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This one just baffles me.
FBI sting on an army officer nets an spying bust. Dog bites man, except there's a lot more not mentioned in the press release. It's culture war because the accused is the first openly trans officer in the Army. However the baffling thing is, why is an openly trans officer willing to spy for Russia which is widely known for its anti-LGBT policies.
The other odd thing about this case is the DoJ's release uses a lot of pronouns that don't don't seem to be Henry's preferred pronouns.
The fed govt. it seems can look for any excuse to indict someone. Sharing health info somehow threatens national security.
Usually the counts are wrapped as one, so the worst case would likely be 10 years.
Because in spite of such polices, Russia is known for having progressive cultural elements too it (literature, chess, ballet, figure skating ,etc.) Sans Putin, it's not that conservative of a country.
In what sense are literature, chess, ballet, and figure skating “progressive cultural elements”? If you just mean that in the current year the average Westerner who is interested in one of those four things is more likely to identify as progressive than as conservative, you’re not wrong, but I see absolutely nothing about any of the four that could even remotely be said to be inherently progressive.
I think Russian culture values those things more than American culture does. Ballet in the US has to compete with all other popular forms of entertainment and also cultural divides.
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Well, for a fucking start, you are my doctor and you are not supposed to be shopping around my private medical information as a means of blackmailing me, whether or not I am in the military of my country, or the spouse/family of a member of the military of my country.
Bitch should have her ass thrown in jail for that alone. Clarification: this is the Johns Hopkins doctor wife who wasn't a soldier, though Soldier Boy shouldn't get away with it, either. Also I note that Johns Hookins have deleted her page on their website pretty damn fast 😁
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When you are an officer in the military? Fuck yes it does.
Soldiers are going to fight to the death at the order of the military. Those soldiers give you critical information necessarily for their survival. And if you somehow decide that this information should be used for your own personal aggrandizement, that is bullet-in-the-head bad.
It is mercy that this person is only facing imprisonment.
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I would not describe those as "progressive cultural elements". They are traditional high culture, not something the left would probably be enthusiastic about. (The modern, Western left, that is. The Soviets believed in the value of high culture and wanted to make it available to the masses.)
Putin is widely popular in Russia, or at least was before the current kerfuffle. Conservative, traditionalist views on society and culture are widespread. There may be a certain feminist streak, a holdover from the Soviet era, but LGBT stuff is a big no-no. (That is my understanding, at least. I'm not Russian, but as far as I know, neither are you.)
Russian society doesn’t seem notably traditionalist, although it’s clearly pretty opposed to blue tribe values.
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Releasing personally identifiable health information is a big deal for civilian doctors, including loss of medical license at the extreme end. I'm sure the army takes a similarly dim view of it. Going out of your way to try and contact the Russian embassy to become a spy, then committing a crime to prove your commitment to future treason is a far cry from the feds "looking for any excuse to indict someone". When the FBI goes on a fishing expedition with 80 IQ ne'er-do-wells, sure, but I'd hope a pair of married doctors would have enough spare brain cells between them to know what they're getting into.
So why is this so sacred, anyway? Medical privacy has always seemed like a moderately cruel joke to me, considering that one's secrets are kept with the uttermost strength away from anybody who couldn't do much to harm a person with them, anyway, but delivered right into the hands of the organizations who hold a person's life in their hands already. Considering how many rights and privileges a person can lose for getting treatment for mental health problems (crucially: for getting treatment;) fighting so hard to protect people from lesser humiliations seems perverse.
People don't want random people knowing they have AIDS, or dick fungus, or chronically shit their pants as a kid, or what have you. All kinds of reasons.
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