collusion russia trump

belated? premature? see whole bunch:

SEE COLLUSION2 2/19

SEE RETALIATION // LIE GASLT J6 REVISIONISM

see active measures

see mueller

see russia-gate = BS deflection durham fail

html : not pumping but owns the future.

see IRA

twit2 twitterbot

neglected/ see nodes eg torshin

see money launder, trump real estate

MUELLER WENT AFTER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, TOLD FBI DOING CTR-INTELL BUT NO ONE DID?!

RETALIATION

nbc?

:{July 9, 2025

By Ken Dilanian, Ryan J. Reilly and Dan De Luce

The Trump administration has put two repeated targets of President Donald Trump under criminal investigation, although details of what exactly they are being investigated for or how far the Justice Department intends on taking the probes are unclear.

The two targets are former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in his first term, according to a statement that a Justice Department spokesperson provided to reporters.

The statement followed a Fox News article on Tuesday evening reporting on the existence of the investigations. After referring to Comey and Brennan, the spokesperson said the Justice Department does "not comment on ongoing investigations.”

A lawyer for Comey had no comment. Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, said he has not been contacted by the Justice Department or the CIA about the reported investigation. The FBI declined to comment.

The Fox News article was published as both FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi are facing significant blowback from conservative media and influencers over their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and material related to it. This week, the Justice Department and the FBI put out a memo restating what prior investigations had already found: that Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, killed himself in his jail cell in 2019 and that there was no incriminating evidence against uncharged third parties.

Patel, before joining the government, engaged with conspiracy theories about Epstein, while a statement from Bondi that an Epstein "client list" was sitting on her desk fueled more speculation on the right. Bondi later said she was speaking about documents related to Epstein, not an actual list.

U.S. news Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin says his family was rescued in Texas floods

As for Brennan, a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department. Exactly what prompted the Comey investigation is unclear.

Ratcliffe last week released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Any conduct that took place during that campaign or even in most of Trump’s first term is now outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes. The Fox News article mentions testimony that Brennan gave to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023 about the so-called Steele Dossier that was an issue during the 2016 campaign. It cites no specific conduct from Comey during the past five years.

A special counsel appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr spent years investigating how the 2017 intelligence assessment was put together, requiring many CIA officials to hire lawyers. That special counsel, John Durham, also used a grand jury to scrutinize the actions of Brennan, Comey and many who worked for them over how the FBI and CIA handled investigations into Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. But Durham did not charge the two former leaders or accuse them of wrongdoing. His sole charge against a public official came against a low-level FBI lawyer who had lied on a warrant application.

The Trump administration has been taking action against people involved in investigations of the president and his supporters. The Justice Department has a "Weaponization Working Group" that is examining those investigations, and many who worked on them and were still in the department have been fired. And on his first day in office, Trump pardoned his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

ED FUCKING MARTIN JARED WISE EX FBI

---

an 7 25

The Guardian reports even dedicated CIA critic Tim Weiner is sounding the alarm on the damage President Donald Trump is doing the agency.

Weiner — who wrote the CIA political take-down ‘Legacy of Ashes’ about decades of CIA mistakes and bad behavior — compares Trump’s second administration to watching the U.S. stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea by voting against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

“You come to the realization, if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis,’” Weiner said.

A chapter of Weiner’s new book "The Mission" addresses how the CIA was blindsided by Russia’s influence operation on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign. This was when Russian intelligence began releasing hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

IFrame Content

“The Russians stole our f—————— election. How do we make sure this never happens again?” Weiner recalls CIA head Tom Rakusan demanding of his staff.

Following two impeachments, an insurrection and a second election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge against the CIA. He’s also hired, according to Weiner, “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”.

“What keeps me up at night,” he told The Guardian, “is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.”

Weiner describes new CIA director, John Ratcliffe — a former personal injury attorney — as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do.”

Ratcliffe immediately fired hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who are now presumably working to recruit them as spies.

“All they need to do is to find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a financial or a drug problem to be exploited,” Weiner said.

Trump’s anti-diversity crusade was another foolish mistake because “if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Radcliffe could have delivered.”

Sadly, Weiner says no “Robert Mueller” or “Barack Obama” is going to save the nation. What that takes is a massive upheaval from Americans.

“[T]he other day, several million Americans marched in the street to protest the Mad King. And just as only we can defeat ourselves, I think only we can save ourselves,” Weiner said.

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

---

12 24 david corn mojo

With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible:

Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.

As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe.

The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton.

After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.

With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?)

As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)

Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax.

And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)

In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The realscandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.

What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.

Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.)

Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.

Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.”

It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.

No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.

This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.”

Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.

Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)

Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)

For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.

Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.

Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit:

By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia.

And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”

One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/former-fbi-agent-on-the-mueller-team-says-trump-was-badly-compromised-in-2016/

peter strock

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/hhs-official-who-manipulated-cdc-reports-on-19-has-deep-russian-ties-report/

no lnx twt

On September 11, Politico reported that Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, interfered in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reports on COVID-19 in order to make them conform to President Donald Trump’s claims about the pandemic. And Caputo, journalist Mary Papenfuss reports in HuffPost, is drawing scrutiny for another reason as well: his ties to the Kremlin.

Caputo, Papenfuss notes, lived in Russia for six years and served as an adviser to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin from 1995-1999 before Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president. The HHS assistant secretary was an adviser to a subsidiary of Gazprom, an energy company owned by the Russian government — and Papenfuss points out thatCaputo “reportedly helped shore up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reputation.”

“Caputo’s Kremlin ties were so concerning that he became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” Papenfuss explains. “He was questioned but was not charged with any offenses. He also testified before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no contact with Russians while serving on the Trump campaign.”

Caputo, a long-time ally of veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, has promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainian government, not the Kremlin, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election — and that the interference was in support of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, not Trump.Papenfuss notes that Caputo “has spread baseless accusations concerning activities in Ukraine by Joe and Hunter Biden. A key source of that Ukrainian smear, Andrii Derkach, turned out to be a Russian spy attempting to interfere in the current U.S. election, the Treasury Department revealed last week.”

During Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Trump denounced the impeachment as “phony” — and he was also highly critical of the Russia investigation.

The Mueller report says of Caputo, “In the spring of 2016, Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky — who also went by the name Henry Greenberg — claimed to have information pertaining to Hilary Clinton. Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky. Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting.”

https://www.alternet.org/:{2020/08/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:senate-panel-referred-trump-family-members-to-doj-over-suspicions-of-misleading-russia-testimony-report/

wapo

Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year notified the Department of Justice that members of President Donald Trump’s family and close circle “might have presented misleading testimony” to the panel during its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reports.

According to the Post, then-Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-VA) referred a list of individuals,including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner to federal prosecutors after their accounts of a pre-election meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “were contradicted by the president’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates” during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

In a separate section, the congressional panel said it had reason to believe Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis “had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony,” the Post reports.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the referrals and viewed a copy of the panel’s letter, the committee believes Bannon may have lied about his knowledge of a meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with a Russian official tied to the Kremlin. Per the Post, “Prince had told Mueller’s team that he briefed Bannon on the meeting, which occurred before Trump’s inauguration in early 2017; Bannon denied the conversation took place.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/

veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”

Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”

Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/21/648803459/russias-2016-twitter-campaign-was-strongly-pro-gun-with-echoes-of-the-nra

many lnx, also graphs

Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.

On every issue, from race to health care, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the Internet Research Agencysought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.

Except when it came to guns and the NRA.

That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the group, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.

Last year, Twitter notified the House intelligence committee about thousands of accounts it linked to the Internet Research Agency; the social media company has deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts.

....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/mueller-subpoenas-director-of-controversial-data-firm-cambridge-analytica-in-russia-probe/

Brittany Kaiser, a director of data company Cambridge Analytica, has been subpoenaed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, the Guardian reports.

A spokesman for Kaiser confirmed she is fully cooperating with Mueller, according to the Guardian, and that she is working with separate “US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities.”

Kaiser is the second person from Cambridge Analytica who has been subpoenaed by Mueller. As the Guardian notes:

“In August, :{Sam Patten:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad, struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.”

Patten worked with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who Mueller on Friday recommended spend up to 24 years in prison for “serious, longstanding, and bold” financial crimes,” and with Russian oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik, a subject of Mueller’s probe.

“Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the :{Brexit:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller,” the Guardian reports.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/why-a-shady-meeting-in-a-cigar-bar-could-provide-key-evidence-of-a-trump-russia-conspiracy/

Since the release of heavily redacted court documents on Feb. 7, another get-together has been vying to beat out the Trump Tower meeting as the most important face-to-face between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. That meeting took place at the Grand Havana Room, a private cigar club that apparently also serves food, for those who can stand to eat in the presence of cigars. And while the meeting may have lacked the presence of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, it does seem to have what the House and Senate investigations into Trump have suggested was missing from their data—direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Grand Havana gathering took place on Aug. 2, 2016, less than two weeks after the Republican convention. It featured Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates, and the Russian political operative who makes frequent appearances in other Manafort-related documents, Konstantin Kilimnik. Both Kilimnik and Manafort have maintained that the meeting was a “personal” meeting about “clients” they shared, but investigators are not buying it.

According to the *Washington Post*, prosecutors with the special counsel’s office believe that at that meeting, Manafort and Gates provided Kilimnik with “key information” in the form of internal polling data from the Trump campaign. That information could have been vital to assisting Russia in its social media attacks on the U.S. election.

Kilimnik also seems to have brought to the meeting a few topics of discussion that weren’t exactly client-related, including a resolution to the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine—a topic that had just been debated at the Republican convention, where the Trump campaign insisted on a softer position toward Russia. It’s not clear if they also discussed the Magnitsky Act, which was a major topic at the Trump Tower meeting.

The information about the Grand Havana meeting is not appearing now because it’s emerged as part of a leak or a deliberate release by the special counsel. It’s because Manafort’s statements about the meeting are a key feature of charges that he continued to lie to investigators even after agreeing to provide evidence to the special counsel in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. And one of the things that Manafort appears to have lied about was just how much of a two-way street there was between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Before, during, and after the campaign, Kilimnik acted as the go-between for Manafort and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There have been still-unconfirmed stories that Manafort met with Kilimnik in Europe for the same reason that they were in the Grand Havana: to exchange data. On multiple occasions, Manafort offered to “brief” Deripaska on behind-the-scenes aspects of the Trump campaign. He certainly briefed Kilimnik.

But even if he didn’t meet with Deripaska during the campaign, Manafort does seem to have deliberately given Russia information from the Trump campaign. And Manafort clearly thought that information had value, as he offered it to Kilimnik in recognition that he still owed millions to Deripaska.

Whatever information was exchanged at the Grand Havana Room, there’s a very good reason to believe that it wasn’t just “a personal meeting.” The attendees of the meeting knew they were doing something wrong at the time the meeting was held — because they all make a point of leaving the building alone, through separate entrances,

There’s also a very good reason why the special counsel’s office might be suspicious about this particular incident, and might have a firm basis to believe that Manafort lied. Rick Gates was there, and Gates has also agreed to provide information in return for a reduced sentence. If the story that Gates is telling disagrees with the story being shopped by Manafort they both could be lying, but one of them certainly is.

Russia timelines have noted that Deripaska’s private jet landed briefly at a New Jersey airport on Aug. 3, just one day after the cigar room meeting. It seems likely that Kilimnik left on this plane to make a swift return to Moscow with the data provided by Manafort. Or maybe Deripaska got his through an in-person briefing from Manafort after all.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/new-evidence-suggests-the-new-york-times-was-tricked-into-retracting-a-major-russia-probe-bombshell/

Former deputy assistant attorney general Harry Litman told MSNBC on Monday that “the glue” tying together all the actors in the Russia probe is the finances of President Donald Trump and those of his convicted campaign manager Paul Manafort and his convicted National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

The remark occurred during a larger discussion of Paul Manafort’s role in the conspiracy, including his “work on behalf of pro-Russian figures in Ukraine” and his subsequent lying about it to the special prosecutor after he got caught.

“If you’re looking for the quid pro quo, you see the quid, you see the work by Russia, and the meddling in the election. What is the quo?” fellow guest Ken Vogel, who broke the story for the New York Times. “You have at least the potential of building a theory around the idea that the quo would be a peace deal that would favor Russia and potentially result in the lifting of U.S. sanctions against Russia which, of course, is the biggest driving foreign policy objective of the Russians.”

Litman noted that prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s refusal to share specific details “even in a closed door hearing” showed that the special counsel was getting close to the “radioactive core” of the case, but offered tantalizing hints.

“What [Weissman] is proposing, even though it is heavily redacted, as Ken says, seems a kind of grand bargain involving not simply a sweetheart deal for Russia and Ukraine, but the lifting of sanctions, which Putin dearly wanted,” Litman said. “And the glue that holds it all together on the U.S. side are the personal financial interests of the actors. Manafort to make money from [pro-Russian former President of Ukraine, Viktor] Yanukovych, Flynn to do something with the sanctions, and Trump to build his big crown jewel of the Trump Tower.”

“So it really seems to be getting toward quite a grand scheme,” he added, “where officials are feathering their nests at the expense of U.S. national interests, and doing Russia’s bidding.”

Super cool, important,

well made, great for

discussing argument and

rhetorical stuff set of

video essays on the New

York Times on Russian

disinformation:

Operation Infektion.

(thanks Maggie!)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/blockbuster-manafort-revelations-should-finally-end-witch-hunt-talk-conservative-columnist/

A conservative Washington Post columnist has written a column in which she argues the latest revelations about former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort sharing confidential campaign polling data with accused Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik is “a blockbuster revelation should end talk of a ‘witch hunt.’”

Jennifer Rubin points to the apparent exchange between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians, in what appears to now be a two-way street.

“This is not the first piece of evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russian figures, to be sure,” she said. “The Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., and Russians promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton has been known for some time. But here we see Manafort giving something of value (insider polling data) to a Russian.”

As Rubin notes, we need to know why Manafort wanted to pass polling to Kilimnik. She quotes former Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller in explaining that there likely isn’t an innocent explanation.

“It’s hard to see what good polling data would be to a Russian oligarch, so it raises the question of whether Manafort’s actual goal was to get the information to the Russian government itself,” Miller said.

As Rubin notes, this is yet another bullet-hole in Trump’s original claim to have nothing to do with Russians during the campaign.

“We have, at the very least, yet another previously undisclosed contact between the Trump campaign and Russians,” she writes. “We’ve come a long way since Trump claimed neither he nor anyone on the campaign had contacts with Russians… It’s hard to describe how bizarre this many contacts between a campaign and a hostile foreign government — one trying to influence the campaign to that side’s favor — truly is. Keep in mind that no major party presidential campaign of which we are aware ever had a single contact with the Russians.”

Read the full column here.

cell phone signal obtained by Eastern European intelligence suggests that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was near Prague during the summer of 2016. The cell phone records were first reported…

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A cell phone signal obtained by Eastern European intelligence suggests that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was near Prague during the summer of 2016.

The cell phone records were first reported by McClatchy on Thursday.

According to the report, “Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.”

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

The phone and surveillance data, which have not previously been disclosed, lend new credence to a key part of a former British spy’s dossier of Kremlin intelligence describing purported coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s election meddling operation.

Although President Donald Trump has referred to the dossier as a “pile of garbage,” much of it has been authenticated by news and intelligence services.

The cell phone signal intelligence has reportedly been shared with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Read the entire McClatchy report here.

https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/the-purchase-of-donald-trump-new-report-details-how-russian-money-poured-in-to-save-trumps-businesses/

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President Donald Trump’s celebrity was cemented in the American mind with the show “The Apprentice,” which sold him as a real estate mogul and business genius imparting his wisdom to a new generation of entrepreneurial hopefuls. But the show’s fundamental premise is a lie.

Far from a business genius, Trump was largely a flop in business. As a recent investigative piece in Foreign Policy explained, Trump’s repeated failures in the ’90s made him virtually radioactive to any American banks looking to fund new ventures. Lenders were wary of trusting the most prominent son of actual real estate titan Fred Trump, because Donald Trump’s businesses were consistently going belly up — most famously, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.

So how was Trump able to recover his image from its ’90s battering? Trump’s sons have repeatedly offered not-so-subtle clues.

In 2008, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. said at a New York conference: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

And in 2014, Eric Trump reportedly told golf writer James Dodson of the family business: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (Eric Trump has since denied saying this.)

Reporters Jonathan O’Connell, David Fahrenthold and Jack Gillum at the Washington Post reported back in May on the Trump Organization‘s curious shift from funding projects almost entirely with debt in the ’90s to employing large bushels of cash by the mid-2000s.

Michael Hirsch, writing for Foreign Policy, found significant corroboration for Trump’s reliance on foreign funds. Multiple anonymous sources, former associates of the president, told Hirsch that Trump especially used Russian funds when American sources ran dry.

Some of this, it seems, came in the form of direct real estate purchases. Despite repeatedly denying any ties to the Kremlin, Trump has even admitted to one major deal with a Russian, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is believed to be close to Putin. Rybolovlev bought a Palm Beach house from Trump for $100 million — $60 million more than what the president had initially paid for it, according to an ABC interview with Trump. This is a remarkably high profit for any such deal — but it is even more startling because it happened in 2008, when the American real estate market was cratering.

“That deal delivered so much cash to Trump, it almost has to be seen as a campaign contribution, or the purchase of Donald Trump,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told Hirsch.

A former business associate told Hirsch that this was not the only property Trump sold to a Russian national.

“I think part of it was he was toxic to the banks. I think he also probably learned that personal guarantees [on loans] weren’t a brilliant idea either,” the anonymous associate told Hirsch. “So he was saying to himself, ‘What else could I do in the world? I’ll just convince people to buy my brand.’ And the only people who were willing to buy it were tasteless Russians, people who like the absurd, ostentatious gold-leaf lifestyle he has. You’re not going to sell that brand to blue bloods in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

But the Russian connection is also hiding in plain sight. In the early 2000s, Trump started his comeback by partnering with the Bayrock Group, a financial firm run, in part, by Felix Sater. Sater had pleaded to guilty to participating in a fraudulent scheme with the Russian mafia in the ’90s, became an informant to the FBI, and was a key player along with Michael Cohen is brokering a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow in 2016 before the negotiations mysteriously went quiet after Trump secured the GOP presidential nomination.

Hirsch explained:

Bayrock’s money sometimes came from sources outside Russia and the former Soviet republics, according to one of the firm’s former employees, including an obscure Icelandic investment bank called the FL Group. But those roads too sometimes appeared to lead back to Russia. In 2017, real-estate developer Jody Kriss, whom Sater hired to help him run Bayrock,told Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg what happened after an Icelandic competitor of the FL Group contacted him to invest in Bayrock. When Kriss brought that offer to Sater and Arif, they told him that the money behind Icelandic banks “was mostly Russian”—and they had to take FL’s funds for deals with Trump because FL was “closer to [Vladimir] Putin,” according to O’Brien. (Kriss confirmed this account to FP.) In 2007, the FL Groupinvested $50 million in several Bayrock projects linked to Trump, including a development in Whitestone, Queens, and Trump SoHo in Manhattan. FL Group dissolved in 2014.

Kriss told Bloomberg’sO’Brien that he eventually left Bayrock because he became convinced that the firm was a front for money laundering.

