Jane Mayer, in The New Yorker, has an article that is being discussed everywhere today--for those who watch REAL NEWS. It states that Christopher Steele (yes the dossier author) is stating that
'RUSSIA' got Mitt Romney's appointment to Secretary of State NIXED! They wanted someone less hostile to Russia and to be sure sanctions would be lifted! Sound plausible?
I plan to read the actual article and will post a link tomorrow. This is ONE helluva of an indictment against the Trump team. CHRISTOPHER STEELE is said to have told this story, regarding memos circulated at MI6 in England, to MUELLER in his 10 hour (or more) interview. And, of course TILLERSON, friend to Putin and honored with Russia's highest civilian award becomes Secretary of State. And of course, a round of BIPARTISAN SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA sits on Trump's desk and has been there for a couple of months--at least.
That's a quick synoposis!
The New Republic
Alex Shephard
14 hours ago
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Did Russia block Mitt Romney from becoming secretary of state?
In a lengthy profile in
The New Yorker of Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer and author of the
infamous pee tape dossier, Jane Mayer
reports that Steele wrote a second memo shortly after the 2016 election, and that he is believed to have discussed it with special counsel Robert Mueller. That memo reportedly featured a single “senior Russian official” who told Steele that there was chatter within Russia’s foreign ministry that Russia had effectively blocked Mitt Romney’s appointment as Secretary of State.
The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.
This is arguably more explosive than anything in the initial Steele dossier, which was made public in January of 2017 by BuzzFeed. That dossier suggested that Russia had a great deal of compromising material on Donald Trump, that it had cultivated him, and that it had aided his candidacy, possibly in exchange for the lifting of sanctions that had been placed after its annexation of Crimea. T
he second memo, however, suggests that Russia had actually done something with the leverage it purportedly had over Trump: It had blocked the appointment of a secretary of state who had made a hawkish stance on Russia one of his key policy positions when he ran for president in 2012. Rex Tillerson, who was eventually named secretary of state, was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin in 2013....
Did Russia block Mitt Romney from becoming secretary of state?
