The only people who deny financial corruption in Ukraine are those who benefit from it.  That group includes U.S. politicians who gleefully send billions of taxpayer funds into the country of Ukraine while capturing returns in the process.

U.S. advisors and consultants, along with private sector contractors and multinational corporations like Blackrock, are all beneficiaries of the vast sums of money being dumped into Ukraine. We all know this.  So, on one hand it is simple to see why the Ukraine government officials would use the same opportunity to enrich themselves

After all, U.S. taxpayers are not only buying bombs, missiles and bullets with the money sent to Ukraine, we are also paying the salaries and pensions of the same government officials who are skimming the proceeds.  The corruption is everywhere, and every entity is participating in the graft, in one form or another.

Zelenskyy’s wife goes shopping in Paris during the war.  Where exactly do politicians think she is getting the money to spend on glitzy holiday vacations?  Everybody knows exactly what is going on.  The glaringly obvious theft is a large part of the contention the American people have with this insufferable effort to fund Ukraine.

During a lengthy Time Magazine article, one of the close and key advisors to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that the corrupt stealing of US funds is widespread.   In addition to the theft, the overall tone of the Time Magazine article paints the war effort in Ukraine, what we have always called ‘World War Reddit’ for its mostly theatrical value, as a lost cause.  This is not surprising; however, for Time Mag to make such an admission, that does indicate a narrative shift in the overall effort.

TIME – […] Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”

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As noted yesterday {Go Deep}, nothing about the story of the Red Wings flight from Tel-Aviv to the Dagestan region Makhachkala airport seemingly made sense.  Yes, the visual aspects of the story were accurate in that Muslims and Hamas sympathizers rushed the airport looking for Israeli Jews on the flight.  However, something just didn’t seem right both in the story and the way it was promoted by western media.

As more people began looking skeptical at the background [Research LINK], it now appears the crowd was organized on Telegram by the TG channel Morning_Dagestan, owned by the anti-Putin politician Ilya Ponomarev, who lives in Kiev.  That channel has now been removed.

Exiled from Russia, Ilya Ponomarev is reportedly working for western intelligence and lives in Kiev, Ukraine.  Ponomarev spent time in the USA in 2014 [San Jose California], before going to Ukraine in 2016. There is an interesting background bio story available on Ponomarev HERE.  …” since invading Ukraine last year, some now call for direct action. Ilya Ponomarev, former Russian Duma member and activist, is leading this charge” in opposition to Vladimir Putin.

If Ponomarev, a self-declared communist, is working for the interests of Ukraine against Russia and Vladimir Putin, he is intersecting with the CIA and U.S. State Dept who are organizing the resistance effort in Ukraine.  It makes sense he would be running psychological operations against Russia and exploiting the opportunities to incite unrest in the Dagestan region.  Pure opportunism.

In essence, if you put all the pretending away, this looks like a collaborative psy-op effort by western intel, with the intent to undermine Putin (Russia) on the international stage.  That would explain how the story and events went viral as intended jumping from social media to mainstream corporate media as promoted by people like Fox News Jennifer Griffin.

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Tucker Carlson and Nigel Farage discuss the increasingly loud voices who are saying western democracies need to accept Hamas sympathetic refugees from Gaza. WATCH: 

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For the sake of this argument, if you wanted to align with Judge Chutkan on the need for a gag order, you would first need to clarify if Mark Meadows was a witness for the Jack Smith prosecution.  Absent an actual witness list, the remarks by President Trump have to be stretched to encompass potential witnesses or foreseeable witnesses.  That’s what Judge Chutkan decided.  Anyone who might be a witness is protected by the gag order forbidding President Trump from talking about them.

Jack Smith baited President Trump by leaking a story to ABC News saying Mark Meadows warned President Trump that Biden’s 2020 election win was legitimate.  It never happened, but the leak and story were bait to get President Trump to respond – thereby creating the dynamic that would lead to the gag order.   The Lawfare worked.

