Tag Archives: Money laundering

Jul 11 2020


Posted originally on The Conservative tree house on July 10, 2020 by 

This evening a Washington DC appeals court denied an emergency request from Roger Stone to delay the start of his 40-month prison term for bragging to congress. The court said Stone had not proved he was in particular danger of catching COVID-19 in prison.

The court decision assured that Mr. Stone would have to surrender to federal correctional offices in Georgia. However, the White House is now confirming that President Trump has contacted Mr. Stone to notify him his sentence has been commuted.

WHITE HOUSE – Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Grant of Clemency commuting the unjust sentence of Roger Stone, Jr.

Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency.

There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia. Such collusion was never anything other than a fantasy of partisans unable to accept the result of the 2016 election. The collusion delusion spawned endless and farcical investigations, conducted at great taxpayer expense, looking for evidence that did not exist.

As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface. These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.

This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.

Roger Stone is well known for his nearly 50 years of work as a consultant for high-profile Republican politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, Senator Bob Dole, and many others. He is also well known for his outspoken support for President Donald J. Trump and opposition to Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Stone was charged by the same prosecutors from the Mueller Investigation tasked with finding evidence of collusion with Russia. Because no such evidence exists, however, they could not charge him for any collusion-related crime. Instead, they charged him for his conduct during their investigation.

The simple fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.

In addition to charging Mr. Stone with alleged crimes arising solely from their own improper investigation, the Mueller prosecutors also took pains to make a public and shameful spectacle of his arrest.

Mr. Stone is a 67-year-old man, with numerous medical conditions, who had never been convicted of another crime. But rather than allow him to surrender himself, they used dozens of FBI agents with automatic weapons and tactical equipment, armored vehicles, and an amphibious unit to execute a pre-dawn raid of his home, where he was with his wife of many years.

Notably, CNN cameras were present to broadcast these events live to the world, even though they swore they were not notified—it was just a coincidence that they were there together with the FBI early in the morning.

Not only was Mr. Stone charged by overzealous prosecutors pursing a case that never should have existed, and arrested in an operation that never should have been approved, but there were also serious questions about the jury in the case.

The forewoman of his jury, for example, concealed the fact that she is a member of the so-called liberal “resistance” to the Trump Presidency. In now-deleted tweets, this activist-juror vividly and openly attacked President Trump and his supporters.

Mr. Stone would be put at serious medical risk in prison. He has appealed his conviction and is seeking a new trial. He maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system.

Mr. Stone, like every American, deserves a fair trial and every opportunity to vindicate himself before the courts. The President does not wish to interfere with his efforts to do so. At this time, however, and particularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence. Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case.

Roger Stone is now a free man!

[LINK]

Jul 10 2020

Risk Seems to be Everywhere


Armstrong Economics Blog/ECM

Re-Posted Jul 10, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Dear Martin,

Thank you for your commitment to helping others through this unsettling time.

Long before I found you, I was fascinated with the capital markets and historical financial crashes, in particular. I spent many years on Wall Street (and LaSalle ST) building and marketing trading systems for the listed options industry.

Through the numerous currency failures, be they inflationary or deflationary, running to private assets has been a lifesaver for some clever enough to figure it out or those lucky to be serendipitously well positioned. Yet, it is always about timing. That is the subject of this question.

If the value of a currency is based on the productive power of the people behind the currency, it makes sense that Socrates is pointing to private assets going forward. It seems to me that the very best private assets would be businesses that enjoy productive power (not so easy to predict/choose in this environment). Whether we are denominating in dollars, rice, or seashells, it seems that a solid business will crank out currency units in whatever form and be a good hedge.

Hugo Stinnes emerged after WWI as an industrialist. Controlling coal, steel, electricity, and other fundamental businesses, he was able to profit as the currency collapsed. Stinnes continued this work straight through the introduction of the Rentenmark and Reichsmark seemingly not skipping a beat. He possessed productive power but was also very politically connected, which is key to this question. Later, The Third Reich was notorious for shutting down or nationalizing businesses. We look to be headed in that direction.

For those accumulating profits in, for example, mining stocks during the commodity boom, or wheat contracts, or equities, the question is, how do we get out of those trades? What is the risk that we sell/trade at the right time only to have our assets seized? For example, do you foresee a day, here in the U.S., whereby the government liquidates a portion of an account’s common shares for a bail-in or wealth tax? If so, then illiquid private placements (productive real estate or businesses with durable Free Cash Flow) that are very hard to value (and liquidate) might be the only real safe haven.

