"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” ~ Elie Wiesel 💙💛 🐙 🌟🌎 #HelpUkraine#StandWithUkriane: @Ukraine@MFA_Ukraine
"Right now, at the request of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, the United States is supporting a multi-national team of international prosecutors and other war crimes experts deployed to the region. This interdisciplinary team, which includes American experts, is directly supporting the efforts of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s War Crimes Units to collect, preserve, and analyze evidence of atrocities with a view toward pursuing criminal accountability processes. And, of course, we have the Moscow Mechanism invoked here at the OSCE by 45 participating States to investigate possible war crimes and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law resulting from Russia’s vicious war of choice. We are committed to using every tool available to ensure those responsible are held accountable for atrocities."
"To believe that life, honour, talent and recognition can be bought and sold is a mistake — a harmful view deserving of contempt. It is no innocent error. A man who convinced himself that everything could be bought and sold, that a society could be the subject of a military occupation in order to create in its place his own paid-for reality, has brought not only the country, but the whole world, to a catastrophe.
Not only did he fall for his fictional reality, but he has also made it the foundation for his actions in the real world. It is now clear that his plans for a brief military operation in a friendly country got bogged down in his own constructed fiction. He was evidently expecting that the use of force by a “genuine” — that is, “his” — country could bring about the immediate demise of the “not genuine” Ukrainian statehood.
He thought he was dealing with a piece of decor ordered by forces hostile to him — perhaps created by America or Europe, a fiction with its origin in methods like his own. He really seems to have believed that his manufactured “popularity” would turn out to be real support for his actions by Russian society. He thought they would believe in the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” and in his mission as a liberator. He must have surmised, likely having listened to his own toadies, that Russia is ready for war and for sanctions.
Putin had convinced himself that Ukrainian society is the same kind of theatre into which he — using murder and intimidation — has transformed Russia. He thought that Ukrainians — from privates in the frontlines to the top leadership so loathed by him — would crumble into a deck of cards and recognise his authority. The president of Ukraine is a former comedy actor, the mayor of Kyiv, a former boxer; who do they think they are? It seems he seriously believed he has psychological and moral superiority over today’s Ukraine and over the global democratic community. His flawed worldview prevented him from realising that his “superiority” was fabricated by his court jesters. His television and radio had only one producer and real viewer — himself. He poisoned himself with his own lies.
He enjoys no moral superiority over anyone. His only superiority was in his military might. But in order to make that superiority real, you require a clear mission, focus, and the justness of your cause. Only Ukraine and the Ukrainians now have such a mission, focus and justness. It is possible that right now Putin is facing a choice whether or not to launch the nuclear weapons at his disposal. This will bring more deaths and suffering. And change nothing of substance.
His war against reality should have been a personal matter. If you want to live in resentment and anger against the whole world — go for it. But he imposed himself on the Russian people using force, manipulation and lies. For many years, he assured his “popularity” by using fair means and foul. By force and intimidation he imposed himself on to Russian society and debased the identity of his own people who once fought side by side with the Ukrainians in a mutual, just war.
He poisoned not only himself but also Russia. He predetermined the contempt with which the whole world will see not only him but every one of us from Russia. For many years ahead we will not manage to convince the world that “we are not like that”, that “this is not us”. For many years — after Putin — it will be up to us to rebuild in Russia a civic system free of any political decor or fiction.
Russia has lost this war morally, simply by starting it. Irrespective of events on the battlefield, Russia has lost this war as a political, economic and social unit, as a member of the commonwealth of nations. There was once a time when the word “war” — without any qualifiers — commonly referred to the Great Patriotic one. Now, this word has a different meaning. This is the war he initiated, the one that made me and all Russians liable for the catastrophe created by him."
"Unless Russia creates a psychic beacon to hypnotize entire Western society its bound to live at an increasing level of sanctions, economic and political stagnation for decades to come. This means Russia can be prone to more invasions and wars. We haven’t heard the last of the Russian invasion and what the future will bring is a rough road with many routes and many bloody and glowing dead ends."
Through in-depth conversations with multiple heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, diplomats, Russian politicians, historians and journalists, this special report chronicles events that shaped the Russian leader, the grievances that drive him, and how a growing conflict with the West exploded into war in Europe.
🇺🇦 “We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors.” @AssociatedPresshttps://t.co/wReVZFYfAI
"I promise to pay $1,000,000 to the officer(s) who, complying with their constitutional duty, arrests Putin as a war criminal under Russian and international laws. Putin is not the Russian president as he came to power as the result of a special operation of blowing up an apartment building in Russia, then violated the Constitution by eliminating free elections and murdering his opponents. As an ethnic Russian & a Russia citizen, I see it as my moral duty to facilitate the denazification of Russia. I will continue my assistance to Ukraine in its heroic efforts to withstand the onslaught of Putin's Orda"
B.C.'s Vikram Bajwa hopes the promise of $50 million will be enough for someone in Putin's inner circle to turn him in to stand trial for war crimes #EndPutin
Have a look at this wonderful yacht called Scheherezade. It’s been talked about for a while. The rumour is it belongs to Vladimir Putin. But there is not much proof, only talks. And that's why it hasn’t been arrested yet. It just sits there in the port of Carrara (🇮🇹). pic.twitter.com/1vnYDREc0Z
But the sobriety of our assessments does not negate the fact that arbitrariness must be fought. When you are killed and robbed, you should at least scream loudly.
Let's think logically. Even my micro-Instagram is read by 60,000 people (love, hug, thank you). @teamnavalny has 195,000 followers. @navalny has 3.5 million followers. There are really many of us. Not in a metaphysical sense, but literally, if you count on the heads. And on the other hand, okay, Putin, the presidential administration (stupid, cowardly bums), some bunch of security officials who can intimidate the controlled media and force them to keep silent about the process. Will we be able to break through the information blockade and make sure that the whole country knows about this lawlessness? So that we and the whole world can see how shamefully Putin is trying to get rid of the main opposition politician? What a pity they forge documents and falsify the trial? Of course we can. Easy peasy. After all, there are a lot of us."
5/10 The money part of the Sakharov Prize given to me by the @Europarl_EN will be the first contribution to this fund. EU citizens, via their representatives, gave me this award for the fight against corruption. I am grateful and I'm allocating their money to continue this fight.
Read what Navalny said in court yesterday. Sounds like a great guide. Everything is clear, there are a minimum of questions. We have already begun our part (investigative), do not lag behind.
“I’m telling you now, dear court, dear prosecutor, you can write down: at 4:25 pm, citizen Navalny, being at such and such an address in the colony, called - here and here - all employees of the Anti-Corruption Fund to continue investigations, continue to publish facts of corruption, to find where Putin, his group, his relatives, his second wife, third wife - where they put the stolen money. Investigate all these United Russia ministers, publish it, encourage everyone else to spread it.
I call on everyone, as usual - an "unlimited group of people",
people, citizens of Russia, I call on donations to us in order to finance this anti-corruption activity. Spread it properly, because this is my political activity, and I am fighting, yes, to change the government in the country. I do not want these people to sit in the Kremlin. They've been there for decades! Well, it can't be that every minister in our country is officially a dollar millionaire. They are thieves. I believe they are thieves. I ask for donations so that we can investigate the activities of these thieves.”
