Why America will never, ever be great again…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

The country is full of millions of stupid, gullible imbeciles who are dumb enough to believe conspiracy theories that the CIA are keeping an alien captive at Roswell; that the Apollo moon landings were faked; that 9/11 was a conspiracy between the Bush and Bin Laden families and involved the US government at the highest level; that Hillary Clinton is running a child paedophilia ring in tunnels and secret chambers hidden beneath a pizza place in Washington D.C. and so-on…. And there are morons around such as Alex Jones of Infowars.com who are spreading this sort of conspiracy theory bullshit, and millions of stupid Americans (and even a few Kiwis) who are mentally-retarded enough actually believe this shit. No wonder America will never, ever be great again when it is full of dumb kooks like those millions of people who are even gullible enough to swallow the bullshit spouted to them by Donald J. Trump. Best to get in the beer & popcorn and watch America self-destruct as the loonies take over and trash the joint.


from The Washington Post....

North Carolina man told police he went to D.C. pizzeria
with gun to investigate conspiracy theory

Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, told police he went to Comet Ping Pong to investigate
“PizzaGate”, a false online conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton.

By FALZ SIDDIQUI and SUSAN SVRLUGA | Monday, December 05, 2016


Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, surrenders to police. — Photograph: Sathi Soma.

A NORTH CAROLINA MAN was arrested on Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.

The incident caused panic, with several businesses going into lockdown as police swarmed the neighborhood after receiving the call shortly before 3 p.m.

Police said 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee was able to flee and notify police. Police said Welch proceeded to discharge the rifle inside the restaurant; they think that all other occupants had fled when Welch began shooting.

Welch has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Police said there were no reported injuries.

Interim D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said police arrived on the scene minutes after the first call, set up a perimeter and safely arrested Welch about 45 minutes after he entered the restaurant.

A D.C. police report made public on Monday says Welch had been armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle. The report also says police seized a Colt .38 caliber handgun and a shotgun. One of those weapons was found inside the restaurant; the other in the suspect's car. Police did not specify the locations.

The police report also describes Welch's arrest. Police said he surrendered shortly after officers surrounded the pizza shop and emerged with his hands raised above his head.

The report says in addition to the weapons, police seized a folding knife, a T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt and denim blue jeans.

Vivek Jain, of Potomac, Maryland, was eating lunch inside Banana Leaf, a nearby Indian restaurant, when Comet patrons came rushing inside. He said Banana Leaf was locked down for about 90 minutes.

“A bunch of people ran in from Comet and said a man walked in with a gun,” Jain said.

About 45 minutes later, he said, he saw a man walking backward out into the street with his hands in the air.

“He laid down on Connecticut Avenue and he was immediately picked up by the police and taken away,” he said.


Police secure the scene where a shooter was present at Comet Ping Pong on Connecticut Avenue.
 — Photograph: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post.

The popular family restaurant, near Connecticut and Nebraska avenues NW in the Chevy Chase neighborhood, was swept up in the onslaught of fake news and conspiracy theories that were prevalent during the presidential campaign. The restaurant, its owner, staff and nearby businesses have been attacked on social media and received death threats.

Although police initially said it did not appear the incident was related to the threats, businesses and residents immediately surmised it might be connected to “pizzagate”.

James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, said in a statement: “What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories comes with consequences. I hope that those involved in fanning these flames will take a moment to contemplate what happened here today, and stop promoting these falsehoods right away.”

The restaurant's owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms. Even Michael Flynn, a retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia. None of them were true. But the fake stories and threats persisted, some even aimed at children of Comet Ping Pong employees and patrons. The restaurant's owner was forced to contact the FBI, local police, Facebook and other social-media platforms in an effort to remove the articles.

Last month, citing its policy against posting the personal information of others, Reddit banned the “pizzagate” topic.

But it didn't stop the harassment, and nearby businesses have received threats as well, according to police. On Sunday, Washington Post reporters involved in this article were the target of online threats shortly after an earlier version of it was posted online.

Matt Carr, the owner of the Little Red Fox market and coffee shop, said his business started getting threats last weekend. They got 30 to 40 calls before they stopped answering calls from blocked numbers, he said. “One person said he wanted to line us up in front of a firing squad,” said Carr, who spent more than an hour in lockdown with his employees Sunday.

The threats were all tied to the Comet Ping Pong accusations online, he said. “There's some old painted-over symbol on the marquee that they claim is an international symbol of pedophilia and that there are underground tunnels…. There's some video on YouTube that has almost 100,000 views and talks about me, the owner of the Little Red Fox, by name.

“This was our worst fear,” he said, “that someone would read all this and come to the block with a gun. And today it happened.”


Police surround the scene where a shooter was present at Comet Ping Pong. — Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency.

Politics and Prose, the bookstore that has been a Washington institution and neighborhood fixture for more than 30 years, was in the middle of a book event when attendees and staff saw police converging on the block, said Bradley Graham, a store co-owner.

They, too, had received threats recently, Graham said, and were planning to meet with police on Monday “because we had feared that what, up to now, had been simply despicable menacing verbal attacks online or on the phone might escalate.”

Graham said he was told that the gunman walked into the kitchen at Comet Ping Pong on Sunday, “presumably looking for the alleged tunnels” where children were hidden and tortured. Graham believes that account of the gunman's actions came from an employee at the restaurant.

He said the businesses are hoping to get more police protection, “and we would also hope that law enforcement authorities will be prompted to take additional measures to shut down the sites where this hateful material is being spread, and also measures to try to trace the menacing phone calls.

“… We're all rather shaken,” he said.

“Political figures have the means to deal with conspiratorial allegations and threats, but your neighborhood mom and pop shop does not,” Carr said later in an email. “I make coffee and breakfast burritos for a living. This is out of our league.”

D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (Democrat-Ward 3) was getting gas down the street from Comet Ping Pong and saw what she described as intense police activity around the restaurant. Cheh said she spoke with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (Democrat), who had been briefed by police. At the time she spoke to reporters, Cheh didn't know the gunman's actions were connected to the false rumors surrounding Comet Ping Pong, but she was concerned.

“It's very, very worrisome,” Cheh said. “I'm just very worried that [the rumors] may have unleashed people who are unstable to pursue violent action, as has happened before.”

She praised the speed of the police response, which she said may have prevented an attack. “It all looked so efficient and professional. I was very pleased it was locked down so quickly.”

Gareth Wade, 47, and Doug Clarke, 50, were sitting down for pizza and beer at Comet when they spotted a commotion. All of a sudden, said Wade, “the server said someone just walked in with a shotgun.

“A man had just walked into the building, passed us into the back of the building, he seemed to have a shotgun or a rifle-type of [gun] and said we ought to vacate the building,” Wade recalled the server saying.

They rushed out of the restaurant and had planned to head to Politics and Prose, where Clarke's wife and 5-year-old took shelter, but they got separated. Clarke and Wade were met by a heavy police presence when they attempted to join up.

“Police said you can't go to the bookstore,” Wade said. They ended up behind the police barricade at Connecticut Avenue and Fessenden Street. Clarke's wife and son were forced to remain inside the bookstore. Meanwhile, Clarke was trying to reunite his son with a present he had received for his fifth birthday, a stuffed lion that they were forced to leave inside the restaurant.

“He's kind of shaken up about the whole thing,” Clarke said. “We've been talking a lot about it and trying to help him understand. That he was a man with a weapon, weapons are bad — he was not a nice person.”

• Steve Hendrix and Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.

• Faiz Siddiqui is a metro reporter covering transportation and local issues at The Washington Post. He has previously contributed to NPR[/u], The Boston Globe and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

• Susan Svrluga is a reporter for The Washington Post, covering higher education for the Grade Point blog.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Fearing yet another witch hunt, Reddit bans ‘Pizzagate’

 • Fake news makes Comet Ping Pong a target for conspiracy theories

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

the story below i call strawman smoke and mirrors to guide fools away from looking at the real things
so hillarys crew can wriggle off the hook
i must admit it is very smart.

did you read any of the wikileaks emails they sure seem like kiddy fuckers to me

so you dont believe there are pedos in the us gov,pedos in the british gov ,and satanist do not exist,and you're an expert on 911
3 buildings 2 got hit with planes yet the buildings were built to withstand being hit with planes
and then there was that building 7 got hit by nothing had a couple of small fires yet dropped like a stone.
you keep on parroting the wankington post because they know a thing or 2 hahaha u retard

everyone is stupid except you hahahaha

you should be the king of the world instead you're a dumbass train jockey
i blame it all on your poor education

they guy who went to ping pong pizza is most likely a dem wind up toy a distraction from the fact that bill clinton went to pedo island more than 20 times and so did hillary with their billionaire friend who was convicted of child trafficking and having sex with under age sex slaves but all he got was i think about 8 months in prison for it,and prince andrew was a fan of the island as well,do some fucken research you daft punk.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.

How the false and the very real collided at Comet Ping Pong.

By MARC FISHER, JOHN WOODROW COX and PETER HERMANN | 8:34PM EST - Tuesday, December 06, 2016


Signs of support hang on the building of Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. The business reopened after Edgar Maddison Welch
from North Carolina discharged his assault rifle at the popular Chevy Chase restaurant claiming he was there to investigate a fake
news story on the Internet about a child sex ring. — Photograph: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post.

WHAT WAS finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint.

What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet — terrifying customers and workers with his assault-style rifle as he searched Comet Ping Pong, police said. He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.

What was false were the rumors he had read, stories that criss-crossed the globe about a charming little pizza place that features ping-pong tables in its back room.

The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It's a tale of a scandal that never was, and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently.

Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation's capital — is possible only because science has produced the most powerful tools ever invented to find and disseminate information.

What brought Welch to the District on a crisp Sunday afternoon in early December was a choking mix of rumor, political nastiness, technological change and the intoxicating thrill that can come from running down a mystery.

His actions on Sunday in one of Washington's wealthiest neighborhoods reminded Americans that last month's election did not quite conclude the strangest political season in the nation's history. Welch did not shoot anyone in the disturbance on Connecticut Avenue NW, but he delivered a troubling message about the shattering of trust in a troubled time.

