GRU SVR bak
719 fail on www?
capt GRU719
see KGB
collusion
see meddling active measures
see ira
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russian-backed-organizations-amplifying-qanon-conspiracy-theories-researchers-s-idUSKBN25K136
reuters August 24, 2020
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Russian government-supported organizations are playing a small but increasing role amplifying conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns of interference in the November U.S. election.
Academics who study QAnon said there were no signs Russia had a hand in the early days of the movement, which launched in 2017 with anonymous web postings amplified by YouTube videos.
But as QAnon gained adherents and took on new topics - with President Donald Trump as the constant hero waging a misunderstood battle - social media accounts tied to a key Kremlin ally joined in.
In 2019, accounts removed by Twitter and suspected of being controlled by Russia's Internet Research Agency sent a high volume of tweets tagged with #QAnon and the movement slogan #WWG1WGA, short for Where We Go One, We Go All, said Melanie Smith, head of analysis at social media analysis firm Graphika. The IRA was indicted by Robert Mueller in his election interference prosecution.
More recently, Russian government-backed media RT.com and Sputnik have stepped up coverage of QAnon, which began with a false proclamation Hillary Clinton would be arrested for an undetermined reason and now includes theories about child trafficking by Hollywood elites, the novel coronavirus and more.
Alethea Group disinformation expert Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst, said RT, Sputnik and other Kremlin-backed media have been writing more about QAnon, using it to fit into their broader narrative of: "The U.S. is falling apart, look how much division there is."
After Twitter banned thousands of QAnon accounts last month, RT.com predicted the move would backfire by directing more attention to the cause, adding that "it gave QAnon followers the validation they craved."
Last week, it ran a similar article after Facebook removed about a third of QAnon groups and restricted the other two-thirds.
RT's story began: "Facebook has removed thousands of groups and pages related to the QAnon conspiracy after expanding its concept of ‘dangerous individuals’ to include those who merely ‘celebrate violent acts.’ Streisand effect, meet slippery slope."
The 27-year-old grew up with her grandmother who shared stories from 1944, when Umerova’s family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars, were deported to Central Asia by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
The Streisand effect refers to when singer Barbra Streisand sued to get photos of her Malibu, California, home removed from the internet, only to win them more viewers.
The articles have fallen short of full-throated support, and others have been critical. But they cast QAnon as channeling legitimate outrage.
QAnon followers have taken note and begun to share more content from the Russian outlets, according to Graphika.
In a report released late Monday, it said the QAnon accounts it tracked had posted material from 69 other websites more often than RT stories in 2018.
By earlier this year, RT was the 23rd most commonly shared site in the community. In the month ended Aug. 20, it had climbed to No. 12. here
"Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory," the report said. "Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far."
QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.
Russia is actively interfering with the campaign season in other ways, the government’s top counter-intelligence official said recently, including by disseminating false stories about Joe Biden in Ukraine. Democrats are pressing for the public release of more instances.
Researchers at Graphika, Stanford University and elsewhere stressed that QAnon for now remains a largely domestic phenomenon. Facebook took down two QAnon networks for coordinated artificial behavior, before its new content restrictions, and neither had Russian connections.
But tracking QAnon has become increasingly tough, Graphika’s Smith said. QAnon backers have moved heavily into other social media groups, helping to organize real-life protests against child trafficking last weekend and getting involved in a pro-police demonstration in Portland that degenerated into violence.
"It’s very difficult to understand what a QAnon account is, versus a Trump supporter’s account versus an anti-vaxxer,"
Smith said.
Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Tom Brown
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russia hackers amplified or created an amp/escalator?
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-qanon-cyber-idUKL1N2HD00Z
disputed see homegrown?
QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on Twitter, archives show
By Joseph Menn
Nov 2 (Reuters)- Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.
Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, reut.rs/2TFWoWc, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. bit.ly/2HTReUh
A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.
From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times.
The archives contain more than 4,000 accounts that Twitter suspended for spreading Russian government disinformation in 2018 and 2019 but preserved for researchers.
The trove shows that some of the Russian accounts tweeted about QAnon’s most important popularizer even before the anonymous figure known as Q emerged, then rewarded her with more promotion when she put videos about Q on YouTube.
Asked about support for QAnon, the Russian embassy in Washington said Moscow does not interfere in U.S. politics.
“Malicious activity in the information space contradicts the principles of Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations,” a spokesman said.
A current Twitter executive said Russian accounts are not driving the present iteration of QAnon, which has expanded to include baseless claims about COVID-19 and other issues.
The original posts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory appeared in late October 2017, purporting to be from a Trump insider with “Q” security clearance who said Hillary Clinton faced arrest and her allies were running a massive child-sex ring.
The fantasy was confined to a small piece of the internet for a few days until conservative video blogger Tracy Diaz, known online as TracyBeanz, began to post regular videos promoting it. She soon began amassing undisclosed donors and now has more than 10 million video views on YouTube.
A few Russian accounts had been retweeting Diaz as far back as April 2017, according to the archives of suspended accounts. After her first Q video on Nov. 3, the number of Russian tweets pushing Diaz’ handle surged to 40 monthly through the following spring, the archives show.
Diaz did not respond to an email seeking comment.
It remains unclear how much the Russians influenced Diaz before she hit it big. But former Twitter security staffers said a handful of accounts that tweeted to Diaz from mid-2017 illustrated the extreme difficulty of detecting covert influence.
Now suspended for undisclosed reasons or abandoned by their operators, these accounts claimed to be American but displayed unusual interest in Russian issues. The visible tweets between them and Diaz were first flagged to Reuters by open-source researcher Chris Scott.
One account called CrusadersPost retweeted obscure Russian officials and appeared to be the first account to use the term “Q Anon” on social media, on Nov. 2, according to people with access to all public tweets.
