Politics & Stuff

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Donald Trump declares himself ‘king’ after striking down New York congestion pricing

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-declares-himself-king-200157069.html

Days after suggesting he is above the law, Donald Trump declared himself “king” following his administration’s push to strike down new tolls for Manhattan drivers to raise funds for the city’s aging mass transit system.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” he wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The White House’s X account then shared his statement with a mock cover of Time magazine featuring a portrait of the president wearing a crown with the caption “long live the king.”

White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich also shared an AI-generated image of the president wearing a crown and regal cape.

In a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy outlined the president’s objections to the first-of-its-kind congestion pricing program, claiming that federal officials would be discussing plans with the state for the “orderly cessation of toll operations.”

Duffy called the program “backwards and unfair” and a “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.”

“Public transit is the lifeblood of New York City and critical to our economic future — as a New Yorker, like President Trump, knows very well,” Hochul fired back in response.

Since the program rolled out last month, vehicle congestion in New York has “dropped dramatically and commuters are getting to work faster than ever,” she said.

“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”

Trump’s statement follows his declaration that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a message also shared by White House X accounts in an apparent endorsement of a belief that the president of the United States is incapable of breaking any law.

On Tuesday, the president — who has empowered Elon Musk to gut federal agencies while blocking congressionally approved funding and inviting major constitutional challenges in courtrooms across the country — issued an executive order to consolidate power by assuming regulatory control of independent agencies created by Congress, which are now no longer allowed to disagree with him.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued Duffy and federal transportation officials on Wednesday, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully and “precipitously — and for blatantly political reasons— purported to ‘terminate’ the program, as then-candidate Trump proclaimed he would do in his first week in office.”

“The Administration’s efforts to summarily and unilaterally overturn the considered determinations of the political branches — federal, state, and city — are unlawful, and the Court should declare that they are null and void,” lawyers for the MTA argued.

If the court allows Trump to follow through with his threats, he will be stripping more than $15 billion that the MTA had planned to spend on crucial upgrades throughout the city’s mass transit system, which moves more than 3.6 million people on subways and 1.4 million on busses each day.

“It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review — and barely three months after giving final approval to the [program] — [the Transportation Department] would seek to totally reverse course,” MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a statement.

New York City comptroller Brad Lander said he was “appalled” by the president’s actions, which he called “another instance of federal overreach by the Trump administration.”

Trump delivered his announcement while New York City Mayor Eric Adams was in a federal courthouse, where a judge grilled his attorneys and the deputy assistant U.S. attorney general about the Department of Justice’s motion to drop federal corruption charges against him. Adams is accused of agreeing to a quid pro quo arrangement that would see his case dissolved on the condition that he support Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda.

Hochul has met with New York City officials about Adams’s future and has not ruled out ordering his removal.

The governor was scheduled to discuss the congestion pricing plan with Trump at the White House last week, though those plans were abandoned after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced she was suing the state and top officials over local immigration policy. Adams was not among the defendants.

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

The US people fought a war to distance themselves from a King...

blokes mental

[Vesper 30,106]

Trump Vowed to Clean Up Washington, Then His Team Hired a Man Who Pushed a Scam the IRS Called the “Worst of the Worst”

Frank Schuler was a leading promoter of a tax deduction derided as a scam by prosecutors, senators and the IRS. Now he’s a senior adviser to the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property.

https://www.propublica.org/article/frank-schuler-gsa-doge-syndicated-conservation-easements-tax-scam

Even as he has vowed to eliminate “every dollar of waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal budget and operations,” the new acting administrator of the General Services Administration, Stephen Ehikian, has appointed a senior adviser whose firm used to specialize in tax transactions that a bipartisan Senate committee excoriated and that the IRS branded as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The adviser has been battling the tax agency in court over $4 billion in disallowed deductions for thousands of his clients.

