The Net Tightens

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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby grzegorz on Tue Feb 20, 2018 2:37 pm

KEND wrote:The latest DoJ indictment was a masterpiece, the WH have done their best to discredit the Mueller investigation, smearing, firing, attacking the agencies. This one came out of left field, a knight move putting the WH in check. The Russian connection is indisputable, how deep trump and his cohorts were involved either as conspirators, opportunists, willing helpers or just plain suckers has yet to be determined


Russia and most of the former Soviet Union is so full of corruption to the point where money does all the talking. Saying that the US is no different and is moving that direction every single day.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby KEND on Fri Feb 23, 2018 1:19 pm

An interesting comparison of Trump and Mueller, beginning to look like a Sergio Leone movie, complete with shootout
Trump and Mueller: Born to wealth, raised to lead. Then, sharply different choices.
They are the sons of wealth, brought up in families accustomed to power. They were raised to show and demand respect, and they were raised to lead.
They rose to positions of enormous authority, the president of the United States and the special counsel chosen to investigate him. They dress more formally than most of those around them; both sport meticulously coiffed hair. They have won unusual loyalty from those who believe in them. They attended elite all-male private schools, were accomplished high school athletes and went on to Ivy League colleges. As young men, each was deeply affected by the death of a man he admired greatly.
Yet Robert Swan Mueller III and Donald John Trump, born 22 months apart in New York City, also can seem to come from different planets. One is courtly and crisp, the other blustery and brash. One turned away from the path to greater wealth while the other spent half a century exploring every possible avenue to add to his assets.
At pivotal points in their lives, they made sharply divergent choices — as students, as draft-age men facing the dilemma of the Vietnam War, as ambitious alpha males deciding where to focus their energies.
Now, as they move toward an almost inevitable confrontation that could end in anything from deeper political discord to a fatal blow to this presidency, Trump, 71, and Mueller, 73, are behaving much as they have throughout their lives: As the president fumes about a “witch hunt” and takes his frustrations to his supporters, the special counsel remains publicly mute, speaking through inquiries and indictments.
The months flip by and the showdown looms: Mueller and Trump, the war hero and the draft avoider, two men who rise early and live mainly at the office, two men who find relief on the golf course. They circle each other, speaking different languages. Their aides talk in fits and starts about whether and when the two will meet,
but it remains unclear whether that will happen. So they continue on their missions, one loudly, the other in silence. Neither knows how this will end.
From Princeton to the Marines
Robert Mueller graduated with a degree in politics from Princeton. Mueller was born to a social rank that barely exists anymore, a cosseted WASP elite of northeastern families who sent their sons to New England prep schools built with generations of inherited wealth.
Mueller’s father was an executive at DuPont, part of a family firmly planted in the country’s plutocracy. Mueller, who grew up in Princeton, N.J., and the Philadelphia Main Line, was sent to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where the Astor, Vanderbilt and Mellon families educated their boys. At the Episcopal school, Mueller became captain of the soccer, hockey and lacrosse teams. He played hockey with his classmate John F. Kerry, a future secretary of state and one of three St. Paul’s alumni who would run for president.
Mueller epitomized the tradition of “the muscular Christian” at the top prep schools, the archetype of the strong boy who embodies “values of kindness, respect and integrity,” said Maxwell King, 73, a classmate at St. Paul’s. “Bob was a very strong figure in our class. ... He was thought of as somebody you could count on to be thoughtful about everybody on the team and to have very high standards.”
King, a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who runs the Pittsburgh Foundation, said Mueller “had a good sense of humor, but he wasn’t smartass at all. He was serious, but in a way that everybody liked him and liked being around him.”
Mueller was, from early on, a role model. As a group of boys gathered one day at The Tuck, a snack shop at St. Paul’s, a student made a derogatory comment about someone who wasn’t there. “Bob said he didn’t want to hear that,” King said. “I mean, we all said disparaging things about each other face to face. But saying something about someone who wasn’t there was something that Bob was uncomfortable with and he let it be known and just walked out.”