CrusadersPost had reached out to Diaz in April to wish her a happy birthday and offer to help her with a new project.
“YOU ROCK,” she replied. The account also encouraged Diaz to publicize MegaAnon, which preceded and resembled QAnon.
Another Diaz fan ran an account called SlicksTweetz, which the banned Russian accounts mentioned 871 times. The day of her debut Q video, Diaz publicly thanked SlicksTweetz for sharing it.
:{:{}:
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A week later, as she worked on new videos, she replied to him: “There are so many connections—that’s a good one I hadn’t seen yet :).” (Reporting by Joseph Menn. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Steve Orlofsky)
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omfg
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/disgraced-rhode-island-republican-illegally-sought-help-from-russian-intelligence-fec/
Rep. David Cicilline enjoyed a landslide reelection when he defeated Republican challenger H. Russell Taub by 29% in Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District. But that defeat was the least of Taub’s problems: Taub, in 2019, was sent to prison for defrauding donors and committing wire fraud. And now, the Federal Election Commission is saying that Taub illegally sought help from Russian government intelligence during his 2016 campaign.
The Providence Journal’s Alex Kuffner reports, “A few months before the November 2016 general election, Taub sent a direct message to a Twitter account known to be used by the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence agency, according to a recently released FEC filing. In the message to Guccifer 2.0, Taub asked for a list of Republican donors.”
Taub, Kuffner adds, “later received a dossier that included opposition research reports, polling data and other information about his incumbent Democratic opponent in the 1st Congressional District race.”
According to the FEC, Taub violated federal campaign law “by knowingly soliciting, accepting or receiving a prohibited in-kind foreign national contribution in the form of opposition research related to the candidate’s opponent.”
Taub, now 33, was 30 when, on July 24, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that he had been sentenced to three years in federal prison for defrauding donors — a crime he pled guilty to along with wire fraud.
Under federal campaign finance law, campaign donations must be used for campaigns, not personal expenses.But Taub admitted to using more than $1 million in campaign money for everything from strip clubs to clothes to cigars.
Taub was released from prison on January 13, according to Kuffner.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
alexh
Many European leaders, from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, were quick to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — and it isn't hard to see that Johnson, Merkel and Macron all believe that U.S. voters made the right choice. But one leader who has yet to congratulate Biden is Russian President Vladimir Putin. And writer Cathy Young, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, stresses that Russian media pundits have been tirelessly promoting the bogus conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud.
In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.
"So far, Putin is the only major national leader to have held back on congratulating Joe Biden on his victory," Young explains. "Meanwhile, the Russian state-run or state-friendly media have alternated mostly between open gloating over an American election in chaos and equally open sympathy for Trump."
According to Young, "On November 4, discussions of America's election drama on Russian airwaves eclipsed a patriotic holiday at home, Russian Unity Day, and the pro-Trump cheerleading grew more heavy-handed. That evening's edition of the political talk show 'Big Game' on TV-1, Russia's main federal channel, was almost entirely dominated by pro-Trump voices."
Young observes that "Big Game" host Andranik Migranyan, a staunch Putin supporter, told Russian viewers, "The majority of American voters want law and order, and today, alas, only Trump symbolizes the idea of law and order." Migranyan, according to Young, joined Trump in saying that Democratic governors and mayors in the U.S. are allowing rioters and looters to run amok — and Migranyan also made the offensive and racist comment that Democrats "get down on their knees and kiss the feet of Blacks."
Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline
— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0
Another Russian program that has been promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, according to Young, is "Evening With Vladimir Solovyov," which airs on Russia's Rossiya-1. Host Solovyov echoed the talking points of Trump supporters in the U.S., claiming that Republican observers were kept away from vote-counting facilities.
Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."
One of Solovyov's guests, pundit Sergei Stankevich, told him, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win — that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans. Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people."
Young observes, "The only anti-Trump voices in Putin's Russia came from the dissidents. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on Kremlin agents, congratulated Biden and (Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris on their victory in a 'free and fair election.'"
Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.
"For less discerning people in Russia and elsewhere," Young writes, "the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election will surely undermine not only America's moral authority, but that of her democratic institutions. And that's on the people who have spread or condoned these toxic fictions."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- The bombshell report on Trump and Russia is flying under the radar ... ›
- Russia used Trump's personal lawyer to feed misinformation to the ... ›
- Facebook confirms that Russia is at it again - Alternet.org ›
- Here's how elections are actually stolen in Russia - Alternet.org ›
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as in Fr Macron le pen hack then mix fake emails in tranche? 6 GRU indicted
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/hunter-biden-e-mail-story-has-all-the-marks-of-russian-involvement-intel-experts/
Supporters of President Donald Trump are hoping that e-mails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, will be the "October surprise" that derails the older Biden's presidential campaign. The New York Post, owned by Fox News' Rupert Murdoch, published that story after receiving an alleged copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — and more than 50 intelligence officials, according to Politico's Natasha Bertrand, have signed a letter saying that the story has the markings of a Kremlin propaganda operation.
Bertrand explains, "While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them 'deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case' and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand at work.'"
Intel experts who signed the letter range from Russ Travers, who served as acting director for the National Counterterrorism Center, to Rick Ledgett, former deputy director of the National Security Agency. Former Central Intelligence Agency directors or acting directors who signed the letter include John O. Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.
The letter reads, "If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election — and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
The intel experts also said, "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the e-mails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not — and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement… (But) there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement…. Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the intelligence community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here — but also, to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-to-not-be-a-useful-idiot-for-the-rights-smear-machine/
Trump is trying hard to recreate the perfect storm that landed him in the White House in 2016 despite being the most unpopular candidate in the modern polling era. That year, the Clinton campaign's hacked emails were dribbled out over the final six weeks of the race. There wasn't much to them, but internal campaign communications tend to be frank and are easily mined for scandalettes. Having established the storyline that Clinton was as corrupt as Trump, they provided a steady stream of stories with "emails reveal" in the headlines which served to reinforce the right's narrative.