And on Navalny’s Youtube channel, I recommend watching @ioannzh’s big video about why Putin wants to imprison Navalny, with the results of the first day of the trial from @kira_yarmysh, and of course with the speech of @navalny himself in court.
Russia is a terrorist state which violates international law! This state has no right to be part of the organisation promoting peace, democracy and sustainable development. REMOVE RUSSIA FROM THE @IPUparliament!#IPU144pic.twitter.com/GPZzXwXKjv
— Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine - Ukrainian Parliament (@ua_parliament) March 21, 2022
In the decades-long unfolding of Vladimir Putin's insane war on the world, America, like Ukraine, has been used as a test lab, for destabilization, disinformation, election subversion, extremist manipulation & corruption on a scale that now threatens to end our culture & our democracy with violence, terror & criminal conspiracy, surrounding Trump org, a side-project of Putin's oligarch gang.
What is mystifying to younger generations is how the "world order" of the UN, NATO, EU, have acquiesced to criminal terror, murder, poisoning, torture, imprisonment of political opponents, for decades allowing Putin & other corrupt warlords to destabilize the world. We've all been warped by a world system which allows psychopaths like Putin & Trump to seize power & smother the possibilities for humane, progressive & peaceful outcomes. Did humanity not learn anything from the century of world wars of the 20th century, with the genocide, slaughter, repression of millions?
This tyrannical psychopathology has become epidemic, intentionally spread like a virus to threaten many countries & billions of humans, from China & Myanmar to Russia, Belarus, Syria, Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, like an Orwellian, totalitarian blueprint for enslaving all of us, keeping us all in a state of panic & confusion, or behind barbed wire. Given Putin's latest psychopathic threat, to use nuclear weapons, let us not forget, even for an hour, that we are all living on a gigantic frankenstein monster made of cruise missiles, submarines, stealth jets & planet-scorching atomic bombs.
Is it coincidental that as these psychopath cults turn up their rage & paranoid threats, humanity is faced with unprecedented climate catastrophes, battered, baked, inundated, forced to flee from extreme weather, requiring us to rally together as a world & radically change our fuels & industries? One can argue that underlying the extremes of politics & environment lies a bed of corruption, connected directly to petroleum production & weapons of war. Obsolete & toxic industries need a reason to continue, or a smokescreen (like war) to hide behind.
Is it possible we are witnessing the dying desperation of these 20th century modes & mobsters of corruption & tyranny? Or are we going to continue to be victims of their violence, madness & theft of possibilities? Will we wait until we no longer have any possibilities left but become refugees, prisoners, hostages struggling just to survive? At what point will the institutions of world order & justice step in to hold these psychopaths & their enablers accountable? We can see in Ukraine how humanitarian intentions, prayers & appeals for sensibility mean nothing to the psychopaths, who actually revel in the cruelty & suffering they cause.
Humanity has reached a winnowing point in our evolution. We are planetary. We know within minutes what has happened on the other side of the planet. We all pretty much know who the psychopaths, criminals, warlords, manipulators are, with detailed documentation available right here on the internet. The "social media" companies know this too.
What is the bottleneck we are being squeezed into? Like the sages of ages & saviors have warned: money (is the root of all evil). Everything on the planet, in the bloodshot eyes of industry, including you & I, has been reduced to a monetary value. In this respect, we are all slaves to a brutal & exploitative economic system which favors control by any means necessary, be it corrupt, homicidal, or completely inhumane (as war is). If an alien occupation of overlords imposed this system on us, we would all rebel, but we have been groomed from birth to acquiesce to the numbers & values of the $y$tem & accept its abuse.
‘It’s not rational’: Putin’s bizarre speech reveals the real Vladimir
Putin references neo-Nazis & drug addicts in bizarre speech to Russian security council
Andrew Roth in Moscow
Looking dead-eyed into the camera on Friday, Vladimir Putin gave one of the most bizarre speeches of his 22 years as Russia’s leader, a directive that managed to sound alarming even in a week when he has ordered tanks into Ukraine and missile strikes on Kyiv.
“Once again I speak to the Ukrainian soldiers,” he said, addressing his enemy. “Do not allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, your wives and the elderly as a human shield. Take power into your own hands. It seems that it will be easier for us to come to an agreement than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”
The speech seemed to be ripped from an alternate reality – or from the second world war, where Putin appears to be spending more of his time as he launches the kind of broad military offensive not seen in Europe for nearly 70 years.
All this week, Putin’s megalomaniacal tendencies have been on display like never before. He has summoned his aides for a surreal national security council that resembled a television reality show and launched tirades about Lenin and decisions made nearly 100 years ago.
He has also, for the first time, spoken about his maximalist goals in this war: regime change in Kyiv, toppling the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and replacing it with a more pliant leadership. Putin’s call for a coup in Kyiv indicates that if Russia wins this war, Zelensky will almost certainly not remain in power. How he achieves that is anyone’s guess.
A number of analysts predicted this as Russia deployed more than 60% of its ground forces to Ukraine’s borders and demanded concessions that could never be granted.
But Putin’s unhinged appearances and apparent drive to war have raised questions of whether he remains a rational leader.
“Despite Crimea and everything else, Putin had always seemed an extremely pragmatic leader to me,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, the founder of R.Politik. “But now when he’s gone in this war against Ukraine, the logic in the decision is all about emotions, it’s not rational.”
Those emotions are deeply rooted in history and the historical injustices suffered by Russia. Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, said he saw Putin as a man with “a historical map in his mind and a plan to use his military to achieve it”.
Central to that map is Ukraine, which he has described as an artificial state. “Modern Ukraine was wholly and fully created by Russia,” Putin said in a historical sleight-of-hand, “namely Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
To help picture it, state TV ran a map earlier this week showing Ukraine cut up to represent which parts were “presents” from various leaders, including Stalin, Lenin and Khrushchev. Some commentators said it represents the partition that Putin himself might be imagining if he gets his way.
While once the map may have been viewed as fantasies or media trolling, a western diplomat based in Ukraine on Friday pointed to his speeches and to that map as a serious sign that Putin was weighing up a dismantling of the country.
“He is not pretending anymore. For the first time I think he’s revealing who he really is,” the diplomat wrote.
Why Putin’s Reasons For Invading Ukraine Are ‘Total Fiction’
Time to stop appeasing Putin and confront Russia’s imperial ambitions
By Paul Grod
The collapse of the USSR was in many ways remarkable as it happened so quickly and took place largely without bloodshed. However, it has since become increasing obvious that Russia never really came to terms with its reduced status or the loss of empire.
Unfortunately, a new generation of Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, and Belarusians currently find themselves forced to defend their freedoms as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to reassert his country’s old imperial influence. Meanwhile, nations in nearby Central Europe are also facing up to the return of a hostile Russia.
The epicenter of this new Cold War is Ukraine.
Since 2014, Russian aggression in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has taken the lives of more than 14,000 Ukrainians and forced millions to flee their homes. While the front lines in the east have remained largely static since 2015, Ukraine continues to suffer regular casualties. Meanwhile, around 7% of the country is under Russian occupation.
Ukraine’s December 1991 referendum was in many ways as significant an event as the initial declaration of independence which took place a little more than four months earlier. While the parliamentary declaration is marked every year on August 24 as Ukraine’s official Independence Day, the referendum paved the legal pathway towards the formal dissolution of the USSR.