[Page 7, pdf link]

I do not fault President Trump for responding to the ABC News article, he should have every right to speak about false assertions against him.  In reality, Jack Smith knew Judge Chutkan wanted to reaffirm the gag order, so he just provided her the legal tool to do it.  When dealing with corruption, that’s how Lawfare operates.

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Within the budget process there are two different facets. Congress is charged by the Constitution with making decisions about how to spend public money. Those spending decisions are split into two parts: authorization and appropriations.  In the recent political era the “authorization” process has essentially been nulled; no one ever asks if the program (Ukraine, Israel, FBI, etc.) should be funded. 

“Authorization” is done by Congress via legislation that “can establish, continue, or modify an agency, program, or activity for a fixed or indefinite period of time,” per the Congressional Research Service. In other words, authorization is Congress saying that money can be spent on a given item — not that it necessarily will be spent on that item.

“Appropriations” are done by Congress via legislation that authorizes agencies to make payments from the federal Treasury (i.e. it allows them to spend the money that had previously been authorized). Appropriations bills are ordinarily passed each year, but in recent years it has been common for Congress to fund the government “on autopilot” via continuing resolutions that simply allow agencies to continue spending the same amount of money they were spending under the previous funding bill.

Matt Gaetz has been trying to change this dynamic because the external recipients of the appropriation spending, the lobbyists, are the ones driving the continuation of the CR approach. The lobbyists pay congress via campaign donations. Those donations come from congressional appropriation. The CR process maintains the largesse.

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Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose stated mission has been to keep Trump from ascending to the White House again, is confident the field narrowing will bode well for his objectives.

In my estimation, Senator Tim Scott will be the next first-loser candidate to exit the race.

To qualify for the Miami debate, first-loser candidates need to reach at least four per cent in two national polls, or four per cent in one national poll and four per cent in two early primary states. Tim Scott has not reached the 4% national threshold.

The sketchy controlled operatives also need 70,000 individual donors, including 200 donors in 20 states, according to the requirements set by the Republican National Committee (RNC), because we all know money drives the RNC.

The donor standard pushed Pence to exit.

WASHINGTON DC – Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he expects more people to drop out of the GOP presidential primary following the third debate, after former Vice President Mike Pence announced Saturday that he’s abandoning his White House bid.

“In the end, it just means this race is narrowing, which everyone said that it would,” Christie said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, after praising the former vice president for running “a tough race.”

“It will narrow more, I suspect, when we get to the debate stage in Miami,” Christie added.

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Every time this guy pops up, I am reminded of his previous fame in constructing the “YouTube video narrative” as an explanation for the 2012 Benghazi attack.  At the time, it was Jake Sullivan working in the State Dept who fabricated that entire story; yes, it was entirely his creation, and the Clinton and Obama team (then NSA Susan Rice) pushed it into the media as the official U.S. explanation.  It’s funny (not really) how no one ever calls Sullivan out on that history, given his current position.

Taking that background context, while also accepting that everything we are told about Ukraine and the official position of the U.S. as it pertains to current Israeli War aspects, Jake Sullivan’s prior manufacturing of extreme defensive narratives, abjectly false presentations, leads more credence to accepting that we are once again being manipulated by fundamentally false information.  Jake Sullivan is now Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor.

Appearing on CBS, Sullivan outlines the current coordination between the Biden administration and Israeli leadership.  While he didn’t specifically say the words in the headline, instead describing exactly that while pretending something else, Hamas is FACTUALLY holding 500+ Americans hostage as human shields. WATCH:

[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Jake, good morning to you.

JAKE SULLIVAN: Good morning, Margaret.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Does the US know if the roughly five to six hundred Americans in Gaza have survived the past 23 days of bombing and have the hostages?

