#he has committed multiple war crimes and did eugenics

[musicnoots]

Love, Lay Me Blind

Bill Guarnere/Reader

Prompt “That was, by far, the stupidest thing you have ever done” requested by anon

Kiss prompt “a small fleeting kiss, which is immediately followed by a passionate, hungry kiss” requested by @rayleighshughes

A/N: i enjoyed writing this soooo much so now i hope u enjoy it too

Synopsis: He wakes you up at five in the morning to go on a date with you. 

Tags: @gottapenny​ @wexhappyxfew​ @higgles123​ @medievalfangirl​ @dustyjjumpwings​ @david-weepster​ @inglourious-imagines​ @dumpofdumblings​ @not-john-watsons-blog​ @bandofmarvels​ @those-dusty-jump-wings​ @alienoresimagines​ @curraheev​ @majwinters​ @meteora-fc​ @radiantcade​ @rayleighshughes​ @junojelli​

It’s nearly five in the morning when you wake up to the sound of something shattering. Your eyes dart to the window of the family you’re quartered with, pieces of glass sit on the windowsill, and the window itself is destroyed, cracked.

The sound sends you flying out of bed to investigate the crash and multiple scenarios cross your mind—was someone trying to break in? Were you about to become the victim of a petty crime? Who in their right mind would decide to commit a burglary in Aldbourne, a small village that was now home to thousands of American soldiers awaiting war? 

You’re not destined to fight in combat—you’re a medic for Pete’s sake, the only thing you know how to do is fix the booboos of grown men—but you grab your field manual for self-defense, just in case. You slowly creep up to the window, your back hugs the floral wallpaper that dons the bedroom, and you cautiously peer outside to find an unexpected late night visitor.

“Bill?”

Yes, him. The feeling of relief engulfs your body like ocean waves crashing down on the rocky shore, but you’re left standing at the window, dumbfounded. 

“Sweetheart, are ya gonna get down here or ya gonna keep staring at me?” He clearly isn’t fazed by the broken window, he’s actually holding a couple more rocks in his hands like he was planning on throwing more. 

“What are you doing?” you whisper-yell to him. He asked you on a date last night but, good God, you didn’t know this is what he meant! “People are sleeping right now!”

“I needed to wake you up for our date!” 

Of course. Maybe you should have expected this when you agreed to go on a date with him, but going on a date with Easy’s most elusive medic, Bill wanted this to be the best date you had ever been on. Weeks, months spent mustering up the courage to ask you, there was no way he was letting this be some boring date the measly boys back home would take you on.

You just wished he had told you before destroying your window. “So you thought to throw rocks at my window and wake up the entire village?!”

“I was tryin’ to be romantic!”

“Romantic?!” Your eyes nearly bulged out of your head. “Bill, you broke the window!”

“Oh, yada, yada—are you gonna meet me in the front so that we can have our date or what?” For someone who thought asking you out while you helped Malarkey vomit on the side of the road was romantic, this was actually a step up for him. 

You nod your head at him, and he grins up at you. “Yeah, I’ll be down in a second.”

To say that Bill was always by your side was an understatement—he always found his way back to you. He’s been by your side since the grueling days at Toccoa, leaving the boys to be with you, smitten with the happiness you bring him. There was one instance where he had disappeared from a game of cards to visit you in the infirmary and listen to you go over your field manuals. You were sitting in between his legs on the floor with your back against his chest, and he was braiding your hair—a skill his older sisters taught him. Bill will admit that the words have gone in one ear and out the other, but in that moment, he didn’t care if someone caught you like this. Needless to say, he didn’t bat an eye when Eugene found you two cuddling on the floor with your hand enveloped in his own.

He was waiting for you at the front door, no flowers but a stupid smirk playing on his lips. You assume he’s tossed the rocks back into the garden because he’s holding out his hand for you to grab, which you do happily. “Hey, there. Lookin’ good, sweetheart.”

“Next time, could you tell me that we were having our date in the middle of the night before you go and break the window again?” you say into his shoulder. “That was, by far, the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Look, when you go on a date with old Gonorrhea, you’re goin’ on the best date in your entire life. I’ve waited so long to ask you on a date, baby, and I’m gonna make the most of it while we’re here.”

You hummed. He’s waited for you for this long? A part of you wonders if it’s too early to say that he’s already claimed your heart to be his. “So what do you have planned for us at five in the morning?”

“Nuh-uh,” Bill shook his head, “don’t wanna ruin the surprise, but trust me, you’re gonna love it.”

“Something tells me I have no say in where we’re going…”

“Damn right you don’t.” He leans over to plant a kiss on the top of your head, and he’s done it several times before, but it feels different this time and you’re not really sure why. 

This time, it feels…intimate. It’s hard to explain because in the previous times Bill had kissed your head, he did out of routine. He kissed you good morning, he kissed you good night, he kissed you when you wiped spaghetti sauce off his lips, but the moment he kisses you on a date, it feels different. 

