DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Russia Offered Afghans Bounty to Kill U.S. Troops, Officials Say

Yeah, those awful math lies.

Even his supporters trust Putin more than our own people.

I will never forget how these trash ass conservatives kept praising Putin and slamming Obama when he was president.

Most of these trump supporters today would never stand side by side with me in the combat zone.

I can’t trust most of them to do the right thing. Especially on this board.

So you are saying that a report that says that Russia has put a bounty on uS Troops wouldn't surface at the top of any day of briefings?

That is BS Total BS..

There is no proof that he wasn't briefed. All you have is the pablum that Trump puts out.

According to even the reports 40 cent is trying to use, the only thing they actually claim is that, "he wasn't briefed verbally".

A president is actually supposed to read his daily briefings but unless someone tells it to Trump, "he doesn't know it."

Because as we all know, for Trump, reading is hard.

And as we all know, if they don't lie for Trump, "You're Fired!"

I’m still waiting on a trump supporter to explain why the president doesn’t read his intelligence reports.

That is part of his job, after all.

They obviously think he shouldn't have to do his job.

Yet when their child doesn't complete all of his homework they go nuts.

He hates to read. Anything.

And he really, really sux at it. Because practice promotes proficiency.
Don't you love those speeches he makes when his handlers force him to stay on script? Flat. Lifeless. Stodgy. Wooden.


If you wanna keep Assterisk45* from stealing your wife's jewels, hide them inside a book. They'll be safe forever.

Make sure it's a book without cover art, though.

Seems most of his job is ‘sir jokes a lot’

Trump doesn't do read and intelegence, he does watch and tweet

jc...


Duckworth on Russia bounties: How dare Trump still call himself our commander in chief?

Trump should be outraged and we should be outraged that he’s not. Whether he's incompetent or putting Russia first, he's a national security threat.

Tammy Duckworth Opinion contributor
Published 6:00 a.m. CT July 7,2020
link


While President Donald Trump has spent the past couple of weeks golfing, campaigning and making sure the buck stopped anywhere but with him, American service members in hot spots around the world likely were wondering whether there might be a bounty hanging over their heads — and whether the president of the United States would even care enough to respond if that were the case.

In a report confirmed by other major news organizations, The New York Times wrote on June 26 that Russia paid Taliban-linked militants to murder U.S. troops, a bounty scheme that U.S. intelligence suggests has led to the deaths of several Americans. Yet while Trump reportedly was told of the plot in writing in February, his administration still hasn’t taken any apparent steps to push back against Russia’s blatant and provocative act of aggression.

And while the administration’s excuses, obfuscations and explanations keep changing, there is now reporting that indicates earlier and earlier briefings, going back to last year, informing the president and the White House of these threats. That leaves us with just a couple options.

Incompetence or putting Russia first?
First, Trump didn’t read any of his written briefings and his intelligence officers didn’t bring it up to him in person, because they either fear what he would do with the information or consider him so counterproductive to the running of the country that they thought it necessary to hide critical information about our national security. Well, ignorance here is not exculpatory. “I didn't know that our adversary was helping kill American troops because no one told me” isn’t an excuse for the commander in chief of the greatest military on earth. It’s a confession of incompetence.


Second, he knew, and this “America First” president simply decided to place Russian interests ahead of American lives. He kept right on trying to score Russia an invitation back into the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, to make it the Group of Eight, even as he received information that Russia was conspiring with terrorists to kill Americans in exchange for cash — a dereliction of duty or worse. Then, when the story finally broke, he decided to lie about what he had known all along, focused more on protecting his own personal reputation than protecting the troops sacrificing for our country overseas.

Neither option absolves him. Both reinforce the grave threat Trump poses to our nation’s security.

Even if one swallows the pill that Trump never knew, it still wouldn’t explain his response now that he has been told. Not once since the story broke has the president expressed his sorrow for those who lost a loved one or expressed awe at the bravery of the service members who were in harm’s way because they loved their country so much, they were willing to go to a war zone for her.

He has had time to call former Vice President Joe Biden names and tweet then delete a video of a Trump supporter shouting "white power" at protesters, but not once has he found the time to express horror that Americans are dead or condemn the adversary that helped kill them. Perhaps most notably, not once in the past six days has he given even the slightest indication that his administration will now finally take action. He's still not telling us how or whether he’s planning to better protect our troops going forward.