On October 28th, FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. New emails had been found on a computer belonging to disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Two days later, someone tweeting under the handle @DavidGoldbergNY cited rumors that the new emails “point to a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center.” The rumor was retweeted more than 6,000 times.

The notion quickly moved to other social-media platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts. On the far-right site Infowars, talk-show host Alex Jones repeatedly suggested that Clinton was involved in a child sex ring and that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, indulged in satanic rituals.

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on November 4th. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.” Jones eventually tied his comments about Clinton to U.S. policy in Syria.

According to YouTube, that video has been viewed more than 427,000 times (however, it has since been mysteriously deleted by the person who posted it).

Over the next couple of days, the wild accusations against Clinton gradually merged with a new raft of allegations stemming from WikiLeaks’ release of Podesta’s emails. Those emails showed that Podesta occasionally dined at Comet Ping Pong.

On November 7, the hashtag #pizzagate first appeared on Twitter. Over the next several weeks, it would be tweeted and retweeted hundreds or thousands of times each day.

An oddly disproportionate share of the tweets about Pizzagate appear to have come from, of all places, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam, said Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina. In some cases, the most avid retweeters appeared to be bots, programs designed to amplify certain news and information.

“What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” Albright said. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”

Online, the more something is retweeted or otherwise shared, the more prominently it appears in social media and on sites that track “trending” news. As the bots joined ordinary Twitter users in pushing out Pizzagate-related rumors, the notion spread like wildfire. Who programmed the bots to focus on that topic remains unknown.

On the Friday before the election, James Alefantis, who owns two restaurants on the same block in upper Northwest Washington, noticed something odd in his Instagram feed: a stream of comments calling him a pedophile.

Upset, Alefantis told some of his young employees at Comet Ping Pong about the hateful comments, and they poked around online. They found rapidly burgeoning discussions on Reddit, 4chan and Instagram about a purported child sex ring operating out of their restaurant.

Alefantis, who grew up in an affluent section of the District, was no stranger to politics. He had held a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign at Comet. He'd had a relationship with David Brock, the erstwhile Clinton nemesis who had a midcareer political conversion and became a pro-Clinton advocate. And Alefantis had lots of customers and friends in liberal Democratic circles.

When Alefantis opened Comet a decade ago, he'd had a run-in with an advisory neighborhood commissioner, a local official who did not like it when Comet put ping-pong tables on the sidewalk. That commissioner had warned that having game tables on the sidewalk might bring “rapes and murders” to the virtually crime-free neighborhood.

Now, a decade later, a Washington Post column about that dispute was trending on Twitter. Somewhere out there, thousands of people were hungrily searching the Internet for anything remotely troubling about Comet Ping Pong.

In the final days before the election, other shopkeepers on the block began to receive threatening phone calls and disturbing emails. Strangers from faraway places demanded to know about symbols on their shop windows or photos on their walls.

Across from Comet, at the French bistro Terasol, co-owner Sabrina Ousmaal noticed a disturbing Google review of her restaurant that alleged that Terasol, too, was involved in a plot to abuse children.

Then, more online comments appeared, focusing on a photo on Terasol's website that showed Ousmaal and her daughter posing with Clinton, who had eaten there several years earlier. The Internet sleuths also fixated on a heart logo that appeared on the restaurant's site as part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which Ousmaal, a cancer survivor, has supported for years.

“These maniacs thought that was a symbol of child pornography,” said her husband and business partner, Alan Moin. “It's crazy.”

The family removed the symbol from their site, but the online comments adapted to the new reality: Terasol must be hiding something. The anonymous calls increased.

“What can we do?” Ousmaal said. “There is no basement. There is no tunnel. There is nothing.”

Alefantis and other merchants were mystified: Where was this all coming from? Can't anyone make it stop?

The merchants approached Facebook and Twitter and asked that disparaging, fictitious comments about them be removed. The shopkeepers said the replies they got advised them to block individual users who were harassing them.

The owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura, said in an email to The Washington Post that “Pizzagate reminds me that a country indicated [there were] stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and many people and countries were deceived. It is same old story.”

Nishimura, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur, said the rumors about Comet could be false: “Some people, who believe they do something good, may be deceived by false information.” But, he said, their motive was good; they “did it for saving children.”

On Connecticut Avenue, the hate calls and death threats kept mounting. Surely, the shopkeepers thought, this will all go away after the election.

On Election Day, Brittany Pettibone, a right-wing online activist in California who writes science-fiction novels with her twin sister, tweeted drawings of children under the label “Sexualized children, child abuse, pools, and bondage.” She wrote that the images were “a look inside Hillary Clinton's friend Tony Podesta’s house.” Tony Podesta, a Washington lobbyist, is John’s brother.

Pettibone attached the hashtag #PizzaGate. “We need to expose this,” she wrote in another tweet.

Dozens of commenters responded almost immediately. “How do we make this VIRAL?” one wrote.

Several of the most frequent and prominent purveyors of the Pizzagate rumors said they first learned about the supposed conspiracy from Pettibone's postings.

“I was one of the first,” Pettibone said in a brief conversation on Tuesday. She said she would not take part in an interview: “I’m uninclined to speak to mainstream media because during the election cycle, they made the right look like nut jobs because we suspected Hillary had a health issue, and it turned out she did.”

For a few days after Donald Trump's victory, a relative calm returned to Comet. But along the block, merchants were hearing from all manner of strange callers. At Besta Pizza, owner Abdel Hammad got an urgent message from the company that maintains his website. A reviewer alleged that his shop's simple, pizza-shaped logo was a symbol of child pornography. Hammad, an Egyptian immigrant who voted for Trump, was stunned.

“It's a slice of pizza,” he said.

Hammad removed the image from his site but could not afford more than $2,000 to pay for new signs out front.

“Why did you change the website?!” anonymous callers screamed at him on the phone.

“We're going to put a bullet in your head,” one threatened.

Down the block, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, employees noticed tweets and other online posts that included them on a list of stores linked by underground tunnels that do not exist.

The fact that one of the shop's co-owners, Lissa Muscatine, had worked as Clinton's speechwriter and adviser for two decades quickly became one more data point in the Pizzagate activists' conspiracy theory.

The shop's phone rang off the hook with profane, abusive calls from across the country. Employees simply hung up, over and over.

Frustrated and frightened, merchants along the block talked to the police. They called the FBI, which said the threats were a local matter.

On November 16th, Jack Posobiec, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer who had spent much of the previous year as a leader of a pro-Trump grass-roots organization, decided he'd had enough of just reading tweets and blog posts about the pizza place in his city.

Posobiec, 31, had never eaten at Comet; he had never even heard of the place until he started reading about it on conservative, anti-government media sites. “I didn't pay much attention to it before Election Day because I was focused on the campaign,” he said. “With that going on, who wants to talk about pizza?”

Now, with Trump elected, he read the posts more closely. Any story that accused Clinton, John Podesta and Brock of nefarious deeds deserved some investigation, he thought. He believed the Clinton campaign was “full of secrecy and deception.”

It seemed reasonable to Posobiec that Podesta might have organized a sex ring in cahoots with Brock. But the only part of the scenario that was real was that Podesta had been known to eat pizza at Comet. This part is false: pictures purporting to show that symbols, such as butterflies and spirals, in signs at Comet and other shops were statements about pedophilia.

Posobiec said he was curious and confused. He and a friend decided to go have some pizza. They walked into Comet eight days after the election, sat down and ordered. Posobiec got the garlic knots. His friend got a beer. But they were not just hanging out. Posobiec was using his phone to broadcast his evening at Comet on Periscope, an app that allows users to stream video live.

“Part of the experience of living in 2016 is live, on-the-scene broadcasts,” he said. “People have lost faith with government and the mainstream media being any real authority. After the Iraq War, after Benghazi, people are searching for other sources of information. If I can do something with Periscope and show what I'm seeing with my own two eyes, that’s helpful.”

Posobiec said he never made any disturbance inside Comet, but the restaurant's managers saw him take his camera into a back room where a child's birthday party was underway. It did not seem appropriate for a child's party to be broadcast on a stranger's Periscope feed. The manager asked two D.C. police officers who happened to be across the street to assist.

Posobiec and his friend “were gently refused service and asked to leave,” said a person familiar with the restaurant's decision.

Posobiec offered to pay for what he had ordered. The manager said it was on the house.

Posobiec said he was not there to make a scene. “I didn't have any preconceived notions,” he said. “I wasn't sure. I thought I could just show it was a regular pizza place.”

That evening, after Posobiec was ushered out of Comet, Pettibone tweeted: “You're my hero for doing this, Jack. Never let go.”

On Twitter, the hashtag #pizzagate peaked in the hours after Posobiec's video appeared.

On November 22nd, Reddit closed its “r/pizzagate” subreddit, a site forum focused on a particular topic. The site said it was concerned that Pizzagate posts were revealing private information about people at Comet and nearby stores. “We don't want witch-hunts on our site,” it said. The decision sparked allegations of censorship from some people who were spreading the Pizzagate rumors. They moved their discussion to a similar site, Voat.

On Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, two men carrying protest signs showed up outside Comet.

Alefantis went outside and offered the men coffee. They declined the offer.

On the phone and online, threats poured in, with as many as 150 calls a day.

The shopkeepers approached D.C. police for help. An officer advised them that the online rumormongering was constitutionally protected speech. Ousmaal replied in an email that she respects freedom of speech but that “derogatory libelous and hateful blogs and emails should not and cannot qualify.”

The officer, Anthony Baker, responded, “I don't have anymore options to give unfortunately.”

A D.C. police statement issued on Tuesday said that the department “became aware of the fictional allegations contained in the false news story last month; however, despite postings of offensive language, we did not receive reports of any specific threats. Officers advised the staff to immediately report to police any threats made against the establishment or individuals.”

Earlier this fall, in Salisbury, North Carolina, Edgar Maddison Welch saw some friends doing drugs and he started preaching at them, aggressively.

Danielle Tillman, 23, was the best friend of Welch's girlfriend. She said she had just taken acid when Welch got upset, chanting Jesus' name at her.