The GSA, the federal agency responsible for managing the government’s land and property, will now be taking advice from Frank Schuler IV, the 57-year-old co-founder and longtime president of Ornstein-Schuler, an Atlanta-based real estate investment company. Schuler’s firm was for years among the most prolific promoters of tax-shelter deals known as “syndicated conservation easements.”

Schuler and his colleagues exploited a tax deduction that was created to reward landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust. When used as intended, conservation easements can preserve pristine land, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and reward the land donor with a charitable tax deduction.

But middlemen like Schuler’s firm turned the tax provision into a highly profitable business, packaging easements into what were essentially outsized tax deductions for purchase. After snatching up a cheap piece of vacant land, Schuler and others typically hired a private appraiser willing to declare that the property had huge untapped development value — that it was suited to become anything from a gravel mine to a luxury resort — and was worth many times its purchase price. They then sold stakes in the easement donation to rich individuals, who claimed wildly inflated tax deductions based on the appraisal, cutting their taxes by twice as much as they’d invested. ProPublica first began investigating the syndicated easement business, which has cost the government tens of billions in tax revenue, back in 2017.

The IRS, the Justice Department and Congress struggled for years, through public warnings, hundreds of audits, tax court cases and criminal prosecutions, to shut down the scheme. Those efforts were countered by $11 million in lobbying expenditures from the promoters and the creation of a Washington-based trade group, called Partnership for Conservation, which Schuler founded. Syndication advocates pressed Congress to defund the IRS crackdown.

In 2020, the Senate Finance Committee released a bipartisan investigative report on the transactions. (Schuler was one of six people subpoenaed by the committee to provide information.) The report, which detailed Ornstein-Schuler’s practices, described syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers, saving them two dollars in taxes for every dollar they put in, “with promoters pocketing millions of dollars in fees for organizing the deals.” The practice was finally curbed through legislation passed in late 2022, but it remains on the IRS’ “Dirty Dozen” list of “bogus tax avoidance strategies.”

“This is someone who made his money by ripping off American taxpayers and who shouldn’t come anywhere near a position of authority over tax dollars,” commented Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who helped oversee the Senate investigation, in a written statement after being told about Schuler’s appointment. “He’ll fit right in with the Trump administration.”

Schuler’s exact role in the government is unclear. A GSA staffer said that he was present on a recent 15-minute video “check-in” conducted by Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old who ProPublica has identified as being part of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Cavanaugh introduced Schuler, who said little, as “my colleague Frank.”

Schuler’s photo and contact information were also listed last week in the agency’s internal staff directory shortly after his profile disappeared from the Ornstein-Schuler website. But it’s unknown whether he’s a paid government employee or a volunteer associated with Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. Schuler and Matt Ornstein did not respond to calls, messages and emails seeking comment. The GSA and Ehikian did not respond to emails sent to the agency’s press office.

Frank Schuler Credit: Ornstein-Schuler website

In the past, Schuler has described his tax transactions as legitimate and well intentioned. In a 2017 interview with ProPublica, he said his entry into the business of syndicating easements was the result of a personal epiphany sparked when his toddler son compared the paving of a residential development to pollution. As Schuler described it, “The importance of conserving land for him and future generations really pushed me to this point. … That’s why today I’m so passionate about conservation.”

Ornstein-Schuler dropped out of the syndicated-easement business in 2019, citing “recent developments and the uncertainty related to the conservation and gifting of property.” The firm turned to other real estate and tax realms, including launching a new division to buy and sell Georgia state film tax credits. Schuler also reportedly earned a credit as an executive producer on a film in which Mira Sorvino played an AI home security system. (Ornstein, who’s still CEO of Ornstein-Schuler, also co-founded a private equity firm, whose holdings include a chain of dental offices and a chain of car washes.)