JAKE SULLIVAN:  We are in regular contact with most of the Americans who are in Gaza. We can’t say every single one, but all of the ones who reach out to us we follow up with on a regular basis, even sometimes a daily basis. And so, we know that many of them are still there, still waiting to get out. And we are working actively to try to make that happen. The challenge right now, Margaret, is that the Egyptians are prepared to let Americans and other foreign nationals out of Gaza. The Israelis have no issue with that. But ¹Hamas is preventing their departure and making a series of demands. We’re trying to work through that to create a circumstance where all of the Americans who are in Gaza are able to get out. It is a priority for the President. He has no higher priority than their safe passage out. And he will continue to work at it until it is accomplished.

[¹What is that, if not hostages and ransom?  /SD]

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Earlier today Mike Lee sent this little bit of raw data from the border, “In the last 4 weeks alone (since the beginning of FY2024), the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Sector has apprehended 5 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, 19 from Syria, and 75 from China. It’s not a stretch—in fact, it’s putting it mildly—to say “they might not mean us well.” {link}  It is very concerning to think about who is walking into our country.

Earlier today, Texas AG Ken Paxton also asked the court for a restraining order against Joe Biden’s administration who are taking down border barriers and cutting through barbed wire in order to increase the flow of illegal aliens. [Court Filing Here] AG Paxton wants the court to stop Biden from opening the border.

TEXAS – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion for a temporary restraining order on an emergency basis after federal agents escalated their destruction of Texas’s barrier at the State’s border with Mexico. The federal government’s renewed effort to destroy Texas’s barrier and assist aliens’ entry into the country follows just days after Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), DHS Secretary Mayorkas, and other agencies for numerous documented incidents of barrier destruction and occasions on which federal agents facilitated aliens’ mass entry during a severe immigration surge in recent months. 

Texas is seeking an order that would enjoin federal agents from cutting, destroying, damaging, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s concertina wire fence. (link) 

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Sometimes I just sit and shake my head.  Why these guys keep appearing with Sean Hannity is beyond my understanding.  That said, the platform and host is the first warning sign, the content of the interview is another.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who is a significant upgrade from Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sits down for an extensive discussion on current political events where Sean Hannity can tell Johnson his role and responsibility as Speaker. WATCH:

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At this point, I am writing this for a whole bunch of people, and it’s ridiculous.

(1) – No, Mark Meadows never told Jack Smith that President Trump didn’t declassify records.  That was the Lawfare leak to ABC News in August – intended to dilute the defense of declassification in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.  It was made up by Jack Smith, and leaked to ABC for a specific purpose.

(2) – No, Mark Meadows never told the DC grand jury (under immunity) that he informed President Trump that Joe Biden’s election was legitimate. Again, that was a Lawfare leak to ABC News this week – intended to undermine President Trump’s DC defense (mens rea, know it) that Trump’s state of mind was such that he knew he was violating the law by saying the election was stolen.  This story was made up by Jack Smith and leaked to ABC for a similar specific purpose.

In reality, Meadows was questioned under oath, during the grand jury, and asked if Joe Biden was the legitimate President.  Meadows responded (encapsulated), “Well, he’s president isn’t he”?  The rest is a manufactured narrative.

(3) – No, Mark Meadows never wore a wire as a confidential informant while he was President Trump’s Chief of Staff.  Again, yet another Lawfare fabrication to the alt-right media, via layers of plausible deniability – intended to get President Trump to attack Mark Meadows and provide fuel for Jack Smith to request the reinitiation of a currently suspended gag order against President Trump.  The ABSURD story is pure Lawfare bait.  The absurdity of the story is why even ABC News couldn’t be used.

And right on cue….

(NYP) – Special Counsel Jack Smith has implored a judge to revive the partial gag order in the federal election interference case against Donald Trump — citing the ex-president’s “threatening” social media posts about former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Smith’s team argued in a filing late Wednesday that Trump, 77, is capitalizing on a stay in the gag order “to send an unmistakable message to a foreseeable witness in this case… with knowledge that it would reach him.” (read more)

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