January 29, 2023

Sunday, January 29,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

Kamala is always busy.

It’ll be Vice President Kamala Harris’ second go in front of the conference, taking place Feb. 17-19.

Harris headed to Munich conference before Ukraine war’s 1-year mark.

Vice President Kamala Harris will once again head the U.S. delegation to the Munich Security Conference, two people familiar with her plans said, a sign of the continued importance the U.S. is putting on transatlantic cooperation on Ukraine nearly one year into the war.

Harris’ appearance at Europe’s premier defense conference is meant to underscore that America won’t abandon Kyiv even as the war is expected to grind on for at least another year. She’ll arrive in the southern German city after a few tense weeks of negotiations between Washington and Berlin over supplying more advanced weapons to Ukraine.

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January 6 Fallout.

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Shame on them. Shame on them.

Paul Pelosi Attack Suspect Tells TV Station He Has No Remorse.

The man accused in the attack of Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, made a disturbing surprise phone call to a California television station on Friday and said that he had no remorse about his actions last October. He suggested that he regretted not causing more harm.

The man, David DePape, who has been charged in the attack against Mr. Pelosi, called a reporter for KTVUfrom his San Francisco County Jail cell on Friday and said that he was only “sorry I didn’t get more of them.” The station is a Fox affiliate in the Bay Area.

His remarks to the reporter, Amber Lee, who said on-air that the statements sounded scripted, came on the same day that a San Francisco court released police body camera footage showing the frenzied moment of the attack. The call to Ms. Lee was unexpected, the station reported, but Ms. Lee had previously reached out to him following his arrest last year. (New York Times).

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Tyre Nichols: Memphis' special Scorpion police unit disbanded after footage release.

The Memphis Police Department has permanently disbanded the special unit Scorpion in the wake of murder charges brought against five of its members in connection to Tyre Nichols' death.

The big picture: The announcement comes less than 24 hours after the city released police bodycam and security surveillance footage that showed multiple officers kicking, punching and striking Nichols with a baton as he screamed for help and pleaded for them to stop.

• Scorpion, which stands for The Scorpion for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, was first formed in 2021 in a bid to crack down on violent crime in Memphis but has faced controversy over its tactics and police officers' conduct.

• Its members primarily deal with illegal gun possession, carjacking and homicides but often drove unmarked police cars as they patrol neighborhoods, typically in 10-man teams.

• The police department faced increasing calls, led by Nichols' family, to dissolve the unit after his death — those calls have only escalated since graphic footage of the beating was released Friday night.

Details: Scorpion members met with Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis on Saturday to discuss the unit's future, according to a statement from Memphis Police.

• "In the process of listening intently to the family of Tyre Nichols, community leaders, and the uninvolved officers who have done quality work in their assignments, it is in the best interest of all to permanently deactivate the SCORPION Unit," the statement reads.

• "While the heinous actions of a few casts a cloud of dishonor on the title SCORPION," Memphis Police and officers assigned to the unit "agree unreservedly with this next step."

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More LGBTQ Updates.

1. The Pope didn’t mean sin in the usual way.

Pope clarifies homosexuality and sin comments in note.

In his note, Francis reaffirmed that homosexuality “is not a crime,” and said he spoke out “in order to stress that criminalization is neither good nor just.”

“When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that every sexual act outside of marriage is a sin,” Francis wrote in Spanish, underlining the final phrase. (Washington Post)

2. The FDA ends discrimination against Gay and Bisexual Men for Blood Donations.

New Blood Donation Rules to Loosen Restrictions on Gay and Bisexual Men.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to revise a longstanding policy that excluded most gay and bisexual men from blood donation, instead adopting an approach that will screen donors depending on their recent sexual activity, agency officials said on Friday.

The move follows years of criticism from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, who have described the prohibition as unscientific and discriminatory.

The F.D.A. said the new approach would be gender-inclusive — the screening would also apply to women who have sex with gay and bisexual men — and would focus on individual risk, not blanket prohibitions on groups. People seeking to donate blood will be asked about their recent sexual activity and partners, as well as injectable drug use.

Potential donors will be asked whether they have had new sexual partners, or more than one sexual partner, in the past three months. If so, they will also be asked whether they engaged in anal sex. If they report such activity, they will not be permitted to donate at that time.

People who do not report new or multiple partners along with anal sex will be permitted to donate.

In addition, anyone who has tested positive for H.I.V. or who has taken medication to treat an H.I.V. infection will be prohibited from donating, said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the agency’s biologics center. (Source. NY Times).

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The GOP substitute for a Speaker, McCarthy, removed Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, but he can’t block all Democrats from key committee assignments. These two 👇 will battle for Democracy.

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Let’s remember that the GOP is a pro-Russia party. We are learning more about that each day.

The audio of then GOP House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling then GOP Speaker Paul Ryan on June 15, 2016, “I think Putin pays Trump” seems to have disappeared from the internet. If you have a copy, please email it to me.

For now, here is a link to the transcript of the recording, originally published in The Washington Post.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3726371/Read-the-transcript-of-the-conversation-among.pdf

Here is the original Washington Post article.

KIEV, Ukraine — A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”
Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”


The remarks remained secret for nearly a year.

On Friday, Yale Professor Timothy Snyder offered a compelling analysis in 20 Tweets, linking Trump, the newly arrested FBI Spy, McGonigal, and Russia. Yesterday, Snyder finished connecting the dots on this frightening narrative. Again, take it in.

The Specter of 2016 - McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America.

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests.  One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI.  Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016.  Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018.  Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch.  And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska).  This is obviously very bad for Trump personally.  But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America. 

Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win.  We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation.  Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt.  And again, the issue is not just the particular person.  If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office.  The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.

For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory.  In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources.  At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously.  American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia.  Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small.  Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse.  After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York.  This was no secret at the time.  One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift.  And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying….(from Snyder’s Substack blog. The Specter of 2016 - McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America.)

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Not every one admires the British Crown. 👑.

Actor Alan Cumming Returns British Royal Honor Over 'Toxicity' Of Empire.

Scottish actor Alan Cumming has returned a special British honor granted by the late Queen Elizabeth II because of his “misgivings about the toxicity” of the British Empire, he announced Friday on social media.

The film, TV and Broadway star who’s currently hosting the Peacock series “Traitors” was granted the title Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire at an investiture ceremony in 2009.

It honored both his acting career and his “activism for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community, USA,” he noted in an Instagram post Friday, which was his 58th birthday.

But he announced in the same post: “I returned my OBE.”

“The Queen’s death and the ensuing conversations about the role of monarchy and especially the way the British Empire profited at the expense (and death) of indigenous peoples across the world really opened my eyes,” Cumming wrote.

He said the “great good” the OBE award “brought to the LGBTQ+ cause back in 2009” before same-sex marriage was legal in the U.S. “is now less potent than the misgivings I have being associated with the toxicity of [the British] empire.”

“I’m now back to being plain old Alan Cumming again. Happy birthday to me!” he wrote.

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Hope your Sunday is good.

I won’t be back until late Monday night/Tuesday morning.