Last November, The Guardian revealed Julian Assange met with Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorian Embassy, shortly after Manafort had been appointed to run the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Assange has vociferously denied these claims, calling Guardian reporters Luke Harding ...read more
The 2016 election exposed a deadly and dangerous glitch among American voters. We're apparently a nation of suckers and kneejerk social media users, and that's actually sugar-coating the diagnosis a little. Russia's active measures worked only because gullible Trump voters and ...read more
Over the past few weeks, Paris and France at large have been rocked by the gillet jaunes ('yellow vests'), who have taken to the streets. The protestors were ostensibly motivated by French President Emmanuel Macron's fuel tax, that puts disproportionate stress on rural French ...read more
Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office released both a sentencing memo and a heavily redacted addendum regarding former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn. He recommended a "sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration," because Flynn cooperated ...read more
I'd like to preface all of this with the caveat that we don't yet have hard evidence showing specific alterations in the midterm election results. And, with that in mind, I'd also like to suggest that, yes, Russia most likely played a part in changing the outcome in several key ...read more
Yesterday Democrat Gil Cisneros finally took the lead over Republican Young Kim to become the next representative from California's 39th district. The district, which encompasses Yorba Linda - home of the Nixon Library - had been held by retiring Republican Ed Royce since 2013 ...read more
No other Republican has done more damage to the United States than Mitch McConnell. In 2010, before he became Senate Majority Leader, he famously said his party's "top political priority should be to deny President Obama a second term." Once he became Majority Leader, he rammed ...read more
Donald Trump announced this weekend that the United States will withdraw from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (or INF for short) because Russia has "not honored" it. At his rally in Nevada, he offered up a word salad of an explanation, which may please both ...read more
The New Yorker's stunning expose of the server communications between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank during the 2016 election is a must-read piece that exposes the tantalizing threads of the Trump-Russia investigation. Reporter Dexter Filkins reaches no hard ...read more
With the battle over the Kavanaugh confirmation in the rearview mirror, we turn now to the midterms and the low frequency stress we're all experiencing in the face of another Election Day that could be hijacked by Russian military intelligence operatives. So far, there hasn't ...read more
Trump is continuing his war on the Department of Justice and the intelligence community by threatening to declassify documents related to Bruce Ohr, an FBI agent whose name is not well-known to the American public, but who has been a target in conspiratorial right-wing circles. ...read more
After Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day on Tuesday which saw his campaign manager Paul Manafort found guilty of 8 felonies (with the rest available for retrial I believe) and his personal lawyer mobbed up fixer Michael Cohen plea guilty to several different ...read more
One of the more "mysterious" reversals in Washington since the illegitimate election of Donald Trump has been Rand Paul from loud critic of Trump to sycophantic ass-kisser. Coming off his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Trump has just a handful of ...read more
As a general rule, I try to avoid making political predictions. I can't always resist the urge to do so, and my track record along those lines is about average, especially now that we've slipped into an alternate universe in which a tabloid clown, complete with garish clown hair ...read more
I was only mildly surprised yesterday morning when Donald Trump tweeted that the infamous Trump Tower meeting was, in fact, about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. Trump had just admitted his son, his son-in-law, and his campaign chair committed a felony. He also ...read more
Note: This is the second of a two-part series of articles concerning the Magnitsky Act. To read the first article, go here. The Magnitsky Act, which cut off Russian oligarchs' access to their American holdings as punishment for the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, represents a ...read more
Over the past two years, The Daily Banter has repeatedly scrutinized California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher for his ties to Russia. Warned as early as 2012 that the Kremlin had been cultivating him as an asset, he continued to spout Kremlin talking points and meet with dubious ...read more
Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, once as tragedy and once as farce. This week, two very different people embodied this maxim as they fooled Republicans through the power of the NRA. The first was Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Showtime series Who is America? premiered ...read more
At this week's G-7 meeting in Canada, Donald Trump is doing his level best to turn our allies into enemies: And yet the president has sent signals that it's the G-7 that needs the U.S., not the other way around. He showed up late enough Friday that he had to reschedule one ...read more
The narrative the far left likes to promote about Russia is that it is morally superior to America and a victim of its imperialist agenda. Intellectuals like Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, and conspiracy theorists like Caitlin Johnstone routinely make light of Russian crimes ...read more
You should note today's date somewhere. Send an email to yourself, post something on your Facebook wall, do whatever you need to do to make sure you remember June 4, 2018. It was almost two years ago, in July of 2016, when we first heard that Russia was behind the hacking of ...read more