“He grabbed my hand and got in my face and was like, ‘Let the demons out of her’,” Tillman recalled. “It was super weird.”

Welch, known to friends as Maddison, had struck friends as a sweet young man who'd had trouble finding his way. He had dabbled in acting — his father ran a small movie studio out of his house — and in writing and firefighting. None of it stuck. He liked to hike, long stretches out West, through mountain ranges, over rivers, into national forests.

A few years ago, he told his hometown newspaper that through hiking, he had broken his addiction to the Internet.

But Welch had another habit. He was arrested several times on drug-possession charges and his name appeared on a forged prescription, according to police records. He was convicted of marijuana possession and public drinking and was sent to a substance-abuse program.

Friends say Welch, 28, in recent months grew far more outwardly religious. “He sees himself as someone who is a protector,” said his friend Charles Dobson, 28. “He is just a thrill-seeking guy.”

On his Facebook page, Welch has posted biblical verses and psalms, some related to the end of days, along with photos of his two children. “Only by your power can we push back our enemies,” one verse reads. “Only in your name can we trample our foes.”

A few years ago, Welch told a longtime friend and former roommate, Dane Granberry, about stories he had read online describing miles of secret tunnels under the Denver airport. Welch, who had also been fascinated by conspiracy theories about the September 11th, 2001, attacks having been staged by the United States, had become obsessed with the tunnels idea and spent long hours reading articles, watching videos and searching for details.

“He's into doing his own research,” Granberry said. “I don't think he has very much faith in the media, but none of us do.” Granberry said her friend needed to see things for himself.

On Friday or Saturday, Welch drove to the District, according to court testimony. He showed up at Comet on Sunday about 3 p.m.

Gareth Wade, 47, and Doug Clarke, 50, were sitting down for pizza and beer when a server told them that someone had walked in with a gun. As Welch passed by their table, he told them to vacate the building. They rushed out.

Outside, dozens of D.C. police officers swarmed the area, evacuating businesses and blocking off streets. A police helicopter circled overhead.

Inside Comet, Welch, armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver and a folding knife, fired his gun two or three times, police said.

Welch, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, remained inside for about 45 minutes, searching for underground vaults or hidden rooms, police said. At least one gunshot broke off a lock to a door. It led not to hidden sex workers but to a computer room. The bullet damaged a computer tower.

At some point, a Comet worker who had been in the back freezer retrieving dough and had missed the earlier commotion heard the shots and emerged into the restaurant. Welch swung the rifle in his direction and the worker fled out onto the avenue, police said.

Finally, Welch responded to police calls for him to leave the building and surrender. He put his AR-15 on top of a beer keg and his revolver on a table. He came out with his hands up, following police commands to walk backward toward them.

Welch was handcuffed, and Sergeant Benjamin Firehock asked him why he had done it. Welch said, according to the arrest affidavit, “that he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. [Welch] stated that he was armed to help rescue them. [Welch] surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.”

Within hours of Welch's arrest, online conspiracy theorists had already decided that he was not one of them. Some suggested he was a “false flag,” a government plant — an enemy of their cause — who had been used in an elaborate plot to conceal the truth.

For years, people have made similar claims about everything from the 9/11 attacks (a government conspiracy to justify war, they say) to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (a government conspiracy to justify gun control, they say).

Now, in Welch's case, the conspiracy theorists insisted that the real news about his dangerous assault was, in fact, fake news.

Comet Ping Pong reopened on Tuesday night; the crowd was large and supportive.

For some months now, Stefanie MacWilliams, 24, a stay-at-home mother of a 1-year-old boy in Ontario, has written nearly every day, usually about politics, for Planet Free Will, a conservative website based in the United States. Her husband, a mechanic, is the family's main breadwinner, but Mac­Williams has been earning some money, too, writing a lot about how good Trump would be for America, and a fair amount about how bad President Obama was.

Starting in early November, MacWilliams noticed that stories based on the Podesta emails were making waves. A friend “who knows I'm interested in politics and shares conspiracy things with me” sent MacWilliams stories about Comet Ping Pong.

Then she happened upon Posobiec's live stream from Comet. This, she decided, was a story. She told the Pizzagate tale in a YouTube video, on Twitter and on Planet Free Will.

In the third paragraph of her story, MacWilliams wrote that “we must stress that there is as yet no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.” She thought she was being quite responsible. She had read Internet chatter about strange happenings and code words, and she thought this needed investigation. She was miffed that Posobiec had been escorted out of Comet when his video tour might have gotten to the bottom of the mystery.

MacWilliams's story spread via social media. She became part of what she called a “worldwide citizen investigation” of Pizzagate.

When she saw Reddit and Twitter react to the conspiracy theory, respectively shutting down a discussion forum and suspending the accounts of some users, she worried that a coverup was underway. “As soon as you tell people they can't talk about something, they're going to talk about it a whole lot more,” she said.

MacWilliams calls herself a journalist, but she does not try to be “100 percent accurate,” either. She believes the beauty of the Internet is that people can crowdsource the truth. Eventually, what is real will emerge, she said.

Pizzagate, she said, is “two worlds clashing. People don't trust the mainstream media anymore, but it's true that people shouldn't take the alternative media as truth, either.” The lack of stories about Pizzagate in the mainstream press meant that the back channels of the Internet would step into the breach.

But how does this end? What could constitute proof that there is no conspiracy? Some Pizzagate buffs want a video tour showing that there are no secret rooms or tunnels. Others say they would need more.

MacWilliams remains caught up in the thrill of the chase. “There is a camaraderie to it,” she said. “It is like sitting around with your friends saying, ‘What really happened to JFK?’ It is like a giant game, especially nowadays when you can crowdsource thousands of emails and figure out what's going on. It's like a real-life Kennedy assassination where all the stuff is at your fingertips, and it's happening today.”

When The New York Times mentioned her site on November 21st as a source of fake news, MacWilliams got a little angry, but she also had reason to smile: The traffic on Planet Free Will soared as never before.

The story is everywhere. Some Americans especially keen on Pizzagate find themselves being accused of being Russian stooges, or of working for hackers intent on disrupting the American political process.

In a small city north of Tel Aviv, in the small hours of the night, Avrahaum Segol, a New Yorker who emigrated to Israel 15 years ago, makes call after call back to Washington. He says he has never been to Comet Ping Pong, but he is burning with a need to know. He found the elderly woman whose family once owned the colorful neon sign that sits over Comet's front door. Alefantis bought the sign from a defunct liquor store in Adams Morgan.

Segol called the woman and spelled out his baroque story. He quoted from an H.G. Wells story called “In the Days of the Comet” and he wondered whether the symbols on the sign — crescents and stars — might reveal a message about sexual misdeeds or satanic rituals.

The woman listened to some of this, then told Segol, “You're an idiot.” She hung up on him.

He is undeterred. He sends letters to the president of the United States and the chief justice, and to newspaper editors and reporters, and to TV and radio hosts. He calls The Washington Post to explain how the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage connects with the symbols on the Comet sign. He calls to explain why his family left him. He calls to say why the death of a former CIA chief may be connected to Pizzagate. He calls to ask whether the neighborhood around Comet is known for murderers and thieves.

“We're living in such a queer time,” Segol said. He said his investigation of Pizzagate is “a work of art. I tell my kids, ‘There are no mysteries, only facts unknown’.”

He asks to be contacted by email, but he warns that he does not open emails unless he knows they are coming in advance. “It’s hard to trust anyone,” he said.

• Keith L. Alexander, Jennifer Jenkins, Michael E. Miller, Faiz Siddiqui, Julie Tate and Craig Timberg in Washington and Rachel Weiner in North Carolina contributed to this report.

• Marc Fisher, a senior editor, writes about most anything. He's been The Washington Post's enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, and he's covered politics, education, pop culture, and much else in three decades on the Metro, Style, National and Foreign desks.

• John Woodrow Cox is a reporter on the local enterprise team. Prior to joining The Washington Post, he worked at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and at the Valley News in New Hampshire. He attended the University of Florida, earning degrees in journalism and business.

• Peter Hermann covers crime for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related content:

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: See the reaction after gunman enters D.C. pizzeria to investigate conspiracy theory

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon workers sleeping in tents near Dunfermline site



https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/fife/325800/exclusive-amazon-workers-sleeping-in-tents-near-dunfermline-site/

Jeff Bezos owns washington post and amazon he is such a stingy greedy pig his amazon workers are forced to live in tents what an arsehole

like i said ping pong pizza is a strawman propaganda shit stir to distract from the real pedo kid fuckers in in the us government,and other governments around the world this is a common tool they film them doing it then it's used as blackmail by the world's elite to control their sick minions so they can better control the people of the planet earth .

read the emails fool they are nothing but the tip of the iceberg
i dont think you ever read real news so i dont blame you for being stupid



but that's ok you just drive a train,the clever jobs for the clever people and the monkey jobs for the monkey people lol

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Yep....try and change the subject.

That's what you Trumpists do when the TRUTH and FACTS start to become uncomfortable.

I guess it is the easy way out for the intellectually-challenged, eh?

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

The gunman was gone. The customers were back. But is #pizzagate over?

Comet Ping Pong reopened on Tuesday after enduring violence inspired by a bizarre online conspiracy theory.

By JOHN WOODROW COX | 11:48AM EST - Wednesday, December 07, 2016


Jeremy Koenig, 40, of Washington, D.C., and his son Will, 6, wait outside Comet Ping Pong.
 — Photograph: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post.

THE LITTLE BOY in the galoshes and Batman jacket abandoned his dad and ran for Comet Ping Pong's front door. He tugged at the handle as raindrops pelted his brown hair. It was 4:53pm on Tuesday evening, and for the first time since a North Carolina man with an assault rifle walked into the Northwest Washington pizzeria searching for proof of an absurd online conspiracy theory, the neon lights outside the restaurant glowed.

Jeremy Koenig, a high school English teacher, had already tried to explain to his 6-year-old son, Will, what had happened on Sunday at the restaurant: A man with a gun came to investigate a fake news story and fired at least two shots before surrendering to police.

But it didn't seem to penetrate until Monday, when father and son learned that, the day after the chaos and the arrest of Edgar Maddison Welch, Comet was closed.