We can expect a similar stream of stories of ostensible "smoking guns" stemming from Hunter Biden's emails (whether hacked or fabricated) to come our way in the final weeks of this race.And some people who want to see themselves as fair will inadvertently amplify the right's preferred narratives by assuming that there must be something there.
So it's very important to keep in mind that the "scandal" is supposed to be that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stave off an investigation into Burisma Holdings--the Ukrainian gas company whose Board Hunter sat on--in order to protect his son. It is supposed to be a story about conflict of interest--of the elder Biden using the office of the Vice Presidency to help his son.
There is not a shred of truth to those claims. The effort to get Shokin fired "was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," *The Washington Post*reported. Andaccording to CNN, a bipartisan "letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time."
Shokin was corrupt, and that was a problem. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy of Shokin's who resigned over his boss's habit of stymieing corruption probes, told*Bloombergthat Shokin was not investigating Burisma during the period in question. "There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against" the firm or its owner. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," Kasko said. And Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption crusader, told *The Washington Post that"Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation."
Without some impropriety on Joe Biden's part, Hunter Biden's business ventures aren't a story. He isn't running for office. Like many, if not most children of the powerful, the younger Biden leveraged both his family name and the connections he'd made at Yale to land various business deal and secure a cushy, high-paying position on a corporate board. Both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged that associating himself with a shady Ukrainian gas company--as opposed to, say, a reputable American or Western European firm--was an error of judgment, but it was neither illegal nor unethical. This isn't a meritocracy, and this is one way that wealth and power are reproduced from one generation to the next. It's distasteful and unfair, but that's a class issue, not a scandal. Hunter isn't running for office and his judgment, or lack thereof, isn't a matter of public concern.
Joe Biden spent years in the Senate, and year after year he ranked among the least wealthy members of that body. We know how he came into his wealth--mostly through a multi-million dollar book advance and speaking gigs after leaving office. Biden may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no evidence that he's corrupt.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/oldest-living-cia-agent-believes-russia-infiltrated-gop-long-before-trump-took-over/
raw
The oldest living CIA agent believes Russia sank its hooks into the Republican Party well before President Donald Trump emerged as a viable candidate.
Peter Sichel was one of the CIA's first agents at the start of the Cold War, and he sees evidence of Russia's spycraft against Trump and the GOP in the Senate Intelligence Committee, reported The Daily Beast.
"One great advantage the Soviets always had over us, is that they played the long game. We thought in terms of quarters, whereas they thought in terms of years or even decades," Sichel said. "They were opportunistic, willing to let matters gradually develop until the right political faction or right leader to support had emerged."
Senate investigators found the Kremlin sought to infiltrate the Republican Party long before Trump became its nominee as part of Russian president Vladimir Putin's effort to deny the White House to Hillary Clinton.
Putin had fostered right-wing political movements across Europe to gain influence there, and Trump's presidential campaign promoted many of the same nationalist themes, and Sichel found numerous instances where Trump campaign operatives opened themselves up to possible Russian blackmail.
"The KGB were absolute masters at it," Sichel said, "and they would use whatever they could get their hands on. A favorite was honey traps [or sexual entrapments], but bribes, favors, whatever they could find. And once they had their hooks into you, they owned you."
Paul Manafort stayed in close contact with Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik throughout the campaign, while Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn met with Russian intelligence operatives promising dirt against Clinton.
"The key thing is that all of them then lied about it to investigators, and that's where the potential blackmail comes in. Imagine if the FBI hadn't caught Flynn out, and he had remained in his post," Sichel said. "The Russians knew he lied — I'm sure they taped all their communications with him — so they would have had him over a barrel forever."
The 97-year-old Sichel said the president himself continued to compromise himself by lying about his own dealings with Russia.
"I know he doesn't see it this way, but by having all this stuff brought out in public, it removes the blackmail threat," Sichel said."The smartest thing Trump could have done when all this started to break was to just come out and say, 'Yes, it appears there was Russian involvement with my campaign, but that's over with now, I'm the president, so let's move on.' But he didn't do that, obviously. Perhaps there were reasons why he couldn't."
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https://www.wired.com/story/russia-hacker-groups-map/
9/19 andy g
OVER THE LAST half decade or so, Russia's state-sponsored hackers have distinguished themselves as the most active, aggressive, and disruptive teams of online aggressors in the world. They've meddled in elections, blacked out power grids, innovated devious new forms of espionage, hacked the Olympics, and unleashed the most destructive worm in history—a list that makes even China's cyberspies look like tame clerical workers by comparison. Now two cybersecurity firms have created a new visual taxonomy to organize all that digital chaos—and in doing so, perhaps helped crystallize who the distinct players are within the Kremlin's hacking forces.
Two Israeli companies, Check Point and Intezer, today released the results of a broad analysis of code that's been previously attributed to Russian state-sponsored hacking operations. The two firms pulled 2,500 samples from the malware database VirusTotal and used Intezer's automated tools to comb those specimens for code matches or similarities, filtering out false positives like reuse of open source components. The result is a kind of constellation chart for every known Russia state hacking group's tool kit, showing clusters that likely represent independent groups. "The information has previously been really scattered. Now for the first time we have a one-stop shop for Russian APTs," says Yaniv Balmas, Check Point's head of cyber research, using the acronym for "advanced persistent threat," an industry term for sophisticated state hackers. "You can look at this, and it’s all there."
[dynamic graf?]
map's largest clusters of connected nodes show tightly interlinked tools used by familiar Russian hacker groups—from the hackers known as Sandworm (aka Telebots or BlackEnergy), which first rose to notoriety with blackout attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, to the Turla spying team that impressed researchers with tricks like bouncing its command-and-control connections through unwitting satellites. (In some cases, it's worth nothing, different code samples are attributed to a group on the map based on reporting that's not related to code overlaps, such as shared infrastructure—though those links are captured in the map's key, not in its connected dots.)
