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Clinton eyes …

September 23, 2016

Clinton eyes,
Wobbling like jelly.
Clinton eyes,
Beginning to close and fail?
How can the hope that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Clinton eyes.

with apologies to rabbits

clinton-eyes-image-gateway-pundit

image gateway-pundit

The Hill:

In 2014 Conan O’Brien did a spoof of Hillary Clinton‘s interview with Diane Sawyer about her lack of lingering health issues following her 2012 concussion. In an obviously photoshopped version Clinton’s eyes are made to oscillate crazily.

It was a very funny piece. Now, it may not seem so funny.

Hillary Clinton exhibited abnormal eye movements during her recent speech in Philadelphia and they were not photoshopped.

Her eyes did not always move in the same direction at the same time. It appears that she has a problem with her left sixth cranial nerve. That nerve serves only one function and that is to make the lateral rectus muscle contract. That muscle turns the eye in the direction away from the midline. 

It comes out of the base of the brain and runs along the floor of the skull, immediately beneath the brain before coursing upward to the eye. Dysfunction of that muscle causes the striking picture of the eyes not aiming in the same direction and causes the patient to suffer double vision.

Like all things medical, there is a long list of potential causes but in my opinion the most likely one, based on Clinton’s known medical history is an intermittent lateral rectus palsy caused by damage to or pressure on her sixth cranial nerve.

It is known that she suffered a traumatic brain injury in late 2012 when she fell and struck her head. What is also known is that she was diagnosed with a transverse sinus thrombosis — blood clot in the major vein at the base of the brain. Almost all patients with a transverse sinus thrombosis suffer swelling of the brain and increased intracranial pressure. Most have headaches, balance issues and visual disturbances — all of which Clinton was reported to have following that event.

Clinton’s physician reported that she was placed on Coumadin (a blood thinner) to dissolve the blood clot. Actually, that is incorrect, because Coumadin has no effect on an existing clot. It serves only to decrease the chance of further clotting occurring Clinton’s physician has also reported that on follow up exam, the clot had resolved. That is surprising since the majority of such clots do not dissolve. The way it was documented that the clot had resolved has not been reported.

If, as is statistically likely, Clinton’s transverse sinus is still blocked, she would still have increased pressure and swelling and decreased blood flow to her brain. That swelling would place pressure on the exposed portion of the sixth cranial nerve at the base of her brain, explaining the apparent lateral rectus palsy. And such a deficit can be partial and/or intermittent. 

Additionally, when patients who have decreased intracranial blood flow becoming volume depleted (dehydrated) or have a drop in blood pressure loss of consciousness can occur. That could explain her witnessed collapse in New York City on 9/11.

One thing that is taught early in medical school is that a patient’s history, physical exam, signs and symptoms should usually lead to a single diagnosis. …….. 

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Trump accepts Obama’s birth was in the US, but the original birther theory was started by Clinton supporters in 2008

September 16, 2016

Someone in Trump’s campaign just said that he accepts that Obama was, in fact, born in the US. That seems to have got a lot of media attention, but it is conveniently forgotten that it was Clinton’s supporters who started the whole Obama “birther movement” in 2008.

Clinton supporters started the Obama “birther” movement

The level of ridiculous rhetoric is now going to rise in the US and it will be difficult for Clinton to match Trump. Yesterday he proclaimed (again) to the electorate that she had started the Obama “birther” movement. We can expect much more from Trump and Clinton’s staff may be hard put to keep up. In battles of exaggerated rhetoric, tempo is of critical importance. The person who makes the first claim always has an advantage. It is having the white pieces in a chess game.

But on the birther story, this certainly originated during the Clinton / Obama battle. There is still not much love lost between Clinton and Obama. The birther story was started, if not by Clinton, certainly by one or more of her supporters, and it was in 2008 during her primary battle with Obama. ….

  1. More than a full year before anyone would hear of Orly Taitz, the Birther strategy was first laid out in the Penn memo.

