Gaza aid blocked again

 

The Italian government pulled its escort ship just before this happened.  The Italian people are voicing their objection.

Sadly, Italy is withdrawing its escort to Gaza

 

I haven't heard whether Greece and Spain are going on.

Italy and Greece join Spain to aid Gazans

 

UPDATE 09/30/2025:  Sadly...

UPDATE 10/01/2025:

Trump's Italian job

Could somebody investigate this before November?  Durham and Barr certainly buried it, and I'm pretty darn sure if they found something to exonerate Trump, they would have published it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There is no justice where Trump is concerned

And it often looks like there never will be.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

  NYT

Surprised?

Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation.

[...]

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another.

[...]

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump.

Was that the basis for Trump's false claims that Italy was involved in nefarious activity against his 2020 campaign? An attempt to preempt whatever might come out from that investigation? No doubt it would have been retaliation, a typical kneejerk Trump reactionto any negative publicity.

The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

[...]

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry.

[...]

The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

Well, until now, I guess.

Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut.

[...]

As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.

[...]

Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.

[...]

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

[...]

The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

[...]

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.

I'm guessing it wasn't a "hunch" anyway.  It was simply Barr's own attempt to "find" something to exonerate Trump and keep him in power.

Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

As was Bill Barr.

Trump & Co. will be blaming this morning's stock market on the Democrats

In the meantime, this is what Trump is tweeting and retweeting:

While in Italy (which we are outstripping because we didn't get on top of this sooner):

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We're number one!

Lyin' our way through a pandemic

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Italy

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Even when the whole country is on lockdown

They may be stuck in their homes, but...

Damn

Sounds serious

You CAN indict an attorney general and a secretary of state

When a summary appeared last week of the July phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, the scope of involvement by the Trump administration seemed at first to be limited. Trump had mostly used his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to pursue his project, it seemed.

But that picture has quickly changed. The release of a whistleblower report Thursday suggested an active role by Barr, and said that a dozen US officials had listened to the Trump-Ukraine phone call, and that summaries of the call had been distributed more widely – raising the question of what proportion of Trump administration energies in recent months have been devoted to Trump’s pet projects.

[...]

Both William Barr, the attorney general, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, collectively participated in contacts between Trump and leaders of at least four foreign countries, according to multiple reports.

Those contacts were variously aimed at producing stories that could damage Joe Biden, Trump’s potential 2020 opponent, or at producing stories that could undermine the US intelligence community assessment from 2017 of Russian election tampering in the last election, the reports said.

[...]

Barr and Pompeo – whose vast portfolios nominally run from administering criminal justice in the United States to securing international alliances and combating threats abroad – have separately tried to distance themselves from the avalanching revelation that Trump’s conduct of the matters of state has apparently, in significant proportion, been devoted to the pursuit of the president’s personal bugbears and ambitions.

  The Guardian

When you live with pigs, you learn to grunt.

Barr was previously reported to be “surprised and angry” to find his name mentioned in a summary of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, while Pompeo, when asked what he knew about that phone call, replied that he had not seen a copy of the whistleblower document that flagged it: “I haven’t seen the complaint,” he told ABC News.

For Barr: sure, he's angry. He thought, for whatever reason(s), that his name would be kept out of it. And for Pompeo: that's not an answer to the question.

In fact, Pompeo reportedly took part in the call, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a senior state department official. For his part, Barr flew to Italy and to London to ask for help in “investigating” the roots of the Russia investigation, the Washington Post reported.

He was in Italy when the complaint became public knowledge, which was just recently. So, they're still at their ventures on behalf of Trump's reelection campaign.

Trump also asked the Australian prime Scott Morrison for help, and Morrison agreed to assist, something first reported by the New York Times, and confirmed by the Australian government.

“It should trouble all of us that the attorney general is flying overseas and spending his time focused on discrediting the origins of the Mueller probe instead of combating crime here in the US,” tweeted the former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “His personal involvement reinforces the view that he does Trump’s bidding.”

“Pretty clear that Barr is working feverishly [with] Trump to produce some kind of anti-Mueller report,” tweeted the MSNBC host Chris Hayes.

