The FBI investigation into Russian collusion has announced that Former Donald Trump adviser George Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contact with Russians. The most interesting thing about the announcement is that Papadopoulos was arrested in July 2017, and pleaded guilty on October 5th, meaning that he was already co-operating with the investigation when he apparently visited London last in late October, and probably long before.
Here's what we know:
- Papadopoulos was arrested at Duelles Airport on July 27th 2017.
- On 5th October 2017 Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
- At the time of his guilty plea the case was sealed, making the details invisible to the public.
- The stated reason the case was sealed was that Papadopoulos was willing to co-operate with the investigation as what they referred to as a "proactive cooperator".
- A "proactive cooperator" is someone who is willing to wear a wire, so it's almost certain that Papadopoulos wore a wire at some point between October 5th, and October 30th when his arrest was announced.
- It's also common practice for defendants to prove their willingness and ability to deliver incriminating evidence before they're officially charged with token lesser offences in return, so it's likely Papadopoulos wore a wire before October 5th too.
In light of this information, it seems almost certain that if Papadopoulos was in London, he was there to meet people in the hope they would admit their parts in criminal conspiracies, and it's likely he's been co-operating all the way back to July too.
And if he wasn't actually in London last week (as some people are speculating), then the Twitter post was put up deliberately in order to make someone think that he was in London.
It's interesting to imagine who Papadopoulos might have met in London, and there are some interesting candidates. Robert Mercer's election data firm Cambridge Analytica is based in London, Nigel Farage (who is a person of interest in the FBI investigations) is based in London, and Julian Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy just a few minutes walk from where the Papadopoulos photo was taken.
If the London photo wasn't actually taken last week and was intended as misdirection, it's interesting to wonder who was being misdirected, and for what purpose.
Anyhow. It would be foolish to imagine that the Mueller investigation into Russian collusion is over with just Papadopoulos charged with lying to the FBI and Paul Manafort facing 12 charges of fraud and tax evasion.
It seems highly unlikely they would have exposed the fact that Papadopoulos had flipped and cooperated with the investigation in return for reduced charges, unless his collaboration had already exposed dirt on a bigger target.
I'm guessing that anyone who has met with Papadopoulos over the last few months must be desperately trying to recall what was actually said, and whether they might have said anything that implicated them or others in a plot to collude with the Russians in order to ease Donald Trump into the White House, or any other criminal conspiracy.
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Few people had heard of the UKIP activist George Cotrell before his July 2016 trip to the United States with Nigel Farage to share their gleeful Ukipper Brexit triumphalism with Donald Trump and the Republican Party convention.
Until his arrest by US authorities on 21 charges of money laundering, fraud, blackmail and extortion, Cotrell was a relatively unknown UKIP activist with a weak social profile. He may not have been much of a public figure but what is undeniable is that he was part of UKIP's inner cadre at the time of his arrest. There is no way that he could have ended up as Nigel Farage's aide on an expenses-paid jolly to the United States if he wasn't considered a trusted member of the UKIP inner team.
Drug dealers, money laundering and the dark web
Cottrell was arrested as the result of an FBI sting in which he'd conspired to launder money for drug dealers he'd met on the dark web. The drug dealers turned out to be FBI agents and Cottrell ended up being singled out of the UKIP team and arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. He has remained under arrest ever since.
In January 2017 Cottrell agreed to a plea bargain with the US authorities in which he admitted a charge of fraud and confessed to his criminal behaviour in order to avoid going to trial. In his written confession Cottrell admitted that he'd offered his services as a dark web money launderer to people he thought were drug dealers.
Having admitted his guilt Cottrell faces a potential 20 year jail sentence and a fine of up to $250,000. Given his establishment connections and the fact that he agreed to a plea bargain it's highly likely he'll get off much more lightly than the maximum sentence.
The plea bargain is incredibly convenient for Cottrell who gets to write his actions off as some kind of foolish youthful misadventure, with no further questions asked about how many other dark web deals he'd made with other criminals and drug dealers before he got caught, or whether he was still orchestrating criminal activities on the dark web between the time he joined UKIP's inner cadre and the time of his arrest.
Cottrell's plea bargain is also incredibly convenient for UKIP because it avoids the appalling PR catastrophe of a trial where the lurid details of Cottrell's dodgy dark web scheming would have been exposed by the prosecution and picked over by the media on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Lord" Hesketh
The question of how then 21 year old Cotrell got himself into the influential political position of Nigel Farage's courtier doesn't take much effort to answer: His uncle is Alexander Fermor-Hesketh who sits as an unelected UKIP peer in the anti-democratic House of Lords.
A clearer case of political nepotism it's difficult to imagine.
A look at Hesketh's background gives us a fascinating insight into the shady sub-democratic world of Westminster politics and the revolving door between the Tory party and UKIP.