  2. The “othering” foundation was built subliminally by the Clinton campaign itself.

  3. Democrats and Clinton campaign surrogates did the dirtiest of the dirty work: openly spread the Birther lies.

  4. Staffers in Hillary’s actual campaign used email to spread the lies among other 0225_obamaturban_460x276Democrats (this was a Democrat primary after all — so that is the only well you needed to poison a month before a primary).

  5. The campaign released the turban photo. Hillary herself used 60 Minutes to further stoke these lies.

The article reblogged below was published by FactCheck in July 2015, just after Trump had announced his intention to run for President.

Was Hillary Clinton the Original ‘Birther’?

by , Posted on July 2, 2015

Two Republican presidential candidates claim the so-called “birther” movement originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008. While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it.

In an interview on June 29, Sen. Ted Cruz said “the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008,” and earlier this year, Donald Trump claimed “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther.”

Neither Cruz nor Trump presented any evidence that Clinton or anyone on her campaign ever questioned Obama’s birthplace, demanded to see his birth certificate, or otherwise suggested that Obama was not a “natural born citizen” eligible to serve as president.

For those unfamiliar with the controversy over Obama’s birthplace, it refers to those who contend that Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.

At FactCheck.org, we have written about the issue of Obama’s birthplace on multiple occasions — indeed we were the first media organization to hold his birth certificate in our hot little hands and vouch for the authenticity of it. But facts have done little to squelch the conspiracy theories that continue to bounce around online.

The issue arose again this week in an interview with Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. Yahoo News’ Katie Couric asked Cruz if he thought that was going to be an issue for voters.

“It’s interesting, the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama,” Cruz said (at about the 25:25 mark). Cruz then went on to say that he believes he clearly meets the constitutional requirement for a president to be a “natural born citizen.”

The claim about Clinton’s tie to “birthers” was made earlier by Donald Trump in February at the CPAC event (at 24:20 mark). Trump — who has a history of pushing bogus theories about Obama’s birth —  said, “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther. She wanted … but she was unable to get it.”

We asked the Cruz campaign for backup, and it pointed us to two articles. The first ran in Politico on April 22, 2011, under the headline, “Birtherism: Where it all began.”

Politico, April 22, 2011: The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.

According to the article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”

The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.”

Both of those stories comport with what we here atFactCheck.org wrote  two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”

Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.

But none of those stories suggests any link between the Clinton campaign, let alone Clinton herself, and the advocacy of theories questioning Obama’s birth in Hawaii.

One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”

The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”

Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Cruz’s claim is false. “The Clinton campaign never suggested that President Obama was not born here,” Schwerin wrote to us in an email.

It is certainly interesting, and perhaps historically and politically relevant, that “birther” advocacy may have originated with supporters of Hillary Clinton — especially since many view it as an exclusively right-wing movement. But whether those theories were advocated by Clinton and/or her campaign or simply by Clinton “supporters” is an important distinction. Candidates are expected to be held accountable for the actions of their campaigns. Neither Cruz nor Trump, whose campaign did not respond to our request for backup material, provides any compelling evidence that either Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting the so-called birther movement.

— Robert Farley

 

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Why is Hillary Clinton’s height still a mystery?

September 15, 2016
clintons-vital-statistics-daily-mail

clintons vital statistics – daily mail

Why is Hillary Clinton’s height such a mystery? Is it 5’5″ or 5’7″? Why should it matter?

After her fainting fit on Sunday at the 9/11 commemoration, and the revelations about her pneumonia, she has now released some information about her various medical conditions.

But not her height and weight.

I observed this exactly a year ago:

Hillary Clinton is still growing.

Back in 2008, she was 5’5″ tall. But she has now reached 5’7″ according to most media and internet sources and, above all, Google. Her campaign has released some of her medical records but is silent about her height. Questions about her height are not answered. …….. So, 5’5″ should be nothing to be so ashamed of. Queen Victoria was only 5′ tall. Queen Elizabeth I was between 5’3″ and 5’5″. And Carly Fiorina with heels is at 5’6″.

No change in the secrecy about her height since a year ago.

Of course one reason could be that it makes it easier to get away with using a “body double” who is actually a different height. Just another conspiracy theory perhaps.

But anybody hearing her coughing fits and observing her behaviour last Sunday, will conclude that a cover-up about her health is continuing. They may well also conclude that the “health conspiracy theory” is turning out to be true.