But the legal warfare over Ornstein-Schuler’s tax-avoidance business continues today. According to a recent IRS filing, the firm has filed more than 100 tax court cases involving its transactions, contesting more than $4 billion in disallowed charitable deductions from some 2,000 investors. Many of the cases are still pending. Ornstein-Schuler has made long-running efforts to reach a global settlement with the IRS; another filing includes an August 2022 letter from one of its law firms asserting that such an agreement would clear the way for collection of $1.5 billion in taxes and would personally cost Schuler and his partner approximately $150 million in additional taxes, interest and penalties.

A tax court decision handed down last year resolved the first of Schuler’s cases to actually go to trial, involving multiple conservation easements from 2014 on 4,607 acres in rural Alabama. The promoters claimed that the potential for sand and gravel mining justified a total of $187 million in charitable deductions. Investor promotional materials, evidence showed, projected $200,000 in tax savings for every $100,000 invested. The decision, which resolved 13 linked cases involving the property, backed the IRS, disallowing about $180 million of the $187 million in write-offs and imposing 40% “gross valuation misstatement” penalties on most of the disallowed amounts. The judge found that partnerships promoted by Schuler had claimed deductions as high as $50,000 an acre on land that had been purchased less than a year earlier for $2,200 an acre.

In his opinion, Albert Lauber, a senior judge in U.S. Tax Court, pointedly noted how Ornstein-Schuler’s standard pitch of promising investors $2 in tax savings for every $1 they invested assumed he’d obtain a sky-high property appraisal, generating a profitable investor write-off. “When asked at trial how he could have posited in advance a deduction-to-investment ratio of $4.389 to $1, before any appraisals had been performed, Mr. Schuler said that appraisals were basically irrelevant to the tax write-off they were offering,” the judge wrote. He called the land values Schuler’s firm had claimed “wholly implausible.”

“We were making plenty of money,” Schuler testified during the case. “The investors were doing well. And we felt that it was great that land was being conserved.”

Ornstein-Schuler is also among the defendants in a federal class-action suit in Georgia filed by three investors. The suit claims Ornstein-Schuler collaborated with lawyers, accountants, appraisers and others to collect millions in fees through a “fraudulent scheme” that deployed “a mountain of misrepresentations and omissions” to promote invalid easement deductions based on “egregiously inflated appraisals.” Ornstein-Schuler and other defendants have filed a joint motion to dismiss the case, asserting that the risks of the easement investments were fully disclosed and they misled no one.

Ornstein-Schuler has also gone on the attack. In December 2023, it sued the IRS, claiming that the agency had failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for an array of agency documents. The firm complained of “IRS abuses relating to its targeting of conservation easement transactions,” which it said were part of a “well-publicized campaign.” Among the requested documents: “all records of communications between IRS employees and members of the news media,” including ProPublica reporter Peter Elkind, Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin and Forbes reporter Peter Reilly, regarding conservation easements. Rod Rosenstein, a deputy U.S. attorney general during the first Trump administration, is representing Ornstein-Schuler in the case.

Doris Burke contributed research. Avi Asher-Schapiro contributed reporting.

 

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[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

Aggregate of polls show 52% of even Republicans are now against Trump and his fawning over Vlad Putin

Putin who is ex KGB was taught how to manipulate the gullible, they use 'MICE'

Money Influence Compromise Ego

Trump is putty in his hands

[Vesper 30,106]

ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account

The Observer has identified the operator of ‘GlomarResponder,’ an overtly racist social media account, as ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden.

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-20-ice-prosecutor-in-dallas-runs-white-supremacist-x-account/

Fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids began to spread the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. Posts on social media and Reddit claimed that ICE had already been spotted in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, where Latino immigrants began to settle in large numbers in the 1970s and have profoundly shaped the culture of the vibrant community.

That same Tuesday morning, an X account with over 17,000 followers named GlomarResponder made an ominous post. “Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,” GlomarResponder wrote. “Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.” One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he “Can confirm all of those,” regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. “May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,” GlomarResponder wrote.