But you like it. It’s not the physical kissing that makes you feel good, but the warmth and connection passing between two people that might be saying: I love you. He’s done it so many times, you wonder if it always had the same meaning.

You aren’t too far from the village when he leads you into an open meadow—had there been sunlight, you could have seen the small white flowers adorn the grass below you, but the sun is starting to peek through the horizon. For someone who thought throwing rocks at your window until it broke was romantic, Bill had kicked the ball out of the park because the view had you scrambling for your words.

“Ta-da!” he grins at you cheekily, extending his free arm to present to you his surprise. “Joe and I found this place a couple days ago—you know, when we went on a hunt for ice cream. You remember that day? How long ago was that?”

It was roughly two weeks ago. “I remember. You went on a quest to look for ice cream, and then you didn’t find ice cream.”

“Yeah. Anyways, ever since, I’ve wantin’ to take you here. Just you and me, baby. C’mon, sit with me!” He seats the both of you down on a spot just steps away from the road you had walked on.

Your heart swells as he wraps an arm around your shoulders, and you’re resting against his side. It’s perfect—hues of orange and yellow enrich the early morning sky as the sun begins to make its ascension. Slowly, you’re able to see the small flowers that reside with the grass around you, and when you look back up at Bill, he seems pleased with how the date has gone so far. “You’ve outdone yourself, Bill.”

“Would you say that this is worth all the ruckus at five in the mornin’?”

You nod. If it’s with Bill, it’s always worth it. 

Sitting on the meadow while watching the sunrise with the man who’s held your heart in the caresses of his hands in your most tender moments. He has a way with words that you can't describe—he pours out his love for you on a silver platter every second he’s with you, and it must be a blessing and a curse to feel it all.

He’s lost in the sunrise, watching the sun bid the stars and moon goodbye as they dip below the horizon and become engulfed by the palette of colors the sky exhibits. Something tells you that you should cherish the moment, and you do—you love the way he looks at the sky with eyes of adoration and you love the way his arm feels around your shoulders, keeping you so close to his chest, you can almost hear his heartbeat and you wonder if it beats for you.

You place a hand on his jaw, and he looks at you with a quizzical look. You manage to steal a kiss on the corner of his mouth. It’s quick and rushed, but when you pull away, he ends up pulling you back in for another kiss that plants butterflies in your chest and stars in your eyes. 

He’s perfect. 

He’s always been perfect, but he grasps your heart in a way that makes you want to feel his love forever. Your heart is no longer your own, but stolen by the hands of an angel whose lips serve as a reminder that you’re loved by a man who has loved you for a lifetime.

[bountyofbeads]

Navy Wants to Eject From SEALs a Sailor Cleared by Trump, Officials Say https://nyti.ms/2r6y58Y

NYT: The Navy SEAL at the center of a high-profile war crimes case has been ordered to appear before Navy leaders Wednesday morning, and is expected to be notified that the Navy intends to oust him from the elite commando force.

Navy Wants to Eject From SEALs a Sailor Cleared by Trump, Officials Say

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher is expected to be formally notified of the action on Wednesday.

By Dave Philips | Published Nov. 19, 2019, 5:50 PM ET | New York Times | Posted November 19, 2019 |

The Navy SEAL at the center of a high-profile war crimes case has been ordered to appear before Navy leaders Wednesday morning, and is expected to be notified that the Navy intends to oust him from the elite commando force, two Navy officials said on Tuesday.

The move could put the SEAL commander, Rear Adm. Collin Green, in direct conflict with President Trump, who last week cleared the sailor, Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, of any judicial punishment in the war crimes case. Military leaders opposed that action as well as Mr. Trump’s pardons of two soldiers involved in other murder cases.

Navy officials had planned to begin the process of taking away Chief Gallagher’s Trident pin, the symbol of his membership in the SEALs, earlier this month. But as he waited outside his commander’s office, Navy leaders sought clearance from the White House that never came, and no action was taken.

Admiral Green now has the authorization he needs from the Navy to act against Chief Gallagher, and the formal letter notifying the chief of the action has been drafted and signed by the admiral, the two officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the impending action.

The Navy also plans to take the Tridents of three SEAL officers who oversaw Chief Gallagher — Lt. Cmdr. Robert Breisch, Lt. Jacob Portier, and Lt. Thomas MacNeil — and their letters have been drafted and signed as well, one of the officials said.

Under Navy regulations, a SEAL’s Trident can be taken if a commander loses “faith and confidence in the service member’s ability to exercise sound judgment, reliability and personal conduct.” The Navy has removed 154 Tridents since 2011.

Removing a Trident does not entail a reduction in rank, but it effectively ends a SEAL’s career. Since Chief Gallagher and Lieutenant Portier both planned to leave the Navy soon in any case, the step would have little practical effect on them. But in a warrior culture that prizes honor and prestige, the rebuke would still cast the men out of a tight-knit brotherhood.

