by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

At what point do you cross the line from ordinary criminal activity to an attempted overthrow of a duly-elected government?  Does that line get crossed when, before an election, you try to rig it from the inside or does it get crossed when you then attempt to gin up a phony “impeachment” story based on political hacksterism and prosecutorial misconduct that, by any reasonable standard, in some cases amount to felonies (e.g. perjury)?

What if the person who is at the pinnacle of all of this isn’t a candidate but rather was a current office-holder who was term-limited out and did this rather than just flat-out refuse to leave?

The entire “Russia, Russia Russia!” thing has always smelled like dead fish.  The US has “interfered” in elections for a very long time, and we’ve done it through the explicit use of violence and coups too.  The Shaw of Iran is just one example where we orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically-elected Prime Minister.  Why did we do that?  Because that democratically-elected government nationalized BP — a British company.

Yep — we orchestrated a military coup in retaliation for the nationalization of a British firm because, well, Britain was angry and they didn’t think they could do it on their own.  So they asked us to do it, and we did.

The CIA has admitted to this, by the way — I guess after 50+ years there wasn’t a lot of point to denying it anymore.

By all evidence the “interference” in 2016 amounted to buying some ads on Facebook and other social media, along with offering dirt to agents of both campaigns.  That’s right — they were an equal-opportunity harasser.  But that Russia was rather interested in Trump losing isn’t hard to figure out — Hillary Clinton, after all, was part and parcel of Russia acquiring a major part of our national Uranium assets through the facially-crooked appearing deal for “Uranium One.”

Trump, on the other hand, wanted to build…… a hotel in Russia.

Yeah, that looks pretty even to me in terms of strategic interests.

Not.

Papadopoulos drew a two week sentence for “lying to FBI agents”, who, it appears, lied themselves multiple times, including to judges and his attorneys.  One of the things appear to have lied about was what is called Brady material — that is, exculpatory evidence they had in their possession.  Why do we know this?  Because they tried to set him up which means the people they did that with were wearing wires and thus there are tapes.  In addition if they had any sort of other communications (e.g. emails, etc) there are copies.  Yet allegedly there was no Brady material to disclose and George was convicted — and given a two week sentence.  Yeah, two weeks.  Serious criminal stuff here, right?

But that’s not over.  You see, during their little scheme the FBI tried to entrap him with a $10,000 bribe, which he detected was a probable entrapment ruse and didn’t bring the money back on the plane with him.  The agents were lying in wait on the other end and tossed his luggage looking for the money he didn’t have.  Oops.  Unfortunately for the agency Papadopoulos secured the cash with his attorney overseas, which is beyond the FBI’s ability to forcibly disgorge and make “disappear”, so we are likely to be able to determine if it was serial-number recorded or otherwise marked — and if so, well, then things get rather interesting don’t they?

Then there’s the case of Butina.  She’s serving a short sentence for acting on behalf of a foreign government without registering — and may well be technically guilty of that.  But she was also a fallout conviction from what looks like a poison tree and it now appears possible that Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.Com, was being used as a government agent to try to entrap her through a fake romance.

Gee, there’s nothing wrong there, right?  Oh, and by the way, the FBI also denied the existence of Brady evidence in her case when Byrne has allegedly said he provided plenty of it.  That’s another felony on the part of the FBI.

In addition there’s the curious matter of Joseph Mifsud.  He was caught red-handed lying to Mueller’s team but never prosecuted for it.  Was or is he a CIA — or FBI — asset?

It matters greatly, by the way, which — because unlike the FBI which can operate inside the US the CIA is prohibited by law from doing so, and especially from doing so with regard to a US citizen inside the United States.  Yet the alleged claim, often repeated in the press, is that he was a hostile foreign (e.g. Russian) agent.  Not so, the evidence appears to suggest; it appears he is in fact an intelligence asset either of the US or one of our allies — and maybe both.

And finally, who wrote the Mueller report?  It wasn’t Mueller.  That was painfully obvious watching him “testify” before Congress; he didn’t know where the facts he allegedly put in the report were found within its pages!  If you allegedly wrote a thesis in a college course and “defended” it as well as he did in front of those committees you’d be tossed out of on your ear as it would be obvious you paid someone to write it for you!

So who are the someones?  And who really ran this “investigation”? Never mind Mueller stating, under oath, that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS!

What we have is a rapidly growing body of evidence that both the CIA and FBI — that is, both our federal police and intelligence services — attempted to queer a Presidential Election and when that didn’t work and Trump won anyway they tried to foment a coup to remove him from office.

I’m no fan of Trump and never have been.  I did like some of his promises during the campaign but warned that I expected exactly zero of the important ones to actually be carried through on.  So far that’s proved up 100% — the so-called “wins” have all been tiny incremental at-the-margin changes that have no real impact whatsoever on the problems this nation faces.  Whether it be illegal immigration or the explosive growth of the fraud-and-felony schemes in the medical system Trump has done exactly nothing to address any of it in a meaningful fashion, despite having plenty of tools in the Executive Branch that could be brought to bear.  I had no love for Hillary either; she clearly, from her actions during and after her time as Secretary of State, not only broke the law in a technical sense she put the national security at risk for her own personal enrichment.  We used to — and still should — literally hang people for that crap.  I voted for neither of these two, incidentally, nor will I vote for Trump next year as in addition to the above he has now proved his intention to destroy this nation fiscally.

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