The links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government continue to emerge.
Here is a story in the New York Times reporting that Michael Flynn received $65,000 from Russian firms for speaking fees. One was a payment of $45,000 to deliver a speech at the Russia Today dinner, where he was seated next to Putin. If you look at the photo accompanying the story, you will see Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in the foreground at Putin’s table.
RT is the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet.
Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, was paid over $65,000 by companies linked to Russia in 2015, according to a letter released on Thursday by congressional investigators.
Among the companies was a cargo airline implicated in a bribery scheme involving Russian officials at the United Nations, an American branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia’s intelligence services, and RT, the Russian government’s English language television channel, according to the letter, which was sent to Mr. Trump on Thursday by Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Maryland Democrat. Mr. Cummings is the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The document provides new details about Mr. Flynn’s ties to Russian entities just over a month after being forced to resign following revelations that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about his conversations last year with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
An email from Katia Illarionova, an RT producer, discusses expenses for Mr. Flynn’s trip to Russia.
The letter, addressed to Mr. Trump; James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, requested additional documents related to Mr. Flynn’s security clearances.
The fees were apparently for speaking engagements by Mr. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The engagements occurred before he became an official adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
The letter and supporting documents provide new details about a trip Mr. Flynn took to Moscow in December 2015 on behalf of RT. As part of that trip, RT paid him more than $45,000 to deliver a speech at an opulent gala hosted by the network, where he sat next to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But we all know that high speaking fees don’t mean that there’s any special favoritism going on. At least, that’s what we were told about certain speaking fees to certain big financial firms.
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Maybe I’m wrong but I would take a speaking fee from Goldman Sachs, but I would not take one from the Russian government.
I have refused invitations to appear on RT because it is a propaganda arm of the Russian government.
Your obsession with Hillary Clinton has affected your judgment.
I wish Goldman Sachs would offer me a speaking fee. I wish it was $250,000. I would donate it to the Network for Public Education. And I would tell them why public education matters.
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Utter hypocrisy to worry about the current administration being owned by Russia for $65,000 yet not to worry about the potential administration you supported being owned by a financial corporation (one of the ones responsible for bringing down our economy in 2008, remember) for more than 10 times that (and that’s just Goldman Sachs; if you add in all the other speeches to banks and corporations, it comes to $21 million).
It’s not my judgment that’s affected here.
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I wish Hillary had been elected.
We would not have an all-out assault on government, the environment, public schools, our allies, health insurance, etc.
Did you forget that Trump has given control of the economy to…Goldman Sachs?
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“We would not have an all-out assault on … public schools….”
Are you kidding me? I’ve been reading your blog for nearly five years – you are perfectly aware of what the Obama administration did to public schools. Do you really think Hillary would have been any different? Need I remind you that she’s best friends with Eli Broad?
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Dienne,
I would vote for Hillary any day over Trump.
Did you know that DeVos is far worse than Broad?
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Yes, she is, but that’s a good thing. People are finally waking up and realizing what’s happening to education and fighting back. The Democrats would have continued to slowly and stealthily chipped away and things would have just continued to slowly deteriorate. Few people would have fought back because the Democrats are the “good guys”. This way we have a chance – only a chance, mind you – to save it because many, many more people are seeing what’s happening and they’re uniting.
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Dienne,
Under Trump, we have the chance for millions of people to face health crises because they are uninsured. We have the chance to destroy the environment. So many chances. Now I understand why you preferred Trump to Hillary.
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To dienne77
It is outrageous to read your illogical expression. However, people need to live in fascism to understand its military power over innocent people.
You can envision the cruelty in mafia gangster: its way or highway.
In the same vein, greedy corporate will be no different from fascism and communism, EXCEPT THAT in greedy corporate culture people with money and intelligence can survive and can trickle down to the middle class and the poverty.
In short, in Fascism and Communism, its culture is to make people stupid (only see the way that leader says), ignorant (ignore the science or nature), inhuman (steal public goods), immoral (no respect for others’ wellbeing and welfare) so that cruel leadership can easily manipulate people like YOU who blindly attack on others for your own safety and sh-ty survival of your own family members. Sigh! Back2basic
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If I were a member of Congress, I would say, “I request the chair to record that I wish to be associated with the remarks of my honorable friend.”
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It is just wild that the hyper-progressives are still bashing Hillary as if she were the worst thing since the bubonic plague. Hillary derangement syndrome is totally resistant to any kind of minimal logic or sanity. First I voted for Bernie and then I had the good sense to vote for Hillary over this current obscenity in the White House. We will be stuck with the results of Trump’s horrible choices and horrible decisions for many years.
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Not only are these choices horrible, they may be irreparable.
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dienne77,
What did Hillary Clinton do for Goldman Sachs in return for that speaking fee? That’s a valid question. But the answer is, “nothing”.
What did the Flynn and the Trump campaign do for Russia and Putin in return for that speaking fee?
We already know their pick for Secretary of State was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship by Putin.
There is a difference. Just like there is a difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, voters like you insisted that there was not and so many vulnerable people are suffering with far more suffering to come as the far right agenda is enacted.
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Hillary Clinton did nothing for Goldman Sachs? That’s a hot one, for as you may have forgotten, she supported the TARP legislation which bailed out Goldman and AIG, who were among its biggest beneficiaries. That $275,000 speaking fee from GS was both payment for services rendered, and a retainer for future services she would presumably provide
Regarding Putin, his powers must be occult because, according to you, he knew in 2015 that Trump would be elected President and would appoint Flynn to a high level position.