The map also illustrates a few unexpected—or at least obscure—code connections between Russian hacking teams. It shows, for instance, that the Sandworm group behind BlackEnergy shared code in one instance with another group known as EnergeticBearor Dragonfly, named by Symantec in 2017 as the group responsible for penetrations of US power grid networks—though Check Point and Intezer admit that the matching code, first spotted by McAfee, may have come from a public source rather than actual collaboration.
A tool called X-Agent, used by the Fancy Bear hackers best known for attacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, shared some code with another spy group known as Potao, known for espionage operations against Ukraine and other former Soviet-bloc neighbors. More notable, the map shows that both BlackEnergy and the malware of a group known as Cozy Bear or APT29 used code that came from a credential-stealing tool called LdPinch.
That may come as a surprise, given that BlackEnergy has been pinned on the Russian military intelligence agency known as the **GRU whereas Cozy Bear has been linked to the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Those two agencies have been known to act independently and even as rivals—such as when they were both discoveredcarrying out separate intrusions into the DNC's network in 2016
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russians wd be stupid not to use Qanon?
720 srch: russia putin GRU qanon disinformation active measures
Search Results
Web results
Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06
The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...
Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon
==
red flag twit bitcoin grift hack 7/20 verifid users
Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06
The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...
Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/
[long]
...#democracyrip was both the hashtag and the plan. The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate. Events in 2016, of course, veered in the other direction. Yet the hashtag is worth pausing over for a moment, because, though it was never put to its intended use, it remains an apt title for a mission that is still unfolding.
Russia’s interference in the last presidential election is among the most closely studied phenomena in recent American history, having been examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, by investigators working for congressional committees, by teams within Facebook and Twitter, by seemingly every think tank with access to a printing press. It’s possible, however, to mistake a plot point—the manipulation of the 2016 election—for the full sweep of the narrative.
Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.
[From the April 2020 issue: George Packer on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions]
In the week that followed Donald Trump’s election, Russia used its fake accounts on social media to organize a rally in New York City supporting the president-elect—and another rally in New York decrying him. Hackers continued attempting to break into state voting systems; trolls continued to launch social-media campaigns intended to spark racial conflict. Through subsidiaries, the Russian government continued to funnel cash to viral-video channels with names like In the Now and ICYMI, which build audiences with ephemera (“Man Licks Store Shelves in Online Post”), then hit unsuspecting readers with arguments about Syria and the CIA. This winter, the Russians even secured airtime for their overt propaganda outlet Sputnik on three radio stations in Kansas, bringing the network’s drive-time depictions of American hypocrisy to the heartland....
The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020....
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PROPAGANDA BACKFIRE: The Kremlin's Conspiracy ...bylinetimes.com › 2020/06/02 › propaganda-backfire-t...
Jun 2, 2020 - By supporting theories aimed at destabilising the US during the Coronavirus pandemic, Kseniya Kirillova reports on how Putin has opened up ...
Russian troll accounts purged by Twitter pushed Qanon and ...www.nbcnews.com › tech › social-media › russian-troll...
Feb 2, 2019 - The accounts' tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Trump, almost 38000 times — the most of any hashtag.
Missing: GRU ?active ?measures
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-troll-accounts-purged-twitter-pushed-qanon-other-conspiracy-theories-n966091
no lnx pix
new batch of troll accounts identified by Twitter as having ties to Russia’s propaganda operation revealed an emphasis on promoting far-right conspiracy theories such as Qanon to Americans.
Twitter announced Thursday the removal of 418 accounts tied to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, the disinformation group whose employees were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller last February for attempted election interference.
The accounts’ tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Donald Trump, almost 38,000 times — the most of any hashtag. #ReleaseTheMemo, a social media campaign pushed by allies of the president last year that aimed to discredit some members of the FBI, was tweeted 37,583 times.
In all, the 400-some accounts tweeted more than 900,000 tweets.
At the time, close allies of Trump brushed off suggestions that #ReleaseTheMemo, which trended on Twitter, was boosted by Russian influence. "Russian trolls have nothing to do with releasing the memo. That was a vote of the intelligence committee,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said last February.
[Related
BUSINESS
Like the fringe conspiracy theory Qanon? There's plenty of merch for sale on Amazon]
Some now-purged users spammed Twitter with tweets repeating the hashtag “#ReleaseTheMemo.”
When removing the spam-style messages that included multiple hashtags, the second-most tweeted topic for the Russian troll accounts was #Qanon, a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Mueller and Trump are secretly working together to take down a global pedophile ring run by celebrities and Democratic politicians.
#GreatAwakening and #FollowTheWhiteRabbit, which are catchphrases for #Qanon followers, also featured prominently in the Russian trolls’ tweets.
Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Kennan Institute focusing on Russia and technology, told NBC News that Qanon’s often outlandish narratives about a secret global cabal fueled by the United States fits well with Russian propaganda’s larger narrative.
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“One of the Kremlin’s favorite tactics is to inspire confusion and doubt to sow distrust in government. Qanon certainly does that,” Jankowicz said.
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“Amplifying the conspiracy theory also makes it look like it has more supporters, distracting from more substantive issues in the online discourse.”
[Related
TECH
What is Qanon? A guide to the conspiracy theory taking hold among Trump supporters]
Qanon, a more elaborate offshoot of the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory, came to prominence when several Trump supporters showed up at the president’s rally in Tampa, Florida, this past August carrying “Q” signs and wearing T-shirts supporting the conspiracy.
In the last year, believers in the conspiracy have also been in armed standoffs with the police in Arizona, and one blocked the Hoover Dam demanding the “Release of the OIG Report,” a Qanon-based conspiracy theory loosely derived from the success of #ReleaseTheMemo.