“To have a commander remove that pin after a guy has gone through so much to earn it, it is pretty much the worst thing you could do,” said Eric Deming, a retired senior chief who served 19 years in the SEALs. “You are having your whole identity taken away.”

“Why would they do it to someone like Gallagher?” said Mr. Deming, who is not involved in the case. “I think the leadership feels like they have lost the trust of the American people and want to rebuild it. So they are trying to show guys will be held accountable.”

The move sets up a potential confrontation between Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly championed Chief Gallagher, and Admiral Green, who has said he intends to overhaul discipline and ethics in the SEAL teams and sees Chief Gallagher’s behavior as an obstacle.

One Navy official who spoke about the specifics of the action said the admiral was making the move knowing that it could end his career, but that he had the backing of Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, and Richard V. Spencer, the secretary of the Navy.

Asked about Admiral Gilday, his spokesman, Cmdr. Nate Christensen, said on Tuesday that the admiral “supports his commanders in executing their roles, to include Rear Admiral Green.”

Chief Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said that punishing the chief after the president cleared him last week would amount to insubordination.

“Does Admiral Green have the authority to do it? Yes,” Mr. Parlatore said in a telephone interview. “But how tone-deaf is the guy? The commander in chief’s intent is crystal clear, that he wants Eddie left alone.”

Mr. Parlatore said he expected Mr. Trump to order the Navy to restore Chief Gallagher’s Trident if it is removed, and to dismiss Admiral Green from command.

Chief Gallagher has been at the center of a whipsaw war crimes case for more than a year. He was arrested and jailed in 2018 on war-crimes charges including shooting unarmed civilians in Iraq and killing a wounded teenage captive with a hunting knife. A military jury acquitted him in July of all the charges except a minor one of posing for a trophy photo with the captive’s corpse; for that crime, he was demoted and faced the possibility of further sanctions. Mr. Trump restored his rank on Friday.

“I had a feeling that it was coming because, you know, the president has shown the nation he was a man of his word,” Chief Gallagher said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “He knew a lot about all the injustices that went on through this whole ordeal I went through.”

Navy officials contend that, independent of the criminal charges, Chief Gallagher’s behavior during and since the deployment has fallen below the standard of the SEALs. A Navy investigation uncovered evidence that he had been buying and using narcotics.

Since his acquittal, Chief Gallagher has trolled the Navy on social media, taunting the SEALs who testified against him; mocking one who wept as he told investigators about witnessing the stabbing of the captive; insulting the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; and calling top SEAL commanders, including Admiral Green, “a bunch of morons.”

The cases of Chief Gallagher and the three officers will be submitted to a review board, who will decide whether to follow the admiral’s recommendation that they be ejected from the force. The process, which can take several weeks, almost always results in the SEAL’s Trident being taken, according to Patrick Korody, a former Navy prosecutor.

“I’ve never seen anyone beat it,” he said. “In cases like this, I don’t know if you could find anyone who would go against the admiral’s recommendation.”

For all four men, the review board’s decision is likely to center on the allegations that Chief Gallagher committed murder during a 2017 deployment to Iraq.

In court testimony, multiple SEALs in his platoon said that they reported one killing the day it happened, and several times after that as well, but that the platoon commander, Lieutenant Portier, did not forward the report up the chain of command as required by regulations. Lieutenant Portier was criminally charged with failing to report the murder; he denied the charges, and they were dropped after Chief Gallagher was acquitted.

Commander Breisch was the troop commander over Chief Gallagher and Lieutenant Portier in Iraq. SEALs in the platoon testified that they told him repeatedly about the killings after the deployment, but were told to “decompress” and “let it go,” according to a Navy investigation. Commander Breisch was not charged.

Lieutenant MacNeil was the most junior officer in the platoon, and was one of the SEALs who reported Chief Gallagher for murder and testified at his trial. During the proceedings, though, it was revealed that Lieutenant MacNeil had done nothing to stop the chief from posing for a trophy photo with the head of the dead teenage captive he was accused of stabbing, and had posed for the photo as well. At trial it was also revealed that Lieutenant MacNeil had been drinking with enlisted SEALs in Iraq, in violation of regulations.

The president has the authority to stop or reverse any decision concerning the SEALs’ Tridents, according to Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. But for generations, he said, presidents have generally refrained from inserting themselves into the military’s personnel decisions.

“The president is the commander in chief; he could give orders about how to peel the potatoes in the chow hall if he wanted,” Mr. Fidell said. “The question is, should he?”

Regarding Chief Gallagher’s Trident, he said: “A reasonable observer could say this is a completely inappropriate intrusion into the military. If Trump saves his Trident — and I’d bet on it — I would say he will have driven the wedge ever deeper into an already divided military. And that can’t be helpful.”