The young Alexander Hesketh inherited his seat in the House of Lords in 1971 at the age of 16 when his father died at just 39 years of age. Hesketh didn't bother to participate in Westminster politics at all until he was befriended by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and invited into her inner team. Despite never having been elected to anything, Hesketh went on to serve in several government positions for the Thatcher regime and then had the important job of Chief Whip in John Major's government too.
In 1999 Hesketh's inherited entitlement to sit in the Lords was abolished when Labour scrapped all but 92 of the hereditary peers, but he managed to stay on as an unelected peer by being one of the survivors from Tony Blair's bizarre compromise deal to allow 92 members of the profoundly undemocratic entitled aristocracy class to keep their unelected seats in the Lords.
Between 2003 and 2006 Hesketh served as the Treasurer of the Tory Party. Then after falling out of favour he resurfaced in 2011 Hesketh when he decided to defect to UKIP.
For decades he couldn't have been more of an establishment insider, or more of a Thatcher-worshipping Tory if he'd tried, but then, like so many Tories before him, and so many Tories after him, he abandoned his true-blue establishment robes of ermine and donned the purple and yellow costume of an UKIP anti-establishment freedom fighter instead!
The sickening hypocrisy of a completely unelected establishment insider defecting to political party that never ever shut up in their efforts to disparage "unelected technocrats in Brussels" and "the establishment" passed him. and presumably pretty much all other Ukippers, by completely.
Hesketh's career sheds a light into the murky and profoundly undemocratic world of Westminster politics, and were it not for his decision to join UKIP then give his young nephew George the gift of a spot of party political nepotism, few would ever have considered it anything unusual, and I certainly would never have ended up detailing it here.
The truth is that this kind of unelected cronyism, political nepotism and Tory-UKIP interbreeding is so absolutely commonplace and ordinary in Westminster politics that nobody in the mainstream press would ever even have thought about reporting on it.
Farage's indignation
In response to the scandal Nigel Farage put on a typically Faragesque display of indignant bluster by talking down the significance of Cottrell's involvement in UKIP's inner cadre and then dismissing Cottrell's written admission of conspiracy to launder money as if it was such a trifling matter that he's actually pretty bloody indignant that journalists would ever bother him about it at all!
This kind of Farage performance should be familiar to all of us by now, especially given the way the mainstream media have diligently awarded Farage seemingly limitless airtime and column inches to pontificate furiously about this, or bloviate angrily about that, all delivered with that woeful victim-complex pleading that appeals so strongly to the right-wing bigot demographic.
The reason that Farage's tone of furious indignation chimes so well with UKIP's not-insignificant bigot demographic is that bigots are generally just as indignant as Farage about things. They're indignant at being held to account for their bigoted views and behaviour by liberal society, and they pine for the good old days when they could hurl racial abuse at people in the street, spit into the prams of mixed-race babies, beat up gays and cram excrement through the letter boxes of their non-white neighbours. Right-wing bigots adore Farage for constantly voicing the kind of indignant fury that they feel at the constraints of living in a modern socially liberal society, and for the way he deliberately inflates their already bloated self-pitying victim complexes.
How very dare journalists ask Farage questions about his dodgy dark web dealing aide? And how very dare the hated PC brigade call right-wing bigots out on their overt displays of bigotry?
That's the mentality that has driven Farage's success.
You've got to hand it to him. He certainly knows how to appeal to people's indignation, and how to feed into their pathetic victim complexes with his ludicrous fairy tales about how a bunch of predominantly wealthy, white, right-wing males are the poorest and most maligned victims in society, and how people like Remain voters, civil rights activists, and members of the anti-Fascist Hope not Hate organisation are actually the evil extremist villains!
The mainstream media
The vast majority of mainstream media hacks lazily filled out their hastily churnalised articles on Cottrell's guilty plea by quoting Farage's blustering indignation word for word, and utterly failing to subject any of it to critical scrutiny in the process.
The hacks just wrote their stories and got paid, and because Farage was apparently one of the only people to issue statements to the press on the scandal, he ended up being gifted column inch after column inch to parade his faux indignation.
Bizarrely, instead of any effort to press Farage any further on how he ended up with a confessed dark net drug money launderer as his aide, the very next day the supposedly left-liberal Guardian gifted Farage yet another huge wave of free publicity by reporting on his call for an ideological purge of the civil service in order to weed out individuals who committed "Ukipper treason" by supporting the case for Remain!
Instead of taking the golden opportunity to back Farage into a corner over how a dodgy dark web money laundering schemer found his way into UKIP's inner core, the Guardian actually chose to give him carte blanche to call for the fascistic ideological purges of political non-conformists to begin!
Imagine if this Cottrell had been a Jeremy Corbyn aide
Given the incredible fuss the mainstream media have made over comparatively trivial Jeremy Corbyn offences like Cenotaph-gate, Train-gate and FakedPhotosOfCorbynDancing-gate, surely it's safe to assume that the mainstream press would have gone into a savage frenzy of Corbyn condemnation had one of his inner circle ended up pleading guilty to planning a dark web drug money laundering scam.
