CNN reported today that US investigators have corroborated some of the communications detailed in Christopher Steele’s 35-page dossier on Donald Trump. No, not the hooker pee-pee stuff, but “intercepted conversations” have proven that “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same … Read more
“Some of the claims in a controversial dossier linking Donald Trump to the Russian government appear to have been verified by U.S. media outlets,” The Independent‘s Lucy Pasha-Robinson reported on 2.7. On top of which former MI6 guy Christopher Steele (aka author of Trump pee-pee dossier) has come out of hiding and is back at … Read more
A 1.12 Guardian story by Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding reports that the reputation of the author of the Trump dossier, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, is sterling among high-level people in the intelligence community. “In the rush [by the Trump camp] to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. … Read more
The first step in Donald Trump’s plan to deball and dilute Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice happened this morning when the House Intelligence Committee released its cherry-picked memo. Trump-approved and Devin Nunes-finessed, the memo alleges anti-Trump bias on the part of the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation. … Read more
Last week it was announced that HBO will team with director Jay Roach and producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman for an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann‘s Game Change, a forthcoming book about the Trump vs. Hillary battle. Halperin and Heilemann have already made similar hay with The Circus, a Showtime series that … Read more
A day or two ago Russian publisher Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian intel officer Sergei Mikhailov was arrested, dragged out of a meeting with a bag over his head, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported or passed along that Mikhailov was charged with treason. It’s also come out that … Read more
Why would Christopher Steele, a respected investigator and former MI6 agent, a guy with a family and a mortgage and bills to pay, work for weeks without salary? Probably because he was convinced that the project he’d been working on (and which not enough people had paid sufficient attention to) was bigger than himself, bigger … Read more
In a 6.12 piece called “The American Press Is Destroying Itself“, Matt Taibbi has nailed the current p.c. zeitgeist, and his observations are downright frightening. “The American left has lost its mind, [having] become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline [while] torching reputations and jobs … Read more
I’m told that 46% of the directors of the forthcoming 2020 Sundance Film Festival are women…cool. The highest percentage ever. And I’m sure the annual ten-day event (1.23 through 2.2) will be…I don’t what. Snowy? Wokey-wokey? Inspiring? A lot of whoo-whooing before each premiere screening? A sense of zeitgeist fatigue? A feeling of “here we … Read more
The big BAFTA news this morning, if you want to call it that, is that the Big Short momentum we’ve all been sensing (insect antennae vibrations, tingling neck hair) is looking real, and as a result the Spotlight guys might have reason to start biting their nails. Maybe. Or maybe not. Adam McKay‘s wonky housing-mortgage … Read more