The late 1991 referendum was also crucial in securing recognition of Ukrainian independence from the international community. Many of the first countries to recognize an independent Ukraine including Canada, Poland, and the United States would go on to become the country’s closest allies, standing shoulder to shoulder over the coming decades as Ukrainians struggled to achieve their aspirations for peace, personal freedoms, and human dignity.
In order to secure these goals, Ukrainians have sought to join the key institutions of the democratic world. Since early 2019, the country’s NATO and European Union membership aspirations have been enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution.
Ukraine’s progress since 1991 has been anything but straightforward, but the country has emerged from years of domestic political turbulence as a vibrant and highly competitive democracy. This makes Ukraine a source of inspiration for the wider post-Soviet region. At the same time, Ukraine’s democratic progress means it is seen in Moscow as an existential threat to Russia’s own authoritarian model.
The current Russian military build-up along the Ukrainian border has attracted considerable international attention. As political leaders and analysts speculate over the likelihood of an invasion, it is vital to underline that Russia has already invaded Ukraine and is waging a war against Ukrainian statehood that is currently in its eighth year.
Putin has made it clear he does not accept Ukraine’s independence. His recent essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” and his frequent claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” reflect the Kremlin ruler’s denial of Ukraine’s very existence as a distinct and separate nation. This rhetoric directly echoes the language of the Czarist era and exposes the imperial ambitions driving Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The democratic world now has an opportunity to demonstrate to Russia that the rules-based international order will prevail by adopting a decisive response to the Kremlin campaign against Ukraine.
It is no secret that the only language Russia respects is the language of strength. Unfortunately, Western efforts to continue doing business with Russia since 2014 have served to encourage further bad behavior. In geopolitics as in the school playground, the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them.
There are a number of options available to the West that would send an unambiguous message to Moscow. Freezing the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be a strong signal. It is also important to upgrade military cooperation with Ukraine, including the provision of defensive weapons.
Ideally, Western leaders would demonstrate their rejection of Russia’s imperial ambitions by moving forward with NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. Allowing Moscow an unofficial veto on future NATO membership rewards the Kremlin and is the surest way to guarantee continued Russian policies of international aggression.
Thirty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted for independence. Tragically, they are now dying in defense of this independence in a war waged by a revisionist and resurgent Russia.
With the Russian military currently massed along the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin is threatening to launch a major escalation in its campaign to extinguish Ukrainian independence. Putin has already plunged the world into a new Cold War in his quest to subjugate Ukraine. He will continue to advance his imperial agenda until confronted decisively.
At stake are the values that will define international relations for decades to come. The West needs bold and visionary leadership to end this war on democracy and a rules-based international order. The alternative is a new age of empires where great powers are free to impose themselves on weaker neighbors. Putin wants to resurrect the Soviet Empire and reverse the verdict of 1991. We cannot allow him to succeed.
Paul Grod is President of the Ukrainian World Congress.
This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality right now.
Masha Gessen: Vladimir Putin's eerie similarities to madman Hitler
Masha Gessen
Vladimir Putin has enjoyed a stunning variety of incarnations in the American imagination in his nearly 15 years as Russia’s leader. He started out as an economic reformer and a budding democrat. His graduation to dictator took years.
In that time, he dismantled Russia’s electoral system, took over its media, saw many of his opponents killed, jailed or forced into exile, created one of the most ruthlessly corrupt government systems in history, made peaceful protest punishable by jail time, waged a long and brutal war on his country’s territory and a short one against a neighboring country, Georgia, a piece of which Russia bit off in 2008.
But it was only after he invaded Ukraine last month that Americans’ image of him took another drastic turn. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ostensibly told President Obama that Putin was out of touch with reality. And then former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler.
So is Putin insane, is he Hitler, or is he both? He is none of those things. In fact, he may be unlike any politician the world has known.
Russian television parrots what Putin has been telling the Russian people for more than a decade: Russia is a country under siege, surrounded by enemies, perennially on the brink of catastrophe, from which only Putin can save it. In Ukraine, and everywhere, he is defending poor besieged Russians, not to mention the history and honor of the U.S.S.R.
Putin expressed this worldview long before he became president, and he has consistently acted on it since.
The day after Merkel’s statement became public, Putin held a news conference in which he denied that Russian troops were in Crimea and made so many other fanciful statements that the State Department issued a fact sheet exposing 10 of his most blatant lies.
Many analysts concluded that the bizarre news conference proved Putin had indeed lost his mind. They were wrong. Putin was acting the way he always has, like a playground bully. Bullies do not aspire to lead through rhetoric; they dominate by intimidation. When confronted, they either lash out or they obfuscate.
Putin said the troops occupying Crimea weren’t Russian, then promised to deploy the Russian military to protect civilians in Ukraine, then disowned deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. He was like a bully caught wearing a younger boy’s jacket — first claiming it was his own, then saying he got it from a friend, then that he wasn’t friends with that guy anyway. This is a tried-and-true intimidation strategy: Bald-faced lies render opponents helpless.
So if Putin is not insane, is he Hitler?
There are some eerie similarities: his obsession with imminent catastrophe, his total distrust of the rest of the world, his paranoid scapegoating of particular minorities, and his appetite for annexing new territories.
But knowing that Putin is similar to many 20th century dictators is not very useful or even interesting. He does, however, have one trait that sets him apart. History’s dictators have generally tried to claim that they were good people fighting the good fight. But Putin has no positive spin for his aggression — or his actions in general.
The political culture Putin has created in Russia is based on the assumption that the world is rotten to the core.
In his official autobiography, published in 2000, Putin told a joke in which President Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev compare notes: Both are embezzling, but Brezhnev embezzles twice as much, blatantly. This is the line Putin’s officials have taken in response to all accusations of graft over the last 14 years: Corruption is endemic to all governments; Russian corruption is just less hypocritical.
The same goes for Russia’s treatment of minorities and political protesters, as well as violations of international law: Putin and his officials are always quick to point out that Western countries are also imperfect on these issues.
A corollary is Putin’s conviction that his opponents act out of self-interest rather than on the basis of political conviction. When members of the punk rock group Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail, he said they got what they wanted.
This belief that everyone, without exception, acts solely out of base self-interest is what has led Putin to ratchet up the aggression, meanness and vulgarity of his public statements and political actions.
For American culture, which relies heavily on a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, this is an impossible world view to absorb. It is another world indeed. But that does not make it crazy.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of the political biography “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”
Renewable Energy Solutions Can Save Our World from Kleptocracy & Corruption: How to defeat Putin & other Petrostate Tyrants
by Bill McKibben
‘Imagine a Europe that ran on solar power and windpower. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia.’
The pictures this morning of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukrainian countryside seemed both surreal – a flashback to a Europe that we’ve seen only in newsreels – and inevitable. It’s been clear for years that Vladimir Putin was both evil and driven and that eventually we might come to a moment like this.
One of the worst parts of facing today’s reality is our impotence in its face. Yes, America is imposing sanctions, and yes, that may eventually hamper Putin. But the Russian leader made his move knowing we could not actually fight him in Ukraine – and indeed knowing that his hinted willingness to use nuclear weapons will make it hard to fight him anywhere, though one supposes we will have no choice if he attacks a Nato member.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to dramatically reduce Putin’s power. One way, in particular: to get off oil and gas.
This is not a “war for oil and gas” in the sense that too many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.
