11 July 2017

Natalia Veselnitskaya, Magnitsky Act, Russian hackers, Putin's tentacles, you name it...


It is a long time since this here blog dabbed in the pictures of nice ladies, so... no, this is not really the reason for this picture at all. It is simply that the person in the picture is being presented as one of the more powerful tentacles of the Kremlin in general and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in particular. When even our provincial Times of Israel opens its main page with a huge font headline:

Moscow denies knowledge of Trump Jr.’s meeting with Putin-linked lawyer

How can one be not thrilled by that? The point of the (slightly poisoned) arrow is, of course, this "Putin-linked lawyer" bit. How sharp it is? So I let my fingers do some surfing in the murky waters of the 'net, with assistance from the kind Google, may his/her name be blessed.

But first a look back, several days ago, when an allegedly explosive news appeared first in that august bastion of progressive thought, NYT:

Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton

Aha, I said to myself, with another few million surfers: finally the Pandora box is getting opened, and the mills of justice are going to start milling much faster. That is, till I have encountered the following pathetic sentence in this "explosive" article:
The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.
What? If anything, this is not an accelerator of the said mills of justice - rather a wrench in the works.

Nevertheless, this kind of the James Bond story, with a nice looking Russian lady thrown in for thrills (the infamous KGB Swallows come to mind, surely), couldn't leave one indifferent. So one googles.

Ms Natalia Veselnitskaya isn't, apparently, hiding in some inaccessible corners of the fast FSB/SVR empire, being at beck and call of Vladimir Vladimirovich. No, she is quite openly active on Facebook, where she presents herself as a managing partner in a Moscow firm of lawyers and quite openly tells all about her fight against Magnitsky Act. More about her in English here and here. While the Magnitsky Act by itself was a good deed of the US government and the fight against it was definitely approved and, most probably, financed by the Russian government, to derive from this a link to Vladimir Vladimirovich is more than just reaching. It is a kind of hyperbole good only for cheap headlines and cheap journalists... but wait, we are talking about progressive press here... oops.

So what could we learn from the whole brouhaha? Nope, it ain't a Pandora box, that's for sure. By the way, the real Pandora box seems to have been a sealed pottery vase. In our case it turned out to be a crock of crapola.

And the only man that is still laughing is the one in Kremlin. Watching the travesty of the ongoing witch hunts and the administration busy at counterattacking the media, instead of doing what the government is meant to do - how could the man not laugh? At least, from all that we know about his habits, he is not laughing out loud.

Just cackling from time to time.

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