“Why?” Will had cried.

They came back again on Tuesday, determined to support Comet and to get Will his cheese pizza, minus the garlic. As soon as the doors opened, they headed inside, along with two other diners who had been waiting in the rain.

Fifteen minutes later, Comet's owner, James Alefantis, walked out with a stack of pizzas to give to a dozen or so waiting reporters. Next to him were three drooping bouquets of flowers and a collection of rain-soaked signs of encouragement. “Hate has no place,” read one. “We love Comet,” read another. On a Facebook page named “StandWithComet”, 1,700 people had committed to visit the restaurant on Friday to show their support.

For weeks, Alefantis had been subjected to a relentless barrage of online attacks and death threats. The online mob inexplicably believed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from inside the restaurant, and before long, the entire block of Connecticut Avenue was swept up in the harassment.


Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis makes a brief statement outside his establishment.
 — Photograph: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post.

Three doors down, at Besta Pizza, owner Abdel Hammad had periodically shut off his phone lines before a pair of protesters barged into the shop last week and photographed a manager, who broke his fingers when he tried to stop them. Across the street, at Terasol, a French bistro, the owners had twice reported the abuse to police before Sunday's incident and, eventually, asked the phone company to block calls from anonymous numbers.

The attacks on those two restaurants and Politics & Prose, a bookstore also inundated with online hate, have mostly subsided, but Terasol got another threatening call on Tuesday — “it’s not over” — and someone who phoned Besta the same day threatened to shoot Hammad, his staff and their customers. He reported it to police.

No one knows whether the torment will end. But there was Alefantis, standing in front of his restaurant on Tuesday night, open for business.

“We've been completely overwhelmed and incredibly, incredibly touched by the support of our community here in Washington and around the world, and we look forward to serving you for many years to come,” he said before declining to answer questions.

The journalists soon dispersed, and Alefantis walked back inside, passing a 6-foot-2 security guard stationed by the front door. Another would soon be posted by a back door.

Alefantis, who somehow looked both exhausted and buoyant, welcomed his patrons, shook their hands, escorted them to tables. A blond woman in a black jacket approached the bar and wrapped her arms around him. He hugged her back and, for several seconds, closed his eyes.

“Y'all have had better weeks, huh?” a woman nearby who was considering whether to order a calzone asked her server.

“For sure,” he said. “We really appreciate you guys coming.”

Minutes later, a gray-haired diner added her name to hundreds of others on a bright yellow poster — “We Stand with Comet” — that hung from a wall in front of the bar.

“Coraje”, she wrote — the Spanish word for “courage”.


A “We Support Comet” sign hangs outside the restaurant. — Photograph: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post.

Earlier, a man waiting for his pizza had suggested to a woman sitting with him that the restaurant seemed slow. Maybe it was the weather, but then again, maybe it was something more than that.

Who could blame any customer reluctant to return?

But dozens did, and as the night continued, the mood seemed to shift. The sound of the Beatles — “Something”, “And I Love Her”, “Imagine” — played as the smell of fresh pizza dough in the wood-burning oven wafted. Beneath a rotating disco ball shaped like a cinder block, kids slurped their sodas and parents sipped their IPAs.

When Will and his father finished dinner, they headed to the back of the restaurant for a game of table tennis.

And in the dining room — where every table had filled by 6:30 and by the end of the night Comet would serve 340 pizzas to nearly 400 patrons — people complained about the weather, debated Donald Trump's Cabinet appointments and checked their phones, both to post #StandWithComet photos to Facebook and, like they would anywhere else in Washington, to read their emails.

It was a Tuesday night at the neighborhood pizzeria.

• John Woodrow Cox is a reporter on the local enterprise team. Prior to joining The Washington Post, he worked at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and at the Valley News in New Hampshire. He attended the University of Florida, earning degrees in journalism and business.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related story:

 • ‘We're going to put a bullet in your head’: #PizzaGate terrorizes D.C. shop owners

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-gunman-was-gone-the-customers-were-back-but-is-pizzagate-over/2016/12/06/ec9eca96-bc1e-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Pedophiles in Politics: An Open Source Investigation

As 2015 begins, high-profile cases involving accusations of pedophilia in the highest ranks of political power are making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

MPs Caught in Pedophile Network

The first case involves the exposure of five VIP pedophile rings operating in Britain in the 1970s and 80s that have been researched in a dossier compiled by John Mann, an MP for Bassetlaw in the Midlands, which was then submitted to the London Metropolitan Police for further investigation. These five rings all included at least one current or former member of parliament, with a total of 24 politicians having been identified in Mann’s dossier. Six of those 24 are currently serving members of the UK government, including three MPs and three members of the House of Lords. As an MP himself, Mann enjoys parliamentary privilege to name the accused politicians in the House of Commons but has said he will not do so because he believes the accusations should be investigated by police first.

The Met are already investigating claims made by an alleged victim of the network that a Conservative MP strangled a boy to death during one of the ring’s sex parties, and that he personally witnessed two other boys murdered by the gang, including one who was run over in broad daylight. Mann has also indicated that he believes two men may have been murdered as part of a cover-up of the network’s activities.

One of the hurdles in investigating the claims is the Official Secrets Act, which prevents the disclosure of state secrets and “sensitive” information. “It is clear there are a lot of people who could provide a lot of information, potentially vital information, to support ongoing criminal investigations,” Mann said regarding the investigation. “But they are not doing so because of the Official Secrets Act. They are fearful of not only breaking the law but the potential effect on their pension. This is absolutely crucial if we are to get some of these ex-officers coming forward and to get prosecutions of some of the former MPs.” He has asked Home Secretary Theresa May to lift the restrictions, allowing former officials to speak up about what they know about the case, but so far there is no indication that this has been done.

Epstein Accuser Names Names

Meanwhile in the United States a similarly shocking set of allegations are emerging from a Florida court case surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the prominent American financier and billionaire who was convicted in 2008 of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. In the years since his conviction, dozens of women have come forward to accuse him of abuse, and he has made 17 out-of-court settlements in various civil cases arising from these accusations. There is now an ongoing federal civil suit in Florida in which two women are alleging violations of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act in the remarkable plea deal that saw Epstein emerge from the scandal with a single count of solicitation of underage prostitution and a 13-month prison sentence.

Late last month, Virginia Roberts made headlines by submitting a motion to be added to the legal action in Florida. Those documents allege that Roberts was one of Epstein’s underage sex slaves and names both Prince Andrew, Duke of York and fifth in line for the British crown, and Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and author, as men with whom she was forced to have sex while underage. Buckingham Palace has emphatically denied the claims, and Dershowitz threatened to sue Roberts’ lawyers over the allegations but was instead counter-sued for defamation.

The scandal threatens to re-focus attention on the Epstein case, which raises many important questions about the billionaire’s connections with the rich and powerful. It has since been revealed that Epstein had 21 different phone numbers for contacting his friend Bill Clinton, who, court records allege, “frequently flew” on Epstein’s private jet between 2002 and 2005. The American tabloid press is now reporting that the new claims have created problems for Clinton’s marriage, with Hillary allegedly visibly angry at Bill at a recent public appearance.

Nothing New

Allegations of pedophilia networks amongst the political and entertainment “elite” are of course nothing new. In recent years Britain has been rocked by revelations of repeated, serial sexual abuse of children by popular children’s television entertainers Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. These scandals have raised questions about institutional support for these activities at a number of levels, including the BBC, the political classes and even royal participation in the enabling and cover-up of the abuse.

Likewise in America, allegations of political pedophile rings date back decades, with the most notorious being the Franklin scandal in which Lawrence E. King Jr. was accused of running an elite child prostitution ring for Nebraska Republican Party members and high-ranking U.S. politicians. The story involves accusations that link the ring to CIA drug dealing, murder and cover up, including accusations of ritual abuse in the Bohemian Grove. The investigation was championed by former State Senator John De Camp and eventually brought before a grand jury in Douglas County but was eventually thrown out as a “carefully crafted hoax” and two of the alleged victims were themselves convicted of perjury after two other witnesses recanted their supporting testimony. Still, questions still surround the cover up of the case as documented in suppressed documentaries like Conspiracy of Silence.

Cover Ups

The question of whether the London Met will be adequate to the task of properly investigating Mann’s dossier is not an idle one. Just last year reports revealed that the Met had 260 crates of evidence documenting police corruption in the north-east corner of London alone. The evidence relates to Operation Tiberius, a 2002 investigation that concluded there was “endemic corruption” in the Metropolitan Police force and that organized crime networks had been able to infiltrate the Met “at will.” The report that issued from that investigation was 170 pages long, but only six heavily-redacted pages were provided to a parliamentary committee that had requested the information. Only a handful of the scores of then-serving officers and officials identified by the investigation were ever prosecuted.

In the Epstein case, as well, there are numerous questions surrounding the possibility of high-level cover up. In recent weeks it has emerged that Epstein struck a remarkable secret deal with the US Attorney’s Office that barred more than 500 pages of documents detailing negotiations of the deal and a staggering 13,000 documents from the investigation into Epstein’s activities that were shelved as a result of the bargain. Moreover, the victims were not told of the plea bargain until after it had been concluded. All of this resulted from the US Attorney Office’s pledge to avoid turning the case into a “media circus” and disclosing the names of people like Prince Andrew.

Clearing the Smoke, Smashing the Mirrors

As always with ongoing legal investigations, it is important to sort the credible from the incredible, the proven from the unproven, and the mere allegations from the actual findings of fact. Hoaxes, lies and moral panics have erupted in the past that have proven fraudulent in the long run.

So what are the credible sources in investigations like these? How can those with a monetary or other interest in slandering the rich and powerful be separated from those with credible claims of abuse? What bodies or institutions can be relied on to investigate claims of this nature, especially when they involve sitting politicians and others in the highest reaches of political or financial power?

These questions and others like them will be answered in an upcoming edition of The Corbett Report podcast. In the meantime, Corbett Report members are encouraged to sign in and leave their own thoughts on these issues, including sources for further reading on theses topics and discussion of why pedophilia accusations of high-ranking politicians continue to crop up, and what these claims might mean if they are indeed true.

https://www.corbettreport.com/pedophiles-in-politics-an-open-source-investigation/

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Put up the proof.