Russia has a pathetic economy – you can verify that for yourself by looking around your house and seeing how many of the things you use were made within its borders. Today, 60% of its exports are oil and gas; they supply the money that powers the country’s military machine.
And, alongside that military machine, control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon. They have, time and again, threatened to turn off the flow of hydrocarbons to western Europe. When the Germans finally this week stopped the planned Nordstream 2 pipeline, Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev , said, “Welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon have to pay 2,000 euros ($2,270) per thousand cubic meters!” His not very subtle notion: if the price of keeping houses warm doubles, Europe will have no choice but to fold.
Today, 60% of Russia’s exports are oil and gas. Control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon
Finally, even the Biden administration – which has been playing its hand wisely in the lead up to the invasion – is constrained by oil and gas. As we impose sanctions, everyone’s looking for an out: the Italians want to exempt high-end luxury goods and the Belgians diamonds, but the US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to seriously interrupt the flow of Russian oil for fear of driving up gas prices and thus weakening American resolve.
As one “senior state department official” told the Wall Street Journal this week, “doing anything that affects … or halts energy transactions would have a great impact on the United States, American citizens and our allies. So our intention here is to impose the hardest sanctions we can while trying to safeguard the American public and the rest of the world from those measures,” the official said. It’s obviously not an idle fear: as of this morning Tucker Carlson was attacking Russia hawk Lindsey Graham for supporting a conflict that will bring “higher gas prices” while he has a “generous Congressional pension”. If you’re an apologist for fascism, high gas prices are your first go-to move.
So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.
Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia – it could impose every kind of sanction, and keep them in place until the country buckled. Imagine an America where the cost of gas was not a political tripwire, because if people had to have a pickup to make them feel sufficiently manly, that pickup would run on electricity that came from the sun and wind. It would take an evil-er genius than Vladimir Putin to figure out how to embargo the sun.
These are not novel technologies – they exist, are growing, and could be scaled up quickly. In the years after Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, America turned its industrial prowess to building tanks, bombers, and destroyers. In 1941, in Ypsilanti, the world’s largest industrial plant went up in six month’s time, and soon it was churning out a B-24 bomber every hour. A bomber is a complicated machine with more than a million parts; a wind turbine is, by contrast, relatively simple. In Michigan alone (“the arsenal of democracy”), a radiator company retooled to make 20m steel helmets and a rubber factory retooled to produce the liners for those helmets; the company that made the fabric for Ford’s seat cushions stopped doing that and started pushing out parachutes. Do we think that it’s beyond us to quickly produce the solar panels and the batteries required to end our dependence on fossil fuel?
Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia
It’s not easy – among other things, Russia has a good deal of some of the minerals that help in renewable energy production. (Nickel, for example.) But, here again, the example of the second world war is helpful – with the Axis in control of commodities like rubber, we quickly figured out how to mass produce substitutes.
It’s true that we could produce carbon free energy with nuclear power too, as long as we were willing to pay the heavy premium that technology requires – and right now Germany is probably regretting its decision to hastily shut down its reactors in the wake of the Fukushima accident. But if you think about the scenario now unfolding across Europe, you’re reminded of another of the advantages of renewable power, which is that it’s widely distributed. There are far fewer central nodes to attack with cruise missiles and artillery shells – targeting reactors is pretty easy, but driving your tank across Europe from one solar panel to the next so you can get out to smash it with a hammer is comical.
At the moment, big oil is using the fighting in Ukraine as an excuse to try to expand its footprint – reliable industry ally Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, went on Fox this week to argue that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline had empowered the Russian leader, for instance, and the American Petroleum Institute today called for more oil and gas development. But this is absurd – we may need, for the remaining weeks of this winter, to insure gas supplies for Europe, but by next winter we need to remove that lever. That means an all-out effort to decarbonize that continent, and then our own. It’s not impossible.
We have to do it anyway, if we’re to have any hope of slowing the climate change. And we can do it fast if we want: huge offshore windfarms in Europe have been built inside of 18 months without any wartime pressure.
We should be in agony today – people are dying because they want to live in a democracy, want to determine their own affairs. But that agony should, and can, produce real change. (And not just in Europe. Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudia Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery.) Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College.
Alexey Navalny turns out to be a great journalist/investigator Navalny video about ‘#Putin’s Palace’ will help sort out the oligarchs (some Trump org overlap) ♞♘ Companion excellent website: https://palace.navalny.com
The Other Mr. President: #Putin the creepy enigma of war https://t.co/JKCvvjbDPE Vladimir Putin elevator pitch: if the Truman Show surrounded a homicidal malignant maniac, had its own military, now invading from an evil alternate dimension w/extremist cults. #PutinIsaWarCriminal
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset more than 40 years ago which exploded into a decades-long 'relationship' of mutual benefit to both Russia and Trump, a shocking new book claims.
Explosive new book claims the KGB began grooming 'young and vain' Donald Trump 40 years ago by saving him from financial ruin and turned him into a Russian asset who gave Putin 'everything he wanted' as president.
'This is a story of dirty secrets and the most powerful people in the world' and Unger reveals what went wrong in the numerous congressional investigations into Trump.
The author claims surveillance on Trump began in 1977 when he married Ivana Zelnickova (Ivanka's Mom), a Czech national from a district where the secret police force was in league with the KGB and Trump was already talking about wanting to be president one day.
In 1987 Donald and Ivana Trump visited Palace Square in St.Petersburg, Russia. The author says the invitation to Russia by a high-level KGB official in 1987 under the guise of a preliminary scouting trip to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, was in fact 'deep development' by KGB handlers that furthered creating secret back channels and allowed the Russians to influence and damage American democracy.
Trump was rescued multiple times from multiple bankruptcies by boatloads of Russian cash laundered through his real estate in the 80s and 90s, the author asserts. Russian money also picked up the tab for buildings franchised under Trump's name.
Trump's association with Russia began in 1976 when he decided to make his move from developing real estate in Queens to Manhattan.
Under the tutelage of the 'Mafia lawyer and dark satanic prince of the McCarthy era', Roy Cohn, who tutored Trump on how to find generous tax abatements, the brash real estate developer paid one thin dollar to buy the old decrepit Commodore Hotel that sat next to Grand Central Station on 42nd and Park Avenue.
The development of that decaying monstrosity into the Grand Hyatt New York offers the key to Trump's first encounter with the Russians when he went downtown to Joy-Lud Electronics at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street to buy hundreds of television sets for his new hotel.
So Trump was under the watchful eye of the KGB. But that had begun years earlier when the 'young, vain, narcissistic and ruthlessly ambitious real estate developer' sold multimillion-dollar condos to the Russian Mafia laundering money by buying through anonymous shell companies.
The sale of these condos made Trump rich again after losing billions of dollars when his Atlantic City casinos went belly up.
Trump sold multimillion-dollar condos to the Russian Mafia laundering money by buying through anonymous shell companies. The sale of these condos made Trump rich again after losing billions of dollars when his Atlantic City casinos went belly up
The author claims Trump's association with Russia began in 1976 when he decided to make his move from developing real estate in Queens to Manhattan. Trump also appealed to the KGB because he was 'vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery and greedy'.
'With Trump it wasn't just weakness. Everything was excessive. His vanity, excessive, Narcissism, excessive. Greed, excessive. Ignorance, excessive', writes the author.