All of the 30 most-used hashtags pushed by the suspected Russian troll accounts focused on either support for Trump, conspiracy theories that targeted his political opponents or a separate — but sometimes overlapping — trolling campaign that meant to demean Muslims.
The hashtags #IslamIsTheProblem, #StopImportingIslam and #BanShariaLaw were each tweeted more than 15,000 times by the 481 Russian troll accounts.
The accounts attempted to emulate Americans on both sides of the political aisle.
One account identified by Twitter as a Russian troll account, @QuartneyChante, posed as an African-American woman. One of her tweets received more than 66,000 retweets.
“Dear White People. It’s a privilege to learn about racism instead of experiencing it your whole life,” the tweet read.
The account was even featured in several news articles, including a Mashable story dubbed "Dear white women: Here's how to step up for women of color.”
Jankowicz said the widespread dissemination of the tweets is a good reminder not to trust everything you read on social media.
“That account was created fairly recently and gained a lot of traction quickly, it seems,” Jankowicz said. “It’s pretty sad, but unless accounts use a plausible name and personal photo on Twitter, I’d advise users against interacting with them.”
Ben Collins
Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
Image: Joe Murphy
Joe Murphy
Joe Murphy is a data editor at NBC News Digital.
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7/19 poulsen
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-election-hackers-are-backand-targeting-george-soros-and-his-open-society-foundations
Russian intelligence agency behind 2016’s election attacks is training its sights on billionaire financier George Soros, The Daily Beast has learned. The move comes hot on the heels of a surge in U.S.-focused hacking by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate with similarities to 2016 in targeting and methodology.
Laura Silber, chief communications officer for Soros’ Open Society Foundations, confirmed a hack attempt, but couldn’t identify the culprit or provide additional details over the weekend. “We were aware of an attack,” Silber told the Daily Beast.
last month Microsoft quietly seized a new batch of 10 deceptive domain names the company says were set up by the hackers known as Fancy Bear, the group intelligence officials and independent analysts have long attributed to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. Those web addresses imitate genuine domains used for Microsoft services like Sharepoint, an unmistakable sign that they were intended for use in phishing attacks, in which a victim is tricked into typing their password into a fake login page.
ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ
Kevin Poulsen
One domain targets a Singapore-based investment firm, and another references the Berlin anti-corruption organization Transparency International, which Russia has targeted before. Others are generic or ambiguous in their targeting. But one seized domain, soros-my-sharepoint[.]com, jumps out as a clear reference to Soros, a past GRU target from Russia’s 2016 election interference.
An additional four phishing domains registered in the same time frame appear to target Soros’ Open Society Foundations, said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the Arlington, Virginia-based cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect. Those domains haven’t been seized and ThreatConnect hasn’t found enough evidence to definitively link them to the Russian hackers, said Ehmke.
The Kremlin’s targeting of Soros and his organization carries echoes of 2016, when the GRU dumped 2,500 files stolen from the Open Society Foundations for the debut of “DC Leaks”, the fake leak site the spies created for their 2016 election interference campaign.
“SOROS INTERNAL FILES – BIG DATA”, the site announced at the time.
Some of the stolen files were reportedly altered to create the appearance that Soros was secretly financing Russian opposition candidates, making the leak politically useful to Vladmir Putin. More importantly, the Soros dump earned DC Leaks instant credibility in American right-wing circles, where the 88-year-old Hungarian-American philanthropist plays the role of villainous global puppet-master in countless conspiracy theories.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency—the so-called “troll farm, later indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller—pushed the same trope on its Facebook and Instagram feeds in the run-up to election day. One meme featured a close-up of Soros against a backdrop of anti-Trump picketers. “No lives matter for those who sponsoring [sic] anti Trump protests,” the caption read. Another imagined Soros confronting the late Senator John McCain. “Hey Johnny, I’m paying you a fortune. I don’t care how much cancer you have, get back to DC and backstab Trump.”
The Soros targeting comes in the wave of what one expert describes as a fresh wave of Fancy Bear attempts against political nonprofits in the U.S. that ran from last December to March or April of this year, using similar tactics to the mass phishing campaign that famously ensnared Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief in 2016.
“It’s a similar type of activity to what hit Podesta,” said Robert Johnston, the former Marine Corp captain who investigated the 2016 DNC breach, and now heads the financial cybersecurity firm Adlumin. “These were against political organizations and NGOs. The FBI has reached out to of bunch of them.”
HACK BACK
Kevin Poulsen
In 2016 Microsoft sued Fancy Bear in federal court in Virginia and won, unopposed, an injunction allowing the company to seize any web addresses registered by the GRU’s hackers that imitate a Microsoft product or service. The company has seized over 100 domains so far.
Experts caution that Russia’s hackers have always cast a wide net, and there’s no way to tell what their motives are in revisiting old haunts now. It may be pure intelligence gathering, or the opening salvo of a 2020 election interference campaign.
“We don't know whether they are ultimately looking to compromise targets for influence operations, internal intelligence uses, or both,” said Ehmke.
Either way, Russia likely views its 2016 efforts as a success, and is certain to try for an encore. “I think you should absolutely anticipate a very vocal Russian interference in the 2020 elections,” said Johnston.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-rudy-giuliani-became-the-shadow-secretary-of-state-with-shady-ties-sprawling-far-beyond-ukraine/
no lnx
How Rudy Giuliani became the shadow secretary of state — with shady ties sprawling far beyond Ukraine
President Donald J. Trump recognizes former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani prior to signing H.R. 1327; an act to permanently authorize the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Monday, July 29, 2019, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Written by Bob Dreyfuss / TomDispatch March 6, 2020
Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.
Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.
That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.
Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.
Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.
During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)
As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.
You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)
Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.
In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”
At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.