These were but the latest posts that GlomarResponder has made over the years that suggest the operator of the account is an ICE employee. GlomarResponder has also routinely expressed blatantly racist and anti-immigrant views. Through an extensive review of GlomarResponder’s X posts, publicly available documents, and other social media profiles and posts, the Texas Observer has identified the operator of GlomarResponder as James “Jim” Joseph Rodden, a 44-year-old who works as an assistant chief counsel for ICE in the Dallas area. Rodden represents the agency in immigration court hearings where judges decide whether an individual is removed from the country.

Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

In August, GlomarResponder posted: “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” Two months later, GlomarResponder shared an image that reads: “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Some GlomarResponder posts evoke anti-immigrant violence: “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” And in January: “My WWII vet grandfather didn’t get a chance to kill asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He’d be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton.”

Rodden’s ICE employment is confirmed by federal court records, background interviews, and Observer courtroom visits.

A resident of Frisco, Rodden has previously lived in Pennsylvania, Northern Virginia, and North Carolina, according to county voter registration, private data broker sites, and property records. Rodden attended Penn State and Wake Forest University law school. A James J. Rodden possesses a license to practice law in Washington, D.C., which allows representation of ICE in Texas immigration court and was granted within a year of Rodden’s graduation from Wake Forest. In court filings, Rodden has claimed to have worked in federal government for a number of years prior to his ICE job. What appears to be his LinkedIn lists prior employment as a U.S. Border Patrol agent, a United States Marine Corps armorer, and a litigation clinic student at a federal public defender’s office. The Marine Corps confirmed Rodden’s service and final rank of corporal, and the Federal Public Defender’s office in Greensboro, North Carolina, confirmed his prior employment. The Border Patrol’s parent agency declined to confirm Rodden’s prior employment and denied a public records request, citing privacy and national security concerns.

The evidence that Rodden operates the GlomarResponder account includes an overwhelming number of biographical details that GlomarResponder has shared over years that align with information about Rodden, including employment history, locations lived, characteristics of a spouse, involvement in a lawsuit against the federal government, height and fashion preferences, penchants for specific phrasing, and a variety of specific interests and hobbies. The Observer confirmed these details about Rodden through other social media profiles, public records, private data broker sites, open-source investigative tools, interviews, and attendance of court hearings in which Rodden was representing ICE.

Rodden did not respond to multiple Observer requests for comment, which detailed the findings of this story, sent to his ICE email address. A call to a phone number associated with Rodden reached a man who declined to confirm his identity before hanging up. When approached in a public hallway outside the Dallas immigration court and asked to confirm receipt of the emailed requests, Rodden said only to “call [his] press office.”

James Rodden approaches a courtroom at the Dallas immigration court in Dallas in February.

An ICE spokesperson declined to confirm Rodden’s employment, and the agency declined to release personnel records for Rodden without his written permission. The spokesperson wrote in an email: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not comment on the substance of this article pending further investigation, to include whether the owner of the referenced ‘X’ account is a current employee. Notwithstanding, ICE holds its employees to the highest standards of professionalism and takes seriously all allegations of inappropriate conduct.”

IN NOVEMBER 2021, A GROUP OF FEDERAL EMPLOYEES filed a class action lawsuit, styled James Joseph Rodden, et al. v. Dr. Anthony Fauci, over the federal employee vaccine mandate that required all federal workers to receive the COVID vaccine to keep their jobs. Per the lawsuit, Rodden was an “Assistant Chief Counsel at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” a position the Observer was able to confirm Rodden still occupies by attending Dallas immigration court and noting his name on a schedule circulated by the Dallas ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, where attorneys are generally referred to as assistant chief counsels.

On September 6, 2023, GlomarResponder wrote: “I’m party to a lawsuit where preventing transmission was the justification for a shot mandate,” referring to the COVID-19 vaccine. He later lamented, on December 12 that year, that the lawsuit had been vacated.