'Deeply insecure intellectually, highly suggestible, exceedingly susceptible to flattery, Trump was anxious to acquire some real intellectual validation - and the KGB would be more than happy to humor him,' the author added.
Must see: Watch me and Yuri Shvets, fmr KGB officer who is great source forAmerican Kompromat, on Narativ TV, telling for the 1st, straight from the horse's mouth, how the KGB cultivated Donald Trump. Buy now: https://t.co/0kmwTkVLldhttps://t.co/bi3sdDdSRy
The file on Trump with the Soviet/Russian intelligence went from laundering money through Trump luxury condos, to partnering with wealthy Soviet émigrés in franchising scams, to becoming involved in countless financial irregularities, to creating secret back channels with the Russians, to partying with Jeffrey Epstein, and on and on,' writes Unger.'
The author claims Trump was connected to Russians through friend Jeffrey Epstein, who was supplying the Russians and Silicon Valley with underage girls.
Epstein, whose father had been a municipal parks department employee in Coney Island, amassed hundreds of millions of dollars, owned fabulous homes around the world and lived two short miles from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
Within his house there were scores of women and young girls, dozens in their teens who were passed around like party favors by Epstein with the help of one time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell -- to the world's most powerful men.
'All the while, he was secretly recording their activities, the tapes of which provided a hammerlock of kompromat, leverage, and influence', Unger writes.
It was a world of unimaginable decadence – gorgeous young women, private planes, spectacular residences – and sex with young girls. Billionaire oligarchs shipped in teenage girls from Russia and the Ukraine.
Russian models and beauty pageant contestants were flown in and manipulated for sexual favors by Epstein with Ghislaine as his fixer, the author claims.
Trump fit in and he reciprocated Jeffrey and Ghislaine's invites.
(Photo with Ivanka around the same time)
Twenty-eight young women were flown in to Mar-a-Lago for a calendar girl competition and the only two males guests were Trump and Epstein.
Trump was known for nonstop groping as well as putting his hands up the skirt of the girlfriend of the organizer of the calendar girl competition – all the way to her crotch.
Christina Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and sister of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg, met Ghislaine when Ghislane was knitting together a social network that introduced Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew to Epstein.
Christina said her mother had an affair with JFK in 1962 and suggested she was President Kennedy's love child.
'Ghislaine was the woman behind the world's greatest Rolodex – and all about power and money', stated Oxenberg.
When the FBI raided Epstein's homes, 'they found video recording equipment, hard disks and evidence of #kompromat – videos of billionaires in the act of pedophilia, raping underage girls, committing crimes that could lead to hard time'.
Trump's name was in Epstein's black book with no fewer than 16 phone numbers.
'Trump Model Management was very much a part of Epstein's picture and allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices –violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls,' the author writes.
Epstein took the fifth when asked if he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of females under eighteen.
Epstein claimed he was the one who introduced Melania to Trump.
'Jeffrey and Ghislaine knew Trump's secrets, and he knew theirs – secrets were the ultimate currency in the decadent and highly transactional world they lived in,' the author writes.
Epstein had made videotapes of sexual acts that he could use for blackmail or kompromat – compromising material - and photos of Trump with a bevy of young girls and girls giggling at the semen stains on Trump's pants when in the company of the under eighteen-year olds and he couldn't hold back his 'excitement'.
After 17 years of friendship, the close friends permanently fell out in 2004 when Epstein told Trump that he was keen on buying a spectacular mansion in Palm Beach being sold out of a bankruptcy auction.
With his heart set on the property, he wanted to make one change – move the swimming pool. So he brought his pal Trump to the property for advice.
In financial straits with his bankruptcies in Atlantic City, Trump outbid his friend with an offer of more than $41 million. Trump put the house up for sale shortly thereafter for $125 million.
Enraged, Epstein never spoke to Trump again but showed around photos of Trump with topless young girls and one photo with semen stained pants.
After three years into Trump's presidency, the curtain was pulled back and revealed 'Trump was a sociopath who had given false or misleading statements more than 20,000 times while in office and created false narratives that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf.'
When it came to 2020 and the president's daily briefings on the rapidly expanding Covid-19 pandemic as early as January that Trump never read, 'He did next to nothing when it came to stopping the spread of the virus', writes Unger who calls it 'a death cult'. He just didn't care if Americans died.
'The pandemic was being handled by a superstitious, science-defying authoritarian leader who had decided to let the people fend for themselves – and die accordingly,' the author writes.
The nation was now in free-fall - thanks to the 'vulgar and vile, misogynistic, racist firebrand' - who had mesmerized tens of millions with 'anti-science based policies that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans'.
ATTN Justice Dept: remember pledging "All of the victims deserve their day in court"? So what about #Epstein & #Trump's many sex crime/trafficking victims? 💀 & "suicide"?#dɯnɹʇ
Donald Trump Associate Jeffrey Epstein Charged w Sex Trafficking Of Minors
Judge denied #GhislaineMaxwell to prevent $23M bail jump. Connect mob$ter dots to #TrumpModels & "teflon Don" the mob boss/trafficker *
#Maxwell/#Epstein recruited at #Trump Mar-a-Lago & #NYC 💀 Inside the wicked saga of #JeffreyEpstein: Oz media report
"#Tяump crime family associates & #TrumpModels clients involved w/ #Dershowitz, #Maxwell & #Epstein in underage sex slavery conspiracy" seems to demand another Netflix series. #TrumpCrimeFamily #Melania #Ivanka all culpable, they were there
Beginning in the late ’80s, the infamous sex trafficker and the future president (and their mutual friend Ghislaine Maxwell) palled around for almost two decades. In an excerpt from his new book, American Kompromat, the author exposes their shared tastes for private planes, shady money, and foreign-born models—many of them “on the younger side.”
BY CRAIG UNGER JANUARY 21, 2021
Ghislaine Maxwell saw Donald Trump as a vital connection for her then boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein early on. In the late ’80s, she had worked for her father, British media mogul Robert Maxwell, in London, first at Pergamon Press, then in another division that specialized in corporate gifts. Thinking Trump would be a great catch as a client for her venture, she realized she had a terrific connection through her father, who knew Trump fairly well as a rival, bidding unsuccessfully to buy the New York Post, inviting him to party aboard the Lady Ghislaine, and attending extravagant society soirees.
Naively assuming that her father would appreciate her initiative, Ghislaine Maxwell asked him to call Trump. However, according to Nicholas Davies’s Death of a Tycoon, even though she was his favorite daughter, Robert Maxwell erupted. “Have you got your bum in your head?” he said. “Why the fuck would Donald Trump want to waste his time seeing you with your crappy gifts when he has a multimillion-dollar business to run?”
But her father was wrong. In the end, Trump spent plenty of time with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. In fact, he fit in quite well with them. Arrivistes all—be it Epstein’s Coney Island, Trump’s Queens, or Robert Maxwell’s Eastern European shtetl—they had all come from the wrong side of the tracks. And at some point in their lives, Robert Maxwell, Trump, and Epstein all had ties to foreign intelligence agencies, arms dealers, and the sex trade.
It was a world of unimaginable decadence. The epicenter of the operation was Epstein’s enormously opulent Upper East Side townhouse. As a dwelling, it was less a home than a deliberately, extravagantly staged showcase, a calculated spectacle that declared to the world that Epstein, a college dropout from a middle-class Brooklyn family, had been embraced securely in the bosom of the powers that be.