All of these connections are almost certainly being scrutinized by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York, and any of the other agencies investigating the president’s past.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-media-scholar-changed-her-mind-and-now-thinks-theres-very-strong-case

cdv khj

Russian government's campaign to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election in order to install Donald Trump in the White House may be one of the greatest intelligence operations in modern history.

What is publicly known is damning. Russia intelligence operatives and other foreign parties working in conjunction with them were able to influence (if not infiltrate) the highest levels of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign staff and other parts of his inner circle. Many of those relationships may have continued well past his election as president. The apparent goal was to manipulate Trump and by extension America's foreign policy in order to advance Russia's and Vladimir Putin's interests to the disadvantage of the United States and the West.

The Russian government also wanted to undermine faith in Western democracy by creating domestic chaos, uncertainty and a crisis of faith in liberal democratic social and political institutions. As special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal continues, public evidence suggests that the worst case scenario seems much more likely than not to be correct: Donald Trump, either directly or because he was manipulated by his closest aides and advisers, may be doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin and other Russian interests.

The Russian effort to elect Donald Trump went beyond compromising Trump's closest aides and advisers -- and perhaps even the candidate himself. Russian intelligence services waged an information warfare influence campaign against the American people. This involved circulating disinformation and outright lies through social media and other online conduits with the goal of demobilizing key Democratic constituencies such as African-Americans while simultaneously encouraging white conservatives to vote for Donald Trump. These latter were apparently focused on shattering Hillary Clinton's support in key battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Russian operatives also used information stolen from the Democratic National Committee to shape the American news media's narrative about Hillary Clinton in such a way as to advantage Donald Trump.

The Russian campaign was successful, at least insofar as Donald Trump is now in the White House. But how much did their various strategies actually influence Donald Trump's voters? Why are some individuals and groups more susceptible to being influenced by propaganda, disinformation and other types of inaccurate information? How does the right-wing echo chamber threaten American democracy? Is it possible to actually quantify the number of votes that were won by Donald Trump -- and lost by Hillary Clinton -- because of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election? Would Donald Trump be president today if the Russians and their intelligence operatives had not helped his campaign?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke withKathleen Hall Jamieson. She is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Jamieson is the author of many books, including "Packaging the Presidency," "Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment," "Eloquence in an Electronic Age," "Presidents Creating the Presidency" and "The Obama Victory." She is also theco-founder of FactCheck.org. Her newest book is "Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President." This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the narratives that has become common over the past two years is that Donald Trump's election is unprecedented and that there has never been such a partisan environment as exists now in the country. What do we actually know, empirically, about partisanship and American politics?

We've had times in which the country was deeply divided. The country was deeply divided over Vietnam. The country was polarized over civil rights. The 1968 election comes to mind in that regard. In the 1960s there were also political assassinations of national leaders.

The country survived those challenges. And then there was the Watergate scandal and the public becoming aware that presidents of both parties have lied to them about the war in Vietnam. Again, this shows that the American people are resilient and the country's institutions are resilient as well. I look at those past situations and draw hope from them. That doesn't mean that we're out of the woods yet, but we've navigated some pretty tough times as a country.

How does social media and the internet more generally influence partisanship and polarization, especially in regard to the Trump-Russia scandal?

One of the things that is intriguing about a social media environment is that the same content can be trafficked through very different sources to reach an audience. For example, when we examine the information that is put into the body politic by Russian trolls and other operatives in cyberspace, that information was often coming from the American right wing and the Republican Party. Sometimes that information and those talking points were refashioned and in other instances they were not. This information wasamplified by botsand other means to increase the likelihood that the public believes that support for a position is more widespread than it actually is.

We get the illusion that attitudes and beliefs are more widespread than they are, when in reality they are from the fringe and are extreme. The Russians come into the American political environment and use trolls and other technological means to skew people's perceptions.

What role does the right-wing media's echo chamber play in circulating disinformation?

Research shows that disinformation is fed within the fairly narrow confines of the right-wing echo chamber.

The synergy among Breitbart and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh is very real and the likelihood that any one of them would be citing the Russian information that was released through WikiLeaks, for example, is extraordinarily high relative to mainstream news outlets and other sources.The amplification power for its audience is higher on the conservative end of the ideological spherethan for those people who pay attention to more mainstream news media outlets and other sources.

Information has to be received and processed and evaluated as being somehow "political" in order for it to have an impact in this context. What does political psychology teach us about why some people and some groups are more susceptible to disinformation and other types of propaganda?

Some people are more predisposed towards accuracy.When confronted with new information they are more likely to ask, "How do I know that? Is that correct?" To the extent that we, as individuals, feel and become more partisan in our identity, we are less likely to emphasize accuracy, to question the motivations about the information that we seek out and subsequently use. Confirmation bias is also very important here, as human beings are often critical and highly analytic about anything that we disagree with and uncritically accept information that may be more suspect when it agrees with our priors.

Social media is very important here. Because people are increasingly involved with social media, it's more likely their partisan and other political identities are being triggered in those spaces.In turn this means that people are less likely to be concerned with what is accurate. The result is that we are much more vulnerable to propaganda.

That is a direct threat to a healthy democracy. If people cannot agree on the facts and the nature of empirical reality then political legitimacy and good political decision-making are made very difficult if not impossible. When did you decide that you needed to research the role and impact of Russian interference on how Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election?

I originally thought that the idea that the Russians could have used social media to create a substantial impact on the election was absurd. I started to change my mind when I saw the first release of Russian social media and troll campaign ads and messaging during the U.S. Senate hearings in October and November of last year. These ads were a coherent plan and understanding of the presidential election which was consistent with Donald Trump's political needs.

If acted on systematically, these ads would have produced a communication effect that on the margins could have affected enough votes to change the outcome of the election in his favor. If the Russians didn't have a coherent theory of what it took for Donald Trump to win -- or what it would take to make it more likely that Hillary Clinton would lose -- then all their machinations would not have mattered. But the Russians knew who to mobilize.

The Russians were trying to mobilize evangelicals and white conservative Catholics. The Russians also knew that they needed to mobilize veterans and military households. The Russians knew they had to demobilize Bernie Sanders supporters and liberals, especially young people. The Russians were also attempting to shift the voters they could not demobilize over to Jill Stein.[RT dinner w/ flynn?]

You add that together with demobilizing African-American voters with messaging that Hillary Clinton is bad for the black community, and then Clinton's whole messaging strategy is at risk.If Hillary Clinton can’t mobilize the black vote at levels near Barack Obama's, although not the same level, then she is in trouble.

I then started to examine where the Russians and their trolls spent their time and attention. They were spending more of it on trying to demobilize African-American voters by emphasizing things that group may not like about Hillary Clinton. When a person casts a vote they are not thinking about every detail or issue relative to a candidate. Voters make decisions based on what is most important in that moment of time, what is on the top of their mind.

So if you remind voters who are African-American that at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency there was a very high level of increased incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges then an African-American voter may say, “Maybe I should think about Hillary Clinton differently.”

If you remember her "superpredator" comment and take it to be about black people in general and not about gangs specifically, then you as an African-American voter may be less likely to support her.

By featuring these types of messages, the Russians were increasing the likelihood that while you may not be likely to cast a vote for Donald Trump, you are more likely to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton.

I then started to wonder whether maybe there was enough troll activity that was addressed to the right constituencies to have impacted the margins of the vote. The question then becomes, did the Russians and their trolls target the right voters in the right places? We still don't know that.

The social media platforms know the answer, but they have not released the information. The trolls alone could have swung the electorate. But in my judgment the WikiLeaks hacks against the DNC is a much stronger case. There we see a clear effect on the news media agenda. We know from decades of communication scholarship that if you change the media agenda you then change the criteria that people vote on. The shift in the media agenda from October forward was decisively against Hillary Clinton. And the questions in the presidential debates which were based on information stolen by WikiLeaks and the Russians disadvantaged Clinton and, looking at the polling data, predicted the vote.

How did the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reflect what the Russians were doing?

One of the things I point out in my new book, "Cyberwar," is that the 2016 presidential election was different than past elections. Usually, we can pretty much predict the eventual vote by knowing where people are as of the conventions, because political party identification is such a strong determinant. Plus, voters know their candidates well enough by that point that they pretty much have logged in their vote. In all, there are not enough votes up for grabs in the last week of an election to shift the outcome and make a difference -- except in a very close election.

Debates will matter in close elections. The 2016 presidential election also demonstrated a very interesting phenomenon: Not simply that there were a lot of votes still available, but there were many Americans who were going to cast a vote and who did not like either of the major-party candidates.

We don't ordinarily have voters who are as conflicted as they were in 2016. And we had a higher percent of people self-identifying as "independent," which meant they were less anchored to a political party. When you come into those final weeks and you see that almost one out of eight voters hasn't decided yet, that's unusual. There were enough people able to be influenced when the hacked content gotten illegally by the Russians from the Democratic campaign headquarters burst into the news after Oct. 7, 2016 -- and that's when early voting is taking place.

There were enough undecided voters watching those last two debates to make an impact on the election. For example, one of the questions that was based on the hacked information was about Hillary Clinton saying one thing in public and another thing in private. In reality, Clinton was using an example from the Steven Spielberg movie about Abraham Lincoln when she said, “Sometimes you need to do some things with one constituency and some with another.”

She was talking about all the maneuvering that Abraham Lincoln did to ensure that he could protect the country through the Civil War. She was not saying, “Well, when I was behind closed doors, I told Goldman Sachs one thing while I'm telling the public something else.” When that statement about the Lincoln film is taken out of context, it seems to be an admission that she was saying things in private that did not agree with her public statements. Hillary Clinton is thrown onto the defensive in that presidential debate and Trump gains a major advantage out of that.

The evidence for this is reflected in responses made by debate viewers as compared to non-viewers. Debate viewers think Clinton is more likely to say one thing in public and another in private.

In the last debate, the issue was what Clinton said about trade and immigration. The statement in the hacked speech was actually about energy transfer. What Chris Wallace implied was that Clinton had conceded that she stood for open borders. Donald Trump makes this immediately about immigration in the debate, but in reality the hacked speech had nothing to do with immigration.

She's disadvantaged in that exchange as well. In total this shows how the Russian hackers got this into the mainstream of American political discourse. Journalists took it out of context and this information was used to hurt Hillary Clinton.

One of the dominant narratives about the 2016 presidential election was that the result reflected "economic anxiety" among working-class white voters. The evidence has shown that it was in fact racism and not class-based "anxiety" that over-predicted the 2016 election and Trump voters' behavior. A related narrative is that there were many "Obama to Trump" voters whom Hillary Clinton lost. What do we actually know about these things?

We know that there are about 200 or so counties where the majority gave its vote to Obama in at least one of the two previous elections [in 2008 and 2012] and then gave its vote to Trump. Now the question is, how much in- and out-migration was there in those counties? Does that explain the difference? I haven't seen a good analysis to answer that piece of the question. You can set up a scenario in which there is an economic factor at play. You can also create a model where there is a socio-cultural factor as well. All those variables melt together in an environment in which there is a high level of anxiety which makes it plausible that a given person might say, “I voted for Obama because I want change, and now I'm voting for Trump because I want change.”

Race might not be driving that vote in either case, or it might be there in different ways in those same two cases. But one should not draw the simple inference that race was not a factor in the vote for Donald Trump in those counties.

As one of the leading scholars in political communication, how would you assess the messaging strategy of the Democrats and the Republicans? Is Donald Trump some type of savant or genius in terms of how he communicates generally, and how he motivates his public, in particular?

We know that after elections people are influenced by what is called "status quo bias," where the outcome had a certain kind of inevitability and was the result of things that we are able to observe. As a result, we tend to assume that the candidate who won the Electoral College must have been strategically adept in some ways that can be isolated. But Donald Trump lost the popular vote by an overwhelming margin, so he could not have been that strategically adept. In a presidential election that close there are so many different factors at play that I would be hesitant to say that a close defeat in the Electoral College demonstrated the strategic superiority of one candidate or the inferiority of the other.

President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting -- and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has thecapacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda.We really should ask: Aren't there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.

Fox News is de facto Trump's state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?

We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. The traditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This reversalwith Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.

How has the 2016 election challenged longstanding assumptions about American politics and the ways that people actually behave and make political decisions?

We learned that the capacity to mobilize and demobilize voters is greater than one might have expected previously. We've confirmed that when you change the balance of messages so that you get more messaging on one side, then elections can be impacted. The 2016 presidential election confirmed the power of agenda-setting.

If you were to explain to the average American how the Russians were able to impact the 2016 presidential election, what would say?

The Russians were able to change the climate of communication for some voters and members of the public through social media in ways that disadvantaged Hillary Clinton. The Russians were able to change the media agenda and questions asked during two presidential debates in ways that disadvantaged Hillary Clinton. The Russians and their disinformation campaign may have influenced a consequential decision by James Comey to make public the reopening of the FBI investigation into the Clinton email server on Oct. 28, 2016, in ways that decisively impacted the election.

Is it reasonable to conclude that the Russians were able to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton, thus securing a victory for him?

Yes, it is probable although not certain. The case for the Russian trolls is more tentative because we don't have the targeting information from the social media companies. The information hacked and leaked by the Russians is a stronger case. Adding in the impact of Russian disinformation and its influence on James Comey makes the case very strong that the Russians were able to swing the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump's favor.

sum IRA:

Finally, here’s an official report that says there were dirty tricks in the 2016 elections, just as we’re hearing about more localized dirty tricks in the elections in November.

The report by cybersecurity experts hired by the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Monday says without hesitation that it was the Russians who used a wide variety of social media outlets to spread disinformation aimed at suppressing the black vote in America and to move conservatives toward candidate Donald Trump. It wasn’t a 400-pound guy on a couch in New Jersey, no matter what Trump says.

“The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day,” concluded The New York Times.

Of course, dirty tricks have been part of American elections since there was an American election. Just ask Richard Nixon. Or maybe John Adams.

But suppressing the black vote? That, as any number of critics would note, has been an American tradition all of its own. Just this last cycle, we saw Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp win his election over Democrat Stacy Adams, who is black, simply by a series of actions aimed at disenfranchising black voters all around the state. There’s a congressional race still being contested in North Carolina with dirty tricks so bad for the Republican candidate that the GOP is thinking of disowning the candidate.

The remarkable thing here is the breadth of effort that the Russians undertook to target African-Americans, to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and to promote the Trump campaign.

There was no attempt to explain exactly why – other than the obvious – that Russians were targeting African-American voters.

On MSNBC yesterday, pundits were talking about the suppression allegations while simultaneously showing televised clips of candidate Donald Trump repeating much of the same messages as in the Russian voter campaigns. But, there is nothing here in writing to suggest that there was more than a topical link, or “collusion.”

Indeed, “Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Tex. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there. A second report was written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University along with Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media.

The Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency,owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company’s employees were indicted last February as part of the investigation of Russian interference by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. Both reports stress that the Internet Research Agency created social media accounts under fake names on virtually every available platform. A major goal was to support Donald Trump, first against his Republican rivals in the presidential race, then in the general election, and as president since his inauguration.

The Russian campaign was the subject of Senate hearings last year and has been widely scrutinized by academic experts. The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Trump and deepen divisions in American society.

The Washington Post reported last night that the Senate report also detailed efforts byRussia’s disinformation teams**to target Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller** III as a threat to Trump, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies.

New Knowledge gave particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages.

The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.organd blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”

The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.

Funny how our longtime embrace of dirty tricks actually comes full circle to show us that they were exploiting our most divisive American politics.

Maybe that’s the worst of it. Russians do American dirty tricks better than we do ourselves.

long nyt overview on collusion

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

Video

The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Imaginary Americans

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

...

the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pursued a strand of the Russa investigation that has largely flown under the radar as other avenues of investigation such as President Donald Trump's financial ties to Moscow and Paul Manafort's dealings in Ukraine garnered more attention. But a new report from the paper on Friday reveals that it not only the Journal that's been paying attention — Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has zeroed in on the curious case of GOP operative Peter Smith as well.

Smith, who died shortly before the Journal first began reporting on his actions in 2017, was conducting a wide-ranging effort in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to track down Hillary Clinton's emails. Along the way, he developed a relationship with disgraced Trump campaign aide and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

And now, the Journal says there is evidence that could tie Smith to WikiLeaks' dispersal of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton's Campaign Chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.

"Investigators also have evidence that the late GOP activist Peter W. Smith may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks, one person familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote.

The article also says that the investigators have pursued related lines of inquiry, including examining Trump ally Roger Stone's and conservative pundit Jerome Corsi's connections with WikiLeaks.

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait explained the significance of these potential connections:

If true, this would mean that Smith wasn’t merely attempting to get ahold of stolen Clinton emails. He got through to WikiLeaks and was, in some form, a channel of collusion between the hackers and the Trump campaign.

Flynn long ago started cooperating with Robert Mueller. So if Flynn discussed any of this information with Trump during the campaign, the special counsel probably knows about it.

https://www.alternet.org/california-man-charged-mueller-sentenced-six-months-prison-helping-russian-interference

California resident Richard Pinedo is the latest person to receive a prison sentence as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia-related investigation.

On Wednesday, October 10, the former computer science student was sentenced to six months in prison, followed by six months of home confinement, for selling fraudulent bank account information to Russian operatives. Pinedo, now 28, had no connection to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, but according to federal prosecutors, he earned tens of thousands of dollars selling fraudulent bank account information to anonymous buyers from 2014-2017—and some of those buyers were Russian operatives linked to the Kremlin.

After Mueller’s probe led to Pinedo, he agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors—who have noted that when Pinedo sold fraudulent bank account information, he didn’t know that some of the people he was selling it to were Kremlin-connected operatives.

In an official statement, Pinedo said, “Never did it cross my mind that the services I was providing were to be used in crimes at the highest level. My life has been turned upside down.”

When U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich sentenced Pinedo, he described his cooperation with prosecutors as “significant” but said that the “widespread scale” of his crimes merited at least some incarceration.

Pinedo’s attorney, Jeremy Lessem, told the court, “Mr. Pinedo obviously should have invested more thought into the possible nefarious intentions of those that sought his services. However, never in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that providing bank account information to set up PayPal accounts could be used to interfere with a presidential election.”

Mueller’s Russia-related investigation has led to several of President Trump’s closest associates being convicted of or pleading guilty to major crimes. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, recently agreed to a plea deal and agreed to cooperate in the investigation after being convicted of multiple counts of tax fraud and bank fraud—and the prosecution’s star witness in Manafort’s trial, Rick Gates, was a Trump campaign aide who admitted to a long list of financial crimes in court.

Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to multiple tax and bank fraud charges in August and has also been cooperating fully with federal prosecutors. And in September, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was sentenced to two weeks of incarceration and a $9500 fine after admitting to lying to the FBI.

https://www.alternet.org/pulitzer-winning-reporter-reveals-smoking-gun-trump-and-russia

salon

It might be the ultimate journalistic cliché to announce that Donald Trump’s presidency is not normal. Indeed, it’s just as likely that this is what normal looks like now, and that the naked power politics of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation — embraced by Republicans for many reasons, but most of all as a smackdown to feminists and liberals and everyone else perceived as preachy and condescending and threatening to the old order — is a sign of the times.

To use another overused phrase of the moment, conservatives will surely reap the whirlwind for this fateful decision, to an extent they cannot now imagine. They don’t appear to care. Meanwhile, the Republican Party as we once knew it — the party of middle American businessmen, upstanding New England ladies and the Presbyterian Church — has been fully digested by the Trumpian virus. Susan Collins, Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake make polite, mournful noises about this, but most Republicans appear to be delighted. All of that is the new normal too.