[mrmichaelchadler]

Thumbnails 2/8/19

Thumbnails is a roundup of brief excerpts to introduce you to articles from other websites that we found interesting and exciting. We provide links to the original sources for you to read in their entirety.—Chaz Ebert

1. 

"Morgan Saylor on 'Anywhere With You,' 'White Girl' and 'Novitiate'": The astonishingly versatile actor chats with me at Indie Outlook about her latest role in Hanna Ladoul and Marco La Via's new indie romance, "Anywhere With You," now available on Digital and On Demand.

“[Indie Outlook:] ‘The five-minute shot of your face on the beach is absolutely mesmerizing, as Amanda goes through a near-operatic roller coaster of emotions. Was that scene always meant to be shot that way?’ [Saylor:] ‘No it wasn’t. Phone calls are always very technical on film. You have to figure out where the person on the other line is going to be, or if they’ll be there at all. The take we used was the first one we filmed. I don’t think we planned to do the second phone call in the same take, but I did it anyway and it worked. They really liked the idea of both calls being in one shot. We originally thought that we’d have Jake in the background calling to me, but there was also the problem of losing light. These are the sort of not-so-fun things that happen onset. I actually remember being very unsatisfied, performance-wise, with that scene, but now in retrospect, I’m quite pleased with it. It’s just so stressful and weird when you have only thirty minutes of that perfect sunset light to work with, and you don’t have the right people as the voices on the other end of the line. It’s really difficult to react to that, but it ended up being one of those magic things. The assistant director was like, ‘Should we call cut? Should we not?’ And they just kept going, and that’s what made it in the final cut. That scene has been talked about a lot, and I think that’s cool.”

2. 

"How Caleb Deschanel Became the Surprise Oscar Nominee for 'Never Look Away'": According to Indiewire's Bill Desowitz.

“Like everyone else, Caleb Deschanel was taken by surprise with his sixth Oscar nomination for German-language nominee, ‘Never Look Away,’ about the horrors of war and the artistic process. The legendary cinematographer, best known for ‘The Black Stallion,’ ‘The Right Stuff,’ and ‘The Natural,’ now becomes the sentimental favorite to win his first Academy Award. ‘People kept coming up and raving about ‘Cold War’ and ‘Roma’ and I sheepishly told them that I had a foreign-language film and they said they had the DVD somewhere,’ Deschanel said. Clearly, enough branch members (bolstered by the large international bloc) were swayed by Deschanel’s exquisite cinematography to give him the nod. ‘Never Look Away,’ directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (‘The Lives of Others’), fictionalizes the life of experimental abstract German painter Gerhard Richter, who finds his artistic voice in the film after falling in love with a fashion student whose gynecologist father has a secret past as a Nazi eugenics leader.”

3.

"Sundance Film Festival 2019: 'Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile'": In her review posted at A Reel of One's Own, Andrea Thompson voices her issues with Joe Berlinger's controversial Ted Bundy biopic, though they aren't what one might expect.

“The goal with ‘Extremely Wicked’ also isn't to show or glorify the murders, or even to explain why Bundy committed them, with not a flashback to his childhood to be found. Instead, the movie shows how he was able to get away with them for so long. It's much easier with a lead like Efron; it isn't just his incredible performance and charisma that makes his take on Bundy so compelling. It's his image and status as one of the most popular actors working today. ‘Extremely Wicked’ dares audiences to resist his charms, even if it constantly reminds us not only what Bundy was, but what he was capable of. We recognize him as human even as Liz notices small moments that reveal his inhumanity. He remained unrepentant until the last minute, probably only revealing at least some of the extent of his crimes in the hopes of prolonging his life. Bundy expertly manipulated the media, nearly everyone around him, and escaped authorities multiple times. Yet he also needed to believe his own lies, daring others as well as himself to imagine that this smiling, seemingly easygoing man could do such things. The issues the movie has stem from the fact that this is a story based on a memoir by Liz herself, and ‘Extremely Wicked’ is written and directed by men. As such, there's little exploration of the more complex gender dynamics that led to many young women attending his trial.”

4. 

"After years of disrupting Hollywood, Steven Soderbergh finds an unlikely ally in Netflix": In conversation with Mark Olsen of The Los Angeles Times.

“‘We're always looking for inefficiencies that can be addressed,’ Soderbergh says a few hours before his Slamdance tribute. ‘I want to be rolling as often as possible; the goal [in my filmmaking] is to be rolling camera, so I'm on the lookout for things that are getting in the way of that. The good news about this job generally in my mind is that every project is completely different and has a new set of demands and needs,’ he says. ‘And so already in my mind it throws open the idea of, ‘Well, how do we want to do it this time?’ I'm always looking to have an experience, that if it doesn't annihilate the experience that I just had, at least there's some aspect of it that's in contrast. So I feel like it's fresh.’ Though it may seem odd at first glance that Soderbergh would premiere his new film at Slamdance — or perhaps characteristically idiosyncratic — he has a longstanding relationship with the festival. As Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter tells the story, the festival’s very first opening night, a 1996 premiere screening of Greg Mottola’s ‘The Daytrippers,’ which Soderbergh had produced, was nearly derailed when the projectionist had a heart attack (he lived) and the projector broke down as well. After someone else was electrocuted trying to fix it, Soderbergh, screwdriver in hand, got the projector running.”