The justice department defied that characterization, issuing a statement Monday describing Barr’s work as business-as-usual to support the US attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation of the FBI’s former investigation of Russian election tampering. The justice department opened the counter-investigation following Trump’s repeated claims that his campaign, which had serial secret contacts with Russian operatives, had been unfairly targeted for scrutiny.

[...]

But it was very unusual for the attorney general, much less the president, to be personally involved at such lengths in an internal investigation.

[...]

“In a real investigation, all that is needed is a request from a line prosecutor to the foreign country, made through the [justice department] Office of International Affairs, and pursuant to the terms of a mutual legal assistance treaty,” tweeted Harry Sandick, a former prosecutor in the southern district of New York.

[...]

Pompeo oversees the internal state department investigation – but has refused questions about it.

Trump finally got the attorney general he wanted.

One night in late October,
When I was far from sober,
Returning with my load with manly pride,
My poor feet began to stutter,
So I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came near and lay down by my side;
Then we sang “It’s all fair weather when good fellows get together”,
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
“You can tell a man who boozes,
By the company he chooses”,
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

~Anonymous

UPDATE:

To be clear, this is not assistance in investigating the Bidens, but in the ostensibly legitimate investigation into the investigators of the Mueller investigation.

UPDATE:

It's Sunday

Steve Bannon's training academy for nationalists is set to lose its spiritual home. Italy's Culture Ministry announced it will revoke the lease on a state-owned monastery given to Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI), a right-wing Roman Catholic institute affiliated with Bannon, the former Breitbart executive and ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump.

  Politico

Apologies to Pope Francis...my original post on this missed the part about the monastery being state-owned.

According to a letter obtained by POLITICO, Cardinal Renato Maria Martino, the honorary president of DHI, raised objections to using the monastery for political purposes. He wrote to Benjamin Harnwell, Bannon's close associate in Italy who is spearheading the project, on January 29, 2019 demanding that there be no "distortions or modifications" to an original plan to create an apolitical Catholic study and training center.

Is that what Bannon told them?

But, get a load of this: it's not because of the hideous intention of the project that it's being ousted.

"DHI has failed to comply with the obligation to pay the concession fee, the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance obligations," Gianluca Vacca, undersecretary for cultural heritage said in a statement Friday.

[...]

Harnwell vowed to fight the culture ministry's order.

“The DHI will contest this illegitimate maneuver with every resource at its disposal no matter how many years it takes. And we will win,” he said on Friday.

Why not in America, Steve?

Don't let it escape your attention that he's leasing this from Italian monks.  I assume Pope Frank knows about it. 

In 1933, Pope Pius XI signed a treaty with Hitler.

In the months and years after the concordat was signed, the Nazis regularly violated the agreement by shutting down some Catholic organizations, confiscating church property, interfering with Catholic newspapers, and imprisoning or murdering clergy and other Church leaders. But the pope did not openly criticize the Nazis until 1937. By then it was too late. Roman Catholic opposition at this point was limited to isolated individuals who could easily be removed from their positions and lacked the support of their Church. According to Bergen: “The Concordat pulled the rug out from under potential Catholic opposition in Germany. How could parish priests criticize a chancellor who had been recognized by their pope?"

  Facing History

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 6/2:  Italy is kicking them out. But not for their hideous ideology and intent.  Also, this article says the monastery is state-owned. I missed that part., so apologies to Pope Francis.

Perhaps coming to a government near you

If Trump gets a second term.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We might need a translation of this article

Also, does Mueller have this information?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We're having to redo the 30's

And this time, it looks like America will be on the side of the Nazis.



Will they have to wear patches on their jackets?

Commander of Cheese likes Italy's PM, because...

...You guessed it.  Italy's PM publicly backed him regarding Russia.



Hmmmmm....

New Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte threw his weight on Friday behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s call for Russia to be included once more into Group of Seven meetings.

“I agree with President (Trump). Russia should be re-admitted into the G8. It is in the interests of everyone,” Conte said in a tweet from Canada where he is due to make his international debut as Italian leader at a summit of world power leaders.

The Italian government, backed by the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and far-right League, has already signalled it is likely to adopt a pro-Russian line in its foreign policy and has called for an end to economic sanctions on Moscow.

  Reuters

Il Duce returns?  That will be cool. 



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.