Epstein’s notorious “black book” of contacts, compiled largely by Ghislaine Maxwell, shows the rarefied circles in which he traveled—Nobel laureates, heads of states, British royals, Wall Street power brokers, and A-listers in every glamour profession. Trump had no fewer than 16 phone numbers beside his name in Epstein’s black book.
Trump later recalled Epstein in those days. “Terrific guy,” he famously told New York magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
No one was more dazzled by the glamour of the Trump–Maxwell–Epstein axis than former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who was so hypnotized by its lavishness that he professed not to see anything wrong with it. In fact, it was something you aspired to. “In those days, if you didn’t know Trump and you didn’t know Epstein, you were a nobody,” Dershowitz, who later served on Epstein’s defense team, told The New York Times.
Within the context of their highly transactional relationships, Trump’s friendship with Epstein struck onlookers as a significant mutually beneficial connection. In the ’90s, Trump needed friends. He had just gone belly-up in Atlantic City. In addition to helping Trump get back on his feet, Epstein seemed to be a latter-day Hugh Hefner—surrounded by gorgeous young women, bespoke private planes, and spectacular residences, all while Ghislaine Maxwell orchestrated a never-ending series of movable feasts at which Epstein would entertain and play courtier to presidents, movie stars, brutal dictators, world-class scientists, Wall Street billionaires, and the like. And he’d have sex with two, three, or more young girls almost every day.
Trump fit right in. Epstein and Maxwell invited him everywhere—and Trump reciprocated. At one highly selective party in 1992 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, The New York Times reported, no fewer than 28 attractive young women were flown in to participate in a calendar-girl competition as entertainment. The organizer, George Houraney, who ran American Dream Enterprise, a small Florida company that staged a calendar-girl contest and other events, was appalled to learn that there were only two male guests—Trump and Epstein.
“Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs,” Houraney told Trump, according to the Times. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein? … I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.”
But Trump ignored Houraney’s warning and plowed ahead anyway. Houraney’s longtime girlfriend Jill Harth later told The New York Times that Trump groped her nonstop at a business meeting around the same time. “He was relentless,” Harth said, describing how Trump took the couple to dinner, sat beside Harth, and put his hands up her skirt all the way to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”
Trump was often the center of Maxwell’s attention, and women who entered Trump’s orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein’s homes.
Among them was Russian model and beauty-pageant contestant Anna Malova, whose journey from the world of beauty pageants and modeling to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Epstein’s island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein and his associates began manipulating young women.
As Epstein’s operation continued into the 2000s, he began importing girls from the former Soviet Union. After the 1998 Miss Universe pageant, Anna Malova signed up with Karin Models, which had been founded by Epstein friend Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel, who also owned MC2 Modeling Agency, was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of groping them sexually, drugging their drinks, and rape.
“I really despise Jean-Luc. … This is a guy who should be behind bars,” John Casablancas, the late modeling agent, told journalist Michael Gross, whose book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women alleges that Brunel repeatedly drugged and raped models. According to Casablancas, Brunel and his pals “were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks.”
Trump’s behavior at such events is unclear, but, according to The Guardian, “The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse, or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.”
As the Epstein operation chugged along, Trump, who had married
three models—Ivana, Marla, and Melania—was very much part of Epstein’s picture. According to court records, message pads confiscated from Epstein’s home showed that Trump called Epstein’s West Palm Beach mansion a number of times.
Asked under oath in a September 2016 deposition whether he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of girls under the age of 18, Epstein punted. Rather than answer the questions, he took the Fifth.
Trump Model Management allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices that MC2 did, such as violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls. Three former Trump models, all noncitizens of the U.S., told Mother Jones in 2016 that Trump Model Management profited by using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work here. And two of the former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency.
All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.
Trump became known for hosting parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time, where older rich men were introduced to young women and girls who assumed “they’d get somewhere” by joining the party, as one partygoer, a fashion photographer, told Michael Gross, writing in the Daily Beast. “Of course, it never happens.”
According to the photographer, the girls were as young as 15. “[They were] over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations,” the photographer added. “There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating girls who can’t push back and can be discarded.”
Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer. “It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor.”
In February 2000, Trump staged a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago and appeared with Epstein, Maxwell, and his latest girlfriend, Melania Knauss, whom Epstein claimed to have introduced to Trump. Epstein’s claim was reported in The New York Times, which noted that “while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting.”
But in 2004, after a friendship of roughly 17 years, Trump and Epstein had a serious falling-out when Epstein sought to buy a spectacular oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach called Maison de l’Amitié (“House of Friendship”) that was being sold out of a bankruptcy auction. The property, a nearly 62,000-square-foot neoclassical palace, had once been owned by Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retailer who was so close to Epstein.
Epstein had his heart set on the house, but he planned to make at least one major renovation project once he bought it: He wanted to relocate the swimming pool, and he brought Trump to the property to give him advice on how to do it.
But before the sale was finalized, Epstein was horrified to see that Trump, who was still underwater financially from his Atlantic City bankruptcies, outbid him with an offer of more than $41 million for the property. The purchase was financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already holding dubious loans for Trump.
Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for a reported $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again.
Exposing Jeffrey Epstein's international sex trafficking ring | 60 Minutes Australia
At Least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct
More women allege underage sexual abuse by Donald Trump
Business Insider Sep 17, 2020
At least 26 women have accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. Renewed attention was brought to the allegations amid the #MeToo movement and a national conversation concerning sexual misconduct. Trump has repeatedly denied the accusations, denouncing his accusers as "liars."
In June 2019, columnist E. Jean Carroll accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her by forcing his penis inside her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.
And in September 2020, model Amy Dorris said that in 1997 Trump forcibly kissed her, groped her all over her body, and gripped her tightly so she couldn't get away.
A deluge of women made their accusations public following the October 2016 publication of the "Access Hollywood" tape, in which Trump was heard boasting about grabbing women's genitals in 2005. Some of Trump's accusers made their stories public months before the tape's release, and still others came forward in the months following.
One accuser, Samantha Holvey, who spoke out in 2016 about her experience with Trump as a Miss USA pageant contestant, said in 2017 that while Trump's election was painful, she and others see the #MeToo movement as an opportunity to "try round two."
"We're private citizens, and for us to put ourselves out there to try and show America who this man is and especially how he views women, and for them to say 'meh, we don't care' — it hurts," Holvey said on NBC News' "Megyn Kelly Today" in December 2017. "And so now it's just like, all right, let's try round two. The environment's different. Let's try again."
Here are all of the allegations — in chronological order — made by 26 named women:
Jessica Leeds
Jessica Leeds told the New York Times in October 2016 that Trump reached his hand up her skirt and groped her while seated next to her on a flight in the late 1970s. "He was like an octopus. His hands were everywhere," Leeds said, adding that she fled to the back of the plane.
During an interview on NBC News' "Megyn Kelly Today" in December, Leeds added that she was at a gala in New York three years after the incident on the plane when she ran into Trump, who recognized her and called her a "cunt."
"He called me the worst name ever," she said. "It was shocking. It was like a bucket of cold water being thrown over me."
Ivana Trump
Donald Trump and his former wife, Ivana, pose outside the Federal Courthouse after she was sworn in as a United States citizen in May 1988.
