Tag Archive for: trump

Julian Assange assasination & ‘options’ considered by CIA under Trump: Report to UK Court


In a dramatic development in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition case, a report submitted before a UK court stated that the United States’ premier intelligence agency, the CIA, under the Trump administration was pondering and discussing ‘options’ to abduct and even assassinate the Australian activist. suggest that the US was hell-bent and outrightly desperate to end the asylum of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. 

According to the report, the US intelligence considered the killing of Assange in 2017 when the WikiLeaks founder was entering the fifth year sheltering at the Ecuador embassy in London. The CIA officials along with the then director, Mike Pompeo, tabled their intentions after being infuriated by WikiLeaks’ publication of ‘Vault 7’, a breach which is considered as the biggest data loss in history. ‘Vault 7’ is a series of documents detailing the activities and capabilities of the US intelligence agency CIA in relation to cyber warfare. In fact, in March 2017, then US President Donald Trump had said, “the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken.”

US considered killing Julian Assange: Report

While the CIA has declined to comment on the grave allegations, the report suggested that the plan of action to assassinate Julian Assange had been laid out and the Trump administration went as far as requesting for his ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ with ‘no boundaries’ for killing Assange. The latest on the purported plot to assassinate Assange adds to incidents that surfaced in this regard in 2020 as well. In September 2020, the internet witnessed global outrage after an employee of a Spanish security company, UC Global, had come to the fore and highlighted details of an alleged attempt to spy on Assange.

Purportedly, microphones were concealed to monitor Assange’s meetings with his lawyers, and his fingerprints were obtained from a glass. The aforesaid information was read out in the Old Bailey in London on September 30, 2020, by one of Assange’s lawyers, who is fighting his extradition to the US on charges relating to leaks of classified documents that exposed the alleged US war crimes and abuses. 

‘If reports are true, I am horrified’: Dutch MP

The counsel…

Source…

Arizona election audit: Draft report confirms Biden defeated Trump in Maricopa County last November


The state Senate Republicans who seized on former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud and ordered up the report and Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced company hired to conduct it, are set to detail their findings in a public presentation Friday.

The draft report emerged Thursday night, and audit spokesman Randy Pullen confirmed its validity to KJZZ Phoenix. “It’s not the final report, but it’s close,” he said.

The draft report shows that the hand recount found that President Joe Biden received 99 more votes than Maricopa County had reported after November’s election, while former President Donald Trump received 261 fewer votes than the county reported.

Maricopa County’s Republican-led board of supervisors pointed to the draft Thursday night, saying that it underscores the reality that the county ran an accurate election.

“You don’t have to dig deep into the draft copy of the Arizona Senate/Cyber Ninja audit report to confirm what I already knew — the candidates certified by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General — did, in fact, win,” board chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, said in a statement.

“This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters,” he said. “That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”

Elections experts in both parties, looking at the manner and the methods of the so-called “audit,” have said for months that its results will not be credible. It was conducted by the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, which had no experience auditing election results and is led by a man who has repeated wild conspiracy theories about election fraud. The company and its volunteers and subcontractors did not follow standard auditing procedures, and observers from Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ office repeatedly noted instances in which those conducting the review broke their own rules.

No matter the outcome of Cyber Ninjas’ examination, the reality that Biden is president and won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes last year will not change.

Still, former President Donald Trump and those who have…

Source…

AP FACT CHECK: Trump makes false claims about Arizona audit


PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities…

PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona’s electoral votes.

Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.

The “forensic audit,” as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.

Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.

County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.

Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:

TRUMP: “168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)”

THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.

Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.

“We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day,” Logan added.

The allegation harkens back to…

Source…

Biden Revokes and Replaces Trump Order That Banned TikTok


TikTok’s woes subsided with Mr. Trump’s election defeat. Though the company is still under scrutiny with the Biden administration’s new executive order, analysts say the dramatic ups and downs for the company will significantly dwindle.

James Lewis, a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration had shown no easing of the government’s strong stance against China. But the new order lays out much more precise criteria for weighing risks posed by TikTok and other companies owned by foreign adversaries like China.

“They are taking the same direction as the Trump administration but in some ways tougher, in a more orderly fashion and implemented in a good way,” Mr. Lewis said. He added that Mr. Biden’s order was stronger than the Trump-era directive because “it’s coherent, not random.”

Under the new system outlined in Mr. Biden’s order, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo would be empowered to “use a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis” to examine software applications designed, manufactured or developed by a “foreign adversary,” including China, according to a memo circulated by Commerce Department officials and obtained by The New York Times.

“The Biden administration is committed to promoting an open, interoperable, reliable and secure internet,” the memo said. “Certain countries,” including China, “do not share these democratic values.”

On Wednesday, administration officials would not go into specifics about the future of TikTok’s availability to American users or say whether the U.S. government would seek to compel ByteDance, which owns the app, to transfer American user data to a company based in the United States. Amid a number of successful legal challenges waged by ByteDance, a deal to transfer the data to Oracle fell through this year shortly after Mr. Biden took office.

Administration officials said a review of TikTok by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body that considers the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, was still continuing and separate…

Source…