Trump should be outraged — and we, the American people, should be outraged that he’s not.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark:President Trump's weak support of troops amid Russian bounty to Taliban shows lack of leadership

Of course, Trump not responding here is a response in its own way, and one that further endangers our national security. Just as he did when he pandered to another tyrant and announced he’d sweep our troops out of Syria last fall, and just as he did when he wanted to look tough by ordering the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani last winter, he put Americans in war zones in even greater danger than they were already in or needed to be in.

Disgraceful subservience to Putin
By refusing to call out this wrong then decrying the reports as fake news — by being incompetent in matters ranging from foreign policy to common decency — Trump has made it more likely that other hostile powers will work with other terrorist networks to exchange other American lives for stacks of cash. He has made it more likely that more spouses will be widowed, and more moms and dads turned into Gold Star parents.

Yet somehow as shocking as this news is, it’s not entirely surprising. Rather, it’s consistent with the disgraceful, inexplicable subservience he has shown to Russian President Vladimir Putin since the opening days of his presidency if not before, from taking Putin’s word over our own intelligence officers when it came to interference in the 2016 election to spilling secrets to Russian officials in the Oval Office. So much for “America First.”

Understanding sacrifice:Tammy Duckworth is a war hero and the best vice president for Joe Biden in 2020

I first ran for Congress so that when the drums of war started beating, I’d be in a position to ensure that our elected officials fully considered the true costs of war: not just in dollars and cents, but also in human lives. I never imagined I’d have to use my position to point out that the American president should care when another nation puts a bounty on the heads of our troops.

Trump has never understood what words like “sacrifice” or “courage” mean. How dare he let his own personal cowardice — his inability, or worse, his disinterest in standing up to Putin — lead to a reality where those Americans actually brave enough to serve are put at greater risk?

How dare he let his own personal insecurities endanger our national security?

In the face of all he has done and all he refuses to do, how dare he still call himself our commander in chief?

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., is an Iraq veteran and helicopter pilot who spent 23 years in the military and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Follow her on Twitter: @SenDuckworth

Trump is off to other dirty dead’s. While this is forgotten like our dead soldiers.

Pffft trump.

Trump is a funny guy.. Funny and dumber than a rock. In fact, his entire administration is out of their minds.

First they deny this story, now they are opening an investigation to find out who leaked the information.

Typical Mob Boss.. Don't worry about what I do and say, let's get the person that told the press,, the leaker.

j/c...



Inside the White House, a Gun Industry Lobbyist Delivers for His Former Patrons

The Trump administration lifted a ban on sales of silencers to private overseas buyers that was intended to protect U.S. troops from ambushes. The change was championed by a lawyer for the president who had worked for a firearms trade group.

By Michael LaForgia and Kenneth P. Vogel
July 13, 2020
Updated 7:59 p.m. ET

Michael B. Williams spent nearly two years helping to run a trade group focused on expanding sales of firearm silencers by American manufacturers.

But try as he might, he could not achieve one of the industry’s main goals: overturning a ban on sales to private foreign buyers enacted by the State Department to protect American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Then Mr. Williams joined the Trump administration.

As a White House lawyer, he pushed to overturn the prohibition, raising the issue with influential administration officials and creating pressure within the State Department, according to current and former government officials.

On Friday, the State Department lifted the ban, and a longtime industry goal was realized. The change paved the way for as much as $250 million a year in possible new overseas sales for companies that Mr. Williams had championed as general counsel of the American Suppressor Association.

His role in pushing to lift the ban, which has not been previously reported, follows a well-established pattern in the Trump administration, with the president handing over policymaking to allies of special interest groups with a stake in those policies. And in this case, Mr. Williams’s victory comes for a key constituency as President Trump seeks re-election.

Mr. Trump’s cabinet includes a former coal lobbyist as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a former lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon Technologies as defense secretary, a lobbyist for the auto industry at the helm of the Energy Department and a former oil and gas lobbyist as interior secretary. Those industries have been sources of funds for Mr. Trump’s campaign and committees supporting it.

Mr. Williams’s work, though lower-profile, has nevertheless been a boon to another crucial political constituency: the gun lobby, which plays a leading role in Republican get-out-the-vote efforts and views eliminating silencer restrictions as an emerging issue. It’s a subject that has been embraced by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — an ally of Mr. Williams’s former trade group — as well as by other powerful gun industry groups.

