Donald Trump defends Vladimir Putin over Alexander Litvinenko murder

The Telegraph ^ | January 26, 2016 | Nick Allen

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Donald Trump has defended Vladimir Putin after a British public inquiry found the Russian president "probably" sanctioned the assassination of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Mr Trump waded into the case saying he had seen "no evidence" of Mr Putin's involvement, adding: "They say a lot of things about me that are untrue too."

The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has previously said he felt a "great honour" when Mr Putin praised him as an "absolute leader". ..

But Mr Trump told Fox Business: "Have they found him (Mr Putin) guilty? I don't think they've found him guilty. If he did it, fine but I don't know that he did it.

"You know, people are saying they think it was him, it might have been him, it could have been him. But in all fairness to Putin - and I'm not saying this because he says 'Trump is brilliant and leading everybody' - the fact is that he hasn't been convicted of anything. Some people say he absolutely didn't do it.

"First of all, he says he didn't do it. Many people say it wasn't him. So who knows who did it?" ...

In the most personal attack yet on his main rival Mr Trump called Mr Cruz a "nasty guy" and a "jerk".

He said: "We can't have a guy who stands in the middle of the Senate floor and every other senator thinks he's a whack job." ..

[WENDLE]

that is a conclusion to a series of what facts?

[JediJones]

Pootie Poot looked into Trump’s soul and found a sympathetic tyrant.

[Trumpinator]

Putin has been rehabilitating Stalin in Russia for over a decade.

---------

That is Bull. From Yesterday:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-denounces-soviet-founder-lenin/2016/01/25/72ca5e64-c37d-11e5-b933-31c93021392a_story.html

Putin denounces Soviet founder Lenin

In the past, Putin has denounced Stalin for massive purges that killed millions, but noted his role in defeating the Nazis in WW II.

In Monday’s comments, Putin also blasted the Bolsheviks for making Russia lose World War I in their quest for power, making Russia suffer defeat by Germany and cede large chunks of territory just months before it lost World War I. “We lost to the losing party, a unique case in history,” Putin said.

-----------------

The anti-Trump side just lies or gets stuff wrong. It reinforces by trust in Trump that those are his enemies.

[Trumpinator]

Would love to know how Donald knows Putin is innocent when he can’t know it.

All men are presumed innocent until proven. Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies).

[ETL]

Russia spent 500 years defending Orthodox Christians and Slavs in Eastern Europe - especially from Muslims - it's a hard habit to break.

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

September 2014

(excerpt from a long, detailed article)

First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.

It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.

But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.

In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.

Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, "Blackbird"), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin's KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates - Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) - also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.

Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:

According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.

Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin's cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.

Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin's Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ..."

much more at link

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality

***********************************************************

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[EveningStar]

LOL and stolen!

[Trumpinator]

He already said he wants the NSA to listen in on phone calls.

so you are voting for Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders?

I don't like that either but Trump did not pass the Patriot Act. And I am pretty sure the Patriot Act was praised by the GOP before it was passed - as it was passed and after it was passed long before Trump came along.

Trump is not perfect but perfect is the enemy of the good.

[Las Vegas Ron]

What would possibly lead me to think that?

You expect people to read the spam you post, why don't you try reading my posting history?

[Trumpinator]

Russo-Turkish War (1787–92)Siege of Ochakov 1788

[GodGunsGuts]

Russia is run by the KGB. All of their current terrorist client states have been our enemies since the days of the cold war. One of those terrorists client states is Assad’s Syria. I wouldn’t doubt that ISIS was created out of whole cloth to distract the US and it’s allies away from regime change in Syria to getting rid of ISIS. They sure act like it.

[ETL]

Trumpinator = Putinator

He is head of the FR Putinistas4Trump movement.

Whether he’s working out of some bedbug-ridden basement apt in Moscow is unclear.

[miss marmelstein]

That he made fun of a disabled man. You use snapshots of his raised arm which seems to ape the arm of the disabled reporter. In fact, if you play the video it is clear Trump is imitating a flustered reporter who has been caught saying something accidentally positive about The Donald.

But go right ahead. After NH, you’ll undoubtedly slink back just the way you did when Perry blew up in your face.

[ETL]

You expect people to read the spam you post,

It's only "spam" to know-nothing, care-nothing idiots like you.

[Las Vegas Ron]

You really are a jerk, take a hike idiot.

[Trumpinator]

Oh, so Syria carried out 9/11? Saudis were actually Syrians on those flights? Osama was hiding in Damascus and not Pakistan?

[ETL]

Russia is run by the KGB.

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[Trumpinator]

Russia is run by the KGB.

Probably because everyone else in Russia was incompetent or drunk. It wast he only competent and professional branch of the USSR remaining when it collapsed. I mean look at Yeltsin.....

[jwalsh07]

You are like a child. Lenin and Stalin are two different people. Putin had the texts in schools changed to purge Stalin’s purges. Why do you feel the need to defend a commie pos? I really don’t get it.

[montag813]

Trump doesn’t want the same scrutiny should Hillary “bump into” some polonium as well.

[Trumpinator]

I just posted an article from yesterday where Putin denounced the entire communist system - thus disproving your assertion. Who is the child and can’t accept that they are wrong?