The risk seems to be everywhere. The risk most concerning and most difficult to predict or quantify is Government Risk – even here in the U.S. I can understand why the very wealthy buy paintings and rare items. Such items represent a real possibility to function as a “time machine” to bridge this insanity.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Above all, Socrates is a lifesaver and I am humbled to have access.

With respect,
JC

Texas

ANSWER: Yes, I knew a client who bought up all the old coins for scrap metal. Then it turned out there was a shortage of metal so the old coins were deemed valid at a new exchange rate. He made a fortune. There are definitely commodities that will preserve wealth in times like this. We must be careful about the Socialists, for they will do the same as the Nazis and nationalize just confiscating assets.

I believe the best shot we have is Socrates — let it monitor the subtle shifts. The one thing you can count on is the greed of those in power. Just as I began to see the subtle shifts with the Repo Crisis last August 2019, thereafter the markets were showing something was not right. I stood up at the WEC in Orlando and warned that something was seriously wrong and that the market would undergo a serious correction with the turn in the ECM.

Historically, Socrates seems to pick up things we humans do not see because they are subtle. It is like playing chess. You have to come up with a strategy and play in your mind the next several moves. You will lose if you simply react on a one move at a time basis. This is what Socrates is doing. It is playing out strategies. It looks for the possible paths and then monitors the movements across the entire globe to determine the eventual path. This is why NOBODY can forecast the future with 100% accuracy. We cannot as humans see all the possibilities. Socrates is mapping out the future and it reveals the most likely path and course of action.

Things can change and we get cycle inversions. But it is always playing one region against another. This is why all of these pundits fail because they focus typically just domestically and never see the trends coming from external factors. Things are so bad in Europe and the politicians are deliberately blocking travel from the USA to Europe in an effort to overthrow Trump to further their New Green World Order. In the process, before year-end, they will bankrupt at least 20% of all small businesses and wipe out the tourist trade for Southern Europe. These morons think they can placate the public with minimal subsistence from Guaranteed Basic Income they are beginning in Spain.

They will NOT be able to defeat the Monetary Crisis Cycle no matter what schemes they come up with. This is totally insane. Nevertheless, we will be monitoring what markets we need to exit in advance to try to preserve assets. This is a game of survival of the fittest. We do not have to run around naked on some island eating bugs. But we may have to take precautions and move to safe havens outside of urban cities for sure.

Jul 7 2020

GHISLAINE MAXWELL ARRESTED


Ghislaine Maxwell is a sociopath. Jeffrey Epstein was also a sociopath.

Sociopaths feel no guilt and don’t commit suicide. If Ghislaine commits suicide, we’ll all know it was murder—just like Epstein’s death was murder. Clearly there are elite forces that do not want her to spill the beans on their illegal sexual activities. She claimed she would not talk about Prince Andrew, so maybe she’s safe if she avoids implicating the royal family. We would like to see her bare it all.

Many questions remain, however. What was she doing in a secluded luxury home on 156 acres in New Hampshire? She could have stayed in France and avoided extradition. She purchased her hideaway for only $1 million, when clearly it is worth much more. Who sold it to her?

Bombshells should drop, but I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing is revealed. The powerful and connected (such as the Clintons) have a way of winning every time.

Ghislaine’s life is in danger and she should get things off her chest sooner than later.

—Ben Garrison

Jul 5 2020

Stores Must Take Cash by Law


Armstrong Economics Blog/Rule of Law

Re-Posted Jul 5, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Dear Mr Armstrong,

Here is a softball question for the holiday weekend.

If US currency is legal tender, aren’t retail stores obligated to accept it?

This would seem to restrict the ability of retail stores to 1) demand electronic payment and 2) reject payment using $100 bills.

Happy 4th to you.

MB

ANSWER: You are correct. Stores MUST accept cash – that is what LEGAL TENDER means! Congress would have to pass an Act and the President MUST sign it to eliminate paper money.

Jul 5 2020

Do You Really Want The Book?..


Posted originally on The Conservative Tree House on July 5, 2020 by 

Begin with the end in mind.

Whatever happened to…

You see, a funny thing happens when you intercept fraud…. It disappears.

That’s just one tiny example.  There are thousands more pixels.

Which sets up a question.  It’s a very big ugly digest.  All of it.  The sum is much more than its collective parts.  So, do you really want the book?  It’s a trilogy: (Vol 1) The Politics. (Vol 2) The Fraud. (Vol 3) The confrontation.

