March 18, 2023

Saturday, March 18, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup

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Kamala is always busy.

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Everything was green yesterday.

Touch below 👇 to watch the water rise and fall green in the White House fountain yesterday.

Vice President Kamala Harris and 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff shared breakfast with Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and his partner, Matthew Barrett, at the Vice President’s House on St. Patrick’s Day 2023, before the Irish Prime Minister met with President Biden at the White House.

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Member of the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland Patricia O’Lynn with Hillary Clinton at Queens University Belfast this week. The former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential Candidate is currently Chancellor at Queens.

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Bill and Hillary Clinton to address conference at Queen’s University Belfast.

Former US president Bill Clinton is to take part in a major conference at Queen’s University Belfast next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement.

His wife and former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – the university’s current Chancellor – will also visit to host the three-day event, taking place from April 17th to 19th.

Their participation was announced by Queen’s on Tuesday and follows confirmation that US president Joe Biden intends to visit the North to coincide with the anniversary of the landmark peace deal.

There is speculation that President Biden may attend the Queen’s conference. (The Irish Times).

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Previously the Roundup posted one segment of the Vice President on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The White House sent out 2 more.

Here 👇 are all 3 with clickable links.

Part 1: VP Kamala Harris: “If You Understand The Issues, You Probably Would Not Make Statements Like That.”

Part 2: “I Am in the Executive Branch” - VP Harris Responds to Former VP Pence’s Legislative Branch Claim.”

Part 3: VP Kamala Harris: It’s “Inhumane” to Punish Women for Seeking Reproductive Care.

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Too many GOP leaders’ relationship to Russia needs explanation.

Vance in beige suit, backed by Peter Thiel.

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Company Backed by J.D. Vance Gives Platform for Russian Propaganda - The New York Times.

GOP Super-Donor Peter Thiel is also named in this investigative article by the Times.

In June, two American veterans fighting as volunteers in Ukraine, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, were captured by Russian forces. They were taken to a black site where they were beaten, run into walls with bags over their heads and hooked up to a car battery and “electrocuted,” the men said after being freed in late September.

Between beatings, they told The New York Times, they were interviewed on Russian media outlets, including RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda organs in the West.

“They stayed away from our faces because they knew that we were going to be on camera, that they were going to try and use this for propaganda.,” Mr. Drueke said. “So they wanted our faces to look OK. But they took care of our bodies pretty good.”

RT had been largely taken off the air in the United States and banned by the European Union in March after Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. But in June, its version of the captives’ story appeared on Rumble, a video-sharing platform that stepped in this year and began carrying RT’s live feed, in addition to its clips. There, a glum-looking Mr. Huynh says they joined the fight in Ukraine after being duped by “propaganda from the West” that “Russian forces were indiscriminately killing civilians.”

Last year, Rumble received a major investmentfrom a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings. Mr. Vance also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show.

Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor.

The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford. It also helps illuminate the relationship between Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel, who mentored the candidate in his Silicon Valley business empire and has contributed more than $15 million to his campaign and affiliated political action committees. (Mr. Thiel has contributed another $15 million to support the candidacy of another protégé, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.)

Mr. Vance is hardly the first candidate backed by Mr. Thiel, who has been underwriting political allies for many years — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri among them, not to mention Mr. Trump.

But his relationship runs deeper than most. Mr. Vance met Mr. Thiel in 2011 while studying at Yale Law School. He attended a speech in which Mr. Thiel lamented the failings of both the legal world and Silicon Valley, and he called it “the most significant moment of my time at Yale.” Within a half-decade, he was hired to work at Mithril Capital, one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds.