The body-double theory is a little more far fetched – at least at first sight. Certainly the photographs taken at the 9/11 ceremony and those taken later in the afternoon show a recovery bordering on the incredible and provide much fuel for the “body double” conspiracy. The Clinton campaign’s secrecy around her height also supports the use – perhaps for quite some time – of a body-double. One wonders if the double goes so far as take some of the medical tests when required.

Related:

Now Hillary Clinton reaches for “average” as 5′ 5″ morphs to 5′ 7″

 

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No presidential candidate has died or withdrawn after nomination (yet)

September 12, 2016

That Donald Trump is the nominated Republican candidate has already made this presidential election quite unusual. That the supposed conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health problems are turning out to be true (forgetfulness, coughing fits, fainting …) is also unusual.

What else is or could be unusual?

Hillary is almost 69 and Trump is 70, though Clinton seems more likely to succumb to illness. Though it has never happened before, no presidential candidate has died or withdrawn after being nominated. Between Trump and Clinton it seems this election is going to be won by the one with the lowest negative perceptions on the day. Either of them being perceived as having a serious illness before election day could be so negative as to hand the election to the opponent.

Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump becoming incapacitated before

  • election day, or
  • after the election but before the electoral college votes, or
  • after being elected but before inauguration, or
  • in office

is not unthinkable. The first 3 scenarios have never happened.  However there have been a few cases which have come close.

  1. William Henry Harrison (February 9, 1773 – April 4, 1841) was the ninth President of the United States (1841). He was 68 years, 23 days old when inaugurated, the oldest president to take office until Ronald Reagan in 1981. Harrison died on his 32nd day in office of complications from pneumonia, serving the shortest tenure in United States presidential history.
  2. In the election of 1872, Horace Greeley was the Democratic nominee for President, but the Democrats lost the general election to the Republican ticket, headed by Ulysses Grant. After the popular vote, but before the Electoral College vote, Greeley died. Because the Democrats had no chance of winning the election, given the outcome of the popular vote and the number of electoral votes already secured by Grant, the party did not bother to stipulate to their electors who an official replacement candidate would be, and most of the Democratic electors in the states that the Democrats had won cast their votes for people other than whom their party had nominated.
  3. In 1912, James Sherman, the Republican candidate for Vice-President (and the incumbent Vice-President under William Howard Taft) died on October 30 of kidney disease, a few days before the general election on November 5. The Republican National Committee scheduled a meeting to be held after the general election, on November 12, to select a successor, and Sherman’s name remained on the ticket for the general election. The Republicans lost, however (the Democratic ticket of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall won), and decided on November 8 not to meet as they had planned.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have appropriate Bylaws in place to cater for most eventualities:

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties have rules in their bylaws governing how to fill the vacancy. The Party Chair calls a meeting of the National Committee, and the Committee members at the meeting vote to fill the vacancy on the ticket. A candidate must receive a majority of the votes to win the party’s nod.

The same process would happen if the vacancy were to occur after the general election but before the Electoral College voting. If a vacancy should occur on the winning ticket, it would then be the party’s responsibility to fill it and provide a candidate for whom their electors could vote. ….

A vacancy could occur at the top of a winning ticket during the period after the electoral votes had been cast but before the President-elect had been sworn in. … No President-elect has in fact failed to be sworn in. Nevertheless, the rules for what would happen if a President-elect were to be unavailable to be sworn in actually became a part of our law with the adoption of the 20th Amendment in 1933. This amendment was passed primarily to shorten the length of time between the general election and the beginning of the new administration (inauguration day was moved from March to January). But it also specified that if, at the time of the inauguration, the President-elect has died, then the Vice-President-elect becomes President, and if a President has not yet been qualified by that time, then the Vice-President-elect acts as President until a President has been so qualified.

With either Clinton or Trump as President, the possibility that their term has to be completed by their Vice Presidents is quite high.

 

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By Clinton’s arithmetic slightly less than 33 million Americans are deplorable

September 11, 2016

She started the ruckus by saying that half of all Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables”.

