President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser met with the leader of a far-right Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis at Trump Tower a few weeks ago, the New York Times reported Monday.
Heinz-Christian Strache wrote on his Facebook page that he had met with retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in Trump Tower.
“Internationally, the Freedom Party continues to gain in influence,” he wrote in the post, as quoted by the Times.
Strache is the charismatic leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, whose candidate for the presidency, Nobert Hofer, lost in a run-off vote this month after earning the most votes of any candidate there in the first round of voting.
Strache also recently signed a so-called “cooperation agreement” with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political party, which outlined plans for regular meetings and established cooperation on joint projects over five years, according to the Times. Leaders of the Freedom Party have argued forcefully for lifting all sanctions against Russia.
Eighteen months after stepping down as leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn himself sat next to Putin at a 2015 gala in Moscow for RT, a Kremlin-backed television channel on which he continued to occasionally appear as a contributor. He told the network in October, during a discussion about Syria, that he believes “Russia and the United States working together and trying to work with the other partners that we all have in this region can come up with some other solutions.”
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The political party of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, which is leading polls ahead of parliamentary elections next year, has vowed to close mosques and “ban the Quran” in its manifesto.
“All mosques and Islamic schools closed, a ban on the Quran,” said the document outlining the electoral program of the Freedom Party (PVV) ahead of March 2017 legislative elections, which was posted on Wilders’ Twitter feed Thursday.
Wilders’ manifesto was the first published by a major political party ahead of elections for the lower house of Dutch parliament which are due by March 15 next year.
The PVV says it will reverse the “Islamization” of the country with a range of measures including closing the borders, shutting asylum seeker centers, banning migrants from Islamic countries and stopping Muslim women from wearing the headscarf in public.
On the back of Europe’s migrant crisis, opinion polls have for months given Wilders’ PVV the edge over the current coalition parties of the Labor Party and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Four years of Trump?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_QTugv3EhMImagine Democrats were doing any of this. ANY of it. Remember that the GOP was FURIOUS about Lynch meeting Bill Clinton at an airport. Remember that Hillary gave speeches to Goldman Sachs. Remember that Hillary’s private server COULD POSSIBLY have been hacked. Those were unconscionable acts.
Republicans have long been notorious for never fighting fairly. Maybe it’s because they’ve never conducted an actual war in a foreign land with anything even approaching competency in strategy and intelligence. Their belligerence has all been aimed at securing their own cushy, well paying jobs at taxpayer expense.
Meanwhile their new Leader is holding hands with the man behind a series of otherwise inexplicable “right” turns in several important western democracies: Putin. Putin has been funding the National Front in France and has just concluded a deal with Austria’s far right party, which fortunately lost the recent election. Putin is following the Aleksandr Dugin playbook on geopolitics (a fascism without borders) and revving up inter-ethnic conflicts inside Western democracies.
So the cowardice, weakness and the need never to play fair to win elections is playing right into Putin’s hands.