At Princeton, which his father also had attended, Mueller was accepted into one of the most socially exclusive eating clubs, where he often was seen before dinner playing bridge by the sitting room fireplace. Mueller had planned to go to medical school, but as a classmate who studied with him recalled, organic chemistry got the better of him. Mueller pronounced himself defeated by the subject; he realized he would not be a doctor.
Just a few weeks after he finished Princeton with a degree in politics in 1966, Mueller enlisted in the Marine Corps, a rare choice for an Ivy League graduate at a time when many young men were casting about for ways to avoid the draft. Mueller, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has often said he was inspired to join the Marines by his lacrosse teammate David Hackett, who had graduated from Princeton a year earlier and gone off to fight in Vietnam.
“As we were graduating, we ... faced the decision of how to respond to the war in Vietnam,” Mueller said in a speech last year. “And a number of (Hackett’s) friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.” In April 1967, as he led his platoon in evacuating fallen Marines from a battleground, Hackett was shot in the back of the head by a North Vietnamese sniper. Mueller to this day speaks of Hackett’s death as a turning point, as the event that pushed him to a career of public service.
Before beginning his military training, and while recovering from a knee injury, Mueller studied international relations at New York University. Then he started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Va., where he excelled, although he did get a D in delegation. Mueller followed that, according to military records, by going through the Army’s grueling Ranger School and Airborne School — unusual training for a Marine, signaling that he was going places.
By November 1968, he was leading a rifle platoon in the jungles of Vietnam.
Off to military school
. Like Mueller, Trump was raised in rare comfort. The Trumps had a family chef and chauffeur, but they never considered themselves part of the country’s ruling class. Theirs was immigrant stock, from Germany and Scotland, hardy entrepreneurs who tackled the new land with a blitz of new businesses — restaurants, hotels and, finally, real estate.
The president’s father, Fred Trump, made his fortune himself, building middle-class housing for the union workers and civil servants of New York’s outer boroughs. Even after he’d established himself as one of the city’s biggest builders, Fred Trump still toiled in the trenches, taking young Donald along on weekends when they went door to door at Trump Village in Brooklyn, collecting rent.
Donald Trump grew up in a 23-room manse in Queens, a faux Southern plantation house with a Cadillac limousine in the driveway. He attended private school from kindergarten on; his focus in school, Trump told The Washington Post in 2016, was “creating mischief, because, for some reason, I liked to stir things up and I liked to test people. ... It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.”
In second grade, he said, he punched his music teacher in the face. He got into trouble often. Before eighth grade started, his father sent him to military school.
At New York Military Academy, where the rules were so strictly enforced that a desperate cadet was said to have leaped into the Hudson River in an attempted escape, Trump thrived. Although he ate in a mess hall instead of being served steaks by the family cook, and although he slept in a barracks rather than his own room in a mansion, he for the first time took pride in his grades. He won medals for neatness and order. He also won notice from fellow cadets for touting his father’s wealth and boasting to friends that “I’m going to be famous one day.”
Trump competed to become a cadet leader and enjoyed wielding authority. As a junior supply sergeant in E Company, he ordered that a cadet be struck on the backside as punishment for breaking formation. Another time, while inspecting dorm rooms, Trump saw cadet Ted Levine’s unmade bed and blew up, ripping off the sheets and tossing them on the floor, Levine said. Levine threw a combat boot at Trump and hit him with a broomstick. Trump, infuriated, grabbed Levine and tried to push him out a second-story window, Levine said.
Promoted to captain of A Company, Trump won respect from some of the other boys, who said they never wanted to disappoint him. Trump introduced them to a world of fun, setting up a tanning salon in his dorm room, bringing beautiful women to campus, and leading the baseball team to victory.
But other cadets said Trump tried to break boys who didn’t bend to his will. During Trump’s senior year, when one of his sergeants shoved a new cadet against a wall for not standing at attention quickly enough, Trump was relieved of his duty in the barracks, said Lee Ains, the student who was shoved.
Trump denied being demoted, saying he was actually moved up. “You don’t get elevated if you partake in hazing,” he told The Post in 2016. He was put in charge of a drill team that would perform in New York City’s Columbus Day Parade.
Fleeting victories and fiery retreats
Mutter’s Ridge was a killing ground, a craggy hellscape in Quang Tri province where the Marines had been fighting for years, setting up and abandoning bases as they tried over and over to assert control of one of the main routes the North Vietnamese used to infiltrate the South.
