s Schumer’s local bridge and tunnel project that got included. While the bill didn’t contain as much as Schumer asked for (remember the tactic of starting off high), the program would qualify for up to $541 million in new transportation funding. Also, the bill would open up $2.9 billion in grants through the Federal Transit Administration for this parochial project that should be dealt with on a state level. New York has high taxes for a reason.

Genocide of White Farmers in S. Africa

Posted on March 20, 2018March 20, 2018 by Denise Simon

A White Farmer Is Killed Every Five Days in South Africa and Authorities Do Nothing about It, Activists Say

Activists say South African authorities are tacitly approving attacks on the country’s white farmers, with one being murdered every five days, and the police turning a blind eye to the violence.

The white nationalist lobbying group AfriForum says that when lawmakers passed a motion last month which could see land being seized from farmers without compensation, it sent a message that landowners could be attacked with impunity.

It said there have been 109 recorded attacks so far in 2018 and 15 farm murders, meaning that this year, one white farmer has been killed every five days.

In a statement, Ian Cameron, AfriForum’s Head of Safety said: “Our rural areas are trapped in a crime war. Although the South African government denies that a violence crisis is staring rural areas in the face, the numbers prove that excessive violence plague these areas.”

Gabriel Stols, 35, told the Independent how his younger brother Kyle, 21, was shot dead by four people on a game reserve near Bloemfontein.

“What is happening to us is torture, it is slaughter, it is brutal, it is revenge. The world doesn’t know what is happening in South Africa,” he said.

Hannetjie Ludik, 56, from Pretoria, told the paper that three armed men broke into her family’s house, stole money and raped her.

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South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa said the government did not condone attacks or the the seizure of white-owned farms and insisted there would be no repeat of what happened in Zimbabwe a generation ago.

But AfriForum says that the parliament’s bill has led to a culture of revenge among those spoiling for a redistribution of land in a country where some 80% of people describe themselves as black African, but only 1.2% of that community own the country’s rural land.

Julius Malema, the head of South Africa’s ultra-left Economic Freedom Fighters party (EFF), has called for land to be taken off white farmers. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

The policy was proposed by the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Julius Malema who says redistributing land can correct historical injustices.

While there is broader political support for the move, a more measured approach is being called for by Kenneth Meshoe, the head of the African Christian Democratic Party, who told The Independent he believes in land distribution, although he says it should not be taken without compensation

“People like Malema who are promoting hate speech should not be allowed,” he added.

Thousands of people have signed a petition asking Donald Trump to let white people in South Africa to migrate to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Australian Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, said he would push for his country to grant visas to white farmers, should they be displaced.

He provocatively said that such people could be helped from “a civilized country like ours”, sparking anger from South Africa’s Foreign Ministry which called for a retraction.

The fact-checking website, Africa Check, concluded in May 2017 that getting an accurate statistic on the country’s farm murder rate, which it estimated at 0.4 murders per 100,000 people, was “near impossible”.

Gareth Newham from South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, told the Guardian there was no evidence white farmers were targeted any more than anyone else.

*** The world is silent on this….question is why?

In 2017:

The couple, who had lived in the area for 20 years, were tied up, stabbed, and tortured with a blowtorch for several hours. The masked men stuffed a plastic bag down Mrs Howarth’s throat, and attempted to strangle her husband with a bag around his neck.

The couple were bundled into their own truck, still in their pyjamas, and driven to a roadside where they were shot. Mrs Howarth, 64, a former pharmaceutical company executive, was shot twice in the head. Mr Lynn, 66, was shot in the neck.

Miraculously he survived, and managed to flag down a passer-by early on Sunday morning. Mrs Howarth, who police said was “unrecognisable” from her injuries, had multiple skull fractures, gunshot wounds and “horrific” burns to her breasts.

“Sue was discovered amongst some trees, lying in a ditch,” writes Jana Boshoff, reporter for the local Middelburg Observer newspaper. “Her rescuers managed to find her by following her groans of pain and then noticing drag marks from the road into the field.

In any other country, such a crime would be almost unthinkable. But in South Africa, these kinds of farm attacks are happening nearly every day. This year so far, there have been more than 70 attacks and around 25 murders in similar attacks on white farmers.

Earlier this month, for example, 64-year-old Nicci Simpson was tortured with a power drill during an attack involving three men at her home on a farm in the Vaal area, about two hours drive from Johannesburg.

When paramedics arrived, they found three dead dogs, and the woman lying in a pool of blood, spokesman Russel Meiring told News24. “They used a drill to torture her,” police spokesman Lungelo Dlamini said.

Read more here.