Greg Miller’s painstakingly researched new book, “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy,” is an attempt to explain how we arrived at this new normal, and beneath the surface a lament for the old one. Numerous other books have been written about the history-shaping 2016 presidential election and Trump’s mysterious relationship to the Russian oligarchy and Vladimir Putin. Miller, who is a national security correspondent for the Washington Post, does not go nearly so far as some reporters in alleging conspiracy or — yes! — collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, or in building a thesis that Putin holds compromising personal information about Trump. (He raises a valid point, both in the book and in conversation: Given what we already know about the president, how bad could the kompromat we don’t know possibly be?)

Instead, Miller builds an exhaustive and authoritative case, as suggested in his subtitle, that a Rubicon was crossed in American political history during that campaign, quite likely without anyone consciously intending to cross it. A mendacious demagogue with an incompetent, unprofessional campaign operation conquered a political party that had come untethered from its philosophical moorings, and then became both the target and the pawn of a highly capable foreign adversary who wanted to sow as much chaos as possible. We can all see the results around us in the ruined state of American political life and civic culture, and most of us would agree (Miller included) that this was the culmination of a long process for which Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin cannot be blamed.

Miller is a consummate institutional journalist, and I mean that to be descriptive rather than pejorative. He has won two Pulitzers as a team member at one of America’s most venerated daily newspapers (probably the best of those, at the moment) and has spent much of his career covering the national security establishment, an especially shadowy institution governed by an arcane set of unwritten codes. As befits that background, he’s a somewhat sphinxlike presence, a handsome, well-dressed white man of indeterminate middle age, whom you might pass on the street without quite registering. (I spent about an hour with him, and I’m not sure I could pick him out of a police lineup.)

Along with that institutional identity perhaps comes a certain myopia, especially in an age when all institutions are in crisis. During our casual conversation before our Salon Talks interview in New York, Miller mentioned a “thought experiment” in which Trump’s conciliatory victory speech on election night in November 2016 actually set the tone for his presidency, and was followed by the customary “honeymoon” and a lot of conventional rhetoric about healing and unity.

I thought that was a startling thing for a reporter of Miller’s experience to say, and even more so for the one who wrote this book. That’s not a thought experiment; it’s an ahistorical fantasy, a middle-path version of making America great again. Donald Trump could no more have become a unifying, “presidential” president than he could have built Trump Tower with his own meaty little hands.

As “The Apprentice” makes clear, Trump’s presidency was born out of poisonous division, and all along that has been the core of his political brand. Virtually none of the incoherent promises he made to his followers will be fulfilled, but they are nonetheless delighted with his xenophobic vitriol and his sweeping contempt for all the formerly sacred norms and institutions of democracy.

The Trumpian masses will evidently tolerate any number of betrayals and reversals, from selling out the country’s fiscal future to the richest of the rich to embracing a prep school graduate and Yalie from an ultra-privileged background as (in some symbolic way) a man of the people. But if their hero had tried to “pivot” himself into yet another vaguely benevolent White House father figure — that might have been the one thing they could not forgive. In Michael Moore’s famous phrase, they wanted to extend a giant middle finger to the American establishment, and didn’t much care about the details.

Even Miller would not claim that there are explosive new revelations about the Trump-Russia connections in “The Apprentice.” But it is researched and sourced at vastly more depth than any other book on the subject to date, and as Miller puts it, almost every page features a nugget of new reporting or reveals a previously hidden connection.

If you had forgotten that the Russian spear-phishing attack on the Democratic National Committee began two or three hours after Trump invited the Russians, in July 2016, to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, that is documented here. If you didn’t know that circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Trump knew about the infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016 in advance, and understood its intended purpose, that’s here as well.

In the bigger picture, Miller means to banish any remaining doubt, on both the Trumpian right and the radical left, about whether Russian agents interfered extensively in the 2016 election with the aim of helping Trump, and about whether they succeeded. In the end, I believe that latter question remains subjective, and likely unanswerable. Given the flukish nature of the final outcome, it’s reasonable to claim that any one of dozens of marginal factors was decisive. Even Miller clearly agrees that to point the finger exclusively at Putin and his troll army is a way of avoiding the massive failures of American political culture and American society that made this possible in the first place.

As for whether there was an active, conscious conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or whether Putin is blackmailing Trump with the “pee tape” or a trail of bribes and payoffs or something else — as befits a journalist of his background and temperament, Miller gestures at all those things but renders no judgment. Instead he offers an Occam’s-razor explanation that’s about as good as any other that I have heard: The “smoking gun” that explains Trump’s obvious and puzzling subservience to Putin is no secret, and has been visible the whole time.

Our conversation has been lightly edited here for clarity.

Greg, your book obviously addresses a loaded topic. And considering your background and reputation, the subtitle is striking.

Yeah, these words, believe it or not, are chosen pretty carefully, right? I mean, “the subversion of American democracy.” I just don't think you can dispute that this combination of things, Trump and Russia, have subverted aspects of our democracy.

To be fair, this is mostly a coherent narrative built from known facts and existing reporting, right? There's not like some bombshell revelation in this book?

Yeah. I wouldn't claim to have a bombshell, but I would say that if not on every page then in every chapter there is new material, previously unreported details and material about the most important developments from this story. My goal here was to write a book that would help people, including people I work with, and including myself in some ways, try to come to terms with and comprehend the magnitude of this moment that we're living through. And understand and put it together in a coherent narrative.

And I have to say that the exercise in organizing myself for this book was really eye-opening. Just putting things on a single timeline and making, drawing connections from things that were unfolding too fast for us to understand.

Well I can testify to the power of organizing the information into a timeline. Just to cite one example, which has certainly been mentioned before, on the day when Donald Trump asked the Russians, jokingly or not, to find Hillary Clinton's emails, what was the timeframe between that and the spear-phishing attack on the Democratic National Committee?

It's almost immediate. It’s hours, right? It is, “Russia, if you're listening?” And then Russia is listening. And there are these incoming spear-phishing attacks within hours.

We don't know that at the time, what Russia does. We only know that now because Robert Mueller has told us that, through this indictments, right? There is so much material out now already, that help to sustain a comprehensive narrative like this that wasn't available when we were writing about this in real time. Those indictments from Mueller, including his indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the GRU and all the named hackers from Russia, tell us extraordinary things about what was unfolding in Moscow as we were watching this presidential race unfold here in the U.S.

For the last couple of years we've heard critics, on both the right and in some cases the left, arguing that we don't have proof that the Russians actually stole this stuff. And we don't have proof that they tried to influence the outcome of the election. You would say conclusively that those two things happened, right?

I would say that for sure. I don't think there's any serious national security official from the Obama administration or even the Trump administration, save for the president, who would dispute either of those things. Where you find a little more argument is whether that affected the outcome. So I would even go a step farther at this point and say it seems increasingly evident that this was among several decisive factors during that election.

It's no longer, I don't think, realistic to argue that the Russian interference didn't have an impact. I mean, we now know that Russia, through its propaganda network, was reaching more than 100 million Americans on Facebook alone. And this was an election decided by fewer than 80,000 voters.

There are other decisive factors: Hillary Clinton's flaws as a candidate, Jim Comey's inserting himself and the [FBI] into this drama, are also big factors. But I think at this point it's hard to argue that Trump didn't benefit significantly from Russia's involvement.

Having interviewed Jim Clapper [the director of national intelligence under Barack Obama] when his book came out earlier this year, I know that he has reached the same conclusion, when in the immediate aftermath of the election he said he wasn’t sure.

Yeah, exactly. I've talked to Clapper, we’ve covered him for many years now. And when he says something like that, I mean, he's such a serious guy, he doesn't say these things lightly. He doesn't say these things because of some hidden political agenda. There's also a line in his book that I love, where he expresses some frustration with Obama and Obama's reluctance to call out Russian interference early enough in the election for it to make a difference. He's talking about how Obama just seemed hamstrung, so nervous about putting his thumb on the scale. And here's Putin on the other end of the scale, jumping up and down on it, Clapper says. It's a beautiful line.

Another thing I know you've talked about is that when the Obama administration finally did try to engage with this issue, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, among other Republicans, was completely uninterested in pursuing it. Is that fair?

I would go even further and say that he did everything he could to prevent that from happening. I think when we look back on this period in history, obviously everybody's going to focus on Trump and his conduct and what he's done and the implications of that for the United States, for our system of government and for institutions like the FBI and the CIA. But he's been abetted in certain, in key instances, by allies who have their own partisan agendas. And McConnell's one of those.

The book goes into great detail on this. There are scenes that we never reported in the paper, a shouting match for example, when John Brennan, the CIA director, becomes convinced that Russia's playing a bigger game here and they're doing something that is much more dangerous than anybody realizes. He proceeds to set up one-on-one meetings with all the congressional leaders. Very unusual for him to do.

He gets to McConnell, starts to lay out the evidence, what Russia's doing, they're trying to help Trump, they're really messing things up. McConnell not only says he will not go along with calling out Putin, he then warns, “I am however prepared to call you out and and call out Obama if you try to do this, if you try to say that Russia's helping Trump. I'll accuse you of interfering in the election. I'm not prepared to accuse Russia of doing that.”

You could argue that sets the table for what comes later. You’re seeking to avoid being understood as a partisan political commentator, I understand that. But a political culture where that kind of thing becomes an acceptable tactic opens the door to all kinds of other stuff that has happened since then.

Exactly. Right. It's a threshold moment. I think it wasn't always this way. If you look back at Watergate, it was the Republicans who turned on the president, who were putting concern for the country ahead of their partisan interest, right? It’s much harder to find examples of that in this day and age.

Just in that moment, choosing your party over taking any meaningful steps whatsoever to safeguard what has to be one of the most precious things about American democracy, a presidential election. I mean, what could be more sacred?

Mitch McConnell also refused to consider a legitimate Supreme Court nomination from the elected president, which was also without precedent as far as I know. All this stuff created a climate ...

Yeah, there are all of these overlapping currents and trends. Even now, we're in the middle of uncertainty over what happens with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Again, the Republicans are, instead of trying to get as many facts as possible and treating that as the overriding objective, they are trying to short-circuit the process to get any of those facts. Even to collect them, let alone to offer them to the public.

Let's address the question of what the collective effect of Russian Facebook messaging and other social media messaging may have been. Because one of the counterarguments all along has been, well, OK, there were all these fake posts that got read and forwarded, some of which were cleverly constructed and some of which were laughably absurd and obvious, to my mind and perhaps yours. But in the overall universe of all the stuff that people saw and people shared throughout the 2016 campaign, it wasn't a very large proportion probably and probably didn’t have much effect.

...

ASSANGE

https://YYY.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/julian-assange-russia-ecuador-embassy-london-secret-escape-plan

https://www.alternet.org/exactly-how-deep-are-ties-between-russia-and-trumps-republican-party

Recent events have driven home the point that Russian influence in American Republican politics is more prevalent than previously thought.

The examples are numerous—and very serious:

Donald Trump’s rejection of the conclusion of U.S. intelligence services about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial of that interference (and no, the “would/wouldn’t” attempt at a take-back doesn’t cut it).
The arrest of Russian agent Maria Butina, who is facing multiple charges and is being held without bail. The details of story and the reports of her offering sex to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party read like a bad spy novel.
Threats of Russian prosecution against—or “interrogation” of—11 U.S. citizens. They include longtime Kremlin critic and financier Bill Browder, who was born in the U.S. but is now a British citizen and whose Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in Russian custody; Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, who, of course, had diplomatic immunity; and Kyle Parker, a congressional staffer who wrote most of the Magnitsky Act imposing sanctions on Russia, which has been a thorn in Putin’s side for years. Trump officials pointedly failed to deny that they might cooperate in such prosecution, saying only that it was “discussed” by the two leaders when they met in Helsinki. They have since backed down.
The report that Russians were asked for and sent stolen documentsabout the Democratic opponent of a sitting Republican U.S. congressman during the 2016 election. Some reports identify that congressman as California’s Dana Rohrabacher, who met with Butina in Russia in 2015 and is sometimes described as “Putin’s favorite congressman.”

Condemnation by media, Democrats, and many Republicans has been swift and severe. Trump has made it crystal clear that he has no problem sucking up to Putin, described as his KGBFF by comedian Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night show on ABC. But exactly how deep are the claws of the Russian bear dug into the GOP?

The threats against Americans—especially the former ambassador—are beyond outrageous, and for any member of the Trump administration to play coy about cooperating with such a plan is despicable. Here’s what California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell tweeted about it:

...tweet

Twitter Ads info and privacyhe U.S. State Department was quick to label the Russian claims against the Americans as absurd. Given the strong backlash by the diplomatic and intelligence community, Trump officials abandoned the idea, and the U.S. Senate voted 98-0 on a resolution condemning the proposal.

But the damage has been done. The Daily Beast compiled comments from several current and former U.S. diplomats, who were all horrified at the prospect of turning over a former ambassador to Putin, even quoting one current diplomat who chose to remain anonymous but said he was “at a fucking loss.” From the story:

David Wade, who was Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff, said that the White House refusal to disavow Putin on McFaul crossed a line “from demoralizing to dangerous” for American diplomats.

“To even hint that there’s some element of credibility to Russian disruptions and distractions puts a bullseye on the back of any diplomat and invites authoritarian regimes to bully and threaten American public servants for the crime of doing their job. No administration should require a lesson or reminder in why this is reprehensible,” Wade said.

What Trump is willing to admit about Russian interference into the 2016 election is anyone’s guess on any given day, depending on whether he’s standing on a stage in Putin’s shadow or whether he’s half a world away, trying to sound tough with laughable damage control. Trump has made more conflicting claims on the charges of Russian cyberhacking than there are ingredients in borscht.

the story of Maria Butina gets more bizarre with each new set of details. And it’s a tale that reaches further into the GOP, touching many GOP officials, many of whom had photos taken with Butina at NRA conventions, the National Prayer Breakfast, and other instances, which she posted on social media.But there’s no question about what’s true—and that Trump knew it was true. The New York Times reports that, two weeks before his inauguration in January 2017, Trump was shown detailed, highly-classified intelligence reports that Putin personally ordered cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to sway the election. All along, Trump knew it wasn’t China or some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed.

Butina faces two charges: conspiracy and acting as a covert agent for Russia’s FSB spy agency. According to a story in The Washington Post:

Butina is accused of trying to cultivate relationships with American politicians to establish “back channel” lines of communication and seeking to infiltrate U.S. political groups, including an unnamed “gun rights organization,” to advance Russia’s agenda. Descriptions in court papers match published reports about Butina’s interactions with the NRA. …

Butina was allegedly assisted in her efforts by a U.S. political operative who helped introduce her to influential political figures. That person was not charged and is not named in court papers, but the description matches that of Paul Erickson, a GOP consultant who sought to organize a meeting between then-candidate Donald Trump and Alexander Torshin, Butina’s Russian colleague and a former Russian senator, at a May 2016 NRA convention.

Butina is described as “a former furniture store owner from Siberia and gun-rights activist.” She questioned Trump during a 2015 town hall meeting (no coincidence, I’m sure) about his plans for Russia; met with Donald Trump Jr. at the 2016 NRA convention; and met with many Republican officials at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Deemed a flight risk, she is being held in custody before her trial.

And speaking of the NRA, the gun industry’s reported ties to Russia also are documented. According to a story from Newsweek:

The National Rifle Association has accepted contributions from at least 23 Russia-linked donors since 2015, the gun rights group revealed in a letter addressed to Congress. The admission came after Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, prodded the NRA as part of an investigation into what political organizations may have been used by Russia to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.

The money totaled $2,500, with most of it coming from subscriptions or membership dues, according to the letter, which was ... first reported on by NPR. About $525 of that money came from "two individuals who made contributions to the NRA," wrote John Frazer, the general counsel for the gun rights group. The 23 people "may include U.S. citizens living in Russia," the NRA said.

Sure, $2,500 sounds like chump change when you consider the fact that the NRA gave more than $30 million to the Trump campaign and other Republicans. But it goes deeper than that. According to reporting by NPR, Alexander Torshin, now deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank and someone who is currently barred from entering the U.S., has spent six years building relationships with multiple NRA officials and past presidents, trying to gain greater access to GOP politicians.

Top GOP officials know all this and don’t care. According to an analysis in The Nation:

Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington. After Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans in Washington proclaimed their solemn concern, just as they did when the president expressed his sympathy for the white supremacists in Charlottesville last year. But all of them are fully aware that they are abetting a criminal conspiracy, and probably more than one. ...

[Special Counsel Robert] Mueller, who knows more than anyone in the media about the extent of the Russiagate scandal and never leaks, isn’t telling us that Trump colluded and obstructed justice—we already know that, because we literally saw Trump request on camera, in the summer of 2016, that Russia hack the Clinton campaign, just as we later saw him bluntly admit to the world that he fired James Comey to end the Russia investigation.

Instead, we are being told something much more frightening: that Russiagate doesn’t end with Trump and his inner circle, that some members of Congress may be implicated, and that the Republican leadership therefore has a personal stake in preventing anyone beyond [former Trump campaign Chair Paul] Manafort and a few other flunkies from being held accountable.

So Donnie, I hope you enjoy your friendship with Vlad, however one-sided it might be. This satire of a Facebook clip, made a few months after the 2016 election by the comedy filmmaker team of Evan and Adam Nix (the Nix Bros.), sums it up perfectly.

https://www.alternet.org/justice-department-releases-fisa-applications-accused-trump-adviser-carter-page-conspiring-russian

no lnx

Justice Department Releases FISA Applications That Accused Trump Adviser Carter Page of 'Conspiring With the Russian Government'

"That the FISA materials hurt the GOP narrative is not surprising since Rep. Devin Nunes admitted he never read the source documents on Carter Page. In fact, the first Nunes memo was such a disaster that I can't wait for the second one."

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams July 22, 2018, 2:42 AM GMT

In an unprecedented and unusually timed document dump Saturday night, the Justice Department released a 412-page, partially redacted version of the FBI's 2016 FISA application requesting authorization to wiretap former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

"The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government," reads the FBI's application, which was ultimately approved by a federal court. The application goes on to accuse Page of "collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government."

The documents can be viewed here.

As Common Dreams reported, the FBI's surveillance of Page became a subject of "partisan sniping" earlier this year when Democrats and the GOP latched onto competing narratives about how Obama's Justice Department obtained permission to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser.

Aligning with President Donald Trump, Republicans alleged in a memo drafted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that the FBI's surveillance of Page amounted to an abuse of power—an abuse Republicans don't typically care about when the privacy rights of ordinary Americans are at risk.

But as Splinter's Dell Cameron and Jack Mirkinson note, the Nunes memo "turned out to be self-defeating for the GOP for several reasons." They explain:

First, it charged that in seeking the secret surveillance warrant, federal investigators had failed to inform judges that key evidence was obtained from a biased source—the so-called Steele dossier, which was initially written by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Democrats. But a response memo published by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee later debunked the accusation, revealing that the court had in fact been informed of the source’s political bias.

The memo also backfired by inadvertently confirming that the Steele dossier was not the primary factor jumpstarting the Russia inquiry. Instead, it acknowledged events previously reported by the New York Times: A former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, came under the scrutiny of investigators in July 2016 after boasting that Russia had dirt on then-candidate Hillary Clinton to an Australian diplomat in London.