Year after year, the ridge, hard by the demilitarized zone that separated North from South, was the scene of fierce assaults, fleeting victories and fiery retreats.
On Dec. 11, 1968, Mueller led a platoon of Marines into an eight-hour battle around an extensive complex of North Vietnamese army bunkers. The enemy hit Mueller’s men with a “heavy volume of small arms, automatic weapons, and grenade launcher fire,” according to a Marine Corps account.
As his platoon suffered heavy casualties, “Second Lieutenant Mueller fearlessly moved from one position to another, directing the accurate counterfire of his men and shouting words of encouragement to them,” the account said.
Mueller set up a defensive perimeter and “with complete disregard for his own safety, he then skillfully supervised the evacuation of casualties from the hazardous fire area,” as the Marines put it. Mueller led a team across the smoldering terrain and into a North Vietnamese-controlled area to recover a mortally wounded Marine. For that, he earned a Bronze Star medal with “V” distinction for combat valor. He was promoted to first lieutenant.
Four months later, the Viet Cong attacked a squad of about a dozen Marines from Mueller’s platoon. Responding to the ambush, Mueller led the rest of his men to assist the Marines under assault. They pushed ahead against heavy fire, and Mueller was shot in the thigh.
“Although seriously wounded during the fire fight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” said the citation on the medal Mueller received.
His year in Vietnam was a turning point, friends said. “He never speaks to that horror and what he did,” said Thomas B. Wilner, a longtime friend and Washington lawyer.
A lifelong friend said that after Vietnam, Mueller “went from being this affable, good guy, good athlete” to having the “backbone and the steel that he has today.” But Mueller doesn’t talk about those harrowing months in the jungle. “That is not his style. He doesn’t brag about himself.”
Draft deferments
The country felt as though it was coming apart at the seams. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump had transferred after two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, protests against the Vietnam War grew larger and more insistent. There were sit-ins, candlelight vigils, demonstrations against university contracts with the military, a metastasizing culture of conflict as a new generation pushed back against war, segregation, dress codes and curfews.
Trump took part in none of that. Nor did he pay much attention to his coursework, fellow students said. He was already spending nearly as much time working for his father’s real estate business in New York as he was on campus in Philadelphia. He said he spent many of his off-hours while at school scouring the neighborhood for apartments to buy so he could rent them to students.
Trump never burned a draft card, but never enlisted either. He benefited from five draft deferments between 1964 and 1968 — four for being a college student and one for a medical disqualification.
Trump has said he had bone spurs in his foot. During his presidential campaign, Trump said he could not recall which foot had the spurs. Later, his campaign said he had them in both heels. At another point, a campaign statement said that in 1969, Trump was fit for service and “had his draft number been selected, he would have proudly served.” His draft lottery number was 356 out of 366 — high enough that he almost certainly would have been spared from mandatory service.
'Mueller, Homicide'
Mueller spent the first two decades of his legal career putting bad guys behind bars. He worked as a prosecutor in San Francisco and Boston. And in Washington, he headed the Justice Department’s criminal division as an assistant attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, supervising high-profile cases such as the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega and the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
But by 1995, he was ensconced in the $400,000-a-year luxury of a white-collar litigation job in the Washington office of a Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr. It was not a happy time.
“He hated it,” said Wilner, his longtime friend. “He couldn’t stand selling his services to defend people he thought might be guilty. ... There was no hesitation for Bob in leaving a lucrative job to ... do what he thought was helping make the world a better place.”
So one day, Mueller called the District’s local prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr., and asked for a job, not handling the office’s big national cases, but working the line, prosecuting homicides on the streets of D.C. He wanted no title, no supervisory position. He told Holder that he was shaken by all the killings in Washington, then the nation’s murder capital, and that he just wanted to try homicide cases.
Mueller said he knew what he was getting into. Holder hired him, but insisted on giving him a title — senior litigation counsel — and eventually made him head of the homicide section. Day to day, though, Mueller was “just a line guy,” Holder said. “He would be in those parts of Washington that were most affected by the violence. ... He would be interviewing people at crime scenes, going to people’s homes to build cases, working with street cops.”