In a 1990 divorce deposition, Trump's first wife and the mother of his three eldest children Ivana Trump accused her then-husband of raping her in a fit of rage in 1989. Ivana said Trump attacked her after he underwent a painful "scalp reduction" procedure done by a doctor she had recommended, tearing her clothes and yanking out a chunk of her hair.
"Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than 16 months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault," Harry Hurt III, who obtained a copy of the deposition, wrote in a 1993 book about Trump. "According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, 'he raped me.'"
Ivana later slightly altered her allegation, saying that while she felt "violated" on that occasion, she hadn't accused Trump of raping her "in a literal or criminal sense."
"[O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage," Ivana wrote in a 1993 statement. "As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a 'rape,' but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense."
Ivana is mother to Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka Trump.
Kristin Anderson
Kristin Anderson, a photographer and former model said Trump reached under her skirt and touched her vagina through her underwear at a New York City nightclub in the early 1990s. Anderson, then in her early 20s, said she wasn't talking with Trump at the time and didn't realize he was sitting next to her when he groped her without her consent.
"So, the person on my right who, unbeknownst to me at that time was Donald Trump, put their hand up my skirt. He did touch my vagina through my underwear, absolutely. And as I pushed the hand away and I got up and I turned around and I see these eyebrows, very distinct eyebrows, of Donald Trump," she told The Washington Post in October 2016.
Anderson said she and her friends, who were talking together around a table at the time of the incident, were "very grossed out and weirded out," but thought "Okay, Donald is gross. We all know he's gross. Let's just move on."
Jill Harth
Jill Harth, a businesswoman who worked with Trump in the 1990s, told the Guardian in July 2016 that Trump pushed her against a wall, put his hand up her skirt, and tried to kiss her at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in the early 1990s.
"He was relentless," she told the New York Times. "I didn't know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route." Harth sued Trump in 1997 both for sexual harassment and for failing to uphold his end of a business deal with Harth and her then-partner.
Lisa Boyne
Lisa Boyne, a health food business entrepreneur, told HuffPost in October 2016 that she attended a 1996 dinner with Trump and modeling agent John Casablancas during which several other women in attendance were forced to walk across a table in order to leave.
As the women walked on the table, Boyne says that Trump looked up their skirts and commented on their underwear and genitals. Trump allegedly asked Boyne for her opinion on which of the women he should sleep with.
Boyne joined Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey, Rachel Crooks — three others who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct — in calling on Congress to investigate Trump in December.
Mariah Billado & Victoria Hughes
Two Miss Teen USA contestants told BuzzFeed News in October 2016 that Trump walked in on them while they were changing in their dressing rooms during the 1997 pageant.
"I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, 'Oh my god, there's a man in here,'" Mariah Billado, who represented Vermont in 1997, told BuzzFeed. Billado added that Trump said something along the lines of, "Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before."
Victoria Hughes, a former Miss New Mexico, said Trump first introduced himself to the teenage contestants when he unexpectedly walked into their dressing room. "It was certainly the most inappropriate time to meet us all for the first time," she told BuzzFeed.
E. Jean Carroll
Former Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her by pinning her against the wall and forcing his penis inside of her in a department store dressing room the mid-1990s.
"The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips," Carroll wrote in an excerpt of her 2019 book,"What Do We Need Men For?".
She went on, "The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I'm not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle."
Temple Taggart
Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, told the New York Times in May 2016 that Trump "kissed me directly on the lips" when she met him at the Miss USA pageant in 1997. Trump did the same thing when Taggart met with him again at Trump Tower in Manhattan after he offered to aid her modeling career, she said. In November 2017, Taggart spoke out again, telling the Times that the allegations against Trump were "brushed under the rug."
Cathy Heller
Cathy Heller told the Guardian in October 2016 that she was attending a Mother's Day brunch with her husband, children, and in-laws at Mar-a-Lago in the 1990s when Trump approached her table, introduced himself to her, and forcibly kissed her.
"He took my hand, and grabbed me, and went for the lips," she said, and added that she was "angry and shaken" as a result of the incident.
Amy Dorris
Amy Dorris told The Guardian in an interview published in September 2020 that Trump forcibly kissed her, groped her all over her body, and gripped her tightly so she couldn't get away in his US Open VIP box on September 5, 1997.
"He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off," Dorris told The Guardian. "And then that's when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything ... I was in his grip, and I couldn't get out of it." Dorris, a 24-year-old model who Trump invited to attend the tournament along with her boyfriend, said she told Trump to "please stop," but "he didn't care."
Karena Virginia
Karena Virginia, a yoga instructor and life coach, told the Washington Post in October 2016 that Trump groped her as she waited for her car outside the US Open in New York in 1998.
Virginia, then 27, said she overheard Trump talking with a group of men about her legs and that Trump then approached her, grabbed her arm, and touched her breast before asking, "Don't you know who I am?"
Karen Johnson
Karen Johnson, a regular at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, said Trump pulled her behind a tapestry and kissed and groped her without her consent during a New Year's Eve party there in the early 2000s.
"I'm a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he's strong, and he just kissed me," Johnson said. "I was so scared because of who he was ... I don't even know where it came from. I didn't have a say in the matter."
Johnson said Trump forcibly grabbed her genitals.
"When he says that thing, 'Grab them in the pussy,' that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that's where he grabbed me," she said, according to the book excerpt.
Johnson said Trump called her repeatedly after the incident, offering to fly her to New York to visit him. She said she refused his advances and never saw him again or visited Mar-a-Lago, where she'd had her wedding reception years earlier.
Tasha Dixon & Bridget Sullivan
Two Miss USA contestants said Trump walked into their dressing rooms, where female participants were changing, and ogled them.
Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Arizona who competed in the 2001 Miss USA pageant, told CBS in October 2016 that Trump walked into the contestants' dressing room while they were changing.
"He just came strolling right in," Dixon said. "There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless, other girls were naked."
She added, "To have the owner come waltzing in when we're naked or half naked in a very physically vulnerable position, and then to have the pressure of the people that work for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him."
Dixon said there was "no one to complain to" because Trump owned the pageant and everyone employed there reported to him.
Bridget Sullivan, Miss New Hampshire in 2000, told BuzzFeed News in May 2016 that Trump walked into the contestants' dressing room unannounced and hugged her inappropriately.
"The time that he walked through the dressing rooms was really shocking. We were all naked," Sullivan said, comparing Trump to a "creepy uncle." "He'd hug you just a little low on your back."
Melinda McGillivray
Melinda "Mindy" McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post in October 2016 that Trump grabbed her buttocks while they were backstage during a Ray Charles concert at Mar-a-Lago in 2003.
Ken Davidoff, a photographer present at the concert, said McGillivray, then 23, approached him soon after the incident and said, "Donald just grabbed my ass!"
McGillivray spoke out again on "Megyn Kelly Today" in December, calling for a congressional investigation into the accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump. "He has to face the music; he can't get away with this," McGillivray said. "I want justice."
Natasha Stoynoff
People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff wrote in an October 2016 column that Trump sexually assaulted her in 2005 at Mar-a-Lago. Stoynoff was visiting Trump and his new wife, Melania, at their Florida estate to report on a story about the couple's first year of marriage.
While a pregnant Melania was changing clothes for a photoshoot, Trump offered to show Stoynoff a "tremendous" room at the resort.
