75th Anniversary of the Holocaust Liberation

1.1 million were herded like sheep through the gates of death. Survivors are few today and their stories are fading from history. Take some time to remember and then share some facts as noted below. #NeverAgain

Most people are familiar with the names of the major concentration campsAuschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka, for example – but few realize that these were not the only places where Jews and other prisoners were held by the Nazis. Each of the 23 main camps had subcamps, nearly 900 of them in total. These included camps with euphemistic names, such as “care facilities for foreign children,” where pregnant prisoners were sent for forced abortions.

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The Nazis established about 110 camps starting in 1933 to imprison political opponents and other undesirables. The number expanded as the Third Reich expanded and the Germans began occupying parts of Europe. When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum first began to document all of the camps, the belief was that the list would total approximately 7,000. However, researchers found that the Nazis actually established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.

These camps were used for a range of purposes including: forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps, built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called “enemies of the state.” Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah‘s Witnesseshomosexuals, and persons accused of “asocial” or socially deviant behavior. These facilities were called “concentration camps” because those imprisoned there were physically “concentrated” in one location.

Millions of people were imprisoned, abused and systematically murdered in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived. As many as 15-20 million people may have died in the various camps and ghettoes. (source)

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In the final days of the camp, the commanding SS officers “evacuated” 56,000 prisoners, most of them Jews. Leaving Auschwitz, however, did not mean the end of their ordeal. Instead, the SS ordered their charges into columns and marched them into the miserable winter. At first, the prisoners went on foot, monitored by officers who shot those who fell behind or tried to stay behind. Malnourished and inadequately clothed, the marchers were subject to random massacre. Eventually, they were shipped back toward Germany in open train cars. Up to 15,000 of the former camp inhabitants died on the death march.

“[The Nazis] wanted to continue to use those tens of thousands of prisoners for forced labor,” says Steven Luckert, senior program curator at the Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and former chief curator of the museum’s permanent collection. “Those prisoners got dispersed over all of the remaining camps.”

Back at Auschwitz, where by some estimates 9,000 prisoners remained, only a few SS guards maintained their watch. Most of the prisoners were too sick to move. “There was no food, no water, no medical care,” says Luckert. “The staff had all gone. [The prisoners] were just left behind to die.”

Among the last acts of the SS were to set fire to huge piles of camp documents, a last-ditch effort to hide the evidence. “They understood the enormity of the crimes they committed,” Luckert says.

Concentration and Extermination Camps and Major "Euthanasia" Centers

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime set up about 20,000 camps to imprison, exploit, and annihilate its declared enemies. This map shows major camps, grouped according to function. The term “concentration camp” applies to those camps built from 1933 on for the purpose of imprisoning political and ideological opponents of the regime and “racial enemies” under the pretense of “protective” or “preventative” custody. In the first years of the Nazi dictatorship, most of those imprisoned in the camps were Communists and Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and individuals deemed “asocial.” After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938, Jews in the German Reich were imprisoned en masse for the first time.

After the beginning of the Second World War, the camp system was quickly expanded and supplemented with POW camps and work camps in the occupied territories. Additionally, the camps began to function more and more as execution sites for members of particular groups, for example, Soviet POWs, members of the resistance, and partisans. To this end, gas chambers were built in the camps Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen starting in 1941. To implement the National Socialists’ plan for the “final solution of the Jewish question,” extermination camps were built in occupied Poland. The sole purpose of these camps was to carry out the mass murder of the European Jews in an efficient manner. The first of these camps, which were supposed to remain secret, was opened in December 1941 in Chelmno. In 1942, the camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were built, and Auschwitz was equipped with a neighboring extermination camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Jews from all over Europe were deported there via transit camps and were usually murdered within 24 hours after arrival.

The map also shows the places where the National Socialists carried out their secret “Euthanasia Program.” Starting in the fall of 1939, various institutions euthanized individuals who were deemed “unworthy to live” on account of either actual or alleged hereditary illnesses. After the revelation of the “Euthanasia Program” met with public protest, gas-administered euthanasia was halted in August 1941. It was replaced by lethal injections in “euthanasia clinics,” which continued until the end of the war. (source)

Have You Met Andrii Telizhenko?

So, we have the phone call whistle-blower, Eric Ciaramella visiting the Obama White House according to visitor logs an estimated 200 times. What?

Ciaramella held the positions of National Security Council director for Ukraine under Susan Rice and director of Baltic and Eastern European Affairs in the Office of Vice President Joe Biden. Ciaramella was advised by Adam Schiff’s staff to fill out a complaint on the Trump/Zelensky phone call and given the text of the complaint, it is obvious it was drafted by lawyers likely out of Schiff’s office, maybe even Daniel Goldman himself.

Coming from Senator Rand Paul’s Twitter feed is this little gem posted on January 16, 2020.

Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) | Twitterhttps://twitter.comType a message

Anyway, Eric Ciaramella hosted a particular meeting on January 16, 2016 in room 230A at the Obama White House to discuss Ukraine, especially Burisma and the ‘Bidens’. Eric Ciaramella also hosted and chaired a meeting in Room 374 of the Eisenhower Executive Office, which seems to be a planning session to re-open an investigation of Paul Manafort which was to review the information that Alexandra Chalupa had gathered on Manafort and she was paid by the DNC to do so.

Artem Sytnyk, the director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), a Soros group. Sytnyk was put on the public register of person who committed corrupt related crimes in Ukraine.

Others at the meeting included:

Jeffrey Cole: Resident Legal Advisor at U.S. Embassy, Ukraine (FBI)

Anna Iemelianova: Special Legal Counsel for the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine

Nazar Kholodnitsky: Ukraine’s Chief anti-corruption Prosecutor

Svitlana Pardus: Operations, DoJ, U.S. Embassy, Ukraine

David Sakvarelidze: Deputy General Prosecutor, fired in March of 2016

Andris Razans: Ambassador of Latvia in Belgium (important, read below)

Liz Zentos: National Security Council Director of Eastern Europe

Catherine L. Newcombe: Eurasia legal programs at the DoJ Criminal Division

This meeting was where the Ukraine corruption and the Biden/Burisma plot was launched to protect the infectious relationships.This meeting’s central objective was to tell Ukraine to no longer investigate/probe Burisma and to allow the FBI to take full control. Kiev did not agree and hence later Biden stepped in with his threat to withhold the $1 billion loan guarantees unless Ukraine complied.

Andrii Telizhenko was in that meeting too and has since been cooperating in full with Rudy Giuliani and is essentially a whistleblower.

My Dinner With Andrii | Talking Points Memo Andrii Telizhenko

Telizhenko was previously a political office in the Ukrainian embassy. Ukraine was financially desperate to follow all instructions put forth by the United States during the Obama administration and now is having to do the same with a new administration under President Trump and the new Ukraine president Zelensky for any kind of survival to maintain stability and not fall to Russian aggression or annexation.

Confusing right?

Then it seems the FBI did gain some control and curiously, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Buretta was hired to defend Burisma president Nikolay Zlochevskyi for income tax evasion and money-laundering. The truth be told, Burisma bought justice by agreeing to pay $7.4 million in back taxes and fines. Burisma can hire who they want and did but having Devon Archer and Hunter Biden on the Board did allow for political cover, access and favors.

In 2014, Prime Minister Theresa May held a summit for where leaders from a handful of countries attended to plot out a plan to provide Ukraine with some leadership guidance and financial assistance after the billions stolen by the former Ukraine president Yanukovich and others in the government from the coffers of the Ukrainian treasury and various banks. Over the years, in fact, hundreds of billions had been stolen…you read that right. Those monies traced to various countries and accounts (tax havens) around the world including South East Asia, the Caribbean, Cyprus, London, Latvia, Luxembourg, and even Liechtenstein.

One account held in a London bank belonged to Mykola Zlochevsky who at the time was not only the Ukraine Resource Minister but the CEO of Burisma. All the while, Russia had officially annexed Crimea and had immediate plans to do the same with Ukraine. Ukraine had no money to fight a war and needed immediate financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and guidance from the United States, hence then President Obama assigned the Ukraine portfolio to Vice President Biden. Various banks around the world that could be attributed to belonging to Ukraine, or by corrupt oligarchs were frozen. This was to stop the bleeding and begin a full and comprehensive investigation by various financial fraud experts of Western nations.

It is no wonder that big print and cable news media is attacking Rudy Giuliani as he as Trump’s personally attorney and former prosecutor has been investigating all of this for a very long time and has a cache of tangible evidence. To complicate matters even more, we have Andrii Derkach who initiated the criminal case of the interference in the U.S. elections.

In part from a long Guardian article published on April 12, 2017:

On 19 January, the day before Trump’s inauguration, Zlochevsky’s gas company announced it was becoming a funder of the Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington thinktank. The Atlantic Council declined to say exactly how much money the tycoon had offered, only that his donation had been between $100,000 and $249,000. A month later, Burisma hired a new director. Joseph Cofer Black does not appear to have any more experience of Ukraine than his colleague Hunter Biden but – as an ex-ambassador and a former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism centre under George W Bush – he is likely to have lots of useful contacts in Washington.

Zlochevsky’s last public appearance was in June 2016 at a Burisma-organised alternative energy forum, co-hosted in Monaco by Prince Albert II, who made the keynote speech. Photographs of the event showed Hunter Biden posing with various comfortably retired ex-politicians, wearing a blue suit twinned with highly-polished brown shoes. Zlochevsky was tanned and healthy in an open-necked shirt, while a more formally dressed Prince Albert placed a solicitous hand on his back.