Responding to the newly released FISA documents on Saturday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) wrote: "That the FISA materials hurt the GOP narrative is not surprising since Rep. Devin Nunes admitted he never read the source documents on Carter Page. In fact, the first Nunes memo was such a disaster that I can't wait for the second one."

In a tweet early Sunday morning, Trump asserted—citing the right-wing advocacy group Judicial Watch—that the documents actually prove that the GOP's narrative was correct, and that the FBI "misled the courts."

"Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!" Trump added.

The FISA documents were released on Saturday in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by numerous news outlets and advocacy groups.

As Charlie Savage of the New York Times observes, "The spectacle of the release was itself also noteworthy, given that wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is normally one of the government's closest-guarded secrets. No such application materials had apparently become public in the 40 years since Congress enacted that law."

bannon sez money laundering russian:

putin real estate

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side

Trump's insistence on a summit with Vladimir Putin, disregarding the advice of aides and worries of allies, is consistent with his obsession with the Russian leader. But it’s inconsistent with his pattern of choosing policies that resonate with his supporters -- there’s no indication that Trump's followers condone this bromance.

So why does Trump pander to Putin?He won’t criticize him and incessantly flatters and coddles him. He has winked at the annexation of Crimea, threatened NATO, suggested that the G7 should readmit Russia, and done nothing to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

Many fear Trump will hand Putin unwarranted concessions, like unraveling U.S. sanctions against Russia. Trump was always soft on them anyway. After Russia requested a secretary of state who favored lifting them, Trump obliged, appointing Rex Tillerson instead of Mitt Romney. When Congress enacted sanctions on 15 Russian entities and individuals in 2017, Trump delayed implementing them for seven months and reversed a decision to impose more. What could be motivating Trump's largesse toward Russia? It's hard to argue that it's what’s best for America. A pattern of reported facts suggest it could be personal financial gain.

Throughout the 2000s, Russians bought many apartments in Trump Tower and $100 million worth of Trump properties in Florida. But these sales dropped precipitously in 2014 after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs for the Crimean incursion. Lifting sanctions would likely restore these sales, and the profits would flow through a trust run by Trump's sons, with the president as sole beneficiary. Indeed, Trump admitted that he’d “be looking at” lifting them.

Trump has many business aspirations in Russia that Putin can make or break. In 1986, Trump met with the Soviet ambassador about building a luxury hotel in Moscow, and announced a potential Trump International complex there. At the 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit, Trump touted plans for condos and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi. In 2011, he licensed his name to an aborted Azerbaijan hotel for $1 million and promoted a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan. Even as he campaigned for the Republican nomination, Trump signed a letter of intent to build Trump Tower in Moscow.

Trump’s business depends heavily on Russian money. Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that “Russians make up a … disproportionate cross-section of … our assets,” and later added, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Eric Trump told a journalist, “We don’t rely on American banks; we have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (He later denied saying that.)

In 2008, Deutsche Bank’s real estate group stopped lending to Trump after he defaulted on a $330 million loan. Inexplicably, he subsequently borrowed $75 million from another DB group. European and American regulators punished DB for laundering billions from Moscow.It’s not a huge leap to suspect that Trump’s DB money came from Russia.

The blackmail potential in all these financial shenanigans is abundant. Implicating Trump in almost any of these schemes could expose him to charges of money laundering and bank fraud.Since Trump’s nomination, 70 percent of Trump sales were tolimited liability companies frequently used by Russians to hide their identity, stow cash and, most likely, violate U.S. sanctions.Hundreds of millions of dollars from unidentified sources funded Trump’s unprofitable golf courses in Ireland and Scotland. Testimony before Congress suggests they were used to launder money for the Russian mafia. Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff, in speaking of White House corruption: “This is about money laundering … the path to …Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Junior and Jared Kushner.”

“America first” ideology has actually put Russia first. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Agreement lost America international forums where it communicated, led and influenced. Cutting the State Department’s budget and foreign aid weakened America’s global clout and allowed Putin to expand Russia's sphere of influence.

Trump’s threat to cut aid to Central America damaged trust in the U.S. Now Putin is providing aid there, reopening military bases and building a satellite-tracking station that could spy on the U.S. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s soft Cuba policy may result in a repeat of Cuba’s pivot to Russia after Dwight Eisenhower rejected Cuban efforts for diplomatic and trade ties. Trump’s trade tariffs and insults of EU and Canadian leaders threatens relationships with our closest allies. His escalating criticism of NATO make some worry the United States might actually leave the alliance – the ultimate gift to Putin.

Congressional Republicans are muting their nervousness about Trump giving away the store, settling for bromides about how there's nothing wrong with just talking to Russia. It's hard to imagine how talking under these conditions will serve America's interest, but on the other hand, we may finally see Trump Tower built in Moscow. In keeping his stakes in 500 foreign businesses -- no other president had any – Trump has unprecedented cause to tailor foreign policy for personal gain. He promised to “drain the swamp,” but there are more reptiles in it than ever, and many speak Russian

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-probing-why-russian-billionaires-were-given-unusual-access-invitation-only

NEWS & POLITICS

Mueller is Probing Why Russian Billionaires Were Given 'Unusual' Access to 'Invitation-Only' Trump Inauguration Parties

One of the individuals was sanctioned by the U.S. government.

By Chris Sosa / AlterNet June 28, 2018, 7:36 AM GMT

no lnx

ABC News has obtained a guest list that shows several "billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities."

The billionaires reportedly had access to events usually "reserved for top donors and close political allies" and included at least one individual now sanctioned by the U.S. government.

“This reflects a Russian strategy of gaining access to our political leaders at a time when they are just forming a government,” Matthew Olsen, a former senior national security official who now serves as an ABC News consultant, said. “They don’t need to be spies in the James Bond sense. They are powerful people with significant wealth who are in a position to exert influence on U.S. policy makers. And they’re in a position to report back to Russian intelligence services on what they’re able to learn.”

Inauguration guests included Victor Vekselberg, billionaire leader of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is now looking into the suspicious inauguration activity. The Washington Post had originally reported that individuals with Kremlin ties were at Trump's inauguration, but the obtained guest list demonstrates a new level of public detail about the connections

ref

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/special-counsel-eyeing-russians-granted-unusual-access-trump/story?id=56232847

Watch: Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

By MATTHEW MOSK JOHN SANTUCCI Jun 28, 2018, 11:41 AM ET

PHOTO: President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.Scott Olson/Getty Images, FILE

WATCHSpecial counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

Several billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities, guest lists obtained by ABC News show.

These powerful businessmen, who amassed their fortunes following the collapse of the Soviet Union -- including one who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department -- were ushered into events typically reserved for top donors and close political allies and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.

Their presence has attracted the interest of federal investigators probing Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Matthew Olsen, a former senior national security official who now serves as an ABC News consultant, said their presence at inaugural events is “very concerning.”

“This reflects a Russian strategy of gaining access to our political leaders at a time when they are just forming a government,” Olsen said. “They don’t need to be spies in the James Bond sense. They are powerful people with significant wealth who are in a position to exert influence on U.S. policy makers. And they’re in a position to report back to Russian intelligence services on what they’re able to learn.”

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller at an installation ceremony at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2013.

The presence of people with Kremlin ties in Washington for Trump’s inaugural celebration was first reported by The Washington Post. But the guest lists obtained by ABC News offer a new glimpse at the level of access granted to several well-connected oligarchs.

Several donated enough to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to qualify for tickets to a “Candlelight Dinner” in Washington’s Union Station on the eve of the inauguration, a perk for $1 million contributors, the list of attendees show. Guests were treated to a preview performance by singer Jackie Evancho, a one-time runner-up on "America's Got Talent," who would go on to sing at the inauguration the following day.

A handful celebrated Trump’s surprise victory at the black-tie “Chairman’s Global Dinner,” an exclusive 500-guest affair held the same night in the Greek-columned Andrew W. Mellon Auditoriumwhose attendees included close Trump friends, high-ranking campaign aides, and an array of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries. The inaugural committee treated them to a dinner of butter-poached lobster, coffee-crusted beef tenderloin and chocolate raspberry dome. For entertainment, casino mogul and Trump pal Steve Wynn flew in Las Vegas show girls to perform a Broadway-style rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.”

According to a source with knowledge of the congressional investigations, at least one oligarch was ushered into Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Day luncheon, hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – an event typically out of reach to donors and even most rank-and-file members of Congress.

“It’s incredibly unusual,” said Stephen Kerrigan, who planned the 2009 and 2013 Obama inaugural festivities and said every guest was scrutinized for foreign ties. “Particularly if they were going to be within arm’s reach of the President, they went through an intensive vetting process.”

Names on the guest lists of the Candlelight Dinner included Victor Vekselberg, the billionaire head of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy,” and his American cousin Andrew Intrater. Late last year, Vekselberg was stopped at a New York airport by federal agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and questioned, according to the New York Times. The Times also reported that Intrater was separately interviewed by the special counsel.

Vekselberg and Intrater were seated at the dinner next to Michael Cohen and his family, according to a source familiar with the arrangements. Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, later signed Cohen to a $1 million consulting contract. Emails to Renova Group went unanswered. A spokesperson for Intrater declined to comment when reached by ABC News.

PHOTO: Renova Group Chairman Viktor Vekselberg attends a session during the Week of Russian Business, held by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), in Moscow, Feb. 7, 2018. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Renova Group Chairman Viktor Vekselberg attends a session during the Week of Russian Business, held by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), in Moscow, Feb. 7, 2018. more +

Investigators for both the Mueller team and the congressional probes have also expressed interest in several of the other Russian guests who had no obvious place in Trump’s diplomatic orbit, three sources told ABC News.

Some had given money to past Republican candidates, including Leonard Blavatnik,a Ukrainian-born billionaire philanthropist who holds American and British citizenship. He appeared on guest lists for both the Candlelight Dinner and the Chairman’s events. His global company, Access Industries, which holds a majority stake in Amedia, Russia’s largest producer of television series, gave $1 million to the inaugural fund.

A spokeswoman at Access Industries directed questions from ABC News to a company official who was not immediately available for comment.

Alexander Shustorovich, a Russian-born American music industry mogul with a background in nuclear energy, also donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration and attended Chairman’s Dinner. Nearly two decades ago, the Republican National Committee returned a six-figure political contribution from Shustorovich because of his past ties to the Russian government, according to the Wall Street Journal, which quoted a GOP official saying it wasn’t “worth the trouble.”

In response to questions from ABC News, John Evans, the chief operating officer of IMG Artists, a company owned by Shustorovich, said the wealthy businessman was maligned by that report and has since made sizable gifts to the Republican Party. He said Shustorovich has actually been under attack in Russia, where he has faced allegations of being an agent of American influence.

“Alex Shustorovich has not been contacted by anyone regarding his attendance at the Trump inauguration, except the press,” Evans said.

A Soviet-born billionaire Alexander Mashkevitch, who built a metals and mining empire in Kazakhstan, appears on the guest list for the Candlelight Dinner. Flight records show his private jet flew into Washington, D.C. on Jan. 19, 2017 and out two days later. European media reports indicate he settled money laundering charges with Belgian authorities in 2011 with no finding of wrongdoing by him. He has held an ownership stake in Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, one of the world’s largest mining and metals concerns, based in London.

ABC News has attempted to reach Mashkevitch through his companies for comment but they have not responded.

PHOTO: President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.Scott Olson/Getty Images, FILE

President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.

Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak joined numerous other ambassadors on the invite list for the Chairman’s dinner.

Guests dined alongside some of Trump’s closest friends and advisors, including private equity investor Thomas Barrack Jr., who chaired the inaugural fundraising effort; investment tycoon Carl Ichan, a longtime Trump friend; and Wynn, the casino boss who also became the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman. He stepped down earlier this year amid a swarm of sexual misconduct allegations, which he has denied.

Trump advisors who have faced criminal charges – such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who awaits trial on charges related to financial crimes, were at the dinners. Manafort pleaded not guilty and is in jail awaiting trial.

Invited guests also included since-departed White House aide Steve Bannon and campaign advisor and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, both of whom have since been questioned in the Special Counsel’s probe.

The Trump inauguration brought in more than $107 million, double the amount of President Obama, to finance a week of festivities that was filled with far fewer events than past inaugurations – only three Presidential balls. In May, ABC News reported that the Special Counsel had questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations from donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Andrew Intrater was stopped at a New York airport alongside Victor Vekselberg. Only Vekselberg was stopped. The person who declined to comment on Intrater’s behalf was his spokesperson, not his lawyer.

WATCH Government investigators to inspect shelters for immigrant kids

First lady Melania Trump traveled to Tucson, Arizona Thursday where she is set to make her second visit in a week to a border detention facility holding undocumented immigrants arrested at the southern border.

"This facility is about two hours away from the actual U.S. border, but is the first place individuals (parents and children together) are brought immediately after detention at the border," the first lady's communications director Stephanie Grisham said Thursday, according to a pool report. "At the facility, she will participate in a roundtable with U.S. Marshalls, U.S. Border Patrol Agents, and local ranchers who will share their stories about what they have seen across the border, like the story of a 6-year-old boy who was found alone in the desert in Arizona."

The first lady's office revealed Tuesday that she would be making another visit to a detention facility as the administration continues to face questions over the status of the more than 2,000 children separated from their parents due to the president's 'zero tolerance' policy.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in California ordered a temporary halt to the separation of families at the border and ruled that children taken from their parents must be reunited within 30 days. The court also prohibited, absent a waiver, the deportation of parents without their children, and it said that in the future children can only be separated from a parent if that parent poses a threat to the child.

The first lady's visit last week drew significant controversy regarding her choice of a jacket that included a graphic on her back reading, "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?"

Mrs. Trump's office said in a statement that the jacket was in no way intended as symbolic or sending a message, but that claim was immediately undermined by a tweet from President Trump who reacted to the mounting criticism with a tweet.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

“I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!

2:51 PM - Jun 21, 2018

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(MORE: Slideshow: Melania Trump through the years)

(MORE: First lady wears jacket to visit immigrant children that reads 'I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?')

(MORE: Federal judge rules children, parents separated at border must be reunited within 30 days)

ABC's Lauren Pearle and Justin Doom contributed reporting to this article.

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Interior Dept. watchdog looking at Zinke's involvement in real estate development connected to oil company executive

By STEPHANIE EBBS Jun 28, 2018, 12:45 PM ET

PHOTO: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testifies before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, March 13, 2018, in Washington.PlayWin McNamee/Getty Images

WATCH Who is Ryan Zinke?

The Interior Department's internal watchdog has opened a preliminary review into reports that Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke was involved in a real estate deal in his hometown and met with a Halliburton executive about that deal in his office in Washington.

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The investigation was requested by House Democrats on committees with oversight of Interior who say that Zinke's conversation with the executive and developers on the project could violate ethics rule about using his office for personal gain.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a letter to the inspector general that Zinke met with Halliburton CEO David Lesar and a developer for the project in his office at Interior, raising questions about whether Zinke was still involved in a foundation that the department said he recused himself from.

"Secretary Zinke doesn’t seem to take his responsibility to the public seriously,” Grijalva said Thursday in a statement about the investigation. “He’s turned it into the Ryan Zinke show, which is more about waving his own flag above the building and doing personal business deals with his friends instead of protecting public lands and improving our environmental quality.”

Grijalva's letter, also signed by Rep. Donald McEachin, D, Va., and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Ca., cited a Politico report that first reported the real estate deal.

A spokeswoman for the Interior inspector general's office Nancy DiPaolo said they opened a formal complaint on June 20 and that a preliminary review is underway.

PHOTO: Rep. Raul Grijalva speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 17, 2018.Susan Walsh/AP, FILE

Rep. Raul Grijalva speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 17, 2018.

Zinke confirmed that he met with Halliburton Chairman David Lesar and his son about the background of the project in an interview this week.

"We go out to dinner. We talk about the background of the park. What are the neighbors like, what was the vision of the park, where the boundaries are, where the water table is because the water table has changed over time, what the railroad is. You know, so they have the background," Zinke said in an interview on Voices of Montana radio show. "And clearly, I'm not on the board anymore. My wife runs the board. And they make a letter of intent for my wife that you know what, the community is for this project, the city approves it. It's a good project for Whitefish. We'll share some parking lots with you. That's it."

The Democrats say that Zinke met with Halliburton chairman and CEO David Lesar and a developer for the project in his office at the Interior Department last August, even though Zinke is recused from the foundation that is involved in the project.

Zinke founded the Great Northern Veterans Peace Park Foundation in 2008 to create a park in his hometown Whitefish, Montana. Plans shared with Zinke show the property would include sled runs, retail space, and a microbrewery.

Zinke's spokeswoman provided documents to ABC News showing that Zinke resigned his position at the foundation in March, but the Democrats say that meeting with people involved with the development five months later raises questions about whether Zinke was really recused from the foundation's work and whether he used his office at Interior for personal gain.

"Though he has claimed that he is no longer involved with the foundation, he continues to be involved with the fate of the foundation's land, which was initially donated more than a decade ago to be a Veterans Peace Park," Grijalva wrote in the letter.

Zinke's wife, Lola, is still listed as an officer of the foundation in public records and their daughter is the treasurer. The nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen wrote to Interior's ethics office this week calling for them to investigate whether Zinke's or his family's business relationship with Halliburton violated federal ethics rules.

Public Citizen

@Public_Citizen

We're urging the Office of Ethics of the Interior to conduct a conflict of interest investigation into Ryan Zinke's connection to a land deal with the chairman of the oil giant Halliburton. The deal stands to be a financial windfall for the Zinke family. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/20/probe-zinke-halliburton-chairman-638327 …

1:49 PM - Jun 20, 2018

Public Citizen seeks probe of Zinke connection to Halliburton chairman

Public Citizen is asking the Interior Department’s top ethics officer to determine whether the arrangement violates any federal laws.

politico.com

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A spokeswoman for Halliburton said the meeting was not related to the company and that Lesar's investment in the deal is personal.

"The Company is confident that any actions of the Interior Department will not be influenced by Mr. Lesar’s personal investment," spokeswoman Emily Mir told ABC News in a statement.

Internal agency emails released by Interior Department show that Zinke had a scheduled meeting with David Lesar, the chairman of Halliburton, John Lesar, and Casey Malmquist on August 3 of last year. On a version of his calendar that was also released the same time frame that day was marked only as "HOLD."

Zinke's spokeswoman Heather Swift said the meeting was on Zinke's personal time and that the three men talked to the secretary about the history and previous work on the project.

"The two gentlemen talked on the Secretary’s personal time about the history of the site, previous studies, promised access and uses of the park, and the work that had gone into the park up to the point of the Secretary’s resignation. The Secretary adheres to all applicable laws, rules and regulations. He goes above and beyond mere technical compliance and strives for full transparency," Swift said in a statement.

The meeting was scheduled from 4:30pm to 6pm on August 3 of last year, according to documents publicly released by Interior.

The Democrats cite an email from the developer for the project to Zinke after that meeting as evidence Zinke might still be involved in the project. The developer emailed Zinke's personal email account on August 13 calling the project a "grand slam" and saying they are "honored" to be associated with the secretary.

"I know you are extremely engaged and consumer with your role as Interior Secretary. I want you to know that whatever assistance you need to protect and promote your vision for the park, please let me know and I will make sure it is communicated and executed," Malmquist wrote in the August 13 email.