He got a kick out of answering his phone, “Mueller, Homicide.”
“I love everything about investigations,” Mueller said years later in an interview with UVA Lawyer, the magazine of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he earned his law degree. “I love the forensics. I love the fingerprints and the bullet casings and all the rest.”
He led the prosecution of high-profile cases including the grisly murders in 1997 of three workers in a Starbucks coffee shop in Georgetown. D.C. police were not thrilled about the idea, but Mueller brought in a star FBI agent to work on the investigation. Three years after the killings, a D.C. man was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
“If it wasn’t for (Mueller), that case would never have been solved,” said former longtime homicide detective James Trainum, who worked with Mueller on the case. “With his quiet demeanor, he just kind of waded in and diplomatically parted the waters.”
Through the decades, Mueller has often said that what matters even more than the content of one’s work is “how we do it,” as he put it in a commencement address in 2013. “You are only as good as your word. You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, and indeed persuasive, but if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer, and once lost, a good reputation can never be regained.”
Tough enough to make it
Trump was determined to push beyond his father’s realm in New York’s outer boroughs and make it big in Manhattan. He had neither time nor patience for climbing the ladder rung by rung. He believed in big, bold leaps, even if that meant breaking with tradition or rules.
“The key to the way I promote is bravado,” he wrote in his best-selling book “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.”
Donald Trump is pictured in 1987 at Trump Tower in New York City. Trump’s older brother was originally supposed to take over the family real estate business but died in 1981 of a… It was Trump’s older brother, Fred Jr., who was originally supposed to take over the family business. But Freddy, mild-mannered and, in Donald’s view, not tough enough to make it, struggled to live up to his father’s demands. Freddy left the family company to become an airline pilot, but he began drinking excessively. In 1981, at age 43, he died of a heart attack following years of alcoholism. Donald had adored his brother, and now he resolved never to drink alcohol and always to remember a lesson he drew from Freddy’s failure: “To keep my guard up one hundred percent. . . . Life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat. You just can’t let people make a sucker out of you.”
In contrast to his brother, Donald was determined to do whatever it took to “be a killer,” as his father had repeatedly insisted. While working on his first hotel project in 1976, Trump persuaded a New York Times reporter to profile him as “a major New York builder,” even though he had never built a thing and had no financing.
He touted his ties to power. In the mid-1970s, seeking to buy New York’s World Trade Center, Trump had lunch with Peter Goldmark, the head of New York’s Port Authority, which owned the twin towers. “You wouldn’t last in your job very long if Governor (Hugh) Carey decided you weren’t doing the right thing,” Trump said, according to Goldmark. “You should know I have a lot of weight in Albany.”
Goldmark said he ended the discussion after that. Trump denied Goldmark’s account, saying, “I really don’t talk that way.”
Trump’s knack for drawing attention sometimes embarrassed or persuaded the powers that were to cede to his demands. When city politicians who opposed granting Trump a tax incentive called a news conference outside the shuttered Commodore hotel, Trump showed up and threatened to abandon the project if the city didn’t give him tax relief.
Trump had prepared for the event by directing his workers to replace the clean boards that covered the once-grand building’s windows with dirty scrap wood, accentuating the decrepit state of the midtown eyesore. The dramatic flourish had the desired effect. Trump got the exemption. He beat the system.
G-Man
After Mueller did a stint as U.S. attorney in San Francisco, President George W. Bush nominated him to direct the FBI. He was sworn in on Sept. 4, 2001, one week before the planes hit the twin towers.
For the next 12 years, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, Mueller led the FBI through one of the most difficult periods in its history. The bureau shifted from a domestic law enforcement agency largely focused on criminal threats to a global intelligence organization reoriented to fight terrorism.
The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on Robert Mueller’s nomination to be director of the FBI in July 2001. Although more terrorist attacks were feared, Mueller was intent on protecting civil liberties, according to those who worked with him. “He didn’t allow FBI agents in the post 9/11 era to engage in interrogation techniques that he thought were inconsistent with American law and tradition,” said Holder, who, as President Barack Obama’s attorney general, was his boss once again.