An armed gunman couldn't find the hidden tunnels and chambers.

The local Washington D.C. police couldn't locate the hidden tunnels and chambers.

The FBI couldn't locate the hidden tunnels and chambers.

Alex Jones is full-of-shit and the clowns who read his bullshit are mentally-retarded.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Put up the proof of what?



who gives a fuck about the armed gunman he was sent there by hillary

why would i care what you think about alex jones
or do i care if you're a clueless inverted moron

not really

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

In home town of alleged Pizzagate gunman, shock and disappointment

For locals in Salisbury, North Carolina, the news of Sunday's events at Comet Ping Pong
in Washington was especially painful because they believe their town should
stand out not for violence, but for tolerance and creativity.

By RACHEL WEINER | 2:26PM EST - Wednesday, December 07, 2016


Downtown Salisbury, the hometown of Edgar Welch, sits decorated for the upcoming holiday.
 — Photograph: Logan R. Cyrus/The Washington Post.

SALISBURY, NORTH CAROLINA — When a man from this small city was arrested as he apparently set out to liberate imaginary children from a fake pedophile ring at a Washington, D.C., pizza place, the incident quickly became national news. But most people here were focused on crimes closer to home.

It was on Sunday afternoon when Edgar Maddison Welch carried an assault rifle into Comet Ping Pong in a wealthy section of the nation's capital, drawn by a viral fake news story of a child sex ring linked to Hillary Clinton, court papers said. No one was hurt, but police said Welch fired his weapon at a door.

Hours earlier in Salisbury, a city of about 34,000, three people were killed. One was a 7-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet; her grandmother was also wounded. One longtime local reporter called it “Hell night” the worst he had seen in 25 years.

“You never hear Salisbury or Rowan County,” said Don Vick, who owns a candy store downtown. “And then all of a sudden — ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.”

For locals, the news is especially painful because they believe Salisbury, about 50 miles north of Charlotte, should stand out not for violence, but for tolerance and creativity. When the Ku Klux Klan announced plans to hold a victory rally in North Carolina last weekend, city residents responded with a “March for Love”. The small and vibrant downtown boasts theaters, independent bookstores and a string of artist studios set up in an old railroad depot.

Still, the area struggles with high rates of poverty as well as drug abuse and crime. As manufacturing has declined, the city has had trouble keeping houses occupied and persuading educated residents to stay.

Just down the street from the artist studios, Darrell Brown was relaxing on Tuesday afternoon with friends over coffee at Main Street's long and cozy Koco Java.

“This isn't a bad place,” said Brown, 57. “But we have our share of crazies. If there's a city you shouldn't go to packing an arsenal, it's Washington, D.C.”

An X-ray technician at Rowan Medical Center, Brown also plays guitar at open-mic nights around town, although he says Salisbury's local music scene is not as robust as its theater community. Later that evening he planned to attend a Christmas play at the Lee Street Theatre, just around the corner.

Brown didn't vote for Hillary Clinton and thinks she's crooked. “But I don't think she's that stupid,” he said of the rumor that police said provoked Welch to drive from Salisbury to Washington looking for evidence of a child sex ring run by the Democratic presidential nominee.

One friend, 53-year-old teaching assistant Cindy Smith Bernhardt, said she was more distressed by the local murders than the faraway shooting that left no one hurt. Seth Holtzman, a philosophy professor at nearby Catawba College, hadn't heard about Welch at all. Like several locals, he had stopped following the news after Donald Trump's election.

An amateur photographer, Holtzman was planning a portrait of Smith Bernhardt's falcon.

“It could have been anybody from any state. It's disappointing that it was a doofus from here,” Holtzman said of Welch. “Now the whole country is going to think North Carolina is a whole bunch of gun-toting hicks.”

Still, he said he wasn't surprised. Salisbury proper is diverse and politically left-leaning, he said — he wore a T-shirt from a 2011 gay pride parade. But the surrounding county is rural and more conservative. Welch was living in the home of his late grandmother on the outskirts of town.


Seth Holtzman (right) and his daughter Ava Holtzman sit inside Koco Java in downtown Salisbury to catch up on current events
such as the story involved in Edgar Welch. — Photograph: Logan R. Cyrus/The Washington Post.

Don Vick and his wife, Nancy, are Republicans active in the Rowan County party. They saw Welch's alleged actions not as political, but a product of emotional problems, although they understood why Trump fired from his transition team a member who spread the Comet Ping Pong conspiracy.

“He has to distance himself from all these conspiracy theories,” Don Vick said.

But Salisbury, they agreed, was a welcoming and forward-looking place. Natives of Chicago and Boston, respectively, Don and Nancy found other small Southern cities downright hostile to newcomers. In Salisbury, they were embraced.

“They want to be open, they want to grow,” Nancy Vick, 62, said. Nearby colleges, she believed, fueled the open atmosphere. At the Candy Shoppe, the couple stock foreign candy for international students and chart the array on a giant wall map.

But the town is also the kind of place where they can hire a clerk they have known since she was 7 years old, simply by calling her parents.

“It's a small town, a Southern town, with great people,” said Don Vick, 67. The store, opened in 2013, was his retirement dream after three decades working for a candy manufacturing company.

The Vicks, like many other locals, knew of the Welch family. Edgar Welch's father is the county's former register of deeds. His grandfather owned a local radio station, served as a county commissioner and was a local football star. Neighbors pointed out that the road to the Welchs' compound of homes is paved, which is unusual for the area.

Welch's parents have not commented publicly. An aunt has described Edgar Welch as a devoted father and said the family was shocked by the news.

“These people who have done so much good for the community, now there's a black cloud over them,” Nancy Vick said. She said some locals were unfairly suggesting that the 28-year-old Edgar Welch's family deserved some blame for his behavior.

“It's not fair to the parents to be tormented,” she said.

Neither the owner nor the clerks at the nearby Queen's Gifts had heard anything about the gun-toting vigilante. Like Holtzman, all three were inclined to tune out the news after Election Day.

Susanna Hollingsworth, a 49-year-old painter who works at the store, suggested the news could be worse.

“He was deranged, but at least he was thinking about the kids,” she said with a grimace and a shrug. “Still, it's not exactly an inspiring Christmas story, is it?”

• Rachel Weiner covers federal court in Alexandria, Virginia for The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/in-home-town-of-alleged-pizzagate-shooter-shock-and-disappointment/2016/12/07/814d89ca-bc1a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

And now it is starting to become patently obvious why Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns.

It's because he is a failed businessman who has been propped up with Russian money and he desperately doesn't want the American people to know it.

Vladimir Putin also doesn't wish the American people to know it, because that would undermind his new puppet & lapdog, President Donald J. Trump.

So Putin directed the Russian secret service to undertake cyber espionage to rig the American election.

Donald J. Trump is 100% correct....the US election WAS rigged, and you heard it first from The Donald's own mouth on numerous occasions.

The evidence is starting to pile up and The Donald will get desperate to put the lid on it, as will Putin.

Expect The Donald to sack the director of the CIA (and possibly even attempt to jail him) in order to stop stuff getting out he doesn't wish to get out.

And expect the Russians to ramp up their cyber attacks on the American government in a desperate attempt to cover their tracks.

Get in the beer & popcorn to watch the fun....America is going to unravel as this oozes out of the woodwork, and they will NEVER, EVER be great again.

It's the greatest entertainment show on earth at the moment, and includes a cast of millions of gullible Trump supporters who are obviously simpletons.
 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

The U.S. has identified individuals and groups who passed Democratic Party material to WikiLeaks.

By ADAM ENTOUS, ELLEN NAKASHIMA and GREG MILLER | 7:45PM EST - Friday, December 09, 2016


CIA briefers told senators in a closed-door briefing it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia's goal, according to officials.
 — Photograph: Victoria Walker/The Washington Post.

THE CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton's chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That's the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton's campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued on Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’,” the statement read.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community's findings about Russian hacking.

“I don't believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia's goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia's intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the “Russian government is not the source.”

The White House and CIA officials declined to comment.

On Friday, the White House said President Obama had ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the election campaign, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to influence the electoral process.

“We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Obama's counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Obama wants the report before he leaves office January 20th, Monaco said. The review will be led by James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said.

During her remarks, Monaco didn't address the latest CIA assessment, which hasn't been previously disclosed.

Seven Democratic senators last week asked Obama to declassify details about the intrusions and why officials believe that the Kremlin was behind the operation. Officials said Friday that the senators specifically were asking the White House to release portions of the CIA's presentation.

This week, top Democratic lawmakers in the House also sent a letter to Obama, asking for briefings on Russian interference in the election.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been cautious for months in characterizing Russia's motivations, reflecting the United States' long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladi­mir Putin and those closest to him.

In previous assessments, the CIA and other intelligence agencies told the White House and congressional leaders that they believed Moscow's aim was to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. The assessments stopped short of saying the goal was to help elect Trump.

On October 7th, the intelligence community officially accused Moscow of seeking to interfere in the election through the hacking of “political organizations.” Though the statement never specified which party, it was clear that officials were referring to cyber-intrusions into the computers of the DNC and other Democratic groups and individuals.

Some key Republican lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement.

“I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now,” said Representative Devin Nunes (Republican-California), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. “There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it.”

Though Russia has long conducted cyberspying on U.S. agencies, companies and organizations, this presidential campaign marks the first time Moscow has attempted through cyber-means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election, the officials said.

The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign.

Within the administration, top officials from different agencies sparred over whether and how to respond. White House officials were concerned that covert retaliatory measures might risk an escalation in which Russia, with sophisticated cyber-capabilities, might have less to lose than the United States, with its vast and vulnerable digital infrastructure.

The White House's reluctance to take that risk left Washington weighing more-limited measures, including the “naming and shaming” approach of publicly blaming Moscow.

By mid-September, White House officials had decided it was time to take that step, but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.

Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security.

Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official.

Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions.

Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Russia would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia's role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow's hands.

McConnell's office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.

Some Clinton supporters saw the White House's reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.

“The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff (California), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that's a problem.”