5. 

"11 Influential Facts About 'A Woman Under the Influence'": Eric C. Snyder of Mental Floss celebrates the genius of John Cassavetes' 1974 masterpiece. 

“Cassavetes gave a long interview to journalist Judith McNally at the New York Film Festival, after he'd spent 18 months trying to find a distributor. He was also burned out on making four movies in a row without studio help. ‘I can't like making films anymore if they're this tough,’ he said. ‘The pressures are too unnatural. I'm not crying, because I enjoy it. But I am saddened by the fact that I have physical limitations.’ Yet working with profit-minded studios was hard, too, since Cassavetes refused to bend on his artistic principles. ‘If that means I'll never make [a] film again, then I'll never make another film again," he said. McNally followed up. ‘You don't have any plans at all for another film?’ He replied: "Right now all I can hope is that [‘A Woman Under the Influence’] is extremely successful. And if it isn't, I won't make another one—that's all. Which in itself is no great tragedy.’ He did, in fact, go on to make five more films before his death in 1989.”

Image of the Day

At Vulture, our own Donald Liebenson spoke with "The Critic" co-creator Al Jean about his five favorite episodes of his uproarious and all-too-short-lived show, including the one from season two starring Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert as themselves (who else?). 

Video of the Day

The Top 11 Funniest Siskel and Ebert Reviews are ranked by Doug Walker, a.k.a. the Nostalgia Critic of ChannelAwesome.com, who makes an impassioned argument for why these gems of witty discourse deserve to be preserved for future generations. 

from All Content http://bit.ly/2SG3D1m

[ariaanna27]

THE DONALD TRUMP JR. PILE ON

(By Roger Stone) There is nothing illegal or improper with someone having contact with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. Julian Assange is not a Russian asset and WikiLeaks is not a Russian propaganda organization. I understand that the US intelligence agencies insist otherwise but they are utterly unable to prove it. It’s true in their minds because they wanted to be.

Contact between Donald Trump,jr.. and Julian Assange certainly does not constitute collusion with the Russians!

In fact Assange is a journalist publishing information given to him by sources just as they do at the Washington Post and the New York Times but Wikileaks record for accuracy and authenticity is far better.

Neither Donald Trump Jr. or Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica did anything inappropriate. Having tried so hard to drive the phony Russian collusion narrative to distract from their own Russian profiteering (Uranium One, Gazprom, Joule) they make casual contact with a first rate Journalist muckraker treason.

Did Donald Trump Jr. Cross the Line With WikiLeaks?

(TheAtlantic.com) Messages between the president’s eldest son and the radical transparency organization don’t reveal evidence of any clear-cut crimes.

Donald Trump Jr.’s private exchanges with WikiLeaks on Twitter during the 2016 campaign raise a host of new questions about the Trump team’s communications with foreign entities before the election. But the messages alone don’t appear to cross any clear-cut legal lines.

“I certainly didn’t see anything that looks like a smoking gun in the descriptions that we were given,” Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor who specializes in election law, told me.

My colleague Julia Ioffe reported Monday that Trump Jr. exchanged multiple private messages on Twitter with the radical transparency organization before the election. In some cases, Trump Jr. appeared to act on requests from the group. In one instance, for example, he tweeted a link it had sent his way. A message posted by his father’s account soon after the group contacted Trump Jr. also mentioned WikiLeaks. The messaging, which WikiLeaks initiated during the election and continued as recently as July, was not previously known to the public.

The earliest known conversations came as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his organization were under immense scrutiny for their role in disseminating stolen Democratic emails. U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded that Russian government hackers laundered the emails through Assange’s website to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and bolster Donald Trump’s chances.

Most of the public discussion about the Russia investigation centers on the question of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton. But “collusion” isn’t a specific crime under federal law. Instead, legal experts have questioned whether any Trump campaign officials may have violated a campaign-finance statute that bars foreigners from donating money or any other “thing of value” to a campaign. That same provision also forbids campaign officials from soliciting such a donation.“If I’m a foreign citizen and I give a thousand dollars to the campaign, then that’s a thing of value,” Hasen explained. “If I provide a dossier, that also could be [a thing of value]. And so the question that came up during the last Don Jr. controversy was whether providing dirt on Hillary Clinton—opposition research—could be a thing of value for purposes of the statute.”That debate first arose in July when The New York Times revealed that Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign Chairman Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in June 2016 after she promised “information helpful to the campaign” about Clinton. Trump Jr. denied any wrongdoing and said that Veselnitskaya, who has ties to the Kremlin, provided no such information to them.