Mueller worked around the clock, traveling from his Georgetown home to FBI headquarters in a black SUV that arrived shortly after 6 a.m. for morning security briefings, heading back late at night. He wore a traditional J. Edgar Hoover-era G-Man uniform: dark suit, red or blue tie and white shirt — always white.
“He won’t wear a blue shirt,” Wilner said. “He is so straight, he always wears a white shirt. He’s a pain in the a-- in many ways because he is so straight. ... He’s conscious that he’s a public figure and he doesn’t want anything to compromise his integrity. Even a blue shirt.”
Around the building, some privately dubbed him “Bobby Three Sticks,” a reference to both the Roman numeral at the end of his name and the three-finger Boy Scout salute. No one dared use the nickname in his presence, former Justice Department officials said.
Mueller usually avoided the limelight. He frustrated his speechwriters by crossing out every “I” in speeches they wrote for him. It wasn’t about him, he told them: “It’s about the organization.”
Family and politics
FBI Director Robert Mueller arrives for the inauguration of President Barack Obama on Jan. 21, 2013. Mueller burrowed into the bureaucracy and won allies by eschewing publicity. Trump charged into one industry after another, from casino gambling to steaks to for-profit education and finally to politics. The only through line in his career was his own celebrity — the power and allure of his name.
In nearly every possible way, from their family relations to their political involvement, the two men have presented themselves in opposite ways.
Three months after he was graduated from college, Mueller married his girlfriend, Ann Standish, whose ancestors had come to the United States on the Mayflower. The couple, who met at a party when they were 17, have two daughters. One of them has spina bifida, and at one point, Mueller took a job in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston in part to be near the treatment she needed.
Mueller has asked reporters not to discuss his family life; Trump for decades regularly sought coverage of his love life by gossip columnists and talked about his dates and bedroom activities with radio host Howard Stern.
© Jabin Botsford/Washington, D.C. President Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk on the South Lawn of the White House on Feb. 5. Trump has five children by three wives, each of them newcomers to New York City, two from Central Europe and one from a small town in Georgia. None was born to privilege. Like his father before him, Trump was distant from his children when they were very young, but grew close to them once they were mature enough to learn the family business and join him on his daily rounds.
Mueller is a lifelong Republican who has worked for administrations of both parties; Trump was raised in a Republican home by a father who spent many weekends visiting the Democratic clubs of Brooklyn, building relationships with the politicians who might help him get his projects built.
For four decades, Trump toyed with the idea of entering politics. He changed his party registration seven times between 1999 and 2012 — he was a Democrat twice, a Republican three times, and an independent. In 2000, he briefly ran for president under the Reform Party banner. Once, when asked in a TV interview why he was a Republican, he said, “I have no idea.”
A friendly conversation
In the Rose Garden on June 21, 2013, Obama announced that James B. Comey would replace Mueller as FBI director. “Like the Marine that he’s always been, Bob never took his eyes off his mission,” Obama said. “It’s a tribute to Bob’s trademark humility that most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize him on the street, but all of us are better because of his service.”
Four years later, last May, the new president invited Mueller back to the White House. President Trump had abruptly fired Comey and now, at the suggestion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mueller was coming in to talk about his former job. On his way into the Oval Office, Mueller met then-chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy officer, and teased him for letting his daughter go to West Point.
Mueller and Trump spoke for about 30 minutes, according to a person familiar with the interview. It was a friendly conversation, but seemed almost pro forma because Mueller made it clear from the start that he was unlikely to take the job he had held for 12 years.
Trump liked Mueller, according to the person. “He thought he was smart and tough,” a type Trump admires more than almost any other.
The question became moot within days, as Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Mueller as the special counsel to investigate whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.
Trump heard the news and asked one of his aides, “Wasn’t that guy just in here interviewing for the FBI?”
Dan Lamothe, Josh Dawsey and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby Steve James on Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:19 pm