Lawsuit filings reveal that Rodden took a blood test as part of providing evidence of naturally acquired immunity to COVID, and a briefing submitted on behalf of Rodden and his co-plaintiffs in a similar case argues that the vaccines are “less efficacious than natural immunity in preventing reinfection.”

In posts on X, GlomarResponder has made statements that echo what Rodden asserted in the court filings. In 2023, GlomarResponder wrote that he found out he had had COVID when he “got a blood test for a lawsuit” and that his immunity was found to be “better than that of the multi-shot morons.” In a recent response to a post that described the vaccine mandate as “insane,” GlomarResponder wrote that “some of us not only said so at the time, we sued them over it.”

On January 21 of this year, the same day that GlomarResponder claimed to be waiting for warrants at a courthouse, Rodden was scheduled to be at the immigration courthouse in downtown Dallas, according to a weekly schedule document from ICE. Later that week, the Observer witnessed Rodden working at a deportation hearing, where he was representing the government agency. At this hearing, and another hearing in early February, Rodden wore a three-piece suit, cufflinks, and a watch—items GlomarReponder has posted about wearing—and appeared to be approximately 6'2", corresponding to the height that GlomarResponder has disclosed in posts on X. He also maintained a cleanly shaved head, something GlomarResponder has recommended as “wisdom” to men who are going bald.

During the January court hearing the Observer attended, Rodden repeatedly used his phone at moments that corresponded to times GlomarResponder made posts. At the February hearing, the Observer saw Rodden scrolling through the X app on his phone and drafting a post at 1:14 p.m. The profile photo that appeared while Rodden drafted the post resembled that of GlomarResponder, which posted at 1:15pm.

Over the years, GlomarResponder has also made a number of posts that closely align with the posts of a Facebook account with the profile name Jim Rodden. James Rodden often goes by “Jim,” according to multiple sources, and the Facebook profile has posted in the Wake Forest Law Class of 2012 group, corresponding with education information on the James Rodden LinkedIn profile (which uses the first name “Jim” in the URL). James J. Rodden also appears in the list of 2012 Wake Forest law graduates. GlomarResponder has posted multiple times about Wake Forest and the city where it is located, Winston-Salem.

The Jim Rodden Facebook profile has been tagged in a post by an account appearing to belong to Rodden’s wife, and the Facebook has posted both specific text and uncommon images that align with those posted by GlomarResponder.

On June 8, 2023, GlomarResponder wrote that “They tried to force a needle in my arm, and threatened to take food out of my family’s mouths. I don’t take kindly to threats. I have responded by spending a significant portion of my time and treasure on lawsuits.”

A year prior, the Jim Rodden Facebook account posted: “This is your periodic reminder that anyone who is trying to force a needle into my arm, or my son’s arm, can fuck directly off forever with the ‘my body, my choice’ bullshit.” This post, along with many others, was either deleted or made private after the Observer contacted Rodden for comment.

The Facebook account has posted about opposition to “red flag laws” that can restrict a person’s ability to purchase a gun, used an image depicting the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that has become associated with far-right Christian nationalism for a profile banner photo, posted about the Comedian from the comic book series The Watchmen, shared an image of the Mexican wrestler Blue Demon, used an image of the character Kratos from the video game series God of War as a profile picture, and used multiple images of the insignia for the rank of Corporal in the Marine Corps for various profile pictures. On X, GlomarResponder has also posted critically about red flag laws, repeatedly posted the phrase “Appeal to Heaven,” posted about how he thinks the Comedian is “based,” shared the same image of the wrestler Blue Demon as the Facebook account (within 24 hours), posted about Kratos and the God of War video game series, and posted about how he had attained the rank of Corporal when he left the Marines, which corresponds with the final rank Rodden attained before leaving the Marines.