"We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat," Stoynoff wrote. She added that Trump told her they would have a sexual affair. "Have you ever been to Peter Luger's for steaks? I'll take you. We're going to have an affair, I'm telling you," he allegedly said.
Jennifer Murphy & Juliet Huddy
Juliet Huddy, a former Fox News anchor, said on the "Mornin!!! With Bill Schulz" podcast in December 2017 that Trump kissed her on the lips without her consent after a meeting in Trump Tower in Manhattan in 2005 or 2006.
"He went to say goodbye and he, rather than kiss me on the cheek, he leaned in on the lips," she said. Huddy added that she was surprised by the kiss, but "didn't feel threatened" or "offended" at the time. "Now that I've matured, I would've said, 'Nope.' At that time, I was making excuses," she said in December.
Jennifer Murphy, a former contestant both in Miss USA and Trump's reality TV show "The Apprentice," told Grazia magazine in December 2016 that Trump kissed her unexpectedly following a job interview in Trump Tower in 2005.
Although Murphy said she was "very taken aback at the time," she later told CNN that she "wasn't offended" by the kiss. She said she voted for him for president, and even created a Katy Perry parody video in which she sang, "I was kissed by Trump and I liked it."
Rachel Crooks
Rachel Crooks told the New York Times in October 2016 that Trump kissed her on the mouth without her consent when she introduced herself him in 2005 Trump Tower in Manhattan, where she worked as a receptionist.
She told the Times that she and Trump shook hands and then he kissed her "directly on the mouth."Crooks told her sister, who confirmed her account to the Times, but said she thought she would lose her job if she told her company anything about the interaction.
"I was shocked, devastated," she said during a December 2017 interview on "Megyn Kelly Today," adding: "I remember hiding in our boss' office because no one else was there, it was early in the morning, and I called my sister ... I felt horrible."
Crooks joined calls for a congressional investigation into Trump's alleged misconduct.
Samantha Holvey
Samantha Holvey, a contestant in the 2006 Miss USA pageant, which Trump owned, told CNN in October 2016 that Trump personally inspected each of the pageant contestants individually.
"He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people," Holvey said, adding that it made her feel "the dirtiest I felt in my entire life."
Then a 20-year-old student at a private Southern Baptist college, Holvey said she "had no desire to win when I understood what it was all about." Holvey also called for a congressional investigation into Trump's alleged misconduct.
Ninni Laaksonen
Ninni Laaksonen, a model and former Miss Finland, told Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat in October 2016 that Trump groped her backstage at the "Late Show with David Letterman" in 2006.
"Trump stood right next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt," Laaksonen said. "He really grabbed my butt. I don't think anybody saw it, but I flinched and thought, 'What is happening?'"
Jessica Drake
At an October 2016 press conference, adult-film actress Jessica Drake accused Trump of grabbing and kissing her without permission and offering her money to accept a private invitation to his penthouse hotel room in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
"This is not acceptable behavior for anyone, much less a presidential candidate," Drake said. "I understand that I may be called a liar or an opportunist, but I will risk that in order to stand in solidarity with women who share similar accounts that span many, many years."
Summer Zervos
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on NBC's "The Apprentice," told reporters at an October 2016 press conference that Trump assaulted her during a 2007 meeting at The Beverly Hills Hotel.
"He then grabbed my shoulder and began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast," she said. "I pulled back and walked to another part of the room. He then walked up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the bedroom. I walked out." Zervos added that Trump thrust himself on her before she left the room.
Zervos sued Trump for defamation after he accused her of lying about the allegations. Trump's attorneys have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that, as president, he can't be sued in state court and that his remarks about his accusers are political speech. The suit is ongoing.
Cassandra Searles
Cassandra Searles, who represented the state of Washington at the 2013 Miss USA pageant, wrote in a June 2016 Facebook post that Trump treated herself and other female Miss USA contestants "like cattle" and had them "lined up so he could get a closer look at his property."
"He probably doesn't want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room," she added.
Alva Johnson
Alva Johnson, a former Trump campaign staffer, said that Trump kissed her without her consent at a Tampa, Florida rally on August 24, 2016.
Johnson, 43, said Trump grabbed her hand and kissed her on the side of her mouth as he exited an RV outside of the rally, according to details in a new federal lawsuit and an interview with the Washington Post.
"Oh, my God, I think he's going to kiss me," Johnson said in a February 2019 interview with the Post. "He's coming straight for my lips. So I turn my head, and he kisses me right on the corner of my mouth, still holding my hand the entire time. Then he walks on out."
Did you ever read an intriguing spy novel? Well, reading this book feels like that – except that it’s all true. The authors felt a need to write this book in order to prevent a future attack on America. The public and its leaders had to know what had occurred. “A thorough accounting was a national necessity.”
The story begins with a history of Trump, Russia, and the Miss Universe contest held in a suburb near Moscow. We see early on Trump’s keen interest to do business in Russia and his desire to meet Putin. It is important to note that when things went badly for Putin and Russia, Putin saw the hidden hand of America trying to impose their worldview. Putin saw the West repeatedly humiliating him, for example, over Libya and Syria, which he considered his back yard. The finger was often pointed at Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State.
Russia was becoming aware of a new world in which battalions and fighter aircraft would be a thing of the past, replaced by hackers and skilled propagandists exploiting rifts in the ranks of the adversary. The goal: destroy NATO, the European Union, and seriously harm the United States. We are all familiar now with the Internet Research Agency and the compromise of social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The story now segues to the hack of the DNC by APT29 (Cozy Bear) and APT 28 (hackers associated with Russian military intelligence). These groups have been active for many years hacking into the systems of aerospace, energy, media, and government. Some time is spent discussing Trump’s connection to the Russian-born Felix Sater, a NY real estate developer.
We also see Trump bragging about how his firm was riding high on money flowing out of Russia. Trump Jr. touted Russia as a key source of profits, and Trump was always trying to secure a project in Moscow. The authors note, “Was he trying to leverage his status as the Republican front-runner to finally score a Moscow deal?” It is an interesting thought.
Paul Manafort played an important role in the Trump campaign for a few months, and the authors devote a chapter to this person. Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state at the time, had stated that “He’s been a Russian stooge for fifteen years.” There is a lot to say here, dating back to the notorious lobbying and consulting firm Black, Manafort, and Stone. We learn of the relationship between Manafort, Deripaska, and Akhmetov, among others.
Of course, then there’s Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The FBI determined that they were being cultivated by cutouts for Russian intelligence, “as part of a sophisticated operation to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign.” Then there’s the Trump Jr meeting with Veselnitskaya and others, which figured prominently in the news.
Moving on, there is some interesting details on the Christopher Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. I interestingly noted that the information provided by the dossier was “akin to preliminary intelligence reporting – information not analyzed, vetted, or ready for distribution.” It was not meant to be gospel, but a raw product of intelligence gathering.
The ensuing chapters discuss the details of the DNC hack, the Obama administration’s response to the Russian interference in the election, the Internet Research Agency and their compromise of Twitter and Facebook, and what the intelligence community was learning about the Russian attack. If you followed the news, much of this will be familiar to you, but the authors go into a bit of detail on these matters.
Alexey Navalny turns out to be a great journalist/investigator #Navalny video about ‘#Putin’s Palace’ will help sort out the oligarchs (some #Trump org overlap) ♞♘ Companion excellent website: https://palace.navalny.com
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