RT’s livestream has received nearly five million views since Rumble began hosting it in March. On Sept. 10, an RT report on Rumble mocked “Kiev’s flawed counteroffensive” as “incredibly unsuccessful,” even as Ukraine was on the cusp of sweeping gains. A more recent RT piece interviewed Ukrainians sympathetic to Russia on the front lines, including one woman saying, “I’m sure the Russian troops will not leave us.” Typical headlines seek to project a sense of competence onto Mr. Putin’s beleaguered military (“Russian sea-based missile strikes hit all designated targets”) and recklessness onto Ukraine and its Western allies (“Ukraine hits Donetsk civilian areas with over 200 NATO-supplied shells”).

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and an official at the center of an alleged scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, the court announced Friday (CNN).

Morning Joe urges Trump to move to Russia after latest America-bashing rant.

Donald Trump posted another video attacking the Biden administration and the NATO alliance, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said he's sick of the former president's "hatred for America."

In his video, the former president called for an end to the war in Ukraine, denied that Russia was a threat to the U.S. and defined his domestic foes as "Marxists," at which point the "Morning Joe" host interrupted the video rant in exasperation.

"Blah, blah, blah -- do you know what's boring to me?" Scarborough said. "What's boring is the hatred for America, the hatred for America that you hear spewing from Donald Trump's mouth. Donald Trump hated America before he became president of the United States, talked about how the American dream was dead -- yeah, try telling that to the immigrants, the migrants, the refugees risking their lives to come to the United States of America ... Talk to immigrants that get here, they will tell you about the American dream, it's talked about all over the world. "

"It's crazy, Donald Trump hates America -- listen to him talk about it," Scarborough continued. "The United States, the country, as Fox News anchors used to remind us, the country that fed and -- wait, this country has fed and freed more people than any other planet in the history of the world ... We won World War I, we won World War II with the help of our allies, we were the driving force, we were the arsenal of democracy. Look what we are doing, helping Ukraine push back against war crimes daily, yet all Donald Trump does, all other people do is, they bash the United States of America, they attack the United States military, our men and women in armed forces, they attack our intel community."

They hate America," he concluded. "By their own words, if they hate it so much, why don't they move to Russia? Russia will take them, they've taken Steven Segal, they'll take Donald Trump and everybody else saying that the U.S. military is going to use helicopters that it used in Afghanistan to kill Americans who voted for Trump. They hate us, they hate America, so why are they still here?" (Raw Story).

Trump’s rant read from a prepared extremist speech on the teleprompter and Morning Joe’s reply are both in the video below. Touch the screen. 👇

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Final note of political news for today’s Roundup.

Feel free to 🙏.

Officials are preparing security in case of Trump indictment.

Law enforcement officials in New York are making security preparations for the possibility that Donald Trump could be indicted in the coming weeks by a Manhattan grand jury and appear in a courtroom in an investigation examining hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with the former president.

NEW YORK — Law enforcement officials in New York are making security preparations for the possibility that former President Donald Trump could be indicted in the coming weeks and appear in a Manhattan courtroom in an investigation examining hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with him, four law enforcement officials said Friday.
There has been no public announcement of any timeframe for the grand jury’s secret work, including any potential vote on whether to indict the ex-president.


The law enforcement officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said authorities are just preparing in case of an indictment. They described the conversations as preliminary and are considering security, planning and the practicalities of a potential court appearance by a former president.

Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, told The Associated Press that if Trump is indicted, “we will follow the normal procedures.” (Washington Post).

Note. Tacopina may not be able to continue to represent Trump in this case. It was recently revealed that Stormy Daniels approached Tacopina to represent her after the allegations of a payoff to her by Trump were originally made public.

Tacopina previously admitted on national television to having a prior attorney-client relationship with Daniels, and, therefore, that he was subject to attorney-client privilege.

"I can't really talk about my impressions or any conversations we'd had because there is an attorney-client privilege that attaches even to a consultation," he told CNN's Don Lemon in a 2018 interview.

It may not be easy for Trump to function with regard to this case if he loses his lead lawyer. (Newsweek).

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A beautiful and haunting image to revisit whenever the world isn’t as pink and as beautiful as you want. Feel free to touch the photo.