Perhaps there should be witnesses in the Trump impeachment trial in the Senate, in fact there should be 200-300 of them and not only should Hunter Biden and the whistleblower be among the witness list, but Eric Holder needs to be on the hot seat too.

Complicated…right?

 

Carter Page is Due Big Money, Manafort May Get Relief

The FISA Court released a few days ago a ruling that at least 2 (the last 2) of the 4 secret surveillance applications against Carter Page were in valid. The first 2 applications are under review and may see the same ruling.

So, former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe are for sure on the legal hot seat as is Dana Boente. At the Department of Justice, at the time Rod Rosenstein had the final signature relying on the lower level FBI certifications of validations.
Carter Page has an excellent case now against the government for violations by the government for illegal search/surveillance/wire-tap(s) warrants and based on the timing, now in-prison Paul Manafort may have a case against the government as well. The Manafort case is not yet resolved based on timelines and use by the Mueller investigation.

This places more layers to the operatives in government perhaps as directed by the Democrat Party to use government power and people for explosive political missions. A new plateau of government collusion it seems.

The timing of this release appears to have some purpose and will affect the impeachment trial in the Senate where the Trump defense team may just use this information to their advantage and the House impeachment managers (Schiff/Nadler) and Speaker Pelosi will be working overtime to draft a twisted defense response.

Image result for fisa court carter page photo source/Forbes

Federalist: Authority granted to the federal government to secretly wiretap and spy on former Trump affiliate Carter Page was “not valid,” the nation’s top spy court noted in a secret ruling penned earlier this month. The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created and authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was initially signed and issued on January 7, 2020, but was not declassified and released until Thursday afternoon.

Judge James Boasberg, the current federal judge presiding over the FISA court, wrote in his order that at least two of the four FISA applications against Carter Page were unlawfully authorized. Additionally, according his order, the Department of Justice similarly concluded following the release of a sprawling investigate report on the matter by the agency’s inspector general that the government did not have probable cause that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. The FISA law states that American citizens cannot be secretly spied on by the U.S. government absent probable cause, based on valid evidence, that an American is unlawfully acting as a foreign agent.

“DOJ assesses that with respect to the applications in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 17-679, ‘if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power,’” Boasberg wrote, referring to the final two of the four FISA applications to spy on Page. “The Court understands the government to have concluded, in view of the material misstatements and omissions, that the Court’s authorizations in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 17-679 were not valid.”

Boasberg’s ruling noted that DOJ had not yet taken a position on the lawfulness of the first two applications against Page, but was currently collecting information to assess whether those two spy applications were also invalid. The invalid applications specified by Boasberg were dated April 7 and June 29 of 2017. The false and invalid April 7 application was personally signed by James Comey, while the false and invalid June 29 application was signed by Andrew McCabe. Both men were referred for criminal prosecution by the inspector general. Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who is alleged to have offered to wear a wire against President Donald Trump, also signed off on the false June 29 FISA warrant against Page.

The FISA court order also noted that it is a federal crime for any federal official to “intentionally…disclose[] or use[] information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having any reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized” by law. The following sentence of Boasberg’s ruling is redacted, raising questions about whether the government used any information obtained pursuant to the now-invalid Page surveillance warrants in other cases.

The final warrant against Page overlapped with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The final three-month authorization to spy on Page was signed nearly six weeks after Mueller was appointed, meaning that Mueller may have had real-time access to and utilized nearly five months worth of surveillance of Page during the course of Mueller’s investigation. If his office used any of the information in subsequent cases, the declaration that the final two spy warrants against Page were invalid could potentially nullify previous or future convictions sought by Mueller’s office.

Surveillance under FISA is not limited to the individual targeted, as the government also surveils individuals with whom the target communicates, and individuals with whom those individuals communicate. That process is called the “two-hop” rule and allows the government to spy on and collect information and communications from individuals who are two degrees separated from the actual surveillance target. Therefore, even if Page never personally spoke to Trump on the phone, the government could still eavesdrop on Trump’s conversations if Page spoke to someone who had spoken to or electronically communicated with the president. It is not known whether the government used the two-hop process on Page to sweep up information from former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, or even the president himself.

In his January 7 order, Boasberg directed DOJ to retain and sequester all information and evidence relevant to both the Carter Page applications, the inspector general investigation of FISA abuse, and any additional DOJ investigations related to or spawned by the inspector general’s report. Boasberg told DOJ to provide all of the required information to the FISA court no later than January 28.

Day 1 of Impeachment Trial in the Senate

After many hours, more than 12, the day was over. A long slog it was with summaries presented on each of Senator Schumer’s amendments to the rules. There was only one Republican defection vote on one amendment by Susan Collins of Maine. Even Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah stayed the course with the Republicans with all the votes they cast.