The number one statement I receive is a version of: “I wish I had never started following your research, because it was so much easier when I did not to know.”  Simultaneously, I receive an equal amount of requests to write a book about them.  [“Them” doesn’t just include the background surveillance against Donald J Trump (aka Spygate), although that’s a recently common reference.]

Here is why I have never, until now, contemplated doing it.

There are many really good and well-written books about politics and scandals.  However, every book, regardless of how well cited, researched and evidenced, always has a big missing part, at least for me: Where’s the confrontation?

Where’s the part in the ‘expose” when the writer takes all of the facts, all of the evidence, all of the cited and documented discovery, and gets in the face of the subject?

What’s the purpose, if not to initiate action.

Where’s the book writer of DC corruption who puts a microphone uncomfortably in the face of Mitch McConnell (or staff), or Peter Strzok, or Andrew McCabe, or John Brennan, or Kevin Clinesmith…  and asks the questions… or confronts Jake Tapper… or travels to the symposium,.. or Tom Perez… or Martin Gugino… or the team of Bubba Wallace…. or Rod Rosenstein… and challenges them in unavoidable detail, to document that part.

Relentlessly.  Visibly.

The answers are just as easily found on the perimeter; but no-one is there.

That Andrew Breitbart approach is always missing; that’s why we miss him so much.

The recent books are great.  I have likely read most.  They are terrific data records and they show solid documentary evidence on a multitude of schemes, but drive no outcome.

We gain knowledge; we seem satisfied; but perhaps, just perhaps, we are satiated only because we have stopped thinking about the purpose any longer.   What value is there in knowing the fraud and scheme if there is no confrontation to conclude it.  Maybe even stop it, or expose it on a level that cannot be denied.

Ongoing denial of truth permits continued trespass.

The villain escapes, ultimately because we have stopped the accountability quest.

Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Next book, new controversy…. new evidence…. same shallow outcome.

Put another way – CTH receives hundreds of requests for interviews on some of our deep dive research; so many that we just don’t respond to them any longer.  But when we did respond, consider this customary reply:

My honest and respectfully intended question to you would be: What is it that makes media folks always want to “get an interview” when the information is there for the taking?

Perhaps, by training, by habit, or by unintended consequence you have developed yourself to live for the process itself as an end result. Is it logical to believe that journalism is the interview; the conversation is the point; the smoke is the fire?

Please forgive my uneducated and poorly worded suppositions, but apparently journalism has evolved into reveling in the process and, as a consequence, it completely ignores the end point, misses the bottom line, doesn’t actually SEE the subject matter and never actually applies what might be discovered.

In fact, I’m led to believe that sometimes those within the industrial media complex avoid the subject matter deliberately, because if they get their heads around it and nail it home, they won’t have anything to talk about any more–because they will have exhausted their stash.

Not attempting whatsoever to lump your intention into such a fray; however, many have gotten into the habit of milking each situation for “so many leads,” “so many interviews,” “so many column inches,” and “so many angles” that problem-solving does not appeal to them at all. They oddly appear to favor the endless process.

So when there’s an approach like what you are encountering with our significant site research, and my reluctance for self involvement, I don’t fit –because I don’t give a flip about “the process.” And therefore, I do not fit into the rationale of the box or the PERT chart.

If you want to make these truths known, they are free for the taking; and they are by no matter or consequence dependent on my advancement.

The same general outlook applies to my perspective on writing books.  Should not the book itself drive an action?  Does not that action, by necessity require a confrontation?

There you have it.

That’s why I have never written a book about all of the subjects we have deeply researched.

That said, the first two volumes of the Big Ugly trilogy are essentially written.  Vol. I “The Politics”; and Vol II “The Frauds”, are assembled.  The summaries of over a decade of CTH material makes each one about 700-1,000 pages (with citations).  But the missing volume III, “The Confrontations” precludes the release.  I will not release a book outlining fraud without initiating an unavoidable confrontation to expose each individual fraud on a very specific level.

So there’s the question: Do you really want the book?

It’s not really a book, per se’, the pages would be released digitally in live-stream video, a rather direct series of confrontations based on prior assembly.

Recent events have shifted the dynamic.

It would be very ugly, and most likely very public.

Think about it.

Jul 3 2020

Trading is the Only School to Learn Real Economics


Armstrong Economics Blog/Economics

Re-Posted Jul 3, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: I noticed that all the economists who are not academics are the people who actually discovered something. The academics always advocate for manipulating society like Keynes and Marx. Why is that?