Facebook, Artificial Intelligence Op, Manipulating You

Posted on March 19, 2018March 19, 2018 by Denise Simon

Is any of this illegal? Well, yet to be determined because no one asks the questions, much less do we know what questions to ask….

It boils down to this: ‘facts don’t matter, it is what readers believe’ or as is in A Few Good Men, a dream world is it does not matter what I believe, it matters what I can prove. Artificial intelligence is proven, believed and kinda sorta factual?

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Facebook says it has saved more than $2 billion from its investments in Open Compute. But five years is an eternity on the Internet, and now every big tech company is out to conquer a different problem. Serving up content cheaply can be done, but figuring out what kind of content to serve among billions of posts is still a challenge. So, just as Facebook set out to rebuild the hardware industry half a decade ago with the Open Compute project, it has more recently created an internal platform to harness artificial intelligence so it can deliver exactly the content you want to see. And it wants to build this “machine learning” platform to scale. (“Machine learning” is a form of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn how to operate without being pre-programmed.) “We’re trying to build more than 1.5 billion AI agents—one for every person who uses Facebook or any of its products,” says Joaquin Candela, the head of the newly created Applied Machine Learning group. “So how the hell do you do that?”

FBLearner Flow combines several machine-learning models to process several billion data points, drawn from the activity of the site’s 1.5 billion users, and forms predictions about thousands of things: which user is in a photograph, which message is likely to be spam. The algorithms created from FBLearner Flow’s models help define what content appears in your News Feed and what advertisements you see.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Facebook’s use of artificial intelligence will help eliminate some of the company’s 13,000 employees. The reality couldn’t be more different, says chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer. AI is helping Facebook augment the capabilities of its human engineers. “We’re able to do things that we have not able to do before,” he says. More here.

***

Stop clicking the bait on Facebook, you are participating in psychometic testing for Facebook.

Predicting individual traits and attributes based on various cues, such as samples of written text (8), answers to a psychometric test (9), or the appearance of spaces people inhabit (10), has a long history. Human migration to digital environment renders it possible to base such predictions on digital records of human behavior. It has been shown that age, gender, occupation, education level, and even personality can be predicted from people’s Web site browsing logs (11 ⇓⇓⇓–15). Similarly, it has been shown that personality can be predicted based on the contents of personal Web sites (16), music collections (17), properties of Facebook or Twitter profiles such as the number of friends or the density of friendship networks (18 ⇓⇓–21), or language used by their users (22). Furthermore, location within a friendship network at Facebook was shown to be predictive of sexual orientation (23).

This study demonstrates the degree to which relatively basic digital records of human behavior can be used to automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private. The study is based on Facebook Likes, a mechanism used by Facebook users to express their positive association with (or “Like”) online content, such as photos, friends’ status updates, Facebook pages of products, sports, musicians, books, restaurants, or popular Web sites. Likes represent a very generic class of digital records, similar to Web search queries, Web browsing histories, and credit card purchases. For example, observing users’ Likes related to music provides similar information to observing records of songs listened to online, songs and artists searched for using a Web search engine, or subscriptions to related Twitter channels. In contrast to these other sources of information, Facebook Likes are unusual in that they are currently publicly available by default. However, those other digital records are still available to numerous parties (e.g., governments, developers of Web browsers, search engines, or Facebook applications), and, hence, similar predictions are unlikely to be limited to the Facebook environment. More here.

***

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So why does Facebook feel like it is a victim of Cambridge Analytica? Well it seems Cambridge Analytica was a customer of Facebook and bought customer data for their own use. Facebook feels betrayed but how about that relationship? Facebook censors and mines data for their own political missions and frankly Cambridge Analytica does the same thing. These two companies along with several others and hired outside data and espionage types are changing the whole balance and equilibrium of the globe, question is to what end?

***

The data company that helped push Donald Trump to victory is now hoping it will win two lucrative contracts to boost White House policy messaging and to expand sales for the Trump Organization.

Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm that uses personality profiling, claims Steve Bannon as a board member, who will soon officially be Mr Trump’s chief strategist.

The firm is backed by billionaire investor Robert Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the 16-person Trump transition team.

The London-based firm said it has marketing and psychological data on around 230 million Americans, which could help Mr Trump to increase his real estate business, or scope out the policy landscape for his government. More here.

In case you are wondering about global opposition research and affecting power to power with global leaders, check out this video:

Now this cat may appear to be quite an odd whistleblower but….

Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon. Its CEO is Alexander Nix.

When Biden and Kerry Concocted a Shady Equity Firm

Posted on March 19, 2018March 19, 2018 by Denise Simon

Keep this post in your bookmarks as we enter into the 2020 general election….