The historic impeachment proceedings against Trump begin ...
Perhaps the reason for full party line votes are as a result of the letter sent to the Senate by 21 State Attorneys General found here. It is a great read even for those on the Democrat/liberal side of the ledger and have already made up their minds to remove Donald Trump from the presidency.

State AG letter to Senate o… by Fox News on Scribd


The House impeachment articles managers/team, led by Congressman Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler filled the 12 hours with repeated emotional and passionate summaries full of twisted and selectively chosen assertions while negating full truths and context. President Trump’s team did not sway from the initial briefing they filed and made their positions short and cogent on each amendment.
For the most part the day was filled with lawyers of all distinctions warring with each other and the polarization of the Federal government was on full display to only stay with our nation for many years to come.

Adam Schiff introduced Lev Parnas several times in his intense statements when Parnas was not part of the House impeachment inquiry at all. That bit of scandal came after the House voted on the final resolution to impeach. While I am not a lawyer, one must question if that was even a lawful introduction in the first place.

Lev Parnas is a turncoat political opportunist and likely a plant infecting U.S. politics for reasons still being uncovered. Parnas has been injecting himself relationships both in Ukraine and the United States by ingratiating his cunning tactics with people such as Rudy Giuliani, John Solomon, Victoria Toensing, Joe DiGenova, Trump family members and even Yuri Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general. Presently, Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman and two others have been charged with conspiring to violate straw and foreign donor bans by the Southern District of New York.

Going forward, the argument to watch for is the matter of ‘executive privilege’. All presidents have this privilege to protect interactions and conversations that involve matters of national security and diplomatic architecture. In a matter of criminal action, privilege cannot be asserted, yet that was in fact the case in the previous scandal of Fast and Furious when President Obama gave AG Eric Holder privilege protection and he was found in contempt of Congress for that. Moving on however…

The embedded message the impeachment managers will continue to use in their summaries will be “corrupt motives”. A president is responsible for foreign policy and is the top steward/protector of taxpayer money, not government money as to where it goes and how it is spent. One question that is not asked and should be is when Congress appropriated and approved the military aid for Ukraine in the NDAA legislation, was there a clause to fully document the status of previous military aid and to make designations of caution and sanction to Ukraine if the equipment and money did not reach or be applied for the intended use. That answer is no. The Congress relied on the Department of Defense to make a statement, which it did but only to declare that the Ukraine military had taken reform steps to address corruption, that is not a certification.

Carry on good and well informed voters.

 

Rosenstein Authorized Release of Strzok-Page Texts

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein acknowledged in a court filing Friday that he authorized the release of text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to media outlets.

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Rosenstein said in a declaration filed in response to a lawsuit Strzok has pending against the Justice Department and FBI that he authorized releasing the text messages to media outlets Dec. 12, 2017, the eve of his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

“The disclosure obviously would adversely affect public confidence in the FBI, but providing the most egregious messages in one package would avoid the additional harm of prolonged selective disclosures and minimize the appearance of the Department concealing information that was embarrassing to the FBI,” said Rosenstein, who left the Justice Department in May 2019.

Strzok, the former deputy chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, sued the Justice Department and FBI on Aug. 6, 2019, for unlawful termination, infringement of due process, and violations of the Privacy Act. He said he consulted with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Affairs, which determined that there was no legal basis preventing the release of the messages, and the authorized the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs to provide 375 messages to a group of media outlets.

Rosenstein asserted that Strzok and Page’s privacy interests were not violated by releasing the messages because they “were sent on government phones with the knowledge that they were subject to review by FBI” and because they “were so inappropriate and intertwined with their FBI work that they raised concerns about political bias influencing official duties.”

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The Justice Department argued that Rosenstein did his due diligence by having his aides consult with the DOJ’s top privacy official Peter Winn on the release of the text messages, and cannot be held responsible for violating the Privacy Act because there was no willful intent.

“Even if [the] Plaintiff could show that the disclosure was somehow inconsistent with the Privacy Act — the Department did not intentionally or willfully violate the statute,” the court filings read. Strzok and Page, who were both members of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team, were caught exchanging messages that were disparaging of President Trump and highly partisan in nature throughout 2016.

Page, who eventually resigned from the Bureau, sued the DOJ last month over the release of the text messages, claiming it violated the Federal Privacy Act. She said she has suffered numerous damages including therapy costs and “permanent loss of earning capacity due to reputational damage.”

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Strzok also sued the DOJ last month, claiming his First Amendment Rights had been violated. He is seeking reinstatement on the basis that his firing was unconstitutional. Rosenstein’s declaration was part of the government’s defense in Strzok’s lawsuit.

Rosenstein resigned from his post with the DOJ in April and is now with a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C.