The email was included in emails publicly released by the Interior Department because it was forwarded from Zinke's personal account to his department account.

Swift said the developer emailed Zinke's personal email to get background info on the park project that no one else had. She also said Zinke forwarded Malmquist's email from his personal account out of an abundance of caution and to be transparent.

ABC News Soorin Kim contributed to this report.

Comments

mma

was already reported that Russian authorities were potentially attempting to use the NRA as a means to help the Trump campaign. We know that the FBI is investigating whether a Russian banker and lifetime NRA member used the NRA to illegally funnel money to support Trump's election.

This week more information came to light as an NRA source confirmed that meetings between an NRA representative and a person closely linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin were held during the election. These revelations come as NRA figures have been downplaying the Russia investigation and launching attacks against Robert Mueller’s investigation.

https://www.alternet.org/ivanka-trump-facilitated-contact-between-michael-cohen-and-russian-offering-facilitate-trump-putin

Mueller and congressional investigators tasked with probing the 2016 presidential election have questioned witnesses about contact between Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and a Russian contact offering to “expedite a Trump tower in Moscow,” BuzzFeed News reports.

According to BuzzFeed, Ivanka Trump “connected her father’s personal lawyer,” Michael Cohen, with Russian athlete Dmitry Klokov,“who offered to introduce Donald Trump to [Vladimir] Putin to facilitate a 100-story Trump tower in Moscow.” Cohen is under investigation in the Southern District of New York for bank fraud, among other alleged crimes.

frum bk:

press: hannity and new say no indep media eg CNN

local fox crew said gianforte guilty, but not asked to be on nat'l; rush applaid, 116K$ ON election day 113

russian dis-info400 ppl, 20m ri8bles (400K$ per mo; 40 rooms0 russian version of FB, made fake ppl on US soc media 115; 100K ads; target 10 m ppl in slected districts and states; msg reached 126M FB users 116.

russia ~ Fr Macron, so vidfeo ell cut hand wash inverted; rebel media posobiec got adv notce of email dump; big overlap betw anti-marcon and pro djt, 18K bots; 118

cernovich pizzagate guy got WH leaks (susan rice unmasked)

trad media tried to be balaced, so any crumb or djt normalcy touted 120

media restriction 1st sign of decline of democ 122

https://www.alternet.org/former-nsa-analyst-claims-us-spy-agencies-have-known-trump-was-russian-agent-2016

mueller sanction 13 oligarchs

Stefan Halper was identified this week as the alleged “informant” who Donald Trump accused of spying on his 2016 presidential campaign and kicking off an FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia.

But several weeks ago, a news outlet with deep ties to Trump himself had already identified Halper as the likely information. The Daily Caller, a right-leaning news outlet founded by Trump supporter and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, had actually reported back on March 25 that Halper had reached out to members of Trump’s campaign in an effort to learn about their communications with Russia.

clapper

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-swung-election-trump-win-msnbcs-maddow-stunned-ex-intel-directors-revelation

teaser? trms? 5/18

...ven before the appointment of Mueller as special counsel in May 2017, FBI agents investigating Russia’s interference in the election learned that Cohen was in frequent contact with foreign individuals about Trump Moscow — and that some of these individuals had knowledge of or played a role in 2016 election meddling, according to two FBI agents.

"That is new," Maddow said Thursday night. "That is new information that adds a whole new dimension to theTrump Tower Moscow story that had been kept secret for a very long time, and then diminished, and we were all told it was nothing. And now it turns out that it was more than nothing, the FBI was interested in it. and it involved people who were part of the 2016 election meddling by the Russian government."

The direct ties between a key member of the Trump's orbit and the efforts to disrupt American democracy would seem to suggest a plausible path for some sort of "collusion" to have occurred and also completely contradicts any number of denials from the president and his allies of any connections to Russia.

...

https://www.alternet.org/senate-intel-committee-splits-nunes-led-house-panel-agrees-putin-interfered-2016-help-trump

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-lawyer-ty-cobb-just-announced-his-exit-hes-being-replaced-clinton

e flood

https://**investigaterussia.org**/media/2018-03-23/boltons-cambridge-analytica-connection

https://investigaterussia.org/key-players/russians-and-ukrainians

Russians and Ukrainians

Vladimir Putin

President of Russia

Sergey Lavrov

Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Sergey Kislyak

Former Russian Ambassador to the United States

Sergei Gorkov

Head of Vnesheconombank (VEB), Russia’s State Investment Bank

Dmitry Peskov

Kremlin Spokesman

Aras Agalarov

Billionaire Real Estate Developer/Trump Friend

Emin Agalarov

Real Estate Executive and Pop Singer/Trump Friend

Natalia Veselnitskaya

Russian Lawyer/June 9th Meeting Attendee

Rinat Akhmetshin

Russian-American Lobbyist/June 9th Meeting Attendee

Viktor Yanukovych

Former Pro-Kremlin President of Ukraine/Paul Manafort Client

Dmytro Firtash

Ukrainian Oligarch/Former Paul Manafort Business Partner

Konstantin Kilimnik

Paul Manafort’s Ukrainian Protégé

Oleg Deripaska

Russian Oligarch/Putin Friend/Former Paul Manafort Client

Irakly (Ike) Kaveladze

Crocus Group VP/June 9th Meeting Attendee

Igor Diveykin

Russian Deputy Chief for Internal Policy

Igor Sechin

Executive Chairman, Rosneft/Former Soviet Spy

Alexander Mashkevich

Kazakhstan Mining Billionaire/Possible Trump Investor

General Valery Gerasimov

Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Services of the Russian Federation

Viktor Khrapunov

Former Kazakh Government Official/Trump SoHo Apartment Owner

Sergey Shoygu

Russia’s Minister of Defence

Sergei Ivanov

Former Putin Chief of Staff

Herman Gref

Chief Executive, Sberbank/Putin Ally

Sergei Ryabkov

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister

Evgeny Buryakov

Convicted Russian Spy

Dmitry Rybolovlev

“Russia’s Fertilizer King”/Purchased Trump’s Overpriced Palm Beach Mansion

Yevgeniy Prigozhin

Russian Oligarch and Putin's Chef

Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, President Trump's incoming national security advisor, hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014 to work for his political committee called the The John Bolton Super PAC.

*The New York Times*:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/connections-trump-putin-russia-ties-chart-flynn-page-manafort-sessions-214868

canal map

https://littlesis.org/maps/2928-cambridge-analytica-trump-brexit-fossil-fuels-and-climate-science-denial

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/books/review/russian-roulette-michael-isikoff-david-corn.html

...In one scene inside Trump Tower, the candidate’s aides debate how to respond to the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which the future president boasts about grabbing women by their genitals. According to the authors, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, her face reddening and eyes filling with tears, urged her father to make a full-throated apology. He did not. He simply dismissed what he said as “locker room banter” without denying anything he did.

It should have been a moment for Team Clinton to celebrate a knockout blow to Trump’s insurgency — except that the video landed on an inauspicious day for them.

Barely an hour earlier, the director of national intelligence and secretary of homeland security issued a statement saying that the intelligence community was “confident that the Russian government directed” the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email system. The subsequent leak of thousands of emails was a tactic “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.”

This was the Watergate burglary of the internet age, yet the revelation was all but drowned out by the release of the tape. “The Clinton staffers hit the phones, calling reporters they had worked with, urging them to give more attention to the Russia story. They weren’t having much luck.”

Photo

And still to come was the third October surprise of the day. WikiLeaks announced that it would begin dribbling out thousands of emails to and from John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, that proved hugely embarrassing to the candidate.

That day — Oct. 7 — may prove to be a turning point in American history. It was, by some unearthly coincidence, also Vladimir Putin’s 64th birthday.

“Russian Roulette” is best when describing how the country’s intelligence agencies were slow to recognize Russia’s effort and the frustration among Clinton’s supporters of the failure of the administration, the F.B.I. and the media to trumpet it for what it was. (Some reporters did, in fact, including Corn and Isikoff, but much more became clear only after Trump’s It was President Obama, however, who set the administration’s tone: He did not want to be seen as trying to tip the scales of the election by suggesting a foreign leader was intervening in support of one side. “We were wearing self-imposed handcuffs,” one agonized aide tells the authors.

...Still another anonymous source reveals one of the book’s most significant revelations. A Russian insider had been providing the American Embassy in Moscow with unconfirmed but what turned out to be prescient information about Putin’s inner circle around the same time Trump was presiding over the pageant. Among the disclosures was the racially tinged disdain senior Russians felt for Barack Obama, all dutifully reported back to Washington in top-secret cables.

This source — described not as an intelligence asset but as a sympathetic political insider, who as a young man had been “heartened by Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric” — told his interlocutor as early as 2014 that the Kremlin was planning to undermine democracy in the West. It was, the authors suggest, one of many missed signals of what was coming.

“Anybody who had any doubt about Putin’s intentions,” the source’s American interlocutor is quoted as saying, “just wasn’t reading what we reported.

wapo

Paul Manafort wanted back in the game,” begins the chapter on the Washington power lobbyist who did indeed want back into Republican Party politics and would find his chance as Trump’s campaign manager.

“Run away!” you want to yell, because we know what is to come: FBI raids on the Manafort home, grand juries and indictments and charges of money laundering and tax crimes and bank fraud and — well, who knows? Even as I type, this sentence is probably being overtaken by the latest turn of events in the Mueller probe. Isikoff and Corn unpack the foreign consulting transactions for which Manafort raked in millions; if you want to dive deep, deep into the weeds of his business contacts in Ukraine, this is your book. But for all the detail, Manafort the man remains inscrutable.

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/trump-russia-investigation-ties/

infographic

nra mojo

May 2016: In an email to Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn, with the subject line “Kremlin Connection,”Erickson says Russia is “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and proposes using the NRA convention to set up “first contact” with the Trump team. According to a New York Times report, Erickson writes that he’s in a position to “slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.” The email doesn’t name Torshin but appears to reference him as “President Putin’s emissary” who planned to attend a dinner hosted by conservative Christian activist Rick Clay. Meanwhile, Clay sends an email to Dearborn with the subject line “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” seeking a meeting between Trump and Torshin. Dearborn forwards Clay’s email to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who reportedly nixes the proposal.

also mashburn on rnc platform change:

Dearborn and Mashburn were also the recipients of phone calls made by campaign foreign policy aide J.D. Gordon as delegates to the Republican National Convention were debating what the party's platform on Ukraine should be. The party ultimately elected to adopt language that endorsed providing ...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-wikileaks-foundation-russia-case

Robert Mueller’s emerging focus on Donald Trump’s knowledge of hacked Democratic National Committee emails shows he’s “laid the foundation” for a collusion case against Donald Trump, a former White House lawyer said.

Wednesday, NBC News reported Mueller’s team is probing how much Trump knew about the stolen DNC emails and whether he was aware the radical transparency organization WikiLeaks planned to publish those exchanges.

Andrew Wright, who served for two years as Barack Obama’s associate counsel, told Business Insider that line of questioning is a bad sign for the president.

“The one specious thing about Trump’s lawyers’ strategy is that they’re saying there’s no substantive focus on Trump when it comes to the collusion inquiry, that this is all about obstruction of justice, and that Mueller already has everything he needs from other witnesses and documents for the obstruction case,” Wright said, referring to reported attempts by Trump’s attorneys to shield their client from sitting for an interview with the special counsel.

“Setting the obstruction case aside, what has happened over the last couple of weeks is that Mueller laid the foundation [for a collusion case] by showing the crimes of the Russians, in at least some form,” Wright continued. “And now we’re seeing his focus on Trump about the hacked emails. At this point, it’s a matter of proving whether Americans were participants in this conspiracy to commit these crimes, and whether they aided or abetted these acts.”

WikiLeaks—which the U.S. intelligence community considers an arm of the Russia government—played a pivotal role in the 2016 presidential election, releasing troves of DNC emails during times of peak tumult for then-candidate Trump. As the Atlantic reports, the organization was in touch with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., from September 2016 to at least July 2017.

According to leaked private Twitter messages, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone also corresponded with WikiLeaks—despite assertions from both parties they’d never communicated during the campaign. Mueller has asked witnesses about Trump’s interactions with Stone throughout the campaign, Business Insider reports.

Trump, meanwhile, publicly touted the emails leaked by WikiLeaks, using them as proof of his claim former rival Hillary Clinton was “corrupt.”

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a July 27, 2016, press conference.

Last month, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three corporations on conspiracy charges for their role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Robert Deitz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, told Business Insider the charges could be a stepping stone in Mueller’s quest to find whether any Americans aided Russia’s effort.

“In these kinds of investigations, prosecutors typically move up the food chain,” Deitz said.”I suspect that Mueller, through earlier interviews or documents, finally has sufficient evidence to begin putting a story together that involves Trump.”

Deitz told Business Insider Mueller “will continue to fill in the dots until he has enough to seek an interview with [or indictment or] Trump.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mike-rogers-gives-warning-trumps-swamp-drowns-washington

random update

.... We learned that Jared Kushner has had his top security clearance downgraded — and it was likely because National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster found out that he has been having meetings with foreign dignitaries on the sly, while certain governments have been keenly interested in taking advantage of his inexperience, debt and blatant conflicts of interest. And that's not even counting the fact that he's up to his neck in the Russia investigation. The White House insists that he's still got his portfolio of bringing Middle East peace and handling relations with China and Mexico, among other things, but nobody can figure out how he can possibly do it if he is not privy to the top U.S. intelligence.

The president could, of course, just slip him the paperwork — he has that power — but it appears that Trump is trying to put a little public distance between himself and his son-in-law, only mustering a lame defense that he's been "treated unfairly" and that he's a good person who works for nothing. (Trump doesn't seem to realize that we all know that rich people in great debt who work for free, like Kushner and Paul Manafort, might be getting something else out of the deal.)

Meanwhile, White House Communications Director Hope Hicks testified before the House Intelligence Committee and, like Steve Bannon before her, apparently just refused to answer most of their questions. The White House has not claimed executive privilege and she didn't plead the Fifth — so normally this would result in a witness being held in contempt of Congress. But this committee is run by Devin Nunes and his Trump coverup band of Republicans, so that was that. She did admit to telling some "white lies" on her boss's behalf sometimes, so that's something.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand got a hold of private Twitter messages revealing that Trump pal and Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone was actually in touch with Wikileaks during the campaign, even though he said he wasn't. Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold at the Washington Post reported that police arrested a security guard at a Trump hotel in Panama when the hotel’s majority owner tried to fire the Trump Organization and Trump employees wouldn't leave. Now the Panamanian government is involved in the dispute, which causes exactly the kind of conflict of interest that might be expected when a president refuses to divest himself of properties and interests in foreign countries.

But perhaps the most important story of the day was a rather stunning appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command. On the verge of retirement and clearly not pulling any punches, he let it all hang out, testifying that the president hasn't issued any special directives to counter Russian election interference and saying “Clearly, what we’ve done hasn’t been enough.” He specifically criticized the administration’s decision not to bother implementing sanctions mandated by Congress as punishment for their intrusion in 2016:

Not just the sanctions but more broadly, my concern is, I believe that President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there’s little price to pay here, and that therefore I can continue this activity... everything, both as the director of NSA and what I see on the Cyber Command side, leads me to believe that if we don’t change the dynamic here, this is going to continue and 2016 won’t be viewed as something isolated. This is something that will be sustained over time.

One can only surmise that President Trump is fine with that, assured for some reason that he will be the beneficiary. In fact, he is so fine with it that he announced he had hired his controversial digital guru from 2016, Brad Parscale, as his campaign manager for 2020.

You may be wondering why in the world Trump is announcing his campaign manager already — after only a year in office. But Trump seems to love campaigning more than being president, which he isn't very good at. There is also the matter of a lot of fundraising already being done for the campaign, large amounts of it being spent on salaries for relatives and cronies of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, along with big bucks for rent in Trump Tower. It's best to have someone "managing" all that money.

Parscale would normally be an odd choice for such a job. He is enmeshed in some very shady business deals, although that seems to be a requirement for any job with Donald Trump. He had no political experience before 2016; he basically was a webmaster who fell into the job of working with Jared Kushner and the shadowy digital company Cambridge Analytica on their social media strategy, which was the only sophisticated aspect of their operation.

Parscale took credit for developing the Facebook and Twitter strategies that he claims won Trump the election, so choosing him for a top Trump 2020 campaign job while the Russia investigation is ongoing is simply mind-boggling. After all, special counsel Robert Mueller just indicted 13 Russians for using those platforms for their propaganda effort, and there is plenty of suspicion that more Americans may have been involved in targeting and strategy.

Nobody knows if Parscale was involved — but he was very, very close to the action. And it's not as if there aren't any other campaign operatives Trump could turn to. After all, the person who really ran his campaign is right there in the White House — Kellyanne Conway.

...

The criminal information document released by special counsel Robert Mueller ahead of Trump campaign aide Rick Gates’ guilty plea on Friday contains prominent references to “a member of Congress” who met in 2013 with future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and another lobbyist.

HuffPost has identified that member as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a loudly pro-Russia lawmaker who has drawn the attention of Mueller and congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller has not yet interviewed Rohrabacher, the congressman’s spokesman told HuffPost on Friday in a message that also confirmed the 2013 meeting with Manafort. But Mueller’s team wanted to interview Rohrabacher as of late last year, according to news reports, and the criminal information released in advance of Gates’ plea suggests they were asking about Rohrabacher recently. The congressman has already been interviewed by the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Gates has told a court that he lied to federal investigators on Feb. 1, 2018, about his knowledge of the meeting between Rohrabacher, Manafort and lobbyist Vin Weber when he falsely claimed he did not know Ukraine was discussed. Ukraine is one of the top foreign policy concerns of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Manafort spent years working for Ukrainian politicians close to Moscow. And Rohrabacher was one of only a few U.S. lawmakers to oppose American assistance to a new government in Ukraine established in 2014 after protests against Putin’s allies in that country.

Rohrabacher has become notorious for being what The New York Times calls “an apologist” for Putin. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said during a 2016 meeting of the GOP’s top brass, according to a secret recording shared with The Washington Post. (McCarthy later said he was joking.) Russian intelligence officials gave Rohrabacher a code namebecause they viewed him as a valuable source, The New York Times revealed last year.

Rohrabacher maintains that he is simply motivated by a sincere desire for better relations between Washington and Moscow. In a 2014 Twitter exchange, the congressman wrote, “Have known Manafort 35 years. As in all matters, I make up mind based on truth & right, not donations or even friendship.”

Officials speaking with The New York Times last year said they did not believe Rohrabacher was actively working with the Russians.

As both chair of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee covering Europe and a former anti-Soviet hawk, the congressman argues that the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals need to get along and that Americans should have more sympathy for Russia’s priorities and its fears of Western encirclement.

https://thegrio.com/2018/01/29/nra-russia-ties/

Did Russia infiltrate the NRA? Did the NRA launder Russian money for Trump? If the answer to these questions is yes, then the problem of guns in America—and why we can’t seem to discuss it, address it or solve it–starts to make more sense.

The FBI is investigating whether a Russian banker, mafia boss and politician with close ties to Vladimir Putin illegally funneled millions to the NRA to help Trump win the presidency.Alexander Torshin, a former Russian senator with connections to the Kremlin, is the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank—and a lifetime NRA member, as reported by McClatchy.