• Philip Rucker contributed to this report.

• Adam Entous writes about national security, foreign policy and intelligence for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 2016 after more than 20 years with The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, where he covered the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House and Congress. He covered President George W. Bush for five years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks.

• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

• Greg Miller covers intelligence agencies and terrorism for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections

 • Trump and Putin are using the same tactic to deflect questions about the DNC hack

 • Putin wants revenge and respect, and hacking the U.S. is his way of getting it

 • U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt elections

 • Putin denies that Russia hacked the DNC but says it was for the public good

 • Russia’s anti-American fever goes beyond the Soviet era's

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

The CIA concluded that Russia worked to elect Trump.
Republicans now face an impossible choice.

Will Republicans join the probe — in opposition to their president-elect's clearly stated position?

By AARON BLAKE | 10:17PM EST - Friday, December 09, 2016


boy looks at a mural depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in Belgrade, Serbia,
on December 5th, 2016. The message on the mural reads in Serbian, Russian and English “Kosovo is Serbia”.
 — Photograph: Andrej Cukic/European Pressphoto Agency.

THE WASHINGTON POST is now reporting that the CIA has concluded something widely suspected but never flatly stated by the intelligence community: that Russia moved deliberately to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States — not just to undermine the U.S. political process more generally.

The Post's report cites officials who say they have identified individuals connected to the Russian government who gave WikiLeaks emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and top Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta. One official described the conclusion that this was intended to help Trump as “the consensus view.”

The report highlights and exacerbates the increasingly fraught situation in which congressional Republicans find themselves with regard to Russia and Trump. By acknowledging and digging into the increasing evidence that Russia helped — or at least attempted to help — tip the scales in Trump's favor, they risk raising questions about whether Trump would have won without Russian intervention.

Trump, after all, won by a margin of about 80,000 votes cast across three states, winning each of the decisive states by less than one percentage point. So even a slight influence could have plausibly made the difference, though we'll never be able to prove it one way or another.

While saying that Russia clearly tried to help Trump doesn't inherently call into question the legitimacy of Trump's win — earlier Friday, the White House made sure to emphasize that it's not making that case — it's not hard to connect the dots. And Trump and his party know it. The Washington Post's report cited Republicans who expressed skepticism about the available evidence when presented with it in September, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky).

In addition, any GOP effort to dig into the matter risks antagonizing the president-elect, who has said flatly that he doesn't believe Russia interfered with the election, despite receiving intelligence briefings to the contrary. And he's proved more than willing to go after fellow Republicans who run afoul of him.

On the other hand, if Republicans play down the issue, they risk giving a pass to an antagonistic foreign power that significant majorities of Americans and members of Congress do not trust and which, if the evidence is accurate, wields significant power to wage successful cyberwarfare with the United States.

Already, House Democrats have begun pushing for something akin to the 9/11 Commission to look into allegations of Russian meddling. During the campaign, they pushed for hearings on the same issue.

Until this week, they'd been unable to get much buy-in from congressional Republicans. But Senator Lindsey O. Graham (Republican-South Carolina) voiced support for a probe on Wednesday, and now Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (Republican-Arizona) says he is working with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (Republican-North Carolina) on a wide-ranging Senate probe, as The Post's Karoun Demirjian reported on Thursday.

“I'm going after Russia in every way you can go after Russia,” Graham said. “I think they're one of the most destabilizing influences on the world stage. I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want [Russian President Vladimir] Putin personally to pay the price.”

But even as these probes start to materialize, Trump is singing a far different tune. In his interview with Time magazine for his “Person of the Year” award, Trump suggested that the interference could just as well have come from someone in New Jersey as from the Russian government.

“I don't believe they interfered,” Trump said. “That became a laughing point — not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say, ‘Oh, Russia interfered’.”

Trump added: “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

Trump also maintained over and over again on the campaign trail that he wanted a better relationship with Russia and praised Putin as a strong leader — while minimizing Russia's favoritism for his campaign. And he did all of this at a time when Putin was very unpopular in the United States and even as the evidence was pointing in the direction of Russian meddling.

In other words, Trump has shown that he's committed to seeing the best in Russia, and it's unlikely another report from the “dishonest media” citing anonymous sources is going to change his mind.

And Trump has every reason to continue to dig in. He doesn't want to breathe any life into the story line that he owes his election to Russian interference. Trump, after all, is a winner, and the idea that someone else might have won it for him just won't fly.

Update: A statement from Trump's transition team, as expected, took a defiant tone about The Washington Post's report: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’.”

But for congressional Republicans, the evidence is increasingly getting to the point where they simply can't ignore it, and some of them are feeling compelled to act — in a way that Trump isn't likely to embrace.

Compounding the dilemma for these Republicans is that many GOP and Trump voters are disinclined to think Russia meddled in the election. A poll released on Friday by Democratic pollster Democracy Corps showed 55 percent of Trump voters and Republicans who didn't vote for Trump say it's probably true that stories alleging Russian interference in the election are conspiracy theories pushed by Clinton.

Many Republicans are undoubtedly concerned about this. But as long as Trump is holding fast to the idea that this is all made up in an effort to undermine him, this whole thing could reinforce the long-standing chasm within the GOP, with him and his base pitted against establishment Republicans who will (again) be made to look like they're trying to take down their outsider president-elect. And you can bet that'll be how Trump pitches it.

It all presents a possibly inauspicious start for the GOP Congress in the Trump era: a potential Trump versus congressional-Republicans-battle over the same election that surprisingly installed him as president.

• Aaron Blake is senior political reporter for The Fix at The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/09/the-cia-concluded-russia-worked-to-elect-trump-republicans-now-face-an-impossible-choice

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

sorry mate i dont believe you're propaganda story the true story is below

Steve Pieczenik: US Intelligence Working With WikiLeaks? ‘We’ve Initiated A ‘Counter-Coup’ Through Julian Assange And WikiLeaks’


Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3668257/steve-pieczenik-hilary-clinton-coup-clinton-takeover-former-deputy-assistant-secretary-of-state-julian-assange/#fd8yK7zhsIq9M2bx.99

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Of course it is true.

After all, Alex Jones claims there is a paedophile ring operating in tunnels and secret chambers beneath a pizza joint in Washington D.C. and that the paedophile ring is being run by Hillary Clinton, even though there isn't a single shred of proof and a nutter gunman who listened to Alex Jones, as well as the Washington D.C. police and the FBI were unable to locate any evidence of those secret tunnels and chambers. Yet Alex Jones claims it is still true.

So....taking a leaf out of Alex Jones' book, you don't need any proof that Trump is a puppet of Putin, because the Russians are propping Trump up financially. The lack of proof seems to be proof that something really is true according to the way Alex Jones runs his conspiracy theories.

That idiot has shown us how to determine what is true and what is not. And so it is with Trump and the Russians.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

i wonder why anyone would think the clintons might be involved in child trafficking
is this maybe why?

Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender's jet much more than previously known


Epstein, (inset left), and Clinton flew together at least 26 times on the disgraced financier's "Lolita Express." (John Coates, airport-data.com)

Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” -- even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.

Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.

“Bill Clinton … associated with a man like Jeffrey Epstein, who everyone in New York, certainly within his inner circles, knew was a pedophile,” said Conchita Sarnoff, of the Washington, D.C. based non-profit Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, and author of a book on the Epstein case called "TrafficKing." “Why would a former president associate with a man like that?”
Epstein, who counts among his pals royal figures, heads of state, celebrities and fellow billionaires, spent 13 months in prison and home detention for solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on “Orgy Island,” an estate on Epstein's 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Virginia Roberts, 32, who claims she was pimped out by Epstein at age 15, has previously claimed she saw Clinton at Epstein’s getaway in 2002, but logs do not show Clinton aboard any flights to St. Thomas, the nearest airport capable of accommodating Epstein's plane. They do show Clinton flying aboard Epstein’s plane to such destinations as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, China, Brunei, London, New York, the Azores, Belgium, Norway, Russia and Africa.

Among those regularly traveling with Clinton were Epstein’s associates, New York socialite Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein’s assistant, Sarah Kellen, both of whom were investigated by the FBI and Palm Beach Police for recruiting girls for Epstein and his friends.

Official flight logs filed with the Federal Aviation Administration show Clinton traveled on some of the trips with as many as 10 U.S. Secret Service agents. However, on a five-leg Asia trip between May 22 and May 25, 2002, not a single Secret Service agent is listed. The U.S. Secret Service has declined to answer multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed by FoxNews.com seeking information on these trips. Clinton would have been required to file a form to dismiss the agent detail, a former Secret Service agent told FoxNews.com.

In response to a separate FOIA request from FoxNews.com, the U.S. Secret Service said it has no records showing agents were ever on the island with Clinton.

A Clinton spokesperson did not return emails requesting comment about the former president’s relationship and travels with Epstein. The Clinton Library said it had no relevant information and does not keep track of Clinton’s travel records.

Martin Weinberg, Epstein’s current attorney, did not respond to multiple inquiries. Epstein said in a court filing said that he and his associates “have been the subject of the most outlandish and offensive attacks, allegations, and plain inventions.”

However, hundreds of pages of court records, including reports from police and FBI agents, reviewed by FoxNews.com, show Epstein was under law enforcement scrutiny for more than a year.

Police in Palm Beach, Fla., launched a year-long investigation in 2005 into Epstein after parents of a 14-year-old girl said their daughter was sexually abused by him. Police interviewed dozens of witnesses, confiscated his trash, performed surveillance and searched his Palm Beach mansion, ultimately identifying 20 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 who they said were sexually abused by Epstein.

In 2006, at the request of Palm Beach Police, the FBI launched a federal probe into allegations that Epstein and his personal assistants had “used facilities of interstate commerce to induce girls between the ages of 14 and 17 to engage in illegal sexual activities.”

According to court documents, police investigators found a “clear indication that Epstein’s staff was frequently working to schedule multiple young girls between the ages of 12 and 16 years old literally every day, often two or three times per day.”