To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.
How to Become a Shadow Secretary of State
Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.
Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract inQatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.
Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)
Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”
At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government.
Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project.Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.
The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”
In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.
Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.
And Then There Was Ukraine
It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.
Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.
The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)
Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”
According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.
As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”
And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:
“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.
“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”
Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy chargesand, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”
Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss
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ransomeware
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/feds-reviewing-previously-unreported-cyber-attack-on-florida-elections-office/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/russia-is-still-listening-democrats-take-aim-at-trump-after-report-uncovers-potential-new-election-help-from-the-kremlin/
no lnx
‘Russia is still listening’: Democrats take aim at Trump after report uncovers potential new election help from the Kremlin
Written by Cody Fenwick January 14, 2020
A new report for the New York Times about a Russian hack of the Ukrainian oil company Burisma is giving many a disturbing sense of history repeating itself.
The company, which is at the center of the impeachment of President Donald Trump, was reportedly targeted by Russian military hackers. The Times explained:
…experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter worked on the board of Burisma while his father was in office and conducting diplomacy with Ukraine, which raised concerns about conflicts of interest and influence peddling. However, there’s been no credible allegations or evidence put forward to indicate that the Bidens were engaged in wrongdoing, and the vice president’s efforts to root our corruption in Ukraine may have even cut against the interests of his son’s company. Nevertheless, Trump and other Republicans have tried to turn the matter — which was entirely overlooked until Biden became a formidable 2020 contender — into a massive scandal for the Democratic frontrunner.
Now, it looks like Russia is helping in the effort. This is hardly a wild accusation, given the extensive evidence that Russia intervened in 2016 to get opposition research on Trump’s opponent and to otherwise manipulate the election.
Democrats are casting a critical eye at the Trump administration following the publication of the report, noting that Trump has done far too little to curb Russian election interference and has, in fact, encouraged it.
“We only learned of this hacking through the press,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is one member of the Gang of Eight that is traditionally kept in the loop on significant intelligence matters. “Congress must be briefed on what the administration knows about this attack and why the president doesn’t have a plan to protect our elections.”
It’s not clear how much the administration knows about the cyberattack, though the Times’ report does indicate that one “American security official” was a source for information about the operation.
“Russia is still listening, Russia is still attacking,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.
He was referencing Trump’s infamous proclamation during the 2016 campaign: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find [Hillary Clinton’s] 30,000 emails that are missing.” According to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian hackers made their first attempts that same day as Trump’s request to obtain Clinton’s personal emails.
So it seemed that Russia was listening then, and it seems like Russia is following Trump’s lead now by targeting Burisma, the company he is so personally interested in. And he’s made it clear that, if Russia or anyone else wanted to offer him dirt on an election opponent, he would welcome it.
“I think I’d take it,” he told ABC News in June when asked about whether he’d accept opposition research from foreign governments. “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening.” Though he equivocated, he suggested he might not inform the FBI if presented with such an offer, despite the obvious counterintelligence risks and potential for criminal activity.
“As far as I see it now, knowing that this president in the past, as Special Counsel Mueller said, invited, welcomed, and planned to benefit as a candidate from Russia’s help, if he does not condemn this, I and many other Americans will hold him as complicit in any attack on any candidate that seeks to benefit Donald Trump,” Swalwell told MSNBC.
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Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Russian-Inspired Accounts
ADAM RAWNSLEY,
CASEY MICHEL
https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts?ref=home
no lnx pix many
Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Violent, Russian-Inspired Accounts
HATEFEST
Neo-Confederates are posting murderous scenes and racist memes—when they’re not reusing material from Kremlin trolls. But Instagram says the accounts don’t violate its rules.
Adam Rawnsley
Casey Michel
Published Dec. 16, 2019 5:12AM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.
Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.
The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.
“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”
When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.
South United, a Russian Facebook and Instagram persona that featured in the IRA’s 2016 meddling campaign, took this theme and ran with it, plastering followers with all kinds of racist, bigoted appeals to the Confederacy.
During the 2016 election, South United was one of the “10 most active IRA-administered Facebook pages,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. It was also undoubtedly Russian. The ads that South United ran were paid for in rubles using a Russian payment processor, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited the page as the work of the IRA in a 2018 indictment of 13 IRA employees and officials.
Some of the images published by South United included racist memes of former President Obama dressed as a Nazi with the caption “Don’t support illegals, support own people.” One meme published by the IRA’s account showed a picture of Black Lives Matter protesters next to the question “Black lives or black thugs?” These memes can still be found on active Instagram accounts that pose as state chapters of the original South United page.
The accounts also published the same racist and neo-Confederate images originally published by Russian trolls, such as one with a Confederate flag middle finger bidding viewers to "Say hi to the Yanks” and another wondering, “How many likes can this battle flag get?” The IRA’s South United watermark can still be viewed on these posts.
It’s unclear when the IRA’s South United Facebook and Instagram accounts were first created, but Twitter users were reposting material from the accounts as early as November 2015. Facebook ad data shows that the IRA’s @South_United Instagram page started running ads that same month. By contrast, the earliest post from among the dozen American-run echo-chamber mimic accounts was in May 2016.
In August of that year, the operators of some of these state chapter Instagram accounts also promoted a Russian-organized pro-Trump rally. As The Daily Beast first reported, the IRA announced a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of Trump’s candidacy on a separate Facebook page it ran called “Being Patriotic” using an image of Hillary Clinton in a prison cell. Two of the state chapter Instagram accounts, @south_united_fl and @south_united_il, promoted the rally using the Hillary image taken from an IRA-run Facebook page.
The accounts still live on Instagram also share considerable overlap with the original Russian page in other ways. All of the accounts, for instance, claim to be state chapters of the original South United page, with names like “South United Iowa” and “South United Tennessee.” They all use a similar logo to the IRA Facebook account, and some posts even use memes with stilted phrases like “History is written By victor...” and “Can it be any simple?”—language reminiscent of the non-native English used in some IRA propaganda memes.