She later backed away from that but only to the extent of saying that the “half” was “wrong” but implied that many – without specifying how many – were still “deplorable”.

les-deplorables

image from theconservativetreehouse.com

The US population is now about 320 million and voter turnout in November will be about 42% of the total population. Of 135 million votes Trump will get – win or lose – about 67 million votes.

Even Hillary Clinton’s grasp of arithmetic should be capable of drawing the conclusion that she has just said that

  1. about 33 million Americans are deplorable, and with her non-apology
  2. something slightly less than 33 million Americans are “deplorable”.

Having used the word “half” she can no longer claim that she actually meant that anything much less than about 33 million Americans are “deplorable”. It could be 49% of 67 million or even 45% but it certainly could not be down to 40% (26 million). It will take some disingenuity for her to get past this.

 

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US – Russia deal on Syria is a de facto acceptance of Assad’s position

September 10, 2016

The deal is that US backed rebels will not fight with forces  backed by Russia (Assad’s). That will allow the US, Russia and their proxies to fight ISIS forces wherever they may be in Syria and Iraq. However it is unlikely that Turkey will refrain from attacking Kurdish groups who are also in the front line against ISIS.

PHOTO: Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov speak at a press conference, Sept. 9, 2016.

If the deal holds it effectively consolidates Assad’s improving position on the ground. But even if the deal does not hold, the US anti-Assad position is grossly undermined.

Reuters: 

The United States and Russia reached a breakthrough deal early on Saturday to try to restore peace in Syria, but air strikes hours later added to rebels’ doubts that any ceasefire could hold.

The agreement, by the powers that back opposing sides in the five-year-old war, promises a nationwide truce from sundown on Monday, improved access for humanitarian aid and joint military targeting of hardline Islamist groups.

But hours later, jets bombed a marketplace in rebel-held Idlib in northwestern Syria, killing at least 25 people and wounding dozens, according to locals and rescue workers who said they believed the planes to be Russian.

Idlib province has endured escalating strikes by Russian jets in recent months, according to international aid workers and residents, destroying scores of hospitals, bakeries and other infrastructure across rebel-held territory.

Aleppo was also hit from the air and fighting continued on the ground. The army attacked rebel-held areas, both sides said, pushing to maximize gains before the ceasefire deadline. …….

Kerry said the “bedrock” of the new deal was an agreement that the Syrian government would not fly combat missions in an agreed area on the pretext of hunting fighters from the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria which has recently changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.

Under the new deal, both sides – Russian-backed government forces and rebel groups supported by the U.S. and Gulf states, – are to halt fighting as a confidence building measure.

If the truce holds from Monday, Russia and the United States will begin seven days of preparatory work to set up a “joint implementation centre”, where they will share information to distinguish territory controlled by Nusra from that held by other rebel groups.

Moon of Alabama has this analysis:

It looks as if there has been unseemly resistance to this agreement by parts of the U.S. government. This may have been just for show. But it may also be a sign that Obama lost control of the bureaucracy:

The proposed level of U.S.-Russian interaction has upset several leading national security officials in Washington, including Defense Secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and Kerry only appeared at the news conference after several hours of internal U.S. discussions.After the Geneva announcement, Pentagon secretary Peter Cook offered a guarded endorsement of the arrangement and cautioned, “We will be watching closely the implementation of this understanding in the days ahead.”

If this deal falls apart, as it is likely to eventually do, all responsibility will be put onto Secretary of State Kerry. Indeed the military and intelligence parts of the U.S. government may well work to sabotage the deal while Kerry will be presented as convenient scapegoat whenever it fails.

 

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In Syria, the Obama non-strategy: US supported groups fight US supported groups

September 3, 2016

Eric Margolis has this post in The Unz Review and it only confirms for me that Obama’s lasting legacy will be of his “paralysis by analysis”. Obama’s actions are dominated by his fears. He has good intentions and then gets bogged down as soon as the risk analysis gets under way. His Iraq/ Syria/ Turkey/ Iran strategy – if it can be credited with the label of a “strategy” – has been one of avoiding risks as they appear. His actions are all short-term reactions to the appearance of new, perceived risks. His “red lines in the sand” have proven to be shifting lines. Obama’s misguided actions and his inactions allowed the ISIS expansion to flourish. The containing of ISIS expansion has only been made possible by the Russian intervention and the propping-up of Assad.