The Twitter conversations made public so far don’t show deliberate solicitation of WikiLeaks’s help on the part of Trump Jr. The closest he came to such a request was on October 3, 2016, when he asked WikiLeaks, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” (Roger Stone, an occasional Trump adviser, had tweeted “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.” the day before.) Indeed, it was WikiLeaks that solicited from Trump Jr. throughout the exchanges—asking for his father’s tax returns, highlighting links for Trump Jr. to tweet, and even suggesting that the elder Trump publicly float Assange as a possible Australian ambassador to the United States.

Even if the exchanges did show Trump Jr. soliciting damaging information from WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors could run into difficulty pursuing charges for violating foreign-spending rules. “Assange is or could be considered a journalist, and we might have different rules for foreign-news media,” Hasen explained. “Certainly that’s how domestic campaign-finance law works, where we treat media differently than others.” And while he believes that a “thing of value” under the statute can include opposition research or stolen emails, that view isn’t unanimous among legal experts. He cited arguments made in July by Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, that such a broad interpretation of the term could run afoul of the First Amendment.

“If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime.”

Trump Jr.’s messages also show WikiLeaks providing him with the login information of an anti-Trump website. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” the account wrote to Trump Jr. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About��� for who is behind it. Any comments?” Trump Jr. replied that he would “ask around” about the website’s provenance.

But Trump Jr. doesn’t indicate whether he actually used the password. Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in computer-crime law, said that doing so would violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. “If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime,” he said. “And whoever would have passed on the email with the intent that someone else use it is committing a crime.”

Prosecutions under the CFAA are relatively uncommon. Kerr estimated that federal prosecutors use it to bring charges between 100 and 120 times a year. Using a stolen password to gain unauthorized access can be a felony if it’s used to further another crime, he added. But what matters under the statute is a potential defendant’s intent when accessing a computer system without permission.

“The criminal law is very focused not just on what somebody did, but on what they were thinking and what they wanted to achieve,” Kerr explained. “That could be established by the emails and messages associated with it from the context. You don’t need him saying, ‘I have an intent to further this.’ It could be, ‘Hey can somebody check into this?’ or ‘Can somebody try this out?’”

Even if the messages don’t directly show criminal behavior, Hasen said he found their contents troubling. On Election Night, when Clinton still seemed likely to prevail, WikiLeaks encouraged Trump Jr. to urge then-candidate Trump to cast doubt on the electoral outcome “if your father ‘loses.’” The elder Trump had spent the weeks before Election Day claiming without evidence that the vote was rigged, only to drop the allegations after he won. “We think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote. Trump Jr. did not respond.

“We were already worried that Trump wouldn’t concede if he lost and that this could undermine the legitimacy of our democracy and the electoral process, and here’s a foreign citizen egging him on,” Hasen said. “That’s very disturbing.”

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/the-donald-trump-jr-pile-on/

from Roger Stone https://rogerstone1.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/the-donald-trump-jr-pile-on/

[milaleah]

THE DONALD TRUMP JR. PILE ON

(By Roger Stone) There is nothing illegal or improper with someone having contact with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. Julian Assange is not a Russian asset and WikiLeaks is not a Russian propaganda organization. I understand that the US intelligence agencies insist otherwise but they are utterly unable to prove it. It’s true in their minds because they wanted to be.

Contact between Donald Trump,jr.. and Julian Assange certainly does not constitute collusion with the Russians!

In fact Assange is a journalist publishing information given to him by sources just as they do at the Washington Post and the New York Times but Wikileaks record for accuracy and authenticity is far better.

Neither Donald Trump Jr. or Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica did anything inappropriate. Having tried so hard to drive the phony Russian collusion narrative to distract from their own Russian profiteering (Uranium One, Gazprom, Joule) they make casual contact with a first rate Journalist muckraker treason.

Did Donald Trump Jr. Cross the Line With WikiLeaks?

(TheAtlantic.com) Messages between the president’s eldest son and the radical transparency organization don’t reveal evidence of any clear-cut crimes.

Donald Trump Jr.’s private exchanges with WikiLeaks on Twitter during the 2016 campaign raise a host of new questions about the Trump team’s communications with foreign entities before the election. But the messages alone don’t appear to cross any clear-cut legal lines.

“I certainly didn’t see anything that looks like a smoking gun in the descriptions that we were given,” Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor who specializes in election law, told me.

My colleague Julia Ioffe reported Monday that Trump Jr. exchanged multiple private messages on Twitter with the radical transparency organization before the election. In some cases, Trump Jr. appeared to act on requests from the group. In one instance, for example, he tweeted a link it had sent his way. A message posted by his father’s account soon after the group contacted Trump Jr. also mentioned WikiLeaks. The messaging, which WikiLeaks initiated during the election and continued as recently as July, was not previously known to the public.