“This is another win for the firearm and suppressor manufacturers by the Trump administration,” said Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, in a statement after the ban was lifted Friday.

In an interview, Mr. Keane praised Mr. Williams, saying “he understands the product, obviously, having worked at the American Suppressor Association.” That association said it was “thrilled” with the ban’s end; the group also dismissed safety concerns, noting that the sales would be regulated by the State Department and that foreign-made silencers were already available for purchase in other countries.

But some in military, diplomatic and arms control circles defended the ban and expressed alarm about its lifting, which was announced Friday afternoon in a little-noticed posting on a State Department website. Although the department’s rules had long permitted selling silencers to foreign governments, they did not allow sales to private companies or individuals, whose use of the devices is more difficult to monitor.

Silencers, or sound suppressors, attach to a firearm’s muzzle and reduce the noise made by gunfire by trapping gas released when a bullet is fired. Sales of suppressors in the United States, which are regulated by federal authorities, have climbed in recent years.

Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr., who was assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs when the ban was enacted in 2002, said the policy was intended to prevent American equipment from being used against American service members, especially during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

“Terrorist groups were using garage door openers to blow up U.S. troops; you kind of think twice about what you are exporting,” said Mr. Bloomfield, who added that such dangers still exist today. “Who are you selling these silencers to?” he said. “I sure hope that none of these are aimed at U.S. or allied forces.”

A State Department spokeswoman said the policy change was made to benefit American manufacturers. “U.S. companies should have the same opportunity to compete in the international marketplace as other manufacturers around the world,” the spokeswoman said. She also said that silencers were more readily available in foreign countries now than when the ban was imposed.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Williams declined to comment.

An examination of Mr. Williams’s rise from trade group advocate to West Wing lawyer reveals that White House tumult and turnover created opportunities for him.

After joining Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, Mr. Williams, at age 30, became an assistant deputy general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget, then led by Mick Mulvaney.

In the spring of 2019, not long after Mr. Mulvaney was elevated to acting White House chief of staff, Mr. Williams joined him as counselor and a deputy assistant to the president. It was from that perch that Mr. Williams began to press the gun issues in earnest, according to the current and former officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

While in the White House, Mr. Williams maintained close ties to the suppressor association, which is funded by silencer manufacturers, distributors, retailers and customers. His brother, Knox Williams, started the organization and serves as its president and executive director, and the two have remained in regular contact. “We speak almost every day,” Knox Williams said in an interview.

Mr. Williams, his brother said, did not run afoul of Trump administration ethics rules that forbid government officials from working on matters affecting their former employers within two years of leaving. But in 2019, he set to work on gun issues without those constraints.

He was involved in a successful push to shift responsibility for foreign sales of semiautomatic weapons, including powerful .50-caliber sniper rifles, to the Commerce Department from the State Department — an effort that had been underway since the Obama administration and that had been blocked by Democratic members of Congress over concerns that it would strip away oversight.

Once that was accomplished, Mr. Williams turned to the silencer sales ban, even though in internal discussions Pentagon officials had warned against lifting it. Silencers have become standard-issue among military special operations forces because they offer an advantage in combat, allowing American troops to shoot at an enemy but making it harder for the enemy to determine where the gunfire is coming from. The officials feared that a glut of high-quality silencers overseas might put American forces at a similar disadvantage.Mr. Williams pressed the case anyway.

Knox Williams called the State Department decision a “big victory” for his group but said the association had had no inside advantage in seeking it — though he acknowledged that his brother had played a role. “We work the issues that we work just the same as any other organization does,” he said.

Government watchdog groups, however, said the case raised concerns about special interests gaining remarkable access in the Trump White House.

“When Michael Williams exits through the revolving door to return to the gun industry, I’m sure he will be greeted with open arms,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a government ethics advocacy group that has filed records requests for Mr. Williams’s communications with the gun lobby from the White House budget office.

Records obtained by Mr. Evers’s group show that in early 2018, about a year after his arrival at the White House, Mr. Williams was invited by the National Shooting Sports Foundation to three meetings that another invitee described as being about countering gun control measures after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

Mr. Keane, the shooting sports foundation’s general counsel, said Mr. Williams did not attend the meetings and had been invited in error. Nevertheless, he said his group communicated with Mr. Williams about the State Department’s silencer policy, and other Second Amendment-related issues. He said Mr. Williams took on what Mr. Keane called the “hook and bullet” portfolio — fishing and hunting issues — at the White House.