Fwiw, my number was 359, but it wouldn't have made any difference. But, I wouldn't have the balls to question someone who'd volunteered to serve in Vietnam.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby grzegorz on Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:36 pm

And both Republicans.

Thanks for posting, I wasn't aware of Mueller's background.

Steve James wrote:Fwiw, my number was 359, but it wouldn't have made any difference. But, I wouldn't have the balls to question someone who'd volunteered to serve in Vietnam.


Definitely a rare breed. My father also volunteered for the Marines during Vietnam.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby Steve James on Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:45 pm

I remember saying on RSF or EF that I'd vote for John McCain. I would still have voted for Obama, but Palin made it a certainty. I'll never forget DT questioning whether McCain was a hero or not. Really, the guy was offered a pass out of a prisoner of war camp, but chose to be tortured instead. It's why I scoff at DT's claims about respect for the military.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby KEND on Mon Feb 26, 2018 1:04 pm

I jave been watching the neverending parade of talking heads on the shooting. A few things stood out. The consensus was that DT had made the WH his own, there were those for him and those against him, it is a cult. He lies constantly, adjusts his point of view to please his followers. One instance was when some elderly ladies who stood for several hours complained they were booed and called democratic plants. A black conservative with 40 years of service was derided, the trump WH has caused the worst form of 'us' and 'them' where them is anyone not white. DT now says he would have run in to confront the shooter--in your dreams, wouldn't the heel spurs have been a problem
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby windwalker on Mon Feb 26, 2018 1:23 pm

KEND wrote:I jave been watching the neverending parade of talking heads on the shooting. A few things stood out. The consensus was that DT had made the WH his own, there were those for him and those against him, it is a cult. He lies constantly, adjusts his point of view to please his followers. One instance was when some elderly ladies who stood for several hours complained they were booed and called democratic plants. A black conservative with 40 years of service was derided, the trump WH has caused the worst form of 'us' and 'them' where them is anyone not white. DT now says he would have run in to confront the shooter--in your dreams, wouldn't the heel spurs have been a problem


A counter view point.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td0Pr_aTKk8

It would be good to know what the SOP was for the officer who did not go in and waited for back up, it seems kinda strange that
other officers did the same according to some reports.

"Several local sheriff’s deputies waited outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while a shooter gunned down multiple people, killing 17, according to new reports. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... cement-gun
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby windwalker on Mon Feb 26, 2018 2:31 pm

So 75 percent of the time when the solo officer goes in and the scene is still hot, the officer is taking
direct action against the attacker.

And here’s an even more important statistic:In all of the solo entries we identified where the
scene was still hot, one-third of the police officers who made that solo entry were shot.


SOLO ENTRY AND “CONTACT TEAMS”
In active shooter situations where an officer arrives at the scene and can hear shooting, screams, or other
indications that the perpetrator is actively shooting or threatening victims, some departments’ policies
explicitly provide that the lone officer can move to stop the threat without waiting for any additional officers to arrive.
The shooter may be stopped by
arrest, by containment, or by use of deadly force

Variations Found in Policies on Active Shooter Response — 9 officers to arrive. The shooter may be stopped by
arrest, by containment, or by use of deadly force.

And some policies note that when an active
shooter incident occurs at a school, a School Resource Officer (SRO) may be the first officer at
the scene who must make a decision about whether to respond alone.

Other departments require that officers wait until a certain number of officers have arrived.
Those officers are instructed to form a “contact team” that responds as a unit with the mission of
stopping the shooter and preventing his escape.

http://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/ ... 202014.pdf

Looks like different depts have different approaches.
Don't see how one can make any conclusions with out looking at the officers training.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby KEND on Sat Mar 03, 2018 8:34 am

Dominos falling, Jared eased out vulnerable because of dodgy business deals with Russians and Chinese, will he turn on his master, only time will tell
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby Michael on Sat Mar 03, 2018 8:55 am

Sounds like Game of Thrones spoilers ;)
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby KEND on Mon Mar 19, 2018 9:35 am