PD

ANSWER: If you look at the first analyst to establish supply and demand, it was John Law. Even Adam Smith used his examples in “Wealth of Nations.” Adam Smith actually investigated his work to come up with his invisible hand. There was David Ricardo, who also made a fortune as a trader. Those are the three greats and NONE of them has a formal economics degree, which was first taught as a separate course in 1902 at Cambridge.

Those of us who come from the real world of trading, do not have the luxury to come up with Utopian theories that sound nice. Unless you have traded, you will never understand that the market is always right. If you do not listen to the market, you will lose everything.

Jul 3 2020

Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested – Clinton’s & Epstein’s Lover


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics

Re-Posted Jul 2, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

Here we go again. The FBI has just arrested Jeffrey Epstein’s friend and alleged procurer Ghislaine Maxwell on charges related to a probe by New York federal prosecutors into his alleged rampant serial sexual abuse of young girls and women. Will Maxwell also commit suicide?

Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell MC (1923– 1991), who was a British media proprietor, Member of Parliament (MP), and they said he was a fraudster. That is only the tip of the iceberg. On November 5, 1991, Maxwell sailed off on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to the Canary Island. He was last seen at 4:25 am local time, but went missing later in the morning. Maxwell fell overboard and was claimed to have suffered a heart attack combined with accidental drowning. This was after he lost money trading with the CLUB. He was defaulting on a £50 million pound loan with the Bank of England, and he was scheduled to have a meeting with the bank the day he fled.

Had Maxwell been arrested and stood trial, the entire club would have been exposed. His death was quite convenient. But his right-hand man was none other than Bill Browder, who then became a partner with another alleged member of the club — Edmond Safra in Hermitage Capital — the company seized by Putin.

Once again we have to wonder if Ghislaine Maxwell will ever make it to trial and if she tries to give up bankers that may be the end of her life. Would the prosecutors dare go after anyone? Ah, the plot never ends.

Then there is a new book out, “A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein,” by Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper. There they say that Ghislaine Maxwell was also Bill Clinton’s lover. Oh, how the plot thickens. But New York specializes in making sure defendants never make it to trial and relish in the virtual 99% conviction rate, with the 1% dying I suppose.

Jul 3 2020

Jeffrey Epstein Sex Trafficking Co-Conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested – Indictment pdf…


Posted originally on The Conservative Tree House on July 2, 2020 by 

The FBI and DOJ from the Southern District of New York (SDNY) have finally made a move to arrest Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-conspirator, manager, and socialite who facilitated the sex trafficking network of Jeffrey Epstein. [pdf to indictment]

Interestingly, very interestingly, the current indictment focuses exclusively on the period of 1994 to 1997.  DOJ Press Release: “The Indictment unsealed today alleges that between at least in or about 1994 through 1997, MAXWELL and co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein exploited girls as young as 14, including by enticing them to travel and transporting them for the purpose of engaging in illegal sex acts.”

This timing aspect is interesting because in Epstein’s original indictment there were two time periods of focus: First, the mid-90’s which aligns with Maxwell today; and second, a conspiracy from 2002 through 2005 which included facilitating “employees.”  It will be interesting to see if the conspiracy charges released today generate more arrests related to the ¹three Epstein employees who facilitated sexual abuse of minors in ’04 and ’05.

Ms. Maxwell, 58, faces charges including the transporting a minor for the purposes of criminal sexual activity and conspiring to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts.  There are a total of six counts within the grand jury indictment unsealed today.

Maxwell was arrested in Bradford, N.H. According to William F Sweeney Jr of the FBI New York field office: “We’ve been discreetly keeping tabs on Maxwell’s whereabouts as we worked this investigation. And more recently, we learned she’d slithered away to a gorgeous property in New Hampshire — continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago.”

The federal charges against her generally align with previously allegations made by Epstein’s victims, who accused Maxwell of helping the abuser run a sex-trafficking ring that targeted and victimized teenage girls.  Maxwell previously denied allegations linking her to Epstein’s exploitation of girls and young women, including denials she made under oath during sworn testimony in 2016.  The DOJ indictment today accuses Ms. Maxwell of committing perjury in those depositions.

DOJ Statement – “GHISLANE MAXWELL was arrested this morning and charged with enticing a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit both of those offenses, and perjury in connection with a sworn deposition.” [More]

Here’s the indictment [pdf here]:

.

¹Keep an eye out for these three employees to become a significant part of this story.  One of them is likely Maxwell; however, the other two?…