A Georgia native and Eagle Scout, Mr. Williams worked as a law clerk for the National Rifle Association before graduating from George Washington University Law School in 2014. Soon after, he went to work at the American Suppressor Association, which his brother had co-founded three years earlier. Mr. Williams managed the group’s budget, but he also helped draft legislation and lobby lawmakers, his brother said. One of his main issues was the fight to open up sales of silencers to private foreign buyers.

Intent on understanding the reasons for the sales ban, Mr. Williams filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents from the State Department and then battled the agency over them for more than a year. His association also sought to attack the ban from Capitol Hill, helping to draft and push a bill introduced by Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of Utah, in 2016 that would have overturned the sales prohibition, according to Knox Williams. The bill never got out of committee.

Neither Mr. Williams nor his brother was required to register as a lobbyist at the federal level, his brother said, because they did not spend 20 percent or more of their time lobbying. “We made sure that we were not hitting those thresholds to require us individually to register,” Knox Williams said.

The Williams brothers also tried to influence silencer policies in various states, including in New Hampshire, where both registered as lobbyists in 2015.

After Mr. Trump accepted the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, their cause got a boost from a prominent figure, Donald Trump Jr.

The candidate’s son, an avid hunter, recorded a video in September 2016 with Joshua G. Waldron, a founding board member of the suppressor association, expressing support for making silencers easier to buy in the United States.

Mr. Waldron, who founded a company called SilencerCo, tells Mr. Trump in the video “there is no better person than your father to protect our Second Amendment,” and says he wants to “try to get the people that love firearms in our community and our industry” to back the Trump campaign.

The same month, Mr. Wiliams left the suppressor association to become director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign in North Carolina. He worked as associate counsel on Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee before joining the Office of Management and Budget in January 2017.

He returned to the budget office last month and was detailed to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, operator of the Voice of America broadcasting network and other federally funded media outlets, as Mr. Trump shook up the agency’s leadership, raising questions about its editorial independence.

On Monday Mr. Williams started as principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A department spokesman did not answer a question about Mr. Williams’s housing policy experience, but called him “a first-rate attorney with immense experience in this administration and in the public policy sphere.”

Michael LaForgia is an investigative reporter who previously worked for The Tampa Bay Times and The Palm Beach Post. While in Florida, he twice won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting

Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence from Washington. He is also the author of “Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp — on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/trump-gun-silencer-exports.html

j/c

That's just another example of the Trump Crime Syndicate.

jc...



Fort Campbell, Ky., first lieutenant dies in noncombat incident in Afghanistan

By STEVE BEYNON | STARS AND STRIPES
Published: July 13, 2020
link

WASHINGTON — An Army officer from Fort Campbell, Ky., died Sunday in a noncombat-related incident in Kandahar, Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department.

1st Lt. Joseph Trent Allbaugh, 24, from Folsom, Calif., was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 108th ADA Brigade. The fatal incident is under investigation.

“The loss of 1st Lt. Joseph Allbaugh is devastating for everyone. On behalf of the 108th ADA Brigade, I want to extend our deepest condolences. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and fellow soldiers. We are with them during this incredibly painful time.” Col. Charles Matallana, the 108th Air Defense Artillery Brigade commander, said in a statement.

Allbaugh attended Vanguard University of Southern California and graduated in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He was commissioned through the ROTC as an Army air defense artillery officer and married his wife, Ashley Allbaugh.

Allbaugh’s awards include the Afghanistan Campaign Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the Army Service Ribbon.

More than 2,400 American troops have died in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion launched in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

beynon.steven@stripes.com
Twitter: @StevenBeynon



My condolences to the wife and family of 1st Lt. Joseph Trent Allbaugh.

It seems that it has become too easy to forget that we have soldiers serving in harms way with some making the ultimate sacrifice.

The unresolved Russian Bounty story might have refocused Americans interest in what is happening to our soldiers who remain in harms way, at War in Afghanistan.

In this case, Lt Allbaugh is said to have died due to a non-combat incident. I hope his family will get crosier as soon as possible.