Its hotting up, a tweet duel at dawn

‘You Will Not Destroy America’: A Trump Battle Is No Longer One-Sided

The New York Times
By KATIE ROGERS4 hrs ago 3/19/18
President Trump and former law enforcement and intelligence officials traded insults over the weekend, turning a conflict that would have once stayed behind closed…
WASHINGTON — Usually, top intelligence and law enforcement officials withdraw to lives of tight-lipped relative anonymity after their careers end. (Suffice it to say, they are not exactly known for viral Twitter battles.)
But as President Trump has voiced his grievances against the F.B.I. with a series of insult-laden tweets, his targets have responded nearly in kind, turning a conflict that would in the past have stayed behind closed doors into a brawl for all to see.
Throughout the weekend, the president attacked “lying James Comey,” the F.B.I. director he fired last year. He also celebrated the dismissal of Mr. Comey’s onetime deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, calling it on Friday “a great day for Democracy.”
Mr. Comey struck back on the president’s preferred digital soapbox. “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon,” he wrote on Twitter on Saturday, in what was most likely a reference to his coming book. “And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”
Mr. McCabe, through his lawyer, tweeted a similar message, though with a biting flourish. “We will not be responding to each childish, defamatory, disgusting & false tweet by the President,” said the lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich. “The whole truth will come out in due course.”
Other former officials who have been the subject of the president’s taunts have also had choice words for him on Twitter. John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director who now refers to himself as “a nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future,” attacked the president’s character on Saturday.
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history,” wrote Mr. Brennan, whom Mr. Trump once called “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington.” “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.”
Throughout history, presidents have found themselves in private conflict with members of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Bill Clinton clashed with Louis J. Freeh, who oversaw the F.B.I. during the Lewinsky scandal. Richard M. Nixon fired the independent special prosecutor in the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and his attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned in protest.
But those tense interactions, experts say, seem almost quaint compared to the public mudslinging unfolding now.
“We’ve never had anybody so blatantly go after a president before,” Gary J. Schmitt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was once an intelligence adviser to President Ronald Reagan, said in an interview. “It’s also unprecedented to have a president so overtly going after various intelligence officials.”
He added, “It’s a race to the bottom.”
The president, who has no qualms about publicly attacking individuals as well as institutions, has grown only more frustrated as the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia continues well beyond the timeline given to him by his lawyers. On Saturday, one of them, John Dowd, said that he thought the investigation was baseless and should end.
The president followed up with a pair of tweets singling out the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for the first time.
“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added...does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!” Mr. Trump wrote.
The White House did not respond to questions about the former officials’ criticism of the president, but Mr. Trump’s outrage spoke for itself. He kept lobbing tweet-size insults until Sunday morning, when he left the White House for a round of golf.
In one, he took aim at news that Mr. McCabe, who was one of the first officials at the F.B.I. to look into possible Russian ties to the Trump team, had kept contemporaneous memos about his interactions with the president. (Mr. Comey also kept memos.)
“Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”
Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta in his roles as C.I.A. director and defense secretary during the Obama administration, said in an interview that current and former officials were alarmed to see a president so intent on eroding the public’s trust in the F.B.I. They are keenly aware, Mr. Bash said, that Mr. Trump’s insults have a way of making it to TV, and vice versa.
“It seems to be a very short distance between the president’s Twitter device and the megaphone of Fox News and other allies on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Bash said. “I think most professionals I speak with think he will ultimately fail, but they worry we are a few Fox News segments away from more and more people in that conspiracy theory echo chamber.”
Some experts question the decision of Mr. Comey and others to publicly hit back at the president. Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now at the Brennan Center, a public policy and law institute, said the public exchanges were further proof of an eroding of trust between the head of the executive branch and its traditionally apolitical civil servants.
He said the former officials’ willingness to speak out against the president could spell problems for Mr. Mueller.
“I would imagine from Bob Mueller’s point of view having potential witnesses tweeting back and forth with the president is the last thing you want,” Mr. German said. “The credibility of everyone involved is being torn to tatters in broad daylight.”
Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former assistant general counsel for the C.I.A., said remarks by former officials like Mr. Comey and Mr. Brennan reflected a larger frustration that others, including Republican members of Congress, were not speaking out against transgressions that would have felled other politicians.
“Comey and Brennan are perfect examples who do not seek the limelight,” Ms. Divoll said, “who do not do anything but speak publicly and privately in very measured ways. But the gloves are off. That’s not happening anymore.”
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby Steve James on Mon Mar 19, 2018 9:46 am

Well, people can smirk and say that these guys are all wrong, but I'd say that there's a revolt. When people start talking about Mr. T the way he talks about people., that'll be fun to watch. And, don't even start that he deserves respect because he was elected. Obedience can be demanded; loyalty can be bought; respect is earned.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby grzegorz on Mon Mar 19, 2018 11:11 am

In the military responsibility and leadership started at the top. I find interesting how Trump demonizes his cabinet and fires them when he is the one who chose them yet he seems to think he does not hold responsibility.