Obama’s predecessor, Bush Jr., distinguished himself by not thinking anything through. He rushed to conclusions and to actions without too much thought or analysis. In my definitions of behaviour he comes across, not necessarily as without courage, but as foolhardy. Obama, on the other hand, will be remembered, no doubt, for being intelligent and analytical but without courage.

As Margolis points out, the actions from diverse groups within the US have been chaotic and often opposed to one another.

U.S. vs. U.S. in Syria

 

pentagon-cia

What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be?

It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash.

But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year’s War. The French were routed by the Prussians. France’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, named one of his dogs, “la Pompadour.”

As a result, the two arms of offensive US strategic power, the Pentagon, and CIA, went separate ways in Syria. Growing competition between the US military and militarized CIA broke into the open in Syria.

Fed up with the astounding incompetence of the White House, the US military launched and supported its own rebel groups in Syria, while CIA did the same.

Fighting soon after erupted in Syria and Iraq between the US-backed groups. US Special Forces joined the fighting in Syria, Iraq and most lately, Libya.

The well-publicized atrocities, like mass murders and decapitations, greatly embarrassed Washington, making it harder to portray their jihadi wildmen as liberators. The only thing exceptional about US policy in Syria was its astounding incompetence.

Few can keep track of the 1,000 groups of jihadis that keep changing their names and shifting alliances. Throw in Turkomans, Yazidis, Armenians, Nestorians, Druze, Circassians, Alawis, Assyrians and Palestinians. Oh yes, and the Alevis.

Meanwhile, ISIS was inflicting mayhem in Syria and Iraq. But who really is ISIS? A few thousand twenty-something hooligans with little knowledge of Islam but a burning desire to dynamite the existing order and a sharp media sense. The leadership of these turbaned anarchists appears to have formed in US prison camps in Afghanistan.

The US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey armed and financed ISIS as a weapon to unleash on Syria, which was an ally of Iran that refused to take orders from the Western powers. The west bears a heavy responsibility for the deaths of 450,000 Syrians, at least half the nation of 23 million becoming refugees, and destruction of this once lovely country.

At some point, ISIS shook off its western tutors and literally ran amok. But the US has not yet made a concerted attempt to crush ISIS because of its continuing usefulness in Syria and in the US, where ISIS has become the favorite whipping boy of politicians.

Next, come the Kurds, an ancient Indo-European stateless people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. They have been denied a national state by the western powers since WWI. Kurdish rebels in Iraq have been armed and financed by Israel since the 1970’s.

When America’s Arab jihadists proved militarily feeble, the US turned to the Kurds, who are renowned fighters, arming and financing the Kurdish Syrian YPG which is part of the well-known PKK rebel group that fights Turkey.

I covered the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in eastern Anatolia in the 1980’s in which some 40,000 died.

Turkey is now again battling a rising wave of Kurdish attacks that caused the Turks to probe into northern Syria to prevent a link-up of advancing Kurdish rebel forces.

So, Turkey, a key American ally, is now battling CIA-backed Kurdish groups in Syria. Eighty percent of Turks believe the recent failed coup in Turkey was mounted by the US – not the White House, but by the Pentagon which has always been joined at the hip to Turkey’s military.

This major Turkish-Kurdish crisis was perfectly predictable, but the obtuse junior warriors of the Obama administration failed to grasp this point.

Now the Russians have entered the fray in an effort to prevent their ally, Bashar Assad, from being overthrow by western powers. Also perfectly predictable. Russia claimed to be bombing ISIS but in fact, is targeting US-backed groups. Washington is outraged that the wicked Russians are doing in the Mideast what the US has done for decades.

The US and Russia now both claim to have killed a senior ISIS commander in an air strike. Their warplanes are dodging one another, creating a perfect scenario for a head-on clash at a time when neocons in the US are agitating for war with Russia.