The Facebook account also features a banner image depicting an M1942 “Frog Skin” camo flag with an atypical cracked-skull Marine Raiders emblem that was updated in November 2023. In July 2024, GlomarResponder posted the same photo. The flag is an uncommon variant that was previously sold on a website called Paid to Raid but is no longer listed among their products. Reverse image searches for the photo of the flag do not turn up any other exact matches outside of Paid to Raid’s webstore.

Left: A screenshot of the M1942 “Frog Skin” camo flag image posted as Jim Rodden’s Facebook banner. Right: A screenshot of GlomarResponder’s post featuring the same M1942 Frogskin Camo Flag image.

The Observer also matched other publicly available information about Rodden with biographical details revealed in GlomarResponder posts. County property records and university documents confirm his prior residence in Northern Virginia and North Carolina and attendance at Penn State, where he participated in marching band according to the LinkedIn profile. This is consistent with GlomarResponder’s posts that the account operator attended Penn State, worked at an office in Northern Virginia, and was in marching band. James Rodden appears in a 2003 Penn State yearbook.

GlomarResponder has also posted repeatedly about being an armorer, serving in the Marines, and working for Border Patrol, which correspond with Rodden’s LinkedIn.

According to the Register of Deeds’ office of Forsyth County, North Carolina—reached by phone—James Rodden got married in August 2009. (Forsyth County is where Wake Forest is located.) His wife’s maiden name, confirmed by the clerk, aligns with public records and private data broker information that help confirm Rodden resides in Frisco.

A Facebook profile sharing his wife’s name made a post in August about a family dog, Freya, in which the account tagged the Jim Rodden Facebook account. The Facebook account has described the dog as a “Working Line German Shepherd,” also referred to generally and by the account as “GSD,” specifically from the Czech lineage of the breed. According to the Facebook and a LinkedIn profile matching her name, as well as publicly available corporate information, Rodden’s wife is a horseback jumper trainer and owner of Clear Round Jumpers. Her Facebook account features posts about an interest in dressage. The account’s profile picture, originally shared in a post by a Collin County horse training facility’s Facebook page that tagged the apparent Facebook of Rodden’s wife, is of a woman with red hair and no visible tattoos.

GlomarResponder has posted that the account operator’s wife is a “hunter / jumper trainer” who is competent at “dressage” and has red hair and no tattoos. The account has also posted several times about having a female dog and training German Shepherds—referring to them as GSDs, positively describing the virtues of the “average working line shep,” and posting that “Czech [GSDs] are also very good dogs.”

On X, GlomarResponder has posted about meeting a spouse at age 27 and getting married before age 30. That aligns with Rodden’s August 2009 marriage record in Forsyth County, North Carolina, where Rodden owned property according to public records. Private data brokers also place his wife at the same North Carolina address as Rodden at this time. “At 28, am I the old guy in the class?,” reads an April 2009 post made by the Jim Rodden Facebook account in the Wake Forest Law Class of 2012 Facebook group.

On Facebook, Jim Rodden has liked and replied to mixed martial arts photos and videos posted by a Frisco MMA gym.

GlomarResponder has claimed to be under consideration for a federal appointment that would require Senate confirmation, which the Observer could not confirm. The account has also suggested that some of its posts may be misrepresentations to purposely mislead those who wish to uncover the operator’s identity.

“If you’re reading my anon Twitter account, some personal details may be misdirection,” GlomarResponder wrote on August 17, 2024.

But the alignment of biographical details, political viewpoints, interests, and the use of the same images across accounts is so specific that open-source intelligence experts who reviewed the Observer’s findings said the evidence linking Rodden to GlomarResponder (and another account, devildog_jim, used for forum posting) is unlikely to be coincidental.

“We asked two of our analysts with more than 20 years of combined experience in open source intelligence to review the identification,” said Bjørn Ihler, founder and CEO of Revontulet, a private counterterrorism intelligence and research company. “They found it to be thorough, well-supported, and worthy of public attention. They agree that the evidence linking James Rodden to the online accounts in question is strong, with significant biographical consistencies spanning over a decade. … The depth of the investigation leaves little room for doubt.”