At work I used to hear his supporters defend him in the beginning but now they don't say jack. LOL! I can't blame them in a few years they will say they never voted for him just as you now here conservatives say that they didn't believe in the war on Iraq, 45 included.

Funny how the GOP never brings up W either.
Last edited by grzegorz on Mon Mar 19, 2018 11:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby Steve James on Mon Mar 19, 2018 1:12 pm

Don't bother talking about taking responsibility. He doesn't have to. He only takes credit; the buck never even pauses near him. But, c'mon, it's just like Melania: i.e., this character trait was clear while he was campaigning.
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Re: The Net Tightens

Postby KEND on Thu Mar 22, 2018 8:10 pm

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser

Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer
The Daily Beast Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team. While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime. Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.
Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.” Five months later, in January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBI assessed “with high confidence” that “Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data.” But the assessment did not directly call Guccifer a Russian intelligence officer. Nor did it provide any evidence for its assertions.
It turns out there is a powerful reason to connect Guccifer to the GRU. Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone’s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference. Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional. “Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.” Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.
Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)
Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
Timestamps in Guccifer 2.0’s first leaks show they were packaged for release over the course of a single day in June 2016, beginning just hours after the DNC intrusion and its attribution to Russia were made public. The moniker was an homage to Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel, who as “Guccifer” achieved notoriety in 2013 for a string of hacks against celebrities and politicians. In his inaugural blog post, Guccifer 2.0 disputed Russia’s involvement and claimed credit personally for the DNC breach, positioning himself as a one-time hacking operation working to expose “the Illuminati.” The post included the world’s first glimpse of the enormous cache of documents siphoned from the DNC’s network, including the Democrats’ opposition research report on Trump. Presaging the leaks that would roil the election, Guccifer 2.0 declared that he’d already sent the bulk of the stolen material to WikiLeaks—which has spent the time since obfuscating whether Guccifer was its source.
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing its cache of approximately 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments stolen in the hack. While Trump promoted the leak on Twitter and in rallies, his surrogate Roger Stone pushed back against the Kremlin attribution. In his August 2016 article for Breitbart, he argued that Guccifer 2.0 was the Romanian hacktivist he claimed to be. “Guccifer 2.0 is the real deal,” he wrote.
Last May, Stone admitted that he’d also exchanged direct messages with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, and he released what he claimed was a complete transcript of his communications with the account. The transcript is brief and banal, showing Stone congratulating Guccifer 2.0 on returning to Twitter after a brief suspension, and then mostly ignoring him. Then and since, Stone has consistently denied that Guccifer was connected to the Kremlin. “I myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them,” he wrote. Guccifer 2.0 maintained a sporadic online presence throughout the election, posting to his dedicated WordPress blog and on Twitter, and spilling more DNC documents, sometimes in private emails to journalists.
While the national election clearly interested him (“Democrats prepare new provocation against Trump,” he thundered in October 2016), Guccifer 2.0 reached down the ballot as well, posting documents from the Democrats’ national campaign committee on his WordPress blog. There, readers could find internal Democratic candidate assessments relevant to battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida; internal assessments of key congressional districts, with granular analyses of their demographics; and campaign recruitment material.
The GRU officer was eager to share this trove, as well. A GOP political operative in Florida, Aaron Nevins, DM’d Guccifer 2.0 a request for “any Florida based information” and received 2.5 gigabytes’ worth, according to The Wall Street Journal. The data, he enthused to Guccifer 2.0, was “probably worth millions of dollars.” A consultant for a successful Florida Republican congressional candidate told the paper, “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.”
Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English that the persona’s earlier efforts. “It’s obvious that the intelligence agencies are deliberately falsifying evidence,” the post read. “In my opinion, they’re playing into the hands of the Democrats who are trying to blame foreign actors for their failure.”(Contrast that with the language from a June 2016 post: “I made some conclusions from the Marcel’s story and decided not to put all eggs in one basket. Moreover, other cases weren’t so successful and didn’t bring me the glory.”) Today the most popular counter-narrative surrounding Guccifer 2.0 concedes that the account was a fake persona but posits that it was created by the DNC to support a false-flag operation implicating Russia. In this theory, advanced in two widely cited anonymous blogs, Guccifer 2.0 was the DNC posing as Russia posing as a Romanian hacker.
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