One victim, in sworn deposition testimony, said Epstein began sexually assaulting her when she was 13 years old and molested her on more than 50 occasions over the next three years. The girls testified they were lured to Epstein’s home after being promised hundreds of dollars to be his model or masseuse, but when they arrived, he ordered them to take off their clothes and massage his naked body while he masturbated and used sex toys on them.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida prepared charging documents that accused Epstein of child sex abuse, witness tampering and money laundering, but Epstein took a plea deal before an indictment could be handed up.

On Sept. 24, 2007, in a deal shrouded in secrecy that left alleged victims shocked at its leniency, Epstein agreed to a 30-month sentence, including 18 months of jail time and 12 months of house arrest and the agreement to pay dozens of young girls under a federal statute providing for compensation to victims of child sexual abuse.

In exchange, the U.S. Attorney’s Office promised not to pursue any federal charges against Epstein or his co-conspirators.

Florida attorney Brad Edwards, who represented some of Epstein’s alleged victims, is suing the federal government over the secret non-prosecution agreement in hopes of having it overturned. Edwards claimed in court records that the government and Epstein concealed the deal from the victims “to prevent them from voicing any objection, and to avoid the firestorm of controversy that would have arisen if it had become known that the Government was immunizing a politically-connected billionaire and all of his co-conspirators from prosecution of hundreds of federal sex crimes against minor girls.”

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida did not respond to a request for comment about the deal.

Other politicians, celebrities and businessmen, including presidential candidate Donald Trump, have been accused of fraternizing with Epstein. Trump lawyer Alan Garten told FoxNews.com in a statement Trump and Epstein are not pals.

“There was no relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump,” he said. “They were not friends and they did not socialize together.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Jeffrey Epstein's victims sue and claim he was given a 'sweetheart deal' giving him immunity after he pleaded guilty to hiring teen for sex
Two of Jeffrey Epstein's victims have filed a lawsuit against the government saying they were misled about his 'sweetheart deal'
The women, who were 13 and 14 at the time they were abused, said they were never told Epstein would not face federal charges for his offenses
Lawyers for the girls also say in the filing that the U.S. Attorney made it seem that charges were coming even after the plea agreement was signed
The girls provided emails between the defense, U.S. Attorney and State Attorney discussing how to keep victims unaware of the plea deal
Epstein pleaded guilty to a single state charge of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution despite more than 30 victims being identified in 2008
He served just 13 months of his 18-month sentence, going to a local jail and not a prison where he was allowed to leave six days a week for work


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3442403/Jeffrey-Epstein-underage-abuse-victims-sue-government-saying-kept-dark-sweetheart-deal-giving-immunity-pleaded-guilty-hiring-teen-sex.html#ixzz4SWcxAV1V
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

so we now we know the news is all a fake,and a straw man story because the us government pays the almost bankrupt mainstream media big money to push propaganda
alex jones has more visitors to his website than 95% of the mainstream media does.
the reason for this is mainstream news keeps faking stuff and the people have noticed this
causing them to lose advertising revenue. they are going broke because of all their lies,they are becoming extinct

also

Washington Post Appends Editor’s Note to Russian Propaganda Story
By Andrew Beaujon on December 7, 2016

A lengthy editor’s note appeared Wednesday atop Craig Timberg‘s November 24 Washington Post story claiming that a Russian propaganda campaign aided the spread of “fake news” in the 2016 presidential election. The note lays some interesting distance between the newspaper and the work its article draws from.
Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.
The note follows intense criticism of the article. It was “rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations,” Intercept reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton wrote, calling PropOrNot, one of the groups whose research was cited in Timberg’s piece, “anonymous cowards.” One of the sites PropOrNot cited as Russian-influenced was the Drudge Report.
The piece’s description of some sharers of bogus news as “useful idiots” could “theoretically include anyone on any social-media platform who shares news based on a click-bait headline,” Mathew Ingram wrote for Fortune.
But perhaps the biggest issue was PropOrNot. As Adrian Chen wrote for the New Yorker, its methods were really messy, and verification of its work was nearly impossible. While “fake news” worked to Trump’s advantage, and email hacks of Clinton staffers pointed to Russian bad hombres, Chen writes, “the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier.”

https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/12/07/washington-post-appends-editors-note-russian-propaganda-story/

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

You're as mentally ill as Alex Jones.

Have you looked into the alien being kept in captivity by the CIA at Roswell?

You really should look at it more closely you know.

I'm sure Alex Jones could fill you in on the lack of facts meaning it must be true, eh?

Faaaaaaaaaark!!   

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

As Democrats demand probe over CIA election claim,
GOP senators express doubt

Democrat Chuck Schumer denounces “meddling” by Russia, but Republican John McCain says he's
uncertain of the CIA's secret report that Moscow helped tilt the election toward Donald Trump.

By KAROUN DEMIRJIAN | 6:59PM EST - Saturday, December 10, 2016


Senator Charles E. Schumer (Democrat-New York) released a strongly worded statement on Saturday morning, saying CIA conclusions
that Russia's hacking and other election interference had the goal of electing Donald Trump are “stunning and not surprising.”
 — Photograph: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters.

SENIOR Democratic lawmakers are calling for a full investigation of the CIA's claims that Russia attempted to tilt the election to Donald Trump, demanding that the intelligence community turn over all its evidence to Congress.

Incoming Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer (New York) released a strongly worded statement on Saturday morning, saying CIA conclusions that Russia's hacking and other election interference had the goal of electing Trump — first reported on Friday night in The Washington Post — are “stunning and not surprising.”

“That any country could be meddling in our elections should shake both political parties to their core,” Schumer stated. “Senate Democrats will join with our Republican colleagues next year to demand a congressional investigation and hearings to get to the bottom of this.”

Schumer's demands were echoed by outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Democrat-Nevada), who charged that FBI Director James B. Comey was aware of the intelligence about Russia's aims before the election and deliberately kept it private. Reid called on Comey to resign.

“Of course. Yes,” he said when asked whether the FBI director should go. “He won't. He has his term there. And I'm sure the new administration, they should like him, he helped them get elected,” Reid said on MSNBC.

Democrats immediately embraced the conclusions of the secret CIA report, which asserted that the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails — and their release to WikiLeaks — was the work of Russian operatives with ties to the government of President Vladi­mir Putin, all intended to help elect Trump.

Key Republicans did not automatically accept that conclusion, despite many of them believing that Russia was behind the DNC hacks and other election interference. For Republicans, giving credence to the CIA assessment probably would cause them to anger Trump even before the president-elect has been inaugurated.

Party leaders began deflecting that sort of intelligence well before the election. According to officials present during a September CIA briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) expressed doubts about the intelligence tying the Russian hacks to Trump.

McConnell did not comment after the news report surfaced, but his spokesman, David Popp, called the allegations “disturbing.”

“I do not have any readout of what did or didn't happen in a classified briefing,” Popp said. “But obviously any foreign breach of our cybersecurity measures is disturbing, and the White House has just announced an investigation to see if that has occurred and will formulate a response.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (Republican-Arizona) said he could not be certain of the CIA's claims given its track record, echoing Trump's reaction to the report in which he said: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

“I'd have to have a briefing before I could judge it and who’s doing it,” McCain said in an interview late on Friday night, once The Post's report was published. “But the CIA has not always been exactly right, to say the least.”

The CIA's conclusions that Russia hacked the election to aid Trump has put Republicans in a political bind. On the one hand, the charges of election hacking are a perfect, galvanizing platform from which to go after Russia for what they see as a global pattern of dangerous meddling, not just in the American elections, but also in the wars in Ukraine and Syria. But on the other hand, they now risk unearthing more evidence giving credence to the charges that Trump's campaign benefited from the hacks. Such evidence could seriously undermine the president-elect before he takes office and beyond.

Other Republican senators also expressed doubts about the CIA's charge.

“I'd be very concerned if a foreign government were doing that — we don't have any evidence of that yet, and I haven't seen the CIA report, so I'll reserve judgment,” Senator David Perdue (Republican-Georgia) said late Friday night.

And still others are questioning why anyone is talking about Russian hacking at all. “All this ‘news’ of Russian hacking: it has been going on for years,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (Republican-Texas) tweeted on Saturday morning. “Serious, but hardly news.”

Nonetheless, even before the latest report, McCain and other senior Republican senators were planning to launch a wide-ranging, coordinated probe into alleged Russian interference in the elections in the next Congress. Such an effort could run directly counter to Trump's foreign policy plans, including a repeatedly stated desire to warm relations with Putin's Russia.

McCain's Senate Armed Services Committee intends to establish a dedicated subcommittee to probe cyberthreats that will hold hearings on the how the United States would respond to an attack as well as investigate allegations of election hacking.

“Everybody that I know, unclassified, has said that the Russians interfered in this election. They hacked into my campaign in 2008; is it a surprise to anyone?” McCain said. “Every expert I respect said the Russians engaged in that campaign.”

Senator Lindsey O. Graham (Republican-South Carolina) has said: “I'm going after Russia in every way you can go after Russia…. I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price.”

He intends to spearhead legislation and hold a series of investigative hearings next year into “Russia's misadventures throughout the world,” including its intervention in the elections.

“Clearly a lot of the information was selectively leaked,” Graham said. “Rather than try to tank the election in terms of an outcome, I want to go after the country that dared to interfere.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker (Republican-Tennessee), who had been a candidate for Trump's secretary of state before the transition team reportedly moved toward ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, said early Saturday that “we're going to do the work that we need to do to understand what’s happened.”

He noted that other senators, particularly those on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, had approached him on the Senate floor during the last roll call votes of the session to “share their concerns” about the issue of Russian hacking.

“They can tell it's warranted and that I should, like other committees are doing, pay a lot of attention to the issue,” Corker said.

But the Tennessee Republican declined to comment directly about hacks potentially favoring Trump.

Trump is relying on Republican doubts to avoid speculation that his win was directly aided by Moscow as he continues to assemble his Cabinet.

In a recent interview for Time, Trump said he doesn’t believe Russia interfered in the election, reasoning: “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” He called the steady stream of allegations tying Russian hacking to his campaign “not a talking point, a laughing point.”

“Why not get along with Russia? And they can help us fight ISIS … and they're effective and smart,” Trump also said during that interview.