AN ATTORNEY EXPRESSING RACISM, XENOPHOBIA, and fascist politics would raise questions about their ability to act fairly and impartially in legal proceedings, such as in Rodden’s capacity representing ICE in immigration removal hearings, said Cyrus Mehta, a New York-based immigration attorney with over 30 years of experience.

“A government lawyer who vilifies people that he opposes in court, and puts that out under the radar, would clearly be engaging in conduct that’s prejudicial to the administration of justice,” Mehta said.

Mehta said such conduct could violate the Rules of Professional Conduct for the District of Columbia Bar—which declined to comment for this story—through which James J. Rodden holds his license. According to Mehta, such rules are common in bar associations and have been used to charge and sanction attorneys.

There’s also a rule in the Code of Federal Regulations regarding government attorneys, Mehta noted, that says it’s “in the public interest for an adjudicating official or the board to impose disciplinary sanctions against any practitioner who falls within one or more of the categories enumerated in this section.” One of those categories is “conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice or undermines the integrity of the adjudicative.”

As of publication time, Rodden is still scheduled to represent the government in immigration court.

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Guess What, America? We’ve Been on the Wrong Side All Along!

Today on TAP: Democracies are out. It’s KGB and KKK; now we’re with them all the way!

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-02-20-guess-what-america-weve-been-on-the-wrong-side/

 

Despite some notable bumps in the road, it’s fair to characterize American foreign policy since roughly 1933 as pro-democracy. The nearly simultaneous ascent of Franklin Roosevelt here and Adolf Hitler in Germany in that year meant that the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy would be anti-despotic, even though the arena in which those values underpinned our policy was primarily Europe, and not always even there, as America’s refusal to engage in the Spanish Civil War made lamentably clear.

After 1945, fascism didn’t pose a significant threat to non-Iberian Europe, but the Soviet model of communism surely did, and our alliance with Europe’s democracies was the basis of our foreign policy. The competition with Russia even compelled us to become more democratic at home, as we could hardly win the allegiance of the Global South so long as our domestic South was governed on overtly racist lines.

Generations of American children have been schooled in democratic values, and when the U.S. has appeared to deviate from those values, its domestic critics have invariably contrasted our conduct with those values we profess to uphold. The left has made this point when we’ve (all too frequently) supported right-wing autocrats in the developing world; the right has made this point in opposing communism, though the right usually labels anything even slightly social democratic as communist, too, though social democracy is actually a profoundly democratic condition.

In any event, all that is now old news. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve now changed sides. Democracy is out; autocracy is in, though President Trump has made this switch on what we might term semi- or sub-ideological grounds.

Our official alliance with KGB veteran and critic-assassin Vladimir Putin, at the expense of the people of Ukraine, has so dominated the news of the past 24 hours that we may already be overlooking how completely it fits with the rest of Trump’s emerging foreign policy. There’s Vice President Vance’s embrace in the run-up to Germany’s upcoming elections of the AfD, the xenophobic German party with neo-Nazi roots and a continuing neo-Nazi presence in its ranks. There’s Trump’s obsession with creating conflicts in which America can dominate every other nation (Canada, Ukraine, Europe except Hungary, etc.) whose adherence to democratic norms makes them inherently weak and suspiciously feminized.

For that matter, Trump has continually supported AfD-type social forces here in the USA: the “good people on both sides” at Charlottesville, which meant the Klan; the January 6th insurrectionists; the Proud Boys he told to “stand by”; and, among figures in our history, the Confederate generals whose names he wants to reaffix to the bases of the very army they fought against. Fort Bragg, Fort Bedford Forrest, Fort Putin, Fort Beria, Fort Himmler, here we come.

