Jill Stein, Michael Flynn and Max Blumenthal Go to a Russian Gala

January 28, 2019 8:00 am EST Halodoc Morning Canary 1
Canary. Photo by 4028mdk09.

Laying a foundation for something to possibly be in tune for.

Look who just popped up on people’s radar. Max Blumenthal, son of “former aide” to Bill Clinton and “long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton,” Sid Blumenthal.

Bill Browder writes: “I wonder what the Russians are putting in the tea to create all these compromised characters who attended the RT Gala,” while pointing to Michael Weiss (author, CNN and DailyBeast contributor) who is pointing to something John Sipher writes: “Yuck.”

“Former head of Russia Operations” John Sipher, career spook of CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service and National Clandestine Service from 1986-2014, turned businessman and co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment, “connecting the worlds of Hollywood and intelligence” and director of client services at CrossLead, a cloud-based software/consulting firm, blog owner of The Cipher Brief and occasional contributor to JustSecurity.

John Sipher points to this.

[John Sipher @john_sipher]

Weird connections.

Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage cause Alternet blogger’s Damascene conversion? – A blogger who once supported the Syrian revolution has reinvented himself as an advocate for Bashar al Assad. Did his pilgrimage to Moscow occasion this conversion? PulseMedia.org

Last March, a live performance in support of Syrian first responders by a flashmob orchestra at New York’s Grand Central Station was physically disrupted by a group of six protesters. Within hours, the video of the disruption was uploaded to social media and promoted by an RT employee. Max Blumenthal, a blogger at Alternet, soon released documents that suggested the performance was organized by a pro-Syrian campaign group. In characteristic inversion of reality, RT billed the disruption as a triumph for “anti-war” direct action.

Three participants in the protest have so far been identified: all have links to RT, the Russian state-funded propaganda network now under investigation by the U.S. government for its alleged interference in the last presidential election. Alexander Rubinstein, the man who filmed the protest, is an RT employee, and Taryn Fivek and Sara Flounders, the two protesters, are RT contributors. Blumenthal, who amplified the story, is also a regular on RT.

Fivek was an officer with the International Organization for Migration until she was found to have used the pseudonym Emma Quangel on Twitter to cheer Russia’s actions in Syria and mock civilian suffering. Flounders, a steering committee member of the pro-Assad Syria Solidarity Movement, has graduated from denying Serb atrocities in Bosnia to denying Assad regime atrocities in Syria. Both have limited influence.  It is Blumenthal who with Alternet has created an effective beachhead in the US for Kremlin propaganda.

PulseMedia

Evidently, this wasn’t necessarily normal for Sid Blumenthal’s son Max.

Questions and questioning.

But how far a leap would it have to be when, up until 2012, he was “a columnist from the pro-Assad Lebanese daily Al Akhbar” – with Blumenthal “citing as his reason” for leaving was because “the paper’s publishing of cheerleaders who blamed Assad’s victims and maligned journalists,” comparing it all to behaviors like “that of Israel’s apologists” – to just three years later, in December 2015, go on a “pilgrimage” to Moscow attending the now infamous “10th anniversary of Kremlin propaganda network,” where both Jill Stein and Ret. US Army Lt. Gen Michael Flynn attended to “has now dramatically resurrected himself as an apologist for Assad, a scourge of critical journalists, and a mirror image – by his own logic – of Israel’s apologists?”

Pulse Media describes Max Blumenthal’s “Damascene Conversion” as a “dramatic reversal” returns “a changed man,” after attending the Russia gala dinner party, when “a month later he founded the “Grayzone Project,” billed as an initiative for “confronting Islamophobia,” but in reality a home for Assad and Kremlin – friendly outcasts from leftwing blogosphere (Grayzone’s few Muslim writers quickly departed after they realised [sic] its true character).”

They do address the question that it wasn’t too far a leap for Blumenthal, writing, “Blumenthal had first signalled [sic] his amenability to the Moscow line in February 2014 when he declared that EU-supporting Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine were fascists and neo-Nazis. He had teamed up with Khalek before to defame another critic of the Putin regime.”

Adding,

There was nothing novel about these conspiracy theories. They closely echoed charges made earlier by Vanessa Beeley, a pro-Assad eccentric who writes for 21st Century Wire, a website established by a former editor for Alex Jones’s Infowars. (She too is an RT regular.) Beeley has since charged that Blumenthal’s articles were based on her work. According to Beeley, Blumenthal tasked Rania Khalek with wangling material from her for his polemic. Unsurprisingly, he failed to acknowledge the source.

Down the rabbit hole thread from an embedded link from the PulseMedia story which goes to Eliot Higgins – founder of Bellingcat.

To which Citizen Intel replies to Higgins in this thread adding more information.

On A Side Note (Opinion)

One has to always consider when considering connections and rabbit holes, and sources, is this just one more, long elaborate attempt of disinformation and propaganda push or is there worthy news of something there.

I am still digging and looking at the source of PulseMedia, but when Bellingcat’s Higgins and Bill Browder are pointing I tend to take notice. Hard to discern who is going after who here within the Democrats’ circles and whether this is a matter of hard left pushing against left centers’, hard left pushing against their own, and where is the Russian propaganda arms falling into it all.

On thing seems to be clear. Something is going on with Sid Blumenthal’s son, a once hard leftist, turned pro-Putin and Assad. It is not like the hard left would not have far to go, they seems to be as susceptible to the Russian disinformation as the MAGAer’s

There is a lot of information packed into the PulseMedia piece Citizen Intel thread. Dive in. Who knows, it may, or may not, be a thing.

Stay tuned.

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