Torshin is reportedly the godfather of the Russian criminal syndicate Taganskaya. Authorities in Spain were prepared to arrest him in 2013 on the resort island of Mallorca for money laundering, until he cancelled his travel plans. Torshin has been a subject of a number of Congressional investigations, including the House intelligence committee.Torshin, a gun enthusiast, has attended several NRA conventions, including the May 2016 convention in Kentucky, where he spoke with Donald Trump Jr. and the gun rights organization endorsed Trump for president.

In November 2017, the committee interviewedGlenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on ties between Trump and Russia. Steele went to the FBI in September 2016 because he was concerned the Russians were blackmailing Trump. In the interview, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) asked Simpson about Russia’s interest with the NRA:

:{–Shocking new details emerge about the infamous Trump dossier–:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

In Simpson’s own words: SIMPSON:

It appears the Russians, you know, infiltrated the NRA. And there is more than one explanation for why. But I would say broadly speaking, it appears that the Russian operation was designed to infiltrate conservative organizations. And they targeted various conservative organizations, religious and otherwise, and they seem to have made a very concerted effort to get in with the NRA. And so there is a Russian banker-slash-Duma member-slash-Mafia leader named Alexander Torshin who is a life member of the NRA. And we spent a lot of time investigating Mr. Torshin."

Simpson also mentioned Maria Butina, a “big Trump fan in Russia” who worked with Torshin, and “then suddenly showed up here and started hanging around the Trump transition after the election.”

In the 2016 election, the NRA spent a record of at least $55 million, possibly more than $70 million, including $30 million on Trump—three times the amount the gun rights organization had spent on Mitt Romney in his 2012 presidential bid.

But why should we care about any of this?

NRA’s overwhelming political influence

Already, there have been at least eleven school shootings in the U.S. in 2018, and no one seems to care. America lacks the will to solve its problems, and gun violence is certainly one of them. Money has corrupted politics, and the signs are all around us.

As the Dallas Morning News has reported, oligarchs tied to Putin havefunneled millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, filling the coffers of politicians such as Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, and Govs. John Kasichand Scott Walker. Meanwhile, House Speaker Paul Ryan received $500,000 from the Koch Brothers immediately after Congress passed the infamous tax bill that amounts to a huge gift to the top 1 percent.

The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in America, and has been operating like an arm of the Republican Party, with the GOP opposing any and all gun control measures. For the NRA, gun regulations have become far more than a matter of policy. Rather, the group has become a solider in the “culture wars,” branding liberals, progressives, Black Lives Matter protesters and those who oppose Trump as their enemy.

Last year in an NRA ad, **Dana Loesch** called for a civil war against the left, who in her words “use their media to assassinate real news,” “use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” and “smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.”

One critic, activist Samuel Sinyangwe, tweeted that the ad was “the white equivalent of an ISIS recruitment video.”

[vid]

On NRATV, NRA’s media outlet, two men accused Black Lives Matter of committing mass violence against whites, making parallels to “South Africa where white families are being tortured and killed almost every day in racist violence.”

[img] One of the men, NRA host Grant Stinchfield, once suggested North Korea should bomb California instead of Guam, and insisted we “blame minorities killing each other” for gun violence rather than “law abiding conservatives. Let’s look harder at broken families not gun laws.” In another video called “We Stand,” the NRA inserted itself into the NFL protests against police brutality.

[img vid]

he NRA, like the GOP, has jumped head first into the pool of fascism and racism, making it increasingly more difficult to distinguish between white supremacist militias and hate groups, gun lobbyists and Republican lawmakers.

Things get very serious when this all translates into policy.

Why is the NRA so mum on Russia ties?

Everytown for Gun Safety, which has created an interactive website on ties between the NRA, Russia and Trump World, notes that the NRA forged ties with Putin as Russia meddled in the U.S. election. “Not only are they Trump’s #1 ally, the NRA’s leadership has been building relationships with Russian officials since at least 2011,” said Jamie Schell, Political Research Director for Everytown for Gun Safety in a Dec. 29 email to supporters.

Schell called out the NRA for promoting a “guns everywhere” agenda. “It’s no surprise that the NRA doesn’t want to talk about their ties to Russia. How can the NRA be protecting freedom when they cozy up to Putin’s authoritarian regime?” he wrote.

The gun lobby has enabled gun proliferation in America, a land where there are as many firearms as there are people. The U.S. has 4.4 percent of the world population, but 42 percent of the guns. This reality translates into 30,000 gun-related deaths each year, and it should be regarded as a major public health crisis.

Gun violence has taken a particular toll on the Black community in terms of homicides, creating a vicious cycle of trauma. Through its legalized bribery of elected officials, the NRA has stood in the way of solutions to America’s gun problem, blocking gun violence research for 20 years. Their answer has been guns everywhere.

In December, the House voted to extremely expand the right to carry concealed weapons just about anywhere in the country, requiring any state to recognize a concealed carry permit from another state. Who benefits from this? Obviously, the NRA, the Republicans, and Russia. Because if you want to disrupt another country, weaken it internally and undermine it, what better way to accomplish this than to bring in all the guns and turn it into the Wild West?

Moreover, GOP leadership refuses to accept the Russia investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as legitimate. In some cases they’ve even attempted to impede and undermine it. For example, Trump attempted to fire Mueller last June, ordering the prosecutor’s termination, which White House lawyer Don McGahn refused to carry out.

–Obstruction? Trump reportedly ordered firing of Russia special counsel Mueller–

Many Republicans in Congress oppose legislation making it more difficult to fire Mueller. The president also launched a campaign to discredit potential FBI witnesses in Mueller’s probe. GOP lawmakers have promoted a conspiracy theory that there is a “deep state” FBI plot to bring down Trump.

House Intelligence Committee chair Rep.Devin Nunes (R-CA), who reportedly recused himself in the Russia investigation because he was a member of the Trump transition team, has exhibited strange behavior for months. Recently, against the objection of the Justice Department, Nunes has called for the release of a Republican memo alleging the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by obtaining a warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The memo targets Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein–who oversees Mueller and who Trump wants removed–and deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe–who worked under fired FBI DirectorJames Comey and has just stepped down–for their role in the investigation.

These and other examples of obstruction and efforts to protect Trump only point to GOP culpability, given what is known about the NRA’s–and by extension the Republican Party’s–ties to Russia.

So, if the NRA did take the Russian money and gave it to Trump and other Republican campaigns, that would certainly explain some things.

Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is actively blocking his own committee’s investigation, refusing to subpoena Trump’s financial records or compel new testimony from key witnesses like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump Jr, despite new information emerging.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham are doing the White House’s bidding by calling for a criminal investigation -- not against those who worked with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election, but against a whistleblower who compiled a research document exposing that interference.

Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News dropped a small bombshell this quiet holiday week that hasn't really exploded yet but might just explain the GOP's recent full-court press to discredit the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller's team. Rep. Francis Rooney, a Florida Republican, explained:

I would like to see the directors of those agencies [the DOJ and FBI] purge it and say, "Look, we’ve got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here." Those are the people to see and know the good work’s being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state.

On Wednesday, Rep. Ron DeSantis, another Florida Republican, went on "Fox & Friends" and backed up his colleague's sentiments, saying,"You look at a guy like Peter Strzok [the FBI agent demoted for sending derogatory texts about many politicians including Trump]. If he’s gonna say that it’s his job as an FBI to prevent a certain candidate from getting elected. ... Anyone who turns up in that situation, I think they should get another line of work.”

For what it's worth, Strzok is a counterintelligence agent who appeared concerned that the "certain candidate" might be acting as an agent of a foreign adversary, which was important information the nation didn't have before the election. In any case, from what we can gather, these Republican congressmen identify nefarious "deep state" actors as those who cannot swear that they are not now and have never been a... Democrat.

As one can imagine, the use of the word "purge" brought forth some rather unfortunate historical images. We haven't seen evidence that they plan the usual accompanying show trials, but give them time. Republicans in Congress are working feverishly to prepare hearings on the Hillary Clinton "Russian uranium email treason" hearings so there's a chance we'll see some kind of facsimile before 2018.

The hysteria that's now raging seems a bit of an outsized reaction for this particular phase of the scandal, especially considering that Mueller actually did remove the offending "deep-staters." Isikoff may have come across a different motivation than simple loyalty to President Trump. He wrote:

In just the last few weeks, his prosecutors have begun questioning Republican National Committee staffers about the party digital operation that worked with the Trump campaign to target voters in key swing states. They are seeking to determine if the joint effort was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate, according to two of the sources.

It would not be surprising if certain Republicans were to become a bit nervous when the investigation into Russian interference turned in that particular direction. It's flown under the radar since the election, but the fact is that it wasn't only the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta's email accounts that were hacked. The intelligence community identified the same group of Russian-affiliated hackers as behind the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

I've been intrigued by this aspectof the Russian hacking story since the New York Times published an early report about it back in November of 2016. Recall that at first the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 released personal information that was used to intimidate Democratic candidates, but then he/she/they suddenly became more sophisticated and targeted, dumping valuable tactical information:

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.

People have wondered ever since if the hacker(s) might have gotten some expert assistance.

Perhaps it's a coincidence that so much of the information in question was republished on a website called HelloFLA by a Florida Republican and former congressional staffer named Aaron Nevins, who was connected to Trump associate and longtime political operative Roger Stone. It could be completely random that among the core group of Mueller antagonists, those calling the probe a "coup d'état" and demanding purges of members of the "deep state" are Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who proposed that Mueller's funding be cut off, and the aforementioned Rep. Francis Rooney, who's been all over TV talking about purging the FBI.

Indeed, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out a while back, one of the ringleaders of the movement to discredit the Department of Justice and Robert Mueller, Rep. DeSantis, directly benefited from Guccifer 2.0’s leak to Nevins after the latter published five documents regarding the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ Democratic opponent, George Pappas. According to The Wall Street Journal, Guccifer 2.0 even sent a link with a HelloFLA article directly to Roger Stone, who told reporters he didn’t forward the hacked material to anyone -- the answer to a question nobody asked,

Donald Trump may think their vociferous attacks on Mueller are all about loyalty to him personally. After all, this group all flew down to Florida together on Air Force One earlier this month. But these guys have skin in the game now and may very well be caught up in the maw of the Russia investigation themselves.If Mueller's team is looking into the digital operation and Roger Stone's interactions with Guccifer 2.0, as one would expect them to do, then these shenanigans in Florida are also coming into view. That may explain why this little circle of Sunshine State GOP congressmen are so anxious to shut him down.

They might not be the only ones. According to The New York Times, material from the DCCC hack was first used by Miami-area Democrat Joe Garcia, a former congressman, to win a tight primary race. Then "the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material" to undermine Garcia and re-elect Rep. Carlos Curbelo,the Republican incumbent.

It should be noted that there were some candidates who refused to use the hacked material against their opponents. This gang of Florida Republicans who are now so loudly attacking the FBI for its supposedly unethical behavior were not among them. As we all know, neither was Donald "I love WikiLeaks" Trump.

digby

http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/

Maybe you saw it, too. On Thursday, I read a post from Facebook executivestouting their determination to reel in the propaganda monster their platform had enabled in 2016’s election.

“We are committed to protecting legitimate political discussion within our community,” Facebook said, citing its “action plan against foreign interference,” which includes “hiring 10,000 people including ad reviewers, engineers and security experts and combining their skills with advances in AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to identify and remove content violations and fake accounts.”

Facebook’s moves come as congressional hearings continue on how Russians, with (as we now know) a more sophisticated understanding of social media than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, planted thousands of propagandistic memes on dominant online platforms including Facebook. These moves come as the Federal Election Commission is mulling new disclosure requirements for the election platforms. (Unless anticipated upcoming FEC vacancies stall this action.)

But what’s most important, amid the recent news surrounding Facebook’s role as one of 2016’s top political propaganda platforms, is what is missing from Facebook’s statements. It's also missing from the few media accounts about possible federal regulation of Facebook. What's missing is the role of another communication platform owned by Facebook: Instagram. This is what Jonathan Albright, a Columbia University Journalism School professor and researcher recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee, and detailed in a long article on Medium.com.

The “most important development about the ongoing Facebook investigation isn’t the tenfold increase in the company’s updated estimate of the organic reach of ‘ads’ on its platform," Albright wrote. "While the estimate increasing the reach of IRA content from 10 million people to 126 million people is surely a leap, after last week’s [Senate] testimony, the real question we should be asking is: how did we suddenly arrive at 150 million? The answer is Instagram.”

“My following analysis shows that Facebook’s sibling property, Instagram—a service larger than Twitter and Snapchat combined—should be seen as a major influence, targeting and engagement hub for the spread of political propaganda,” Albright continued. “How do I know? Because I amassed a huge trove of content, analytics numbers, and did the analysis to prove it. To show the reach and use of Instagram for political propaganda the last two years, I’ve collected the following evidence: First, the full profile analytics, post 'like' history and comment statistics, and the complete content—including text, dates and original URLs—for a sample of Instagram posts from 28 of the 170 removed accounts. These posts accounted for 2.5 million recorded interactions (not estimated 'shares') and 145 million projected total interactions based on Socialblade, Klear, and Keyhole influencer data.”

Albright is one of the foremost investigative reporters, dealing with millions of real recorded social media posts and interactions, including tracing how content spreads. His latest conclusion is that Instragram, which Facebook owns, has been overlooked in the congressional scrutiny of its parent company and Google and Twitter in understanding how social media fanned and exploited propagandistic divisions among the electorate in 2016. More important, what Albright highlights remains online today—including what he labels the thousands of “zombie” memes and other posts from 2016.

Instagram More Influential Than Twitter

“I argue here that Instagram is more pervasive than Twitter for political meme-spreading as well as viral outrage video-based behavioral re-targeting,” he said. “Part of the reason for this is because it uses the same range of Facebook’s universe of sophisticated ad targeting infrastructure—including Lookalike and Custom Audiences. The Instagram platform can even link even video views to direct response and campaign objectives.”

Albright goes further, explaining that Silicon Valley top coders built the communications network that not only spreads viral content, but leaves it lingering online, and mines user interactions and compiles psychological profiles to further this provocative dynamic.

Let’s take these step by step.

“Instagram is also a major re-distributor of IRA [Internet Research Agency, a Russian company] memes: Two unofficial third-party 're-sharing' apps on Instagram have circulated and pushed IRA content far beyond the realm of Instagram and Facebook, and embedded it all over the internet. This includes cross-posting of memes and posts from removed accounts from Instagram back into Facebook, Instagram, and also into Twitter. These apps also helped the memes get over to Pinterest.”

This recycling has led to a stunning observation—one that partly accounts for the deepening poisonous nature of arch-partisan politics—which is the observation that much of 2016’s political propaganda is still circulating, despite Facebook and other sites taking steps to close these accounts.

...

https://www.alternet.org/dncs-emails-werent-only-hacked-they-were-edited-report

Emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign may not have been as reliable as the anti-Clinton camp would like to believe.

The first document published by hacker Guccifer 2.0 had been tampered with prior to being published, according to the Associated Press. In addition to not coming from the Democratic National Committee as Guccifer had promised it would be (it instead came from the email inbox of John Podesta, former chairman for the Clinton campaign), the document had the word "CONFIDENTIAL" written on it. Yet a former DNC official has said that the word "confidential" was not on the original document, indicating that Guccifer had airbrushed it in to spice it up for journalists.

If one document from the Clinton emails was altered, it stands to reason that others may have been as well. After all, releasing tainted leaks would hardly be a new practice for Russian hackers.

In 2017 researchers at the Citizen Lab group released a study indicating that Russian hackers have a pattern of tampering with documents leaked by its hackers to serve the purposes of its propaganda.

"This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign,"the authors wrote. "It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then 'leaked' to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique 'tainted leaks.'"

The authors added, "The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society."

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-manafort-may-hold-key-who-was-he-really-working

... We've known the outlines of this before, but the details of Mueller's requests show that he's stepping up the pressure on the White House and will be focusing on individual staff members to testify about what they saw and heard during this entire period. Notably, Mueller's staff has requested information from former White House press secretary Sean Spicer about his public comments pertaining to Comey's firing.

That request has in turn led to the revelation that Spicer has kept copious notes going all the way back to the Republican convention, the Trump campaign, the transition and into the administration. Those will undoubtedly be of great interest to the special counsel and possibly the congressional committees. When asked about these notebooks, Spicer told his old friend Mike Allen of Axios to stop texting and calling him or he'd "call the proper authorities." As the Mueller investigation starts to close in on the White House, things are getting tense in Trump world.

But for all that intrigue, it wasn't the biggest Russia investigation story of the week. Since he was the man who ran what was known as "The Torturer's Lobby" in Washington for many years, it's only fitting that Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is slowly roasting over a very hot spit. This week CNN confirmed that Manafort had been under a FISA surveillance warrant by American intelligence services from 2014 through 2016 under suspicion of ... something. The warrant wasn't in effect during the period Manafort worked for Trump's campaign, but the government reportedly began to track his communications once again from the fall of 2016 through at least the spring of this year.

Manafort has been involved with a lot of shady characters over the years (and I do mean a lot), so it's difficult to know specifically why he was a surveillance target. But the Washington Post reports that among the documents Manafort turned over to the congressional committees are emails he sent to an employee named Konstantin Kilimnik,who allegedly has ties to Russian intelligence. In those emails, Manafort appears to be offering to set up meetings between Trump and a notorious Russian oligarch namedOleg Deripaska, who has previously been denied entry into the U.S. because of ties to organized crime.

These emails seem to be written in a sort of code to obscure Deripaska's identity, but nobody has had much trouble figuring it out. At one point Manafort wonders if arranging this meeting will make him "whole." Manafort's spokesman said that he was just trying to collect some money owed to him, but since Deripaska had filed suit against Manafort in 2014 for $17 million, it might make more sense to conclude that Manafort was offering to trade contact with Trump for a relief of his debt, rather than the other way around.

This raises the the question once again as to why in the world Manafort was supposedly working for a billionaire candidate for free. It's not as if Manafort was a longtime Trump friend or a true believer in Trump's ideology, whatever that is. He's a hired gun and hired guns don't work for nothing. He is not the type of guy who doesn't get paid.

Natasha Bertrand at Business Insider put together a narrative of Manafort's tenure with the Trump campaign that's very useful in drawing the bigger picture. The bottom line is that it is starting to look very much as if Manafort was working for someone other than Donald Trump.

What we don't know is what other people on the campaign knew, including Trump himself. To this day he can't bring himself to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin. His irrational attempts to shut down the investigation do not suggest the behavior of a man with nothing to hide.

Manafort left his job as campaign chair in August 2016, but continued to be involved. He made one key decision before his official departure: He made sure that Trumpchose Mike Pence as his running mate. When Pence took over the presidential transition team after Chris Christie was let go, according to the Daily Beast, Manafort came back in the tent, helping to choose cabinet members and speaking with Trump and Pence on a regular basis. He even advised the incoming administration on how to handle the Russia investigation.

So Manafort, who had resigned after a wave of reports detailing his shady relationships with Russia-aligned Ukranian politicians, was up to his neck in the Trump transition. During the same period when Jared Kushner was meeting with Russian bankers and talking to the Russian ambassador about back channels at the Russian embassy, and Mike Flynn was on the horn promising to lift the Russia sanctions. Nobody remembered to put any of these meetings on their applications for security clearance.