In terming this Big F---in’ Switch to be semi- or sub-ideological, I mean only that it reflects aspects of Trump’s personality as much as it does a forthright preference for intolerant, anti-liberal autocracy. The current heads of government whom Trump admires are all autocrats—Putin, Xi, Korea’s Kim Jong Un—who violently suppress their critics. And just as Putin is to be admired for ordering the murder of his leading domestic opponents, so Volodymyr Zelensky is to be reviled for having rebuffed Trump’s request to concoct some criminal allegations against the Biden family. Whereas the violent suppression that Xi engages in can be called upon by Chinese leaders because it’s hardwired into the kind of one-party rule that characterizes Leninist (though now semi-capitalist) China, the violent suppression that Trump has as his ideal is not hardwired into the American system. Rather, it’s an aspect of his insecure, narcissistic, thuggish personality, which sees every situation that involves him as one that he must win, preferably by humiliating and harming the loser. His is a personality that is inherently constrained by the laws and norms of liberal democracy, and freed by their being supplanted by autocratic rule.

So much, then, for America as the city on a hill, as the last best hope of humankind, as the anchor, however imperfect and intermittent, of an alliance of democracies. We are now the shithole country that has emerged, fully formed, from the mind of Donald Trump.

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 Trump was recruited by KGB with codename 'Krasnov', claims ex-Soviet spy

A former Soviet intelligence officer has claimed Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename “Krasnov”.

The bombshell allegation was made by Alnur Mussayev, a former Kazakh intelligence chief, in a Facebook post. The 71-year-old, who previously headed Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, said he had served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB in Moscow, which was responsible for counter-intelligence support within the economy.

One of the directorate’s primary objectives, he claimed, was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” According to Mussayev, Trump, then a 40-year-old New York real estate developer, was one of those recruits. "In 1987, our directorate recruited Donald Trump under the pseudonym Krasnov,” he wrote.

Today, the personal file of resident ‘Krasnov’ has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin’s close associates,” he alleged. His allegations come amid years of speculation over Trump’s ties to Russia, dating back to his first visit to Moscow in 1987.

At the time, Trump, then a rising star in the New York property market, travelled to the Soviet Union to explore the possibility of building a hotel in the capital. Soviet officials reportedly facilitated the trip, raising questions among intelligence analysts about whether it was a routine business opportunity or something more scandalous.

Several years ago a report highlighted how, in 1985, the KGB had updated a secret personality questionnaire distributed among its officers, detailing how to identify and recruit Western figures. The document, according to intelligence sources, instructed agents to target “prominent figures in the West” with the aim of “drawing them into some form of collaboration with us… as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”

Mussayev’s claim appears to suggest that Trump may have been one such target. Despite years of scrutiny, Trump has vehemently denied having any improper ties to Russia or colluding with President Vladimir Putin.

However, some US officials have repeatedly raised concerns about his close relationship with the Kremlin leader, particularly during his first term in office. Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, added to the intrigue during a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics: US podcast.

He suggested that Trump’s deference to Putin has puzzled many of his former senior officials. “I think there is a mysterious ‘hold’ on the president,” he said. Scaramucci did not elaborate on what that ‘hold’ might be but suggested that several former Trump administration officials, including H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly— had also struggled to understand Trump’s affinity for Putin. “I don’t know why it’s like this,” he said. “McMaster couldn’t figure it out, Mattis couldn’t figure it out, Kelly couldn’t figure it out.”

AP Press

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Jonathan Pie - The Art of The Deal

 

 

 

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Musk off his tits on ket and coke and CPAC. This is the twat that wants to put a silicon chip in your brain

 

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[KEVINAA 129]

Later today at 5am UTC will be exactly 3 years since RUSSIA attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was the first reports on Russia invading Ukraine.

Be on high alert in Europe. At any moment it would fireworks again.

3 year anniversary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine_(24_February_–_7_April_2022)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

Edited February 23 by KEVINAA

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The strategists

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London yesterday