Does anyone think poor, demolished Syria is worth the price? Hatred for the US is now seething in Turkey and across the Mideast. Hundreds of millions of US tax dollars have been wasted in this cruel, pointless war.

Time for the US to stop stirring this witch’s brew.

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Is President of Mexico scenting a Trump victory?

August 31, 2016

If the mainstream media are to be believed Donald Trump is already dead and buried. They have gone to unprecedented lengths to vilify and castigate him – and I suspect have gone so far in their vendetta as to now damage their own credibility.

Why then has the President of Mexico invited Trump for private talks?

Trump Mexico

They are going to be meeting today.

Washington Post: Donald Trump is considering jetting to Mexico City on Wednesday for a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, just hours before he delivers a high-stakes speech in Arizona to clarify his views on immigration policy, according to people in the United States and Mexico familiar with the discussions.

It could be that President Peña Nieto is just playing safe and making sure that channels to a President Trump – however unlikely – are not completely closed. But, I don’t buy that. If Trump’s case is as hopeless as the media claim it to be, Nieto does not need all the negative publicity and certainly not from Hispanics within the US.

Or could it be that the media does not represent the reality among the US electorate and President Nieto is anticipating something that the US media are in denial about?

 

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Murdered DNC leaker to Wikileaks is latest addition to the Bill and Hillary body count

August 11, 2016

The “Bill & Hillary body count” is unusually long. It is more reminiscent of that of a dictator of a banana republic than of a leading “democratic” country. Now one more joins the list.

The number of people from the Bill & Hillary Clinton “inner circle” who have died mysteriously is between 50 and about 80. It seems that potential “whistleblowers” who may have had information implicating the Clintons are particularly vulnerable. I recall the apparent suicide of White House Counsel, Vince Foster in 1993 and the strong speculation that, in fact, he was eliminated because he had found something incriminating while investigating Bill Clinton’s finances.

Seth Rich, a DNC worker, was murdered on 10th July, apparently the victim of an armed robbery. But now it seems – from what Julian Assange says – that Rich was the source of the leak of information from the DNC to Wikileaks. And, he implies, Rich was murdered to prevent his testifying to the FBI. The speculation continues that he had information about the Clinton campaign’s activities (via the DNC) against Bernie Sanders and his murder was to shut him up.

[Seth

Seth Conrad Rich

Inquisitr: 

Seth Rich Murdered For Leaking DNC Emails?

Seth Rich may have been the source of the DNC email leak, the founder of WikiLeaks suggested this week about the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer.

Rich, who was murdered in Washington, D.C., back in July, has been the subject of a number of conspiracy theories. There were reports that he was planning to speak to the FBI about potential election fraud being committed in the Democratic primary, a report that turned out to have no basis, and now there are reports that he was the one who supplied the organization WikiLeaks with access to tens of thousands of emails from the DNC.  

Speculation had started to build that Seth Rich could have some connection to WikiLeaks when the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, announced this week that he was offering a $20,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in his death.

Assange took the speculation a step further, insinuating in an appearance on a Dutch television show that Seth Rich was a “source” to the organization. The Gateway Pundit had a transcript of Assange’s appearance and his reference to Rich.

Julian Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27 year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.

Reporter: That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?

Julian Assange: No. There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.

The statements from Julian Assange kick-started a new round of speculation that Seth Rich may have been murdered for his role in uncovering fraud on the part of the DNC. While the allegations about election fraud during the Democratic Primary have been debunked as a misunderstanding about the nature of exit polling, the possibility that Rich was an informant opened up a new avenue for conspiracy theories.

whatreallyhappened.com is maintaining a list of the “Clinton body count”.

Their list has well over 50 names and they have the following entries about Vince Foster and Seth Rich:

Vincent Foster

Deputy White House Counsel

Died: July 21, 1993

Found dead in Ft. Marcy Park in Washington, DC, of a supposed suicide by gunshot. A suicide note was supposedly found a few days later, torn into several pieces, in his briefcase, after his office had been entered by White House staff and materials removed. The “suicide” note, (leaked despite official efforts to keep it from view) has since been revealed to be a forgery.