It's not clear whether Trump has stayed in contact with Manafort since he became president. I'm sure his lawyers go to bed every night praying that he didn't.

digby

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/rachel-maddow-traces-russia-collusion-scandal-back-republican-national-convention

new report from the *Daily Beast* sheds more light on how Russian intelligence operatives used Facebook to organize support for Donald Trump’s candidacy during the 2016 presidential election.

According to the report, a Russian-sponsored Facebook group called “Being Patriotic” helped organize and promote multiple Trump rallies and events throughout the election campaign, including a pro-Trump “flash mob” in Florida that was promoted by a local Trump campaign chairman, who posted photos from the event on his Facebook page.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” said the Facebook event page for the events. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”

The “flash mobs” weren’t the only events that the Being Patriotic group organizer, either. The Daily Beast also found that “events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.”

At its peak, Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers on Facebook. It was shut down last month, shortly before Facebook publicly disclosed that it had received cash from Russian groups for political ads during the 2016 election.

Brad Reed

ref

http://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-appear-to-use-facebook-to-push-pro-trump-flash-mobs-in-florida

no link img

http://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-appear-to-use-facebook-to-push-pro-trump-flash-mobs-in-florida

xclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities

‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life.

BEN COLLINS

GIDEON RESNICK

KEVIN POULSEN

SPENCER ACKERMAN

09.20.17 11:39 AM ET

Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.

The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.

The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”

The Florida flash mob was one of at least four pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations conceived and organized over a Facebook page called “Being Patriotic,” and a related Twitter account called “march_for_trump.” (The Daily Beast identified the accounts in a software-assisted review of politically themed social-media profiles.)

Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers and the strongest activist bent of any of the suspected Russian Facebook election pages that have so far emerged. Events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.

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The Being Patriotic Facebook page was closed in August 2017—right when Facebook purged accounts secretly operated by a notorious St. Petersburg troll factory called Internet Research Agency. According to a public report by U.S. intelligence agencies (PDF), Internet Research Agency is financed by “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.” Being Patriotic’s posts included scores of pro-Trump or anti-Clinton memes framed and watermarked in the same style as those found on the Heart of Texas and Secured Borders Facebook pages previously identified as Russian operations.

The Being Patriotic Twitter account was suspended at around the same time.

A Facebook spokesman told The Daily Beast the company was “not able to confirm any of the details here,” in response to a question about the Russian origin of Being Patriotic, but did not challenge The Daily Beast’s reporting.

On Sept. 6, Facebook acknowledged for the first time that inauthentic accounts from 2015 to 2017 promoted what the company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, characterized as “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” But Stamos said that most of the fraudulent activity it found—some 3,000 ads connected to 470 now-shuttered accounts linked to Russian troll farms—“didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting, or a particular candidate.”

After The Daily Beast found known Russian accounts that used Facebook’s Events tool to promote rallies inside the United States, the company said that it was not well positioned to determine “if something like coordination occurred” between the Trump campaign and Russia—something investigators and security researchers doubt because of the social network’s massive trove of information on its customers.

But the discovery of the Being Patriotic rallies suggests that the fraudulent activity on Facebook did indeed involve messaging on behalf of Trump, did prompt at least some Americans to rally on Trump’s behalf, and did result in the Trump campaign volunteers subsequently sharing material from those events.

The pro-Trump events represent “the next level” of suspected Russian influence operations, said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has testified about those operations to a Senate committee investigating them.

“This would be a direct effort that they attempted that’s more than online promotion,” Watts told The Daily Beast. “‘Let’s organize and try to get people to move to events in a proactive way around a candidate. Again, if it traces back to Russia, you can’t deny that’s foreign influence in an election.”

Railing Against #BLM, Too

The extent of Being Patriotic’s impact is not clear. In June of last year, for example, the Being Patriotic Facebook page asked participants to “gather in front of Trump Tower, N.Y.” The event received call-outs on Facebook and Twitter, and 138 people marked themselves as “attending” on Facebook. Over 400 marked themselves as interested.

March_For_Trump specifically reached out to Nick Toma, a local news anchor in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for coverage of a “Miners for Trump” rally it promoted last October, only a month before the election.

“@NickTomaWBRE Hi, Nick! We're holding a ‘Miners for Trump’ rally tomorrow. If you're interested in covering it, please let us know,” March_for_Trump wrote on October 1st.

When Toma was emailed the link to the tweet, he told The Daily Beast: “Don’t recall ever seeing it before.”

Facebook has turned over some of the illicit ads to special prosecutor Robert Mueller after a federal judge issued a search warrant for the material, according to CNN. Facebook also showed congressional investigators that material but did not leave it with them. Legislators investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 election have expressed frustration over what they describe as insufficient disclosures to Congress, and have indicated that they will seek public testimony from Facebook and other social-media companies.

Watts, the former FBI agent and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted that “plausible deniability is built into any Russian active-measures strategy,” such as using troll farms in St. Petersburg or Macedonia to conceal influence campaigns. But compelling unsuspecting Americans to gather in the streets on behalf of Trump shows the reach and efficacy of those efforts.

The page earned such a large following, a known Macedonian fake news distributor, Nikola Tanevski, purchased BeingPatriotic.com this year, but the page is currently dormant. Tanevski runs popular, pro-Trump fake news factories USATwentyFour.com and TheAmericanBacon.com. Attempts to reach Tanevski did not receive a response.

The layers of deception went beyond Facebook posts and manufactured rallies. When it wasn’t organizing events, Being Patriotic encouraged violence against minorities in incendiary posts. “Arrest and shoot every sh*thead taking part in burning our flag! #BLM vs #USA,” Being Patriotic’s Twitter account posted in April 2016, using the hashtag for the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

The account also advertised a toll-free “Being Patriotic Hotline” to report instances of voter fraud on Election Day.

“Detected a voter fraud? Tell us about it! Call 888-486-8102 or take photo/video and send it to us,” the account wrote on Nov. 8. Being Patriotic’s sister account, @March_for_Trump, plugged the same phone number, as well as a hotline for the “Trump Lawyer Team.” The number is now disconnected.

‘Broward’s Most Famous Trump Fan’

When asked for comment, the White House referred The Daily Beast to the Trump campaign, which, in turn, did not respond to emailed questions. But Susie Wiles, who served as Trump’s campaign manager in Florida, told The Daily Beast that the Broward County portion of the flash mob “was not an official campaign event.”

That’s despite the fact that the event was promoted on “Official Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Facebook Page for Broward County, Florida.” Photos and videos of the demonstration were posted there afterward.

When emailed the link to the Facebook posting, Wiles told The Daily Beast: “There are groups such as this across the state—and maybe other places, too. Groups of people get together and establish a presence such as this but it is unaffiliated with the campaign, per se. The photos ring no bells with me.”

Wiles also said that the Trump campaign’s purported Broward County Facebook page, which markets itself as being “official,” was not set up by the campaign.

“The Donald Trump campaign did not set these Facebook pages up,” she told The Daily Beast. “Rather, supporters (like the lady registered as the contact) set them up to support the campaign and subsequently the president.”

The “lady” registered as the contact is Dolly Trevino Rump, the Trump campaign’s chairwoman for Broward County who, until this April, was also the secretary of the local Republican Party. The Miami Herald described her as “perhaps Broward’s most famous Donald Trump fan.” Rump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. Neither did the chairman of the Broward County Republican Party.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Dolly Trevino Rump @dollytrump

Huge, enthusiastic crowd greeted the Trump RV at Wings Plus in Coral Springs Fl

5:29 AM - Sep 1, 2016

The Being Patriotic event listings for its Florida flashmobs included the names and phone numbers of people listed as local volunteer coordinators. When contacted by The Daily Beast, two of those coordinators vaguely recalled the events taking place, but not much else.

Betty Triguera, who was listed as a coordinator for a gathering in Sarasota, Florida, told The Daily Beast that she recalled but didn’t attend the event.

“We got the information from it on Twitter but I didn’t go,” Triguera said unable to remember other details.

Jim Frische, who was listed as a coordinator for an event in Clearwater, Florida, told The Daily Beast that he was called about organizing an event and put one together.

He said he was unsure if it was organized by the campaign.

“I don’t recall the group’s name,” Frische said. “I know somebody called and said would you organize something so I put together a group. “I remember doing it and I think we had a dozen or so people out on the street corner. I remember afterward hearing it had happened all over the state."

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/7/headlines/facebook_says_russian_troll_farm_bought_ads_to_polarize_us_electorate

On Capitol Hill, representatives of Facebook told lawmakers Wednesday the company unwittingly sold $100,000 worth of advertisements to a Russian company that aimed to polarize the U.S. electorate on issues of gun rights, immigration, LGBTQ rights and racism. The company was described as a Russian "troll farm" with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda. Democratic Congressmember Adam Schiff cited the move as evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

LAT

House Intelligence Committee issued seven subpoenas Wednesday, ramping up its investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and into whether names of President Trump’s associates were improperly revealed in classified intelligence reports.

Subpoenas went to Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and to the president’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen. The Senate Intelligence Committee and a federal grand jury in Virginia also have issued subpoenas for Flynn’s business records.

In a statement, the House committee said it had issued subpoenas seeking “testimony, personal documents and business records” from Flynn and Cohen. It also approved subpoenas for the Flynn Intel Group LLC and for Michael D. Cohen & Associates PC.

“We hope and expect that anyone called to testify or provide documents will comply with that request, so that we may gain all the information within the scope of our investigation. We will continue to pursue this investigation wherever the facts may lead,” Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas), the committee chairman, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), the ranking member, said in a statement.

The investigative moves come as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, has cleared ousted FBI Director James B. Comey to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his contacts with the president, according to a Comey associate....

factcheck farley march 28

Rep. Adam Schiff laid out a series of “coincidences” to build a circumstantial case that President Trump’s campaign associates may have colluded with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign. But one of his “coincidences” is not an established fact.

“Is it a coincidence that Roger Stone predicted that [Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman] John Podesta would be a victim of a Russian hack and have his private emails published, and did so even before Mr. Podesta himself was fully aware that his private emails would be exposed?” Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said in his opening statement at a March 20 hearing.

There is nothing in the public record so far that proves Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump associate, predicted the Podesta email hack.

Rather, Schiff is making an assumption, based on connecting two events: a tweet that Stone sent out on Aug. 21 saying that it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel,” and the release of Podesta’s emails by WikiLeaks two months later.

On ABC’s “This Week” on March 26, Stone denied that he predicted Podesta’s emails would be hacked, adding — correctly — that his tweet never “made any reference to John Podesta’s email.” Stone said his tweet referred to Podesta’s business dealings with Russia, and the expectation that that would become a news story.

Schiff’s Case

On March 20, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing at which FBI Director James Comey took the unusual step of publicly confirming that the FBI investigation of Russian influence into the presidential campaign “includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

At the start of the hearing, Schiff, the committee’s ranking Democrat, laid out what he later called “circumstantial evidence of coordination,” and highlighted the need for a full investigation into collusion between the Russians and people connected to the Trump campaign.

Stone featured prominently in Schiff’s list of “coincidental” events — including the allegation that Stone knew in advance that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would release Podesta’s hacked emails to damage Democratic presidential nominee Clinton.

Schiff, March 20: On August 8th, Roger Stone, a longtime Trump political advisor and self-proclaimed political dirty trickster, boasts in his speech that he has communicated with Assange and that more documents would be coming, including an October surprise. In the middle of August, he also communicates with the Russian cut out Guccifer 2.0 and authors a Breitbart piece denying Guccifer’s links to Russian intelligence.

Then later, in August, Stone does something truly remarkable when he predicts that John Podesta’s personal emails will soon be published. “Trust me,” he says, “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. #crookedHillary.” In the weeks that follow, Stone shows remarkable prescience. “I have total confidence that WikiLeaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon,” he says, #LockHerUp.” “Payload coming,” he predicts and two days later it does.

WikiLeaks releases its first batch of Podesta emails. The release of John Podesta’s emails would then continue on a daily basis, up until the election. On Election Day in November, Donald Trump wins. …

Is it a coincidence that Roger Stone predicted that John Podesta would be a victim of a Russian hack and have his private emails published and did so even before Mr. Podesta himself was fully aware that his private emails would be exposed?

Schiff concluded that while it is possible the events he listed were “unhappy coincidence,” it “is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated and that the Russians use the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet. And we owe it to the country to find out.”

Whether some of the events highlighted by Schiff amount to anything may be left to the FBI and congressional investigators to determine. But on the issue of Stone predicting the hack of Podesta’s emails, Schiff makes a factual leap — one not established in publicly shared evidence.

A Timeline

Stone, a longtime political operative who says he has no problem being called “a dirty trickster” with “sharp elbows,” was employed by the Trump campaign for several months early in the presidential campaign. Stone parted ways with the campaign in August 2015 — Trump said he fired him; Stone said he resigned because he felt he could more effectively help Trump’s cause outside the campaign, and that he remained in regular contact with Trump. ... Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. Schiff notes that Stone communicated with both Guccifer 2.0 and Assange (both of whom were deemed to have acted as proxies for Russian intelligence to release emails damaging to the Clinton campaign, according to a declassified intelligence community assessment released on Jan. 6).

Stone did communicate with Guccifer 2.0 in 2016 in a series of Twitter messages between Aug. 14 and Sept. 9 that Stone says he has since published in their entirety. In a lengthy interview with Stone published by *Politico* on March 27, Stone said that after he posted his Breitbart article, he learned that Guccifer 2.0 — who he said he does not believe to be a Russian agent — was banned from Twitter, and then was reinstated. Stone said he reached out to give Guccifer a social media “high-five,” expressing his support for Guccifer’s reinstatement “because I’m against censorship.”

The rest of the messages, Stone says, are pretty innocuous. In one, Guccifer 2.0 writes, “please tell me if I can help u anyhow.” But there is no record that Stone replied to that message. Twice, Stone asks Guccifer 2.0 to retweet his articles, and in one, Guccifer makes a benign comment about an article on election strategy, which Stone replies is “Pretty Standard.”

Stone also revealed during a speech to the Southwest Broward Republican Organization on Aug. 8 that he had “communicated with Assange.”

“I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be,” Stone said.

Stone later clarified that he never spoke directly with Assange, but that the two have a mutual journalist friend — or what Stone referred to in a tea party speech as a “back-channel intermediary” — who told him in August that Assange “has the mother lode on Hillary [Clinton]” and that those emails would be released in October.

Stone said the information he received was no more specific than that, but enough to prompt him to make repeated statements and social media messages predicting upcoming bombshells related to Clinton. Stone said he also speculated that the hacked emails were related to the Clinton Foundation.

Stone says his Aug. 21 tweet about Podesta — that it would soon be Podesta’s “time in the barrel” — had nothing to do with hacked emails, though. Two days prior, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, quit the campaign amid media reports about prior business dealings with Russia-aligned leaders in Ukraine.

Stone said he was aware that Podesta also had business ties to Russia, and that journalists were beginning to look into those. That’s what prompted the tweet, he said.

Indeed, earlier that year, media accounts based on the so-called Panama Papers reported that Podesta’s company, the Podesta Group, had been hired to lobby on behalf of one of Russia’s biggest financial institutions. And in October, the Wall Street Journalpublished an opinion piece on business ties between Podesta and a Russia-backed investment firm.

In an Oct. 19 story for Breitbart, Stone said Podesta’s business ties to Russia were the motivation for the tweet.

Stone, Oct. 19, Breitbart: This because of a tweet I posted in August at the time my boyhood friend and colleague Paul Manafort was under attack for his perfectly legal work in Ukraine for a democratic political party. I predicted that Podesta’s business dealings would be exposed. I didn’t hear it from WikiLeaks, although Julian Assange and I share a common friend. I reported the story on my website.

So let’s be clear. I had no advance notice of WikiLeaks’ hacking of Podesta’s e-mails.

“There is no foreshadowing of Podesta’s email,” Stone said in his interview with Politico. “That’s speculation. It’s conjecture.” Stone said any claim that he “orchestrated or strategized or knew the scope of what they [WikiLeaks] had and the scope of what they intended to release is false.”

Stone has volunteered to testify before the House intelligence committee, and he says he’d like it to be in public.

A spokesperson for Schiff emailed us this statement: “During his opening statement, Ranking Member Schiff laid out the public record of Mr. Stone’s statements, including his tweeted prediction regarding Podesta, his direct communications and defense of Guccifer 2.0, and his claims to be in contact with Julian Assange, either directly or through an intermediary. Along with a host of other issues of concern, Mr. Schiff stated that these matters could be completely coincidental – or they may not – but they do bear examination in any thorough investigation; in the context of the Russian Active Measures campaign during the election, these are questions that must be answered. At an appropriate time, the Committee will call Mr. Stone to testify, and Mr. Stone can answer these questions and others based on both public reporting and any other pertinent evidence.”

Schiff is free to question what Stone meant by the tweet. But in the intelligence hearing, Schiff stated as a matter of fact that Stone predicted the release of Podesta’s hacked emails, and questioned whether Stone’s prediction was a coincidence or evidence of collusion with Russia. More information may emerge as a result of FBI and congressional investigations, but based on what is currently in the public domain, it’s not an established fact that Stone knew in advance that Podesta’s emails were hacked and would be published in October.

Share The Facts

Adam Schiff

Democratic Congressman

"Roger Stone predicted that John Podesta would be a victim of a Russian hack and have his private emails published and did so even before Mr. Podesta himself was fully aware that his private emails would be exposed."

House intelligence committee hearing – Monday, March 20, 2017

Trump’s campaign was working in parallel with Russian anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda efforts, although the specific nature of their cooperation has yet to emerge, according to new analyses connecting the dots between Russia’s theft of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails and Trump campaign social media messaging.

As congressional investigators and journalists compare timelines of anti-Clinton social messaging on FaceBook and Twitter in October 2016 with statements by officials high up in Trump’s campaign and some family members, it's becoming clear that the micro-targeting of Clinton voters in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin was certainly done by the Trump campaign—and also possibly done by Russia.

The big unanswered question is just how closely coordinated those operations were.

Will Bunch, writing for PhillyNews.com, pulled this together in a piece that ran Sunday, July 16, declaring that the old journalist maxim of “follow the money” has turned into “follow the data” under Trump. He writes, “The campaign’s data effort was overseen by President Trump’s son-in-law and arguably his closest adviser, Jared Kushner.” Bunch points to investigative reporting by the McClatchy News Service published last week. McClatchy wrote:

“Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation—overseen by Jared Kushner—helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016. Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states—areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.”

Bunch reminds his readers that there have been a handful of investigative reports that probed exactly what the Trump campaign was doing to target Clinton’s supporters on social media—the new go-to political advertising media for 2016.What was different about last year’s political messaging, however, was the proliferation of fake news: stories, memes, attacks and websites all intentionally designed to discourage Clinton voters via Facebook and Twitter. These put a new twist on an old political campaign tactic: slinging mud via negative ads.

As Bloomberg.com’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg reported in late October 2016, Trump’s social media operation targeted Clinton supporters on FaceBook and Twitter to discourage them from voting for the former secretary of state. As FaceBook revealed in an April 2017 report on how its platform had been abused by propagandists during the election, “Social media accounts and pages were created to amplify news accounts of and direct people to the stolen data. From there, organic proliferation of the messaging and data through authentic peer groups and networks was inevitable.”