Primer:

1. China plants industrial espionage operatives in the U.S. that steal government contract secrets and sell them back to China. FBI caught at least one.

2. Through cyber espionage, China has stolen much of the F-35 technology, more than 50 terabytes.

3. John Kerry and Joe Biden did exactly the same thing as Hillary…sold access for money while exploiting it all as diplomatic missions with the title(s) of bi-lateral agreements.

4. Subpoena former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and ask him about the CFIUS approvals of Chinese back enterprises. We may surely need to go back to former Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, did he set the table for all this with Obama’s approval creating that ‘Asia Pivot‘?

5. What does Congress know about foreign investments and when do they know it? They get reports, but who is asking questions, anyone?

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NYP: Joe Biden and John Kerry have been pillars of the Washington establishment for more than 30 years. Biden is one of the most popular politicians in our nation’s capital.

His demeanor, sense of humor, and even his friendly gaffes have allowed him to form close relationships with both Democrats and Republicans. His public image is built around his “Lunch Bucket Joe” persona. As he reminds the American people on regular occasions, he has little wealth to show for his career, despite having reached the vice presidency.

One of his closest political allies in Washington is former senator and former Secretary of State John Kerry. “Lunch Bucket Joe” he ain’t; Kerry is more patrician than earthy. But the two men became close while serving for several decades together in the US Senate. The two “often talked on matters of foreign policy,” says Jules Witcover in his Biden biography.

So their sons going into business together in June 2009 was not exactly a bolt out of the blue.

But with whom their sons cut lucrative deals while the elder two were steering the ship of state is more of a surprise.

What Hunter Biden, the son of America’s vice president, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (later to be secretary of state), were creating was an international private equity firm. It was anchored by the Heinz family alternative investment fund, Rosemont Capital. The new firm would be populated by political loyalists and positioned to strike profitable deals overseas with foreign governments and officials with whom the US government was negotiating.

Hunter Biden, Vice President Joe Biden’s youngest son, had gone through a series of jobs since graduating from Yale Law School in 1996, including the hedge-fund business.

By the summer of 2009, the 39-year-old Hunter joined forces with the son of another powerful figure in American politics, Chris Heinz. Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania had tragically died in a 1991 airplane crash when Chris was 18. Chris, his brothers, and his mother inherited a large chunk of the family’s vast ketchup fortune, including a network of investment funds and a Pennsylvania estate, among other properties. In May 1995, his mother, Teresa, married Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. That same year, Chris graduated from Yale, and then went on to get his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Joining them in the Rosemont venture was Devon Archer, a longtime Heinz and Kerry friend.

The three friends established a series of related LLCs. The trunk of the tree was Rosemont Capital, the alternative investment fund of the Heinz Family Office. Rosemont Farm is the name of the Heinz family’s 90-acre estate outside Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania.

The small fund grew quickly. According to an email revealed as part of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, Rosemont described themselves as “a $2.4 billion private equity firm co-owned by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz,” with Devon Archer as “Managing Partner.”

The partners attached several branches to the Rosemont Capital trunk, including Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, and Rosemont Realty.

Of the various deals in which these Rosemont entities were involved, one of the largest and most troubling concerns was Rosemont Seneca Partners.

Rather than set up shop in New York City, the financial capital of the world, Rosemont Seneca leased space in Washington, DC. They occupied an all-brick building on Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare of exclusive Georgetown. Their offices would be less than a mile from John and Teresa Kerry’s 23-room Georgetown mansion, and just two miles from both Joe Biden’s office in the White House and his residence at the Naval Observatory.

Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals often with those same foreign governments.

Some of the deals they secured may remain hidden. These Rosemont entities are, after all, within a private equity firm and as such are not required to report or disclose their financial dealings publicly.

Some of their transactions are nevertheless traceable by investigating world capital markets. A troubling pattern emerges from this research, showing how profitable deals were struck with foreign governments on the heels of crucial diplomatic missions carried out by their powerful fathers. Often those foreign entities gained favorable policy actions from the United States government just as the sons were securing favorable financial deals from those same entities.

Nowhere is that more true than in their commercial dealings with Chinese government-backed enterprises.

Rosemont Seneca joined forces in doing business in China with another politically connected consultancy called the Thornton Group. The Massachusetts-based firm is headed by James Bulger, the nephew of the notorious mob hitman James “Whitey” Bulger. Whitey was the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, part of the South Boston mafia. Under indictment for 19 murders, he disappeared. He was later arrested, tried, and convicted.

James Bulger’s father, Whitey’s younger brother, Billy Bulger, serves on the board of directors of the Thornton Group. He was the longtime leader of the Massachusetts state Senate and, with their long overlap by state and by party, a political ally of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.

Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were in China, having secured access at the highest levels. Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their Chinese-language website was telling: Chinese executives “extended their warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its US partner Rosemont Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe Biden).”

The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the meeting do not appear on their English-language website.

Also, according to the Thornton Group, the three Americans met with the largest and most powerful government fund leaders in China — even though Rosemont was both new and small.

The timing of this meeting was also curious. It occurred just hours before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese President Hu in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit.

There was a second known meeting with many of the same Chinese financial titans in Taiwan in May 2011. For a small firm like Rosemont Seneca with no track record, it was an impressive level of access to China’s largest financial players. And it was just two weeks after Joe Biden had opened up the US-China strategic dialogue with Chinese officials in Washington.

On one of the first days of December 2013, Hunter Biden was jetting across the Pacific Ocean aboard Air Force Two with his father and daughter Finnegan. The vice president was heading to Asia on an extended official trip. Tensions in the region were on the rise.

The American delegation was visiting Japan, China, and South Korea. But it was the visit to China that had the most potential to generate conflict and controversy. The Obama administration had instituted the “Asia Pivot” in its international strategy, shifting attention away from Europe and toward Asia, where China was flexing its muscles.

For Hunter Biden, the trip coincided with a major deal that Rosemont Seneca was striking with the state-owned Bank of China. From his perspective, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and Finnegan arrived to a red carpet and a delegation of Chinese officials. Greeted by Chinese children carrying flowers, the delegation was then whisked to a meeting with Vice President Li Yuanchao and talks with President Xi Jinping.

Hunter and Finnegan Biden joined the vice president for tea with US Ambassador Gary Locke at the Liu Xian Guan Teahouse in the Dongcheng District in Beijing. Where Hunter Biden spent the rest of his time on the trip remains largely a mystery. There are actually more reports of his daughter Finnegan’s activities than his.

What was not reported was the deal that Hunter was securing. Rosemont Seneca Partners had been negotiating an exclusive deal with Chinese officials, which they signed approximately 10 days after Hunter visited China with his father. The most powerful financial institution in China, the government’s Bank of China, was setting up a joint venture with Rosemont Seneca.

The Bank of China is an enormously powerful financial institution. But the Bank of China is very different from the Bank of America. The Bank of China is government-owned, which means that its role as a bank blurs into its role as a tool of the government. The Bank of China provides capital for “China’s economic statecraft,” as scholar James Reilly puts it. Bank loans and deals often occur within the context of a government goal.

Rosemont Seneca and the Bank of China created a $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a name that reflected who was involved. Bohai (or Bo Hai), the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea, was a reference to the Chinese stake in the company. The “RS” referred to Rosemont Seneca. The “T” was Thornton.

The fund enjoyed an unusual and special status in China. BHR touted its “unique Sino-US shareholding structure” and “the global resources and network” that allowed it to secure investment “opportunities.” Funds were backed by the Chinese government.

In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers.

The partnership between American princelings and the Chinese government was just a beginning. The actual investment deals that this partnership made were even more problematic. Many of them would have serious national security implications for the United States.

In 2015, BHR joined forces with the automotive subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to buy American “dual-use” parts manufacturer Henniges.

AVIC is a major military contractor in China. It operates “under the direct control of the State Council” and produces a wide array of fighter and bomber aircraft, transports, and drones — primarily designed to compete with the United States.

The company also has a long history of stealing Western technology and applying it to military systems. The year before BHR joined with AVIC, the Wall Street Journal reported that the aviation company had stolen technologies related to the US F-35 stealth fighter and incorporated them in their own stealth fighter, the J-31. AVIC has also been accused of stealing US drone systems and using them to produce their own.

In September 2015, when AVIC bought 51 percent of American precision-parts manufacturer Henniges, the other 49 percent was purchased by the Biden-and-Kerry-linked BHR.

Henniges is recognized as a world leader in anti-vibration technologies in the automotive industry and for its precise, state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities. Anti-vibration technologies are considered “dual-use” because they can have a military application, according to both the State Department and Department of Commerce.

The technology is also on the restricted Commerce Control List used by the federal government to limit the exports of certain technologies. For that reason, the Henniges deal would require the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews sensitive business transactions that may have a national security implication.

According to BHR internal documents, the Henniges deal included “arduous and often-times challenging negotiations.” The CFIUS review in 2015 included representatives from numerous government agencies including John Kerry’s State Department.

The deal was approved in 2015.

Excerpted with permission from “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” by Peter Schweizer, published by Harper Collins. The book goes on sale March 20.