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A former aide to longtime President Trump confidant Roger Stone must testify before the special counsel’s grand jury, a federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday.

The judge rejected a challenge from Andrew Miller, a former assistant to Stone who tried to block subpoenas from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The redacted opinion from U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell affirming the legal legitimacy of the special counsel’s appointment does not identify Miller by name, but his attorney confirmed that the ruling is in response to Miller’s request.

Howell’s ruling orders Miller to “appear before the grand jury to provide testimony at the earliest date available” and to provide subpoenaed records.

“We’re disappointed with the court’s ruling,” Miller’s attorney, Paul Kamenar, said in an interview. “But the judge obviously took our challenge to Mueller’s constitutionality seriously, as evidenced by the 93-page opinion.”
 


A former aide to longtime President Trump confidant Roger Stone must testify before the special counsel’s grand jury, a federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday.

The judge rejected a challenge from Andrew Miller, a former assistant to Stone who tried to block subpoenas from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The redacted opinion from U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell affirming the legal legitimacy of the special counsel’s appointment does not identify Miller by name, but his attorney confirmed that the ruling is in response to Miller’s request.

Howell’s ruling orders Miller to “appear before the grand jury to provide testimony at the earliest date available” and to provide subpoenaed records.

“We’re disappointed with the court’s ruling,” Miller’s attorney, Paul Kamenar, said in an interview. “But the judge obviously took our challenge to Mueller’s constitutionality seriously, as evidenced by the 93-page opinion.”


 


LONDON — Shortly after leaving the G7 Summit in Canada in June, President Donald Trump tweeted to say he had instructed US officials not to endorse a statement he had agreed just hours earlier with other world leaders. Trump was displeased with something Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during the summit’s closing press conference, which the president was following on TV from Air Force One.

But almost two months on, those instructions from Trump have never been acted upon, apparently ignored, two sources who were directly involved in the G7 process told BuzzFeed News.

US inaction means Trump effectively endorsed the final statement after all.
 


US counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade, the Guardian has learned.

The Russian national had been hired by the US Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a potential window into highly confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president.

The woman had been working for the Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion in 2016 during a routine security sweep conducted by two investigators from the US Department of State’s Regional Security Office (RSO).

They established she was having regular and unauthorised meetings with members of the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency.

The Guardian has been told the RSO sounded the alarm in January 2017, but the Secret Service did not launch a full-scale inquiry of its own. Instead it decided to let her go quietly months later, possibly to contain any potential embarrassment.

An intelligence source told the Guardian the woman was dismissed last summer after the state department revoked her security clearance. The dismissal came shortly before a round of demanded by the Kremlin after Washington imposed more sanctions on the country.
 


“The Storm is coming,” say the conspiracy theorizers whose grotesque imaginings https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-mystery-of-q-how-an-anonymous-conspiracy-monger-launched-a-movement-if-he-even-exists/2018/08/01/6d10f5b4-95a3-11e8-80e1-00e80e1fdf43_story.html?utm_term=.ec2de7625ef5 (terrified) the country to attention this week. Maybe they’re right.

QAnon adherents encourage those seeking the truth to “follow the White Rabbit,” but it’s hard to hop down this hole without getting totally lost in their horrorland. The simplest description of the plot line goes something like this: President Trump isn’t under investigation; he is only pretending to be, as part of a countercoup to restore power to the people after more than a century of governmental control by a globalist cabal. Also, there are pedophiles.

A figure named “Q,” who supposedly possesses Q-level security clearance, disperses “crumbs” that “bakers” bring together to create a “dough” of synthesized information. (This is not how baking works, but that seems the least of our worries.) Because Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet and 17 is also a number Trump has said a few times, among other clearly-not-coincidences, he is the real deal, not an Internet troll engaged in an elaborate example of live-action role-play.

It’s obvious that this is scary, but it’s less obvious exactly why. To start, the sheer scope of the supposed conspiracy should cause alarm. By combining the tales tinfoil-hatters have told over time, these truthers have packaged everything attractive about this type of propaganda in one tantalizing product. And that means more and more people will buy what they’re selling.

Then there’s QAnon’s path to prominence — from 4chan to 8chan to more mainstream sites such as YouTube and Twitter and, finally, to a https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/01/we-are-q-a-deranged-conspiracy-cult-leaps-from-the-internet-to-the-crowd-at-trumps-maga-tour/?utm_term=.7a1ac0e0b8ea (Florida Trump rally) and television screens across the nation. In the cesspools where the theory first flourished, registration is either not required or not possible, and the “rules,” such as they are, look nothing like the terms of service for a site like Facebook. The intelligentsia is already at odds over how the more-established entities should regulate themselves, or be regulated. It’s even harder to have that conversation about a site like 4chan or 8chan that eschews responsibility for its content entirely.

Now that it’s clear that what starts on the fringe doesn’t stay there, it is a real concern.
 


This love! I don’t know if you were able to see it last night, any of them. I mean, there’s such tremendous love.

— President Trump on Wednesday’s “The Rush Limbaugh Show” radio program, discussing his rally in Tampa the night before.

“This love!”… indeed. There are some critical moments in world history that we refer to as “crossing the Rubicon” — a point of no return, like Julius Caesar’s fateful decision to cross a forbidden river into Italy with his army and launch a civil war. But in America’s agonizingly slow-motion descent into the riptides of autocracy, Trump’s Tampa rally felt more like sinking to the bottom of the Rubicon while drowning in a white, frothy backwash of conspiratorial lunacy and misdirected rage.

But it was hardly a one-off. Thursday night, the 45th president is bringing this freak show to Pennsylvania, campaigning in Wilkes-Barre in an effort to help his xenophobic clone, Rep. Lou Barletta, pull an upset and win election to the U.S. Senate on an anti-immigration platform. As August blurs into the fall midterm campaign, Trump has vowed to hold a slew of such rallies for Republican candidates but — more importantly — for himself and his Hindenburg-sized ego.

Something has clearly changed. Mass rallies — and their disturbing Nuremberg-on-the-Susquehanna vibe, including violence and fistfights that were applauded from the podium by the ringmaster himself — have been a staple of Trumpism from that day in June 2015 when the short-fingered vulgarian descended the Trump Tower escalators to run for the White House.

Journalists who attended the Tampa rally said they were shocked at the number of attendees wearing T-shirts or other paraphernalia or babbling incessantly about the vast online conspiracy theory — little known or written about before this week — called “QAnon” or simply “Q”,’ in honor of its mysterious internet poster (or posters) claiming to have inside government knowledge of the secret Trump-led program taking down a web of child molesters involving top Democrats and Hollywood stars.
 
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