Such statements could cause Senate Republicans to take a second look at Trump's nominees. Senate Democrats cannot filibuster Trump's Cabinet picks, but they are now likely to face more questioning about any ties to Russia.

Tillerson, who has been decorated with Russia's Order of Friendship, is causing special concern.

“Let's put it this way: If you received an award from the Kremlin, order of friendship, then we're gonna have some talkin'. We'll have some questions,” Graham said. “I don't want to prejudge the guy, but that's a bit unnerving.”

• Karoun Demirjian covers defense and foreign policy and was previously a correspondent based in The Washington Post's bureau in Moscow, Russia.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related media:

 • VIDEO: CIA assessment: Russia tried to help Trump win 2016 election

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-democrats-demand-probe-over-cia-election-claim-gop-senators-express-doubt/2016/12/10/049e1c62-12ea-4a94-bf80-70beeb2aa6a3_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

EDITORIAL: ‘Lessons learned’ about Russia

President Obama should disclose the findings of the full review
of the role Moscow played in Donald Trump's election.

By EDITORIAL BOARD | 7:30PM EST - Saturday, December 10, 2016


A supporter of President-elect Donald Trump takes a photo of him on her smartphone at a rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Friday.
 — Photograph: Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

THE STRONGEST INDICATION that the Obama administration has not adequately disclosed or responded to Russian interference in the presidential election may be that President-elect Donald Trump still denies that it happened. “I don't believe they interfered,” Mr. Trump told Time magazine last week, adding that computer hacking of state election authorities and the theft and release of emails from the Democratic National Committee “could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

Mr. Trump has surely been briefed by U.S. intelligence agencies on the evidence that caused them to publicly accuse Russia of interference, and that prompted President Obama to use the nuclear hotline to warn the regime of Vladimir Putin against further “malicious cyberactivity”. But Mr. Trump probably calculates he can get away with flouting the facts — and continue his bromance with Mr. Putin — because the White House has neither made public what it knows about the Russian hacking nor adopted any punitive measures.

That must change before Mr. Obama leaves office. On Friday, under pressure from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the president's homeland security adviser disclosed that a “full review” of Russian actions during the election campaign had been ordered. White House aide Lisa Monaco said the interference “may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that … to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned.”

A full review is appropriate. The intelligence agencies and those they have briefed in Congress appear to have a high degree of confidence about Russia’s responsibility. As Ms. Monaco indicated, what occurred was not merely espionage, which the United States as well as Russia routinely engage in, but a deliberate attempt to sabotage the U.S. election: The Washington Post reported the CIA had concluded that Moscow's aim was to help Mr. Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the operation was part of a broader Russian assault on Western democracies: Moscow's hackers went on to target Italy's government in a constitutional referendum, and, according to the German intelligence service, are already seeking to disrupt Germany's incipient election campaign.

Consequently, it is crucial that the “lessons learned” in the administration's review be imparted not just in classified briefings but also to the world — and that the Kremlin suffer some consequences for its actions. Those in Russia who conducted the election hacks should be named, banned from travel and targeted for asset freezes. If possible, they should be prosecuted. A public disclosure of U.S. intelligence about Mr. Putin's regime — evidence of corruption, for example — would be appropriate.

It's encouraging that congressional leaders from both parties are seeking to hold Russia accountable. Seven Democratic senators on the intelligence committee sent Mr. Obama a letter last month calling for the declassification and release of “additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election” and noting that a more detailed request had been conveyed through classified channels. Republican Senators Lindsay O. Graham (South Carolina), Bob Corker (Tennessee) and John McCain (Arizona) say they are planning hearings on various aspects of Russian cyber-activity, including attempted incursions into U.S. weapons systems.

It is Mr. Obama, however, who has the means and the obligation to act before he leaves office. If Mr. Trump is inaugurated without disclosure of the role Moscow played in his election, the meddling is likely to remain undisclosed and unpunished. Mr. Obama should ensure that it is, at least, undeniable.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Kremlin defers to Trump on the CIA assessment that Moscow helped him win

 • Let's get the facts right on foreign involvement in our elections

 • Dana Milbank: The election really was rigged

 • Eric Chenoweth: Americans keep looking away from the election's most alarming story

 • Elizabeth Warren: Trump didn't invent the ‘rigged election’ myth. Republicans did.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/lessons-learned-about-russia/2016/12/10/d7719690-be48-11e6-ac85-094a21c44abc_story.html

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

this is funny stuff welcome to the fake news war


http://worldwide.chat/Washington_Post_Desperate_Names_Drudge_&_Ron_Paul_%22Fake_News%22/ZK3tj2Hvd60.video

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers
on Russia's motives in 2016 hacks

The CIA said Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
In a separate briefing, an FBI official was more circumspect.

By ELLEN NAKASHIMA and ADAM ENTOUS | 7:56PM EST - Saturday, December 10, 2016


Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Grand Kremlin palace in Moscow on July 27th.
 — Photograph: Yury Kochetkov/European Pressphoto Agency.

IN A secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election.

Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.

For the Democrats in the room, the FBI's response was frustrating — even shocking.

During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA's statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.

The FBI official's remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren't on the same page, the official said.

The divergent messages from the CIA and the FBI put a spotlight on the difficulty faced by intelligence and law enforcement officials as they try to draw conclusions about the Kremlin's motives for hacking Democratic Party emails during the 2016 race. Officials are frequently looking at information that is fragmentary. They also face issues assessing the intentions of a country expert at conducting sophisticated “influence” operations that made it hard — if not impossible — to conclusively detect the Kremlin's elusive fingerprints.

The competing messages, according to officials in attendance, also reflect cultural differences between the FBI and the CIA. The bureau, true to its law enforcement roots, wants facts and tangible evidence to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. The CIA is more comfortable drawing inferences from behavior.

“The FBI briefers think in terms of criminal standards — can we prove this in court,” one of the officials said. “The CIA briefers weigh the preponderance of intelligence and then make judgment calls to help policymakers make informed decisions. High confidence for them means ‘we're pretty damn sure’. It doesn't mean they can prove it in court.”

The FBI is not sold on the idea that Russia had a particular aim in its meddling. “There's no question that [the Russians’] efforts went one way, but it's not clear that they have a specific goal or mix of related goals,” said one U.S. official.

The murky nature of the assessments is maddening many lawmakers who are demanding answers about the Kremlin's role in the presidential race. The FBI, under Director James B. Comey, is already under fire for dropping a bombshell letter days before the election on the discovery of new emails potentially related to the Clinton private server investigation. The emails proved irrelevant to the case. On Saturday, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Democrat-Nevada) called on Comey to resign, saying the FBI director deliberately kept quiet evidence about Russia's motives before the election.

With so much of the evidence about Russia's alleged role in the election shrouded in secrecy because of strict classification rules, Democrats and Republicans in Washington who have access to the underlying intelligence say they have struggled to make their respective cases, leaving an already deeply divided public convinced that both sides are shading their conclusions to help the candidate they backed on Election Day.

The clamor from Democrats and some Republicans for a more fulsome accounting prompted the White House on Friday to announce that President Obama had ordered a full review of Russian cyber actions during the 2016 campaign. The president wants the report to be completed before he leaves office next month. Officials said Obama intends to declassify as much of the report as possible. Lawmakers, in turn, want the review to be accompanied by a joint congressional investigation.

“Only in this way can the American people know the extent of Russian interference and we can attempt to inoculate ourselves against continued meddling in our elections,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff (California), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, who has been briefed but did not comment on the information he has learned.

Senator Angus King (Independent-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community's information needs to be made public “not to revisit this election, but to see that this doesn't happen again.” Russia regularly tries to influence European politics and elections, “and I don't want this to be the case here,” he said.

King said he does not believe Moscow's efforts end with Trump's election. “It could happen in the midterms. It could be in the next presidential election. They have shown us that they are capable and willing to do it here. For us not to react with the highest level of investigation and preparing responsive measures would be negligent,” he said.

Meanwhile, top Republicans on the committee have pointed to the possible ambiguity of the evidence to question the soundness of the claim that Russia acted to help Trump. “There is no clear evidence — even now,” said Representative Devin Nunes (Republican-California), the panel's chairman. “There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it.”

At the start of the House Intelligence Committee briefing, the senior FBI official walked lawmakers through the evidence that the bureau thought was credible about Russia's role in the election, according to officials in attendance.

It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to the statements that the CIA briefer had made to the Senate panel, making the case for the first time that Russia intended to help Trump win the election.

Previous CIA assessments of Moscow's goals were more cautious, saying they were limited to undermining faith in the U.S. electoral system. In earlier statements to the intelligence committees in Congress, the agency stopped short of saying the intrusions were meant to benefit one candidate over another.

During the nearly two-hour briefing, the Democratic lawmakers in the room, again and again, tried to pin the FBI official down on whether the bureau believed that Russia had a preference in who won the election.

“It was shocking to hold these [CIA] statements made about Russian intentions and activities, and to hear this guy basically saying nothing with certainty and allowing that all was possible,” said an official who attended the briefing. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.

Many of the Republican lawmakers welcomed the FBI's caution. They didn't think the CIA had a basis for coming to the conclusions presented to the Senate panel. Some of the Republicans on the House side thought it would have been more logical for the CIA to conclude that Russia preferred Clinton because she was a known commodity and because Trump talked during the campaign of expanding the U.S. military, something Russia might interpret as a threat, according to officials.

At one point during the discussion in the secure room, a Republican lawmaker turned to his Democratic colleagues and said the back-and-forth suggested that “Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus,” according to an aide who was present, adding: “We're looking at the same evidence and drawing very different conclusions.”

• Julie Tate contributed to this report.

• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

• Adam Entous writes about national security, foreign policy and intelligence for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 2016 after more than 20 years with The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, where he covered the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House and Congress. He covered President George W. Bush for five years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-and-cia-give-differing-accounts-to-lawmakers-on-russias-motives-in-2016-hacks/2016/12/10/c6dfadfa-bef0-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Hahaha....we all KNOW the director of the FBI set out to rig the election in Trump's favour, so he's dragging the chain over the Russians interfering in the election.

Good job the CIA haven't be bought out by Trump yet.