The earliest known conversations came as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his organization were under immense scrutiny for their role in disseminating stolen Democratic emails. U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded that Russian government hackers laundered the emails through Assange’s website to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and bolster Donald Trump’s chances.

Most of the public discussion about the Russia investigation centers on the question of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton. But “collusion” isn’t a specific crime under federal law. Instead, legal experts have questioned whether any Trump campaign officials may have violated a campaign-finance statute that bars foreigners from donating money or any other “thing of value” to a campaign. That same provision also forbids campaign officials from soliciting such a donation.“If I’m a foreign citizen and I give a thousand dollars to the campaign, then that’s a thing of value,” Hasen explained. “If I provide a dossier, that also could be [a thing of value]. And so the question that came up during the last Don Jr. controversy was whether providing dirt on Hillary Clinton—opposition research—could be a thing of value for purposes of the statute.”That debate first arose in July when The New York Times revealed that Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign Chairman Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in June 2016 after she promised “information helpful to the campaign” about Clinton. Trump Jr. denied any wrongdoing and said that Veselnitskaya, who has ties to the Kremlin, provided no such information to them.

The Twitter conversations made public so far don’t show deliberate solicitation of WikiLeaks’s help on the part of Trump Jr. The closest he came to such a request was on October 3, 2016, when he asked WikiLeaks, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” (Roger Stone, an occasional Trump adviser, had tweeted “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.” the day before.) Indeed, it was WikiLeaks that solicited from Trump Jr. throughout the exchanges—asking for his father’s tax returns, highlighting links for Trump Jr. to tweet, and even suggesting that the elder Trump publicly float Assange as a possible Australian ambassador to the United States.

Even if the exchanges did show Trump Jr. soliciting damaging information from WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors could run into difficulty pursuing charges for violating foreign-spending rules. “Assange is or could be considered a journalist, and we might have different rules for foreign-news media,” Hasen explained. “Certainly that’s how domestic campaign-finance law works, where we treat media differently than others.” And while he believes that a “thing of value” under the statute can include opposition research or stolen emails, that view isn’t unanimous among legal experts. He cited arguments made in July by Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, that such a broad interpretation of the term could run afoul of the First Amendment.

“If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime.”

Trump Jr.’s messages also show WikiLeaks providing him with the login information of an anti-Trump website. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” the account wrote to Trump Jr. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” Trump Jr. replied that he would “ask around” about the website’s provenance.

But Trump Jr. doesn’t indicate whether he actually used the password. Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in computer-crime law, said that doing so would violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. “If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime,” he said. “And whoever would have passed on the email with the intent that someone else use it is committing a crime.”

Prosecutions under the CFAA are relatively uncommon. Kerr estimated that federal prosecutors use it to bring charges between 100 and 120 times a year. Using a stolen password to gain unauthorized access can be a felony if it’s used to further another crime, he added. But what matters under the statute is a potential defendant’s intent when accessing a computer system without permission.

“The criminal law is very focused not just on what somebody did, but on what they were thinking and what they wanted to achieve,” Kerr explained. “That could be established by the emails and messages associated with it from the context. You don’t need him saying, ‘I have an intent to further this.’ It could be, ‘Hey can somebody check into this?’ or ‘Can somebody try this out?’”

Even if the messages don’t directly show criminal behavior, Hasen said he found their contents troubling. On Election Night, when Clinton still seemed likely to prevail, WikiLeaks encouraged Trump Jr. to urge then-candidate Trump to cast doubt on the electoral outcome “if your father ‘loses.’” The elder Trump had spent the weeks before Election Day claiming without evidence that the vote was rigged, only to drop the allegations after he won. “We think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote. Trump Jr. did not respond.

“We were already worried that Trump wouldn’t concede if he lost and that this could undermine the legitimacy of our democracy and the electoral process, and here’s a foreign citizen egging him on,” Hasen said. “That’s very disturbing.”

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/the-donald-trump-jr-pile-on/ from Roger Stone https://rogerstone12.tumblr.com/post/167525186723

[rogerstone12]

THE DONALD TRUMP JR. PILE ON

(By Roger Stone) There is nothing illegal or improper with someone having contact with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. Julian Assange is not a Russian asset and WikiLeaks is not a Russian propaganda organization. I understand that the US intelligence agencies insist otherwise but they are utterly unable to prove it. It’s true in their minds because they wanted to be.

Contact between Donald Trump,jr.. and Julian Assange certainly does not constitute collusion with the Russians!

In fact Assange is a journalist publishing information given to him by sources just as they do at the Washington Post and the New York Times but Wikileaks record for accuracy and authenticity is far better.

Neither Donald Trump Jr. or Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica did anything inappropriate. Having tried so hard to drive the phony Russian collusion narrative to distract from their own Russian profiteering (Uranium One, Gazprom, Joule) they make casual contact with a first rate Journalist muckraker treason.

Did Donald Trump Jr. Cross the Line With WikiLeaks?