The gun which he supposedly used to kill himself was reported to be still in his hand, but the person who first found the body reports that there was no gun at that time. Many irregularities surround the death and the investigation of it. For one thing, neither Foster’s fingerprints or blood were on the gun he supposedly inserted into his mouth and fired. There was no blood on Foster’s hands.

Foster was also from Hope, Ark., like Clinton, and also worked for the Rose Law firm. Foster had intimate knowledge of the Clintons’ personal finances. Foster was involved in an investigation of their finances, and reportedly made a phone call to Hillary Clinton, in Los Angeles, just hours before his death. Foster had been called to testify to Congress about the records Hillary refused to turn over. Another possible motive for the murder relates to the Clinton Presidential Blind Trust, being prepared by Foster, but six months late. Testimony during the Whitewater hearings suggestsd the trust was fraudulent, with the Clintons retaining control over much of their finances, in order to profits from inside information.

Recently, the signed report of M.E. Dr. Donald Haut was uncovered at the National Archives, proving that Foster had a previously unreported gunshot wound to his neck.

Finally, an FBI memo surfaced dated the day after the date of the official autopsy, in which the autopsist informed the FBI that there was NO exit wound.

Seth Conrad Rich

DNC Voter Expansion Data Director

Died: July 10, 2016

Seth Conrad Rich was shot several times in the back a block from his home in D.C.’s neighborhood of Bloomingdale. The police declared it a roberry gone bad, but nothing had been taken; Seth still had his wallet, watch, and cell phone.

One possible motive for his assasination lies with the WikiLeaks dump of 20,000 DNC emails which proved the DNC was rigging the primaries to favor Hillary Clinton. The scandal forced DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz to resign. Although Hillary’s people tried to portray this as a hack by Russia, to cast Hillary as a victim of international intrigue, WikiLeaks, while not identifying the leak, denied it was Russia, and stated it was an “internal” leak. If Seth (who was in a perfect position to acquire the data) were the leak, that would be ample motive to murder him, as a warning to others inside the DNC not to blow any whistles.

Shortly after the killing, Redditors and social media users were pursuing a “lead” saying that Rich was en route to the FBI the morning of his murder, apparently intending to speak to special agents about an “ongoing court case” possibly involving the Clinton family.

A reward has been offered for information on this murder.

Whatever the truth is, it is clearly not healthy to be allowed into the Clinton circle and then try to leave.

 

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Can Trump withstand the all-out media onslaught?

August 10, 2016

If the media reports on Trump (starting in the US and then carried all over the world) are taken at face value, the Trump campaign has imploded and Trump is dead as a Presidential candidate. The November election is already being declared a walk-over for Hillary. The current media onslaught on Trump appears to be a “no holds barred” thing where the most tenuous arguments are used to support sensational conclusions (the latest being that Trump is encouraging violence against Clinton by gun owners).

But there is a fundamental disconnect somewhere. If Trump’s chance is already as dead as the media say it is, then they should be returning to the ridicule they showered on Trump a year ago when his campaign started. But the media “reporting” is, instead, getting increasingly strident, increasingly vituperative, increasingly vicious. It suggests to me that rather than being a reaction to Trump’s declining chance of being President, it is a reaction dominated by the fear that he might win.

The ingredient that the media are most scared of it seems is the US electorate. They are in fact terrified of what is my hypothesis – that the anti-establishment wave that has put Trump where he is, will turn into an anti-establishment tsunami come November. The media are trying, with their increasingly wild attacks, to get to an audience they normally cannot reach.

Get Trump

Right now the media are still living in the hope that they can pre-empt a Trump candidacy. I suspect they might be too late. Some of the more liberal media are enaged in such “over-the-top” attacks on Trump which reminds me of the desperate, crazed, suicidal tactics of berserkers or kamikaze. If Trump can withstand the onslaught and is still around in the middle of September, then, I think, the media’s survival instinct will kick in. If, with 6 weeks to go, Trump is still a potential President, the media will have to look to how they remain alive under a President Trump who might turn out to be quite vindictive.

The mentality driving some of the most extreme attacks on Trump is not so very different to the desperate, crazed, suicide attacks of an embattled terrorist group.

 

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