We all know there would have been endless column inches written about it, and we also all know that all the right-wing Labour Party rent-a-gobs would have fuelled the flames of condemnation with their efforts to completely destroy the Labour Party from within rather than allow it to be run by a genuine democratic socialist on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of people who elected him to run it.
It doesn't matter how little respect for Jeremy Corbyn you might have in his position as leader of the Labour Party, only the most delusional of reality-deniers would attempt to argue that had it been Corbyn in Farage's situation, there would have been no barrage of furious and deeply biased condemnation in the mainstream media and no howls of faux outrage from divisive Anyone But Corbyn ranters like John McTernan, Peter Mandelson, Tristram Hunt, Ian Austin, Luke Akehurst and Tom Blenkinsopp.
Conclusions
Nigel Farage's former aide is a profoundly dodgy dark web drug money laundering plotter; Nigel Farage himself is a Poundland fascist who is pining for the ruthless ideological purges to begin in earnest supported by an adoring mob of furious bigots with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons; lazy mainstream media hacks consistently fail to hold Farage to account and afford him almost limitless free publicity; the Labour Party is a complete shambles stuffed full of intensely bitter right-wingers who would rather destroy it from within than give it back to the kind of people who actually founded it; and anyone who imagines that the incredibly hostile mainstream media would have given Jeremy Corbyn such an easy ride had it been his aide admitting to a dark web drug money laundering scam must be suffering truly meta-level scales of delusion.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Donald Trump's disgusting brand of hatemongering rhetoric is becoming increasingly familiar. His willingness to lie, slur, fearmonger and generally appeal to the basest human instincts in order to generate ever more publicity for himself is appalling, but clearly successful given that he's managed to convince so many millions of Republicans to endorse him as their candidate to become President of the United States.
Trump's misogyny and anti-Hispanic racism are disgusting to behold, but his anti-Muslim sentiments really are something else. The Republicans have thrown up some pretty awful Presidential candidates in the past (their last candidate was the appalling vampire capitalist Mitt Romney) but nothing to compare with Donald Trump. His proposed policy of banning Muslims from entering the United States (even if they are US citizens) is clearly a bigoted and deeply illiberal political policy. I've challenged people who support the imposition of religious purity tests at US borders to explain how such a policy is compatible with the US constitution in the past, but to no avail. People who support the bigoted collective punishment of millions of innocent people are not generally the type to think things through carefully or explain their reasoning.
Donald Trump's reaction to the Orlando nightclub massacre was appalling even by the disgustingly low standards he has already set for himself. Trump used the murder of dozens of people as an opportunity to gloat and congratulate himself on Twitter and then regurgitate his Nazi style policy of imposing religious purity tests at US borders.
After getting over the initial revulsion that somebody would use such a tragedy to pat themselves on the back and promote the kind of deeply bigoted agenda that many of the victims would surely have opposed, it's also worth noting how staggeringly incoherent Trump actually is.
The Killer Omar Mateen was a New York born US citizen, so it's absolutely clear that Donald Trump's religious purity tests at US borders would have had no influence on the situation at all (other than probably stirring up more domestic extremists full of rage at the US policy of openly discriminating against innocent Muslims).
The more we learn about Omar Mateen the more ridiculous Trump's distasteful gloating looks. Mateen was known to the US secret services for his extremist views, but he was still allowed to legally buy the kind of powerful assault rifle that he used to carry out the biggest mass killing in modern US history. Surely the answer to this problem isn't to ban peaceful law-abiding Muslims from entering the US, but to ban people from buying the kinds of gun that nobody outside the military would ever actually need to use (especially if they have been identified as potential terrorists by the FBI).
The view that this massacre had more to do with the easy availability of powerful weapons to violent and unstable people than the religious background of the murderer is supported by the evidence. Mateen's former wife has said that he was a violent and unstable person, the FBI admit that he was known to them for his extremist views, yet he was allowed to legally buy the weapons he used to carry out the massacre. Additionally it has been claimed by people who knew him that Mateen barely practiced Islam at all.
The main issue isn't that Mateen is of Islamic origin, it's that a violent and emotionally unstable person who had been investigated by the FBI for his extremist views was allowed to legally purchase the weapons he used to massacre dozens of people.
The trouble for Trump is obvious. He counts an awful lot of extreme-right gun nuts amongst his supporters, so any attempt to clamp down on the availability of powerful assault weapons to violent and emotionally unstable people with extremist views would surely cost him votes, so instead of even admit what the actual problem is, he's decided to bypass it completely by using the tragedy as an excuse to indulge in a spot of bigotry and distasteful self-congratulation.
It's bad enough that Trump opportunistically used this tragedy to wheel out his bigoted and unconstitutional policy of imposing religious purity tests at US borders, but slapping himself on the back about how right he is when his Nazi style border policy would have had no effect at all on the massacre just goes to show how fundamentally incoherent his bigoted policies actually are.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