(TheAtlantic.com) Messages between the president’s eldest son and the radical transparency organization don’t reveal evidence of any clear-cut crimes.

Donald Trump Jr.’s private exchanges with WikiLeaks on Twitter during the 2016 campaign raise a host of new questions about the Trump team’s communications with foreign entities before the election. But the messages alone don’t appear to cross any clear-cut legal lines.

“I certainly didn’t see anything that looks like a smoking gun in the descriptions that we were given,” Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor who specializes in election law, told me.

My colleague Julia Ioffe reported Monday that Trump Jr. exchanged multiple private messages on Twitter with the radical transparency organization before the election. In some cases, Trump Jr. appeared to act on requests from the group. In one instance, for example, he tweeted a link it had sent his way. A message posted by his father’s account soon after the group contacted Trump Jr. also mentioned WikiLeaks. The messaging, which WikiLeaks initiated during the election and continued as recently as July, was not previously known to the public.

The earliest known conversations came as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his organization were under immense scrutiny for their role in disseminating stolen Democratic emails. U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded that Russian government hackers laundered the emails through Assange’s website to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and bolster Donald Trump’s chances.

Most of the public discussion about the Russia investigation centers on the question of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton. But “collusion” isn’t a specific crime under federal law. Instead, legal experts have questioned whether any Trump campaign officials may have violated a campaign-finance statute that bars foreigners from donating money or any other “thing of value” to a campaign. That same provision also forbids campaign officials from soliciting such a donation.“If I’m a foreign citizen and I give a thousand dollars to the campaign, then that’s a thing of value,” Hasen explained. “If I provide a dossier, that also could be [a thing of value]. And so the question that came up during the last Don Jr. controversy was whether providing dirt on Hillary Clinton—opposition research—could be a thing of value for purposes of the statute.”That debate first arose in July when The New York Times revealed that Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign Chairman Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in June 2016 after she promised “information helpful to the campaign” about Clinton. Trump Jr. denied any wrongdoing and said that Veselnitskaya, who has ties to the Kremlin, provided no such information to them.

The Twitter conversations made public so far don’t show deliberate solicitation of WikiLeaks’s help on the part of Trump Jr. The closest he came to such a request was on October 3, 2016, when he asked WikiLeaks, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” (Roger Stone, an occasional Trump adviser, had tweeted “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.” the day before.) Indeed, it was WikiLeaks that solicited from Trump Jr. throughout the exchanges—asking for his father’s tax returns, highlighting links for Trump Jr. to tweet, and even suggesting that the elder Trump publicly float Assange as a possible Australian ambassador to the United States.

Even if the exchanges did show Trump Jr. soliciting damaging information from WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors could run into difficulty pursuing charges for violating foreign-spending rules. “Assange is or could be considered a journalist, and we might have different rules for foreign-news media,” Hasen explained. “Certainly that’s how domestic campaign-finance law works, where we treat media differently than others.” And while he believes that a “thing of value” under the statute can include opposition research or stolen emails, that view isn’t unanimous among legal experts. He cited arguments made in July by Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, that such a broad interpretation of the term could run afoul of the First Amendment.

“If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime.”

Trump Jr.’s messages also show WikiLeaks providing him with the login information of an anti-Trump website. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” the account wrote to Trump Jr. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” Trump Jr. replied that he would “ask around” about the website’s provenance.

But Trump Jr. doesn’t indicate whether he actually used the password. Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in computer-crime law, said that doing so would violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. “If anyone actually entered in the username and password or entered in the password to the website, that’s a federal crime,” he said. “And whoever would have passed on the email with the intent that someone else use it is committing a crime.”

Prosecutions under the CFAA are relatively uncommon. Kerr estimated that federal prosecutors use it to bring charges between 100 and 120 times a year. Using a stolen password to gain unauthorized access can be a felony if it’s used to further another crime, he added. But what matters under the statute is a potential defendant’s intent when accessing a computer system without permission.

“The criminal law is very focused not just on what somebody did, but on what they were thinking and what they wanted to achieve,” Kerr explained. “That could be established by the emails and messages associated with it from the context. You don’t need him saying, ‘I have an intent to further this.’ It could be, ‘Hey can somebody check into this?’ or ‘Can somebody try this out?’”

Even if the messages don’t directly show criminal behavior, Hasen said he found their contents troubling. On Election Night, when Clinton still seemed likely to prevail, WikiLeaks encouraged Trump Jr. to urge then-candidate Trump to cast doubt on the electoral outcome “if your father ‘loses.’” The elder Trump had spent the weeks before Election Day claiming without evidence that the vote was rigged, only to drop the allegations after he won. “We think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote. Trump Jr. did not respond.

“We were already worried that Trump wouldn’t concede if he lost and that this could undermine the legitimacy of our democracy and the electoral process, and here’s a foreign citizen egging him on,” Hasen said. “That’s very disturbing.”

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/the-donald-trump-jr-pile-on/