Thus, Donald Trump’s campaign bombarded swing-state Democrats with political ads/fake news, some of which was content based on stolen information gained by Russian hacks of the DNC and Clinton campaign.

Bunch cites a May report by Kate Brannen at JustSecurity.org, where in a podcast, Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the National Security Council, asked Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, the Intelligence Committee vice-chair, about one-half of this scenario: how Russia used social media to attack the Clinton supporters. Here’s the podcast excerpt:

Vietor: One thing I’ve heard about the focus of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Russian hacking is that the sophistication and the preciseness of the targeting is something that’s being looked at closely. Specifically that Russian bots were targeting Clinton voters at the precinct level to suppress their vote with fake news, and that that level of expertise would require data from a targeting firm, like Cambridge Analytica, for example. Is that true? And can you tell us anything about the nature of these Russian hacks that I’m hearing about?

Warner:When you see some of the explanation and some of the fact that it appears that, for example, women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Democrats were too brain-dead to realize those states were even in play.… It was interesting that those states seem to be targeted where the bots — where they could create a lot of these fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, could in fact overwhelm the targeted search engines that would end up saying on your news feed, you suddenly got stuff that “Hillary Clinton’s sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department.” I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware ofreally raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry. How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?

Vietor: I wonder if they just asked Jared [Kushner] like Trump does with all of his questions. We’ll find out.

Warner: We’ll find out. More to come on that.

Next, JustSecurity.org’s report goes to the data-mining operation the Trump campaign used, Cambridge Analytica, which was underwritten by the reclusive billionaire investor Robert Mercer. His daughter, Rebekah, was instrumental in the Trump campaign’s makeover in mid-summer 2016. Brannen then cites Paul Wood's take, a BBC reporter “who’s been ahead of the pack on the Russia-Trump investigation.”

Last March, Wood wrote, “Firstly, hackers steal damaging emails from senior Democrats. Secondly, the stories based on this hacked information appear on Twitter and Facebook, posted by thousands of automated 'bots,' then on Russia’s English-language outlets, RT and Sputnik, then right-wing U.S. ‘news’ sites such as Infowars and Breitbart, then Fox and the mainstream media.”

You are correct if you think this sounds like Trump’s campaign and the Russians were running in similar circles to attack the Clinton campaign. That is essentially what Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian of early-20th-century authoritarian regimes, said in a mid-June. Snyder explained that Russia didn’t need to hack America’s voting machinery to mess with voters or the counts, even though they were probing those computer database systems. That’s because the Russians found a much more effective way to influence the election: bombard voters on social media.

“The main element of the Russian intervention in the election had to do with gathering political data about tens of millions of Americans, and then using Facebook and other platforms to target fake news to people who were regarded as susceptible, especially in the last weeks before the election, which probably determined the outcome in critical states that were targeted,” Snyder said. “This isn’t to say that there aren’t other reasons, and in my view, good reasons, why people could vote for Mr. Trump. It isn’t to say that Hillary Clinton ran a wonderful campaign either. It’s just to say that in a very close election, that probably made the difference.”

The question that is emerging now is not whether Trump and the Russians were targeting swing-state Democrats on social media in 2016, but whether they were operating in parallel or coordinating closely. Brad Parscale, the digital director of the Trump campaign, accepted an invitation on Friday to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“I am unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operation of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign,” he said in a statement posted on Twitter, in which he said the campaign worked with the Republican National Committee, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Cambridge Analytica.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dont-look-now-investigators-are-exploring-if-russia-colluded-pro-trump-sites

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories..Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.

It is a wide-ranging investigation that is examining the unusually large number of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign, as well as the possibility that the Kremlin has personal or financial leverage over members in the Trump camp, including the president himself according to his own remarks on Twitter.

The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.

A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.

Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.

Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.

Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found that was a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.

“This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,” Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?”

Mattes believes that the aim of the campaign was to damage Clinton, who Vladimir Putin saw as his arch foe, and then, after the primaries were over, to minimise the number of Sanders voters who switched their support to Clinton in the face-off against Trump.

He was particularly struck by a report on 10 August that formed part of the dossier on the Russian interference campaign compiled by the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, which quoted an unnamed Trump associate discussing a Russian-driven campaign to alienate Sanders supporters from Clinton.

“He was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn’t articulate until September,” he said. Because the Sanders online campaign was so open, democratic and relatively unregulated, Mattes says he now realises: “We basically set ourselves up to be victims of an international cyberwarfare campaign. We were pawns in this but very effective pawns.”

Clint Watts, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert, said that a Russia-driven influence campaign also became apparent in the Republican primaries.

He told the Senate intelligence committee the campaign “may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed”.

He saw the same pattern that Mattes had observed, of seemingly independent operators across Europe suddenly starting to propagate similar messages consistent with messaging from Moscow.

“What you have to look at now is how were these sites financed and you have look at their ownership. How did they get the funds to get started?” said Watts, now a senior fellow at the Centre For Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.

He has also found a high degree of apparent coordination in the dissemination of fake news between official Russian propaganda outlets and “alt-right” sites in the US.

“They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,” he added. “And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”

The U.S. intelligence community has long since concluded Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and it was reported shortly after the 2016 presidential election that a GOP superPAC linked to Paul Ryan used illegally hacked material to attack Democratic House candidates. But a bombshell report published on Thursday confirms that Republican political operatives were working with the Russian government to hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats during the election — the first direct evidence of so-called collusion.

The Wall Street Journal reported that hacked information was posted on a blog run by Aaron Nevins, the political operative, and then passed along to top Trump adviser Roger Stone during the campaign. The Republican operative in Florida received a trove of Democratic documents from the allegedly Kremlin-linked hacker, Guccifer 2.0. For months, both Congress and the FBI have been scrutinizing evidence that associates of Trump may have colluded with Russia during the campaign.

Nevins confirmed to the Journal that he told hacker Guccifer 2.0 to “feel free to send any Florida based information” after learning that the hacker had tapped into Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) computers last summer. From the DCCC, Guccifer 2.0 released internal assessments of Democratic congressional candidates, known as “self-opposition research,” to GOP operatives using social media. Nevins told the Journal that, after receiving the stolen documents from the hacker, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.” The stolen DCCC documents also contained sensitive information on voters in key Florida districts, breaking down how many people were considered dependable Democratic voters, undecided Democrats, Republican voters and the like. Nevins made a war analogy, describing the data he received to Guccifer 2.0 as akin to a “map to where all the troops are deployed.”

After Nevins published some of the material on the blog HelloFLA.com, using his own pseudonym, Guccifer 2.0 sent a link of the information to close Trump associate Roger Stone — who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins, who set up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to transfer data, told the Journal. “If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”

Stone told the Journal that while he did receive a link to Nevins’s blog from Guccifer 2.0, he didn’t share the stolen data published on the blog with anyone.

In addition to receiving hacked information about Democratic races in Florida, Nevins also received internal details about congressional districts in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan, eventually used the material that was stolen by hackers in attack ads against several Democrats.

Anthony Bustamante, a Republican campaign consultant for Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), told the Journal that he used the stolen information to plan ad buys and better target a mailer effort: “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.”

Republicans ignored Democrats’ pleas not to use the hacked material for political gain.

After Guccifer 2.0 targeted the chair of the DCCC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Paul Ryan arguing that “the NRCC’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” and if the National Republican Campaign Committee continued using the materials, the GOP “will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.” Ryan never responded.

For his part, Trump has repeatedly denied any coordination with Russian officials. The Kremlin has also rejected any connection to Guccifer 2.0. But both the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence believe Guccifer 2.0 is tied to Russian military intelligence.

Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313108-declassified-report-putin-ordered-election-interference-to-help

Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump

BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 01/06/17 03:59 PM EST 16,308

Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a widespread influence campaign intended to help elect Donald Trump, the intelligence community said in a declassified report released Friday afternoon.

“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report reads.

“We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The bombshell document details the intelligence community's findings but provides little in the way of forensic evidence backing up its assessment, citing the need to protect sources and methods.

“While the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods,” the report reads.

The document is made up of publicly available information, painting a portrait of Moscow as making a shrewd decision to back a candidate it saw as friendlier to its interests.

According to the document, Putin “most likely” wanted to discredit Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, because “he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”

But the former KGB agent saw Trump as having “Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine” and approved of his stated policy to work with Russia.

Moscow also reportedly saw the election of Trump as “a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition” against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Officials note that Putin publicly contrasted the president-elect’s approach to Russia with Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric” — but the report offers no previously unknown information.

There is some level of minor disagreement among intelligence agencies as to the strength of its judgment that Russia intended to help Trump.

The CIA and FBI have high confidence in the judgment, while the National Security Agency has moderate confidence, the report acknowledges.

The report — devoid of a “smoking gun” — is unlikely to silence skeptics who are unconvinced that the intelligence community can prove Russia’s motivations.

Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the community's conclusions and has treated its assessment as an attack on the legitimacy of his presidency.

The president-elect has instead focused on the intelligence community's long-public assessment that no physical voting machines were impacted by the Russian campaign.

After receiving a briefing from senior intelligence officials earlier on Friday, Trump issued a statement claiming that the hacks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Prominent Republicans echoed the approach following the release of the report.

“We must also be clear that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or balloting process,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement.

“We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”

Russian intelligence did obtain access to multiple state and local electoral boards, according to the report, but the Department of Homeland Security assessed that none of the systems the hackers targeted or compromised were involved in vote tallying.

Democrats immediately pushed back on the assertion that the campaign had no impact on the election.

“It is one thing to say that there was no tampering with vote tallying — which is true — it is another thing to say that the daily dumping of documents disparaging to Secretary Clinton that was made possible by Russian cyber operations had no effect on the campaigns,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“Whether [Russia] had a decisive impact on the outcome will never be known and was certainly not the subject of the intelligence community's analysis, but that they were of great consequence is undeniable."

The Russian campaign involved more than just hacking. According to the report, it also included propaganda campaigns in the media and a “troll campaign” on social media.

Russian state-run outlets Sputnik and RT both amped up campaigns to delegitimize the Clinton campaign, including English-language videos like one headlined “Clinton and ISIS Funded with the Same Money,” and promoted the idea that WikiLeaks had an email that would “put Clinton in Prison.”

“In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems,” said the report, which describes Clinton’s health as a focal point of the campaign.

Russia’s “Internet Research Agency,” a paid army of social media “trolls,” also got in on the act. Accounts once devoted to supporting Russian annexation of the Ukraine flipped to support Trump.

According to officials and lawmakers who have seen both, the report is identical to the classified version of the document prepared for President Obama.

The so-called Gang of Eight — House and Senate leaders and the heads of the two Intelligence committees — reviewed the complete document earlier on Friday.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday morning lamented that more of the document would not be made public, perhaps hinting at frustration that the Obama administration hasn’t done more to silence doubters.

“I would hope that we could get more," she said Friday morning. "I know we have to respect sources and methods. But I think that even Congress has the right to know more than they want to disclose to Congress, beyond the Gang of Eight."

"So this will be interesting in terms of what the disclosure is, of this report," she added. "But suffice to say, it's stunning in its conclusions, and you'll see some of it." =

insert txt: no lnx see bak

If there was a Deep Throat in the Trump-Russia scandal, this is what he’d be telling today’s Woodwards and Bernsteins:..."Follow the data.

With all the drama over this week’s bombshell disclosures of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails and a previously unknown Trump Tower meeting between top campaign officials and a woman who’d been pitched to them as “a Russian government lawyer,” there was another investigative report that arguably could have equal or greater significance in the ongoing probes of wrongdoing in the 2016 campaign. It said probers are now taking a much closer look at possible cooperation between Russia ...http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.html..."The" campaign="campaign" s="s" data="data" effort="effort" was="was" overseen="overseen" by="by" president="President" trump="Trump" son-in-law="son-in-law" and="and" arguably="arguably" his="his" closest="closest" adviser="adviser" jared="Jared" kushner...http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html...Here’s what the McClatchy News Service reported Wednesday...Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016....Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries....<...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/12/the-investigation-goes-digital-did-someone-point-russia-to-specific-online-targets/

...The Washington Post also took a deep dive into the important of the “fake news” blitz in helping bring out Trump’s surprise victory in November....>In October of last year, Bloomberg News that the campaign’s digital arm, run by Brad Parscale, would target possible Hillary Clinton voters for an inverse pitch. The Trump campaign would not show them ads making the case for voting for Trump; instead, they showed videos that they hoped would dampen enthusiasm for Clinton — and get the voters to stay home....[A] young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts” — nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it....

http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushners-help-613612...

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia back in May questioned how the Russian fake-news-spreaders knew which voters to contact. He said: “When you see some of the explanation and some of the fact that it appears that, for example, women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play … It was interesting that those states seem to be targeted where the bots — where they could could create a lot of these fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, could in fact overwhelm the targeted search engines that would end up saying on your news feed, you suddenly got stuff that “Hillary Clinton’s sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department.”...It’s fascinating: Most of the media attention has focused on the emails that were hacked — i.e., stolen … a felony — from Democratic sources, allegedly by the Russians, and then leaked to help Trump’s campaign. The key points in the Trump Jr. emails bombshell were that 1) Russia wanted Trump to win the election and 2) Trump’s inner circle seemed eager to cooperate with them. And so if the Trump campaign somehow provided data to...http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.htm...Russia’s “fake news” content farms, that would suggest an even closer level of cooperation between the winning presidential campaign and an adversarial foreign power that wanted a new president to lift economic sanctions...

Here’s where it really gets interesting. The Trump campaign, including Kushner (who also took part in the Trump Tower confab with the Russian lawyer) worked closely with a data firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica" ...Cambridge Analytica — connected to Trump’s richest, most secretive and arguably most influential backer, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and his daughter Rebekah. That circle also includes another top Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, who was on the Cambridge Analytica board of directors, and Kellyanne Conway, who did consulting work for the Mercers before she connected with Trump...Much of this scenario was spelled out...https://www.justsecurity.org/41199/connecting-dots-political-microtargeting-russia-investigation-cambridge-analytica/...in an article that appeared on the website Just Security in May. After the election, Kushner bragged that micro-targeting was Trump’s secret weapon, and

https://YYY.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

A deeply reported investigative piece in the Guardian, also published in May, made two explosive claims about Cambridge Analytica’s work over the course of 2016 that go well beyond Kushner’s claims. The first was that a key part of the Mercers’ firm’s work was indeed to suppress the Democratic turnout last November....Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee....Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence....

Second, it claims that Cambridge Analytica also playeda critical role in the other 2016 vote that shocked the world: The successful Brexit campaign to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Both that result and Trump’s election achieved the key strategic goal of Russia: Destabilizing the Western alliance. That’s no proof of collusion, of course. But you can see why investigators are stepping up their probes. In the case of hacking, we know that the Trump campaign was seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and that dirt — courtesy, it is alleged, of Russian hackers — appeared just weeks later. In the case of data, we know that Jared Kushner wanted to target specific voters and the Russians set up an operation to create “fake news” content for exactly those readers. Either it’s the world’s greatest coincidence, or something darker was going on. This take by the Guardian’s writer Carole Cadwalladr is as dark as it gets:

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future. endit

...just three words — not even uttered in real life but in a Hollywood movie — that nevertheless came to define American politics over the last 40-plus years. “Follow the money.” That’s what the fictional portrayal of the whistleblower “Deep Throat” told Bob Woodward in the 1976 movie version of “All the President’s Men” was the key to tracing the real roots of the Watergate scandal — follow the flow of illegal campaign money into Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign…who it came from and where it was going. It turned out, of course, that the money from favor-seeking millionaires paid for illegal bugging, break-ins and other dirty tricks, and Nixon became the first and only president to resign in disgrace (so far). Despite that, the role of money in propelling political power in America grew only stronger.

Now it’s 2017 and things have changed. Money is still important, and more dark money flows into our politics than ever before. But that’s because money helps campaigns buy the real source of political power: Knowledge. And in the computer era, knowledge means data: Where to find your voters, how to reach them, what to tell them that will guarantee they turn out to vote for your candidate … or how to make the other side stay home.

If there was a Deep Throat in the Trump-Russia scandal, this is what he’d be telling today’s Woodwards and Bernsteins:

Follow the data. With all the drama over this week’s bombshell disclosures of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails and a previously unknown Trump Tower meeting between top campaign officials and a woman who’d been pitched to them as “a Russian government lawyer,” there was another investigative report that arguably could have equal or greater significance in the ongoing probes of wrongdoing in the 2016 campaign. It said probers are now taking a much closer look at possible cooperation between Russia — [:](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.htmlHere’s%20what%20the%20McClatchy%20News%20Service%20reported%20Wednesday)[bad code follows]

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.

The Washington Post also took a deep dive into the important of the “fake news” blitz in helping bring out Trump’s surprise victory in November.

In October of last year, Bloomberg News reported that the campaign’s digital arm, run by Brad Parscale, would target possible Hillary Clinton voters for an inverse pitch. The Trump campaign would not show them ads making the case for voting for Trump; instead, they showed videos that they hoped would dampen enthusiasm for Clinton — and get the voters to stay home.

[A] young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts” — nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.”

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia back in May questioned how the Russian fake-news-spreaders knew which voters to contact. He said: “When you see some of the explanation and some of the fact that it appears that, for example, women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play … It was interesting that those states seem to be targeted where the bots — where they could could create a lot of these fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, could in fact overwhelm the targeted search engines that would end up saying on your news feed, you suddenly got stuff that “Hillary Clinton’s sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department.”

It’s fascinating: Most of the media attention has focused on the emails that were hacked — i.e., stolen … a felony — from Democratic sources, allegedly by the Russians, and then leaked to help Trump’s campaign. The key points in the Trump Jr. emails bombshell were that 1) Russia wanted Trump to win the election and 2) Trump’s inner circle seemed eager to cooperate with them. And so if the Trump campaign somehow provided data to Russia’s “fake news” content farms, that would suggest an even closer level of cooperation between the winning presidential campaign and an adversarial foreign power that wanted a new president to lift economic sanctions.

Here’s where it really gets interesting. The Trump campaign, includingKushner (who also took part in the Trump Tower confab with the Russian lawyer) worked closely with a data firm — Cambridge Analytica — connected to Trump’s richest, most secretive and arguably most influential backer, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and his daughter Rebekah. That circle also includes another top Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, who was on the Cambridge Analytica board of directors, and Kellyanne Conway, who did consulting work for the Mercers before she connected with Trump.

Much of this scenario was spelled out :{in an article that appeared on the website Just Security in Ma:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{y:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:. After the election, Kushner bragged that micro-targeting was Trump’s secret weapon, and he specifically praised the Mercer-run outfit for Forbes:

This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

Second, it claims that Cambridge Analytica also played a critical role in the other 2016 vote that shocked the world: The successful Brexit campaign to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Both that result and Trump’s election achieved the key strategic goal of Russia: Destabilizing the Western alliance. That’s no proof of collusion, of course. But you can see why investigators are stepping up their probes. In the case of hacking, we know that the Trump campaign was seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and that dirt — courtesy, it is alleged, of Russian hackers — appeared just weeks later. In the case of data, we know that Jared Kushner wanted to target specific voters and the Russians set up an operation to create “fake news” content for exactly those readers. Either it’s the world’s greatest coincidence, or something darker was going on. This take by the Guardian’s writer Carole Cadwalladr is as dark as it gets:

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

To say it more simply: Follow the data.