Yes, Hillary is different from Trump (I voted for her, grudgingly), but that also doesn’t change the reality that President Trump is the biggest part of her, her husband’s, and Obama’s legacy, and until Democrats fully understand that and remedy it (if that’s even possible, given the magical thinking on display everywhere), Trump wins.
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Michael Fiorillo,
Thank you – you make some excellent points that should be brought up. I’d argue with you a bit about whether supporting the TARP bail out was simply to do a favor for Goldman Sachs in exchange for a later financial payoff, although I know that Hillary was successfully portrayed as such by haters. Hillary – at least at the time she was NY Senator – was voting for what the incoming Obama administration wanted. Somehow Obama never got smeared as being in bed with Goldman the way Hillary was, which was part of the problem in this election. Although you may believe Hillary lost because she wasn’t an outsider like Trump, that’s simply not what happened. She lost because people believed she was corrupt, despite the fact that they approved of Obama’s performance that mirrored her more moderate politics. Maybe it’s a woman thing — I can already see the smears about Sen. Warren’s dishonesty starting up. It is likely if Warren chooses to run for higher office that half the country will be convinced by the alt right that the Sen. is as corrupt as they believed Hillary to be. Because in the end, it isn’t the position Hillary took on TARP that lost the election. (If that was the case, all those right wing Senators in the midwest would not have handily defeated their anti-TARP opponents). Obama left office with high approval rates despite being the one who was most responsible for those policies you believe doomed Hillary. It wasn’t the policies — it was the smear that she was corrupt. Voters didn’t trust her.
And your magical thinking that the same attacks that turned John Kerry into a coward, Al Gore into the world’s biggest liar, and Hillary Clinton into the world’s most corrupt money-hungry woman could not have been turned on Bernie or Warren or Russ Feingold or any other Democrat who challenges the status quo will be just as likely to lead to a Trump victory.
No candidate the Dems present will be good enough or progressive enough or immune to being portrayed as a lying corrupt candidate. Until the Dems whose primary candidate loses stop help the right do their dirty work to smear the winning primary candidate.
I’m going to vote for the most progressive candidate in the primary just like I voted for Bernie. And I will support whoever wins to run against Trump. But I am under no delusions that any of the candidates will ever be immune to the attacks unless we stop helping them take hold as legitimate. And grudgingly voting for a candidate while agreeing with the right about how corrupt that candidate has been is playing right into the alt right’s hands. That’s the kind of “support” that Hillary got and far too many voters figured if even the Dems are saying such nasty things about her, she must be corrupt.
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What ever happened to the days that Republicans extolled freedom? There is no freedom in Russia. I guess all those years they attacked the USSR their real objection was the socialist aspect of it, not the totalitarian aspect.
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Sickening.
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I am kind of mixed up about something I learned at a st. louis school board meeting. I can start here, with a paragraph from November from the nyt.. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/europe/turkey-flynn-erdogan-gulen.html?_r=0 Ankara has paid far more attention to General Flynn’s full-throated support for Mr. Erdogan’s government, and especially its wish to extradite the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen from his sanctuary in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.
General Flynn wrote an article published in The Hill on Election Day calling on the United States to be more sympathetic to the concerns of Turkey, a NATO ally, and embracing Mr. Erdogan’s position that Mr. Gulen is an extremist who was behind the failed July coup against his government.
I have always wondered about one of the better performing schools in St. Louis: Gateway. http://www.gsasouth.org/about/general-info/ I was asking someone, not a board member, about the contradictions I encounter regarding Gateway. In a district which has 82% black student population, some accounts list gateway as being as high as 83% white, and 4%black. Other charts show far different figures. I looked up some of their principals’ names, murat sagnak, Nuh Celik and others, which are of Turkish origin, consistent with how Gulen’s concept schools are set up. Their website labels them as charters, but their stats, unlike other charters are listed with the non charter schools. There has never been any mention of them being one of Gulen’s 150? charter schools. I have been told they are not really charter schools but there are a lot of things which do not quite add up. One of the questions I asked of the board, which still exists despite having no power for ten years now, if the charter schools had to go along with the change in policy making it not easy to send k-2 children home for suspensions….a progressive move for this school year. They simply shook their heads, almost like saying are you kidding? charters do whatever they want.
I have tried, without success to find out whether Gateway is or was ever a Gulen school. I was told by the person I was talking to at the meeting, that a trick was pulled by the charter operation…..Gateway has been around for a long time, and they were able to use the name to go ahead and do what they wanted…with a lot of cherry picked success. Not sure of their history.
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MO (9)
Frontier School of Excellence – Middle
Kansas City
2900590-03180
Frontier School of Excellence – Upper
Kansas City
2900590-03181
Frontier School of Innovation – Lower
Kansas City
2900590-03127
Frontier School of Innovation – Middle
Kansas City
2900590-03182
Frontier STEM High School
Kansas City
2900590-03232
Gateway Science Academy High
St. Louis
2900592-03205
Gateway Science Academy Middle
St. Louis
2900592-03244
Gateway Science Academy of St. Louis
St. Louis
2900592-03174
Gateway Science Academy South – Elementary
St. Louis
not sure of this source… http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/p/list-of-us-gulen-schools.html
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