Some of the accounts on Instagram even claim to be directly related to the original Russian page. “South United Louisiana” says it’s “the South United page for the state of Louisiana,” while the “South United Georgia” page says it’s the “@south_united page made for the great people of Georgia.” (The latter was taken down at some point prior to The Daily Beast’s discovery, although the Louisiana page remains live.)
The parrot accounts used not just IRA memes but other inflammatory content from outside the South United network. The accounts reposted a variety of memes along the same lines of Southern political and cultural resentments, including pro-Confederacy, pro-gun, anti-Islam, and anti-Hillary Clinton content. In one particularly egregious example, the @south_united_florida account posted an image of four bodies with gunshot wounds to the heads and the words “King Barrak, Queen Michelle, Usurper Hillary, George Soros” above each corpse.
The Daily Beast made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the Instagram accounts still up but received no reply.
Nathan Gleicher—head of security policy at Facebook, which owns Instagram—said the accounts, for now, haven’t violated company policies aimed at helping users distinguish between “inauthentic behavior and authentic speech.” So they're staying online.
“When we take down influence operations, we take action based on the behavior we see on our platforms, not the content they post,” Gleicher told The Daily Beast. “We’ve seen these manipulation campaigns reuse content created by innocent people.Most of the content shared by coordinated manipulation campaigns isn’t provably false, and would in fact be acceptable political discourse if shared by real people. That’s why content alone is not a strong signal for identifying these operations.” To disinformation researchers at the DFRLab, the Instagram accounts that are still live show signs of being dedicated to amplifying IRA material.
DFRLab researchers found evidence that someone may have used engagement-for-hire services to interact with the American Instagram amplification accounts.A few accounts with defunct jewelry and crystal storefronts posted generic comments on the state chapter network accounts’ images.
Not that the IRA needed much help in amplifying its neo-Confederate content. The IRA’s South United Facebook page reached a height of 138,000 followers and harvested a total of 1.5 million likes and 2.3 million shares before it was shut down in 2017. Of the dozen American state chapter Instagram accounts, none have more than 1,000 followers and most have just a few dozen.
Facebook told The Daily Beast that the parrot network accounts appeared to be authentically American. "It appears that these accounts belong to real people in the United States whose content was likely mimicked by these operations we removed in the past," Gleicher told The Daily Beast.
DFRLab researchers found some evidence that the IRA’s neo-Confederate persona may have copied organic memes created by authentic American bigots outside the state chapter network. The IRA’s South United Instagram account published a picture of a Confederate stick person attacking an LGBT pride flag stick person in late 2016—a meme copied from an unrelated American Instagram account posted in 2015.
In other words, the Russians copied the American racists. And the racists copied the Russians. It’s a circle of hate.
During 2016, the Kremlin’s sophisticated understanding of the United States led its propaganda to amplifyit. They invented memes to exploit racism, secure in the knowledge that the memes would find wide purchase in America. But while the larger social-media firms purged the accounts that promoted them, the memes have achieved exactly what the Russians wanted: persistence.
And sadly, material aimed squarely at Confederate sympathizers apparently remains a popular topic for Russian trolls: Facebook announced just two months ago that it had removed dozens of Instagram accounts that originated in Russia, some of which published pro-Confederate material targeted at American audiences.
==
Poisoned by Polonium 210: The Litvinenko murder - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com › news › stories-42100235 › poisoned-by-polonium-...
1.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowdstrike-the-truth-about-trumps-insane-ukraine-server-conspiracy
no lnx many
The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy
Trump asked Ukraine’s president to help prove a bonkers, Russia-friendly conspiracy theory that U.S. intel relied on manufactured evidence to blame the 2016 DNC hack on Moscow.
Kevin Poulsen
Sr. National Security Correspondent
Updated 10.16.19 12:47PM ET / Published09.25.19
Update: President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again promoted the baseless idea that a Democratic National Commitee server that was hacked in 2016 is being held in Ukraine. Below is a story The Daily Beast published last month about this conspiracy theory amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate it.
Donald Trump asked for more than a criminal investigation of his political opponent’s son in his call with Ukraine’s president. Trump also sought help in reviving a long-ago debunked conspiracy theory that challenges the basic underpinnings of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings on Russia’s 2016 election interference, in a bizarre spectacle that sees an American president trying to conscript a foreign leader into undermining his own intelligence agencies.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” Trump said, according to a compilation of notes on the call released by the White House. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
To those not versed in fringe-right canon, it’s a curious thing to say. “It almost sounds like he was babbling to the president of Ukraine,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin, who led the DNC breach investigation while at Crowdstrike. “I imagine it would have confused the Ukranian president. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Conservative websites are spinning the odd exchange as a reference to a Justice Department investigation ordered by William Barr into the origins of the Mueller probe. “It is unclear specifically what Trump was referring to withCrowdstrike,” reads one article in this vein on The Federalist. In truth, it’s actually quite clear. Trump is referencing a conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls and far-right pundits that imagines the Democratic National Committee fabricating all the evidence in Russia’s 2016 breach of the DNC network.
“Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version of events.”
The hoax has its roots in a GRU persona, “Guccifer 2.0,” created to cast doubt on Russia’s culpability in the DNC hack. Today it’s buttressed by deceptive blog posts, memes, and putative forensic analysis of metadata in documents leaked from the DNC and John Podesta intrusions, and has spun out several related theories and offshoots, including the Seth Rich hoax that blames the hack on a slain DNC staffer with previously-unknown hacking skills.
Crowdstrike enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator. A publicly-traded company headquartered in California, Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian, and that he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.
In real life, Alperovitch is an American citizen born in Russia who escaped to the U.S. with his family during the Soviet era. But Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version.
“Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked the AP in 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based… I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.”
The “server” in the conspiracy is the hacked DNC server that the Democrats, the claim goes, won’t let the FBI examine because it would expose their elaborate plot. “What is the server saying?” Trump asked in one tweet last year.
That part’s made up, too. The DNC turned down one unusual FBI request early in the hack investigation. The bureau wanted access to the DNC’s network while the Russians were still in it, most likely to stage a counter operation against the GRU. The DNC declined, perhaps reluctant to have two intelligence agencies playing capture-the-flag in their systems five months before a presidential election.The DNC later authorized Crowdstrike to share full copies of the hacked servers with the bureau, giving the FBI access to the same evidence Crowdstrike had.
“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” Crowdstrike said in a statement Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/russia-government-carried-out-shocking-breach-of-the-actual-substance-of-fbi-communications-in-2016-report/
no lnx
Russia government carried out shocking breach of ‘the actual substance of FBI communications’ in 2016: report
Written by Alex Henderson September 16, 2019
In 2016, the Russian government not only interfered in the United States’ presidential election — a fact that has been well-documented in the Mueller report — it also spied on U.S. intelligence within the United States. And according to an investigative report by Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor for Yahoo News, Russian operatives “targeted FBI communications” and successfully “hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil.”
One of the sources for Yahoo News’ report, a former senior official for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), asserted, “It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations.”
On December 29, 2016, the outgoing Obama Administration gave almost three dozen Russian diplomats only 72 hours to leave the U.S. and seized two rural estates owned by the Russian government. At the time, Russian officials insisted that those estates were merely vacation spots. But according to Yahoo News’ report, the estates were used for spying — and that spying was so comprehensive that it underscores “U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
Security compromises in the U.S., according to Yahoo News, “gave Russian spies in American cities — including Washington, New York and San Francisco — key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications.”
Former U.S. officials told Yahoo News adds that Russian spies successfully cracked some types of encryption used by U.S. intelligence. A former U.S. national security official, interviewed anonymously, told Yahoo News, “Any time you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets off a ripple effect. The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology…. They are singularly dangerous in this area.”
Russian spies, according to Yahoo News’ report, also compromised the FBI’s backup communications systems. “This was something we took extremely seriously,” a former senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News.”
Yahoo News’ report also quotes a former senior counterintelligence official as saying, “The intel reporting was they did break our codes or got their hands on a radio and figured it out. Either way, they decrypted our comms.”
Joel Brenner, who headed U.S. counterintelligence from 2006-2009, told Yahoo News, “When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was.… focused entirely on its core concern, which is insider threats, and in particular mole hunting. This is, in fact, the core risk, and it’s right that it should be the focus. But we were neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in networks, technical networks, electronic networks.”
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Top Trump official face-plants at House hearing after being asked a simple question about Russia
written by Tana Ganeva / Raw Story July 11, 2019
On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing titled, “United States Efforts to Counter Russian Disinformation and Malign Influence.”
When Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) questioned Lea Gabrielle — a top State department official under Trump — for examples of Russian disinformation campaigns around the world she replied with a drawn-out “Ummm,” ABC reports.
“It is clear that the Kremlin has been attempting to damage America’s credibility among our allies and our partners, undermine trans-Atlantic unity, and to sow discord in target societies,” Gabrielle testified. “They covertly plant false stories.”
Frankel wanted her to name concrete examples.
“What are the tales that they are telling, their fake news. What do you see?” Frankel wanted to know. “Give me a couple of examples of fake stories. Because we’ve been talking in generalities, I’d like to know what kind of information they’re spreading. What are they saying, for example?”
“Well, it really depends on the country,” Gabrielle said.
Frankel pressed her for an example.
“Well, just give me an example,” Frankel said. “Pick a country and give me an example.”
“Um,” Gabrielle said.
“Anybody can help her,” Frankel said.
That’s when another official was forced to step in and chronicle all the recent instances of Russian propaganda, ranging from a false narrative about NATO exercises, political unrest in Venezuela and the poisoning of British citizens.
Gabrielle is a former Fox News correspondent, according to ABC.
In a report released last October, the Brookings institute warned that although Russia’s goals and strategies aren’t new, the Kremlin is increasingly mastering digital tools to sow division and distrust by blending the line between fiction and fact.
“Over the next few months we are going to see more disinformation campaigns, including fake websites that work together as a network to spread disinformation, fake personalities and entities on Twitter and Facebook, and manipulation of social media networks’ algorithms, including Google, YouTube, and others,” the report concluded.
“And we’re not really paying enough attention to algorithmic manipulation.”
And as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, so will Russia’s propaganda campaigns.
“Right now, humans control and produce online entities like bots and trolls,” the report notes.
“But soon, disinformation campaigns will become more automated, smarter, and more difficult to detect. AI driven disinformation will be better targeted to specific audiences; AI driven online entities will be able to predict and manipulate human responses; At some point very soon, we won’t be able to tell the difference between automated accounts and human entities.”
WATCH:
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/your-regular-reminder-that-mcconnell-abetted-russian-election-interference-and-is-doing-it-again
Running interference for the occupier of the Oval Office, the execrable Rep. Steve Scalise is attacking Joe Biden, saying “Russian interference in America’s elections happened on Obama and Biden’s watch.” That’s “irrefutable” he says, pointing to a craptacular 2017 CBS News report from 2017 that vaguely references the “political difficulties” President Obama faced in addressing Russian hacking without once mention Mitch McConnell.
Those political difficulties were entirely of McConnell’s making. He’s the guy who, in reporter Greg Miller’s retelling, was fully briefed on everything the intelligence committee knew about Russian interference. He was told that Russia was intervening to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. And McConnell told the CIA, “You’re telling us that Russia is trying to help elect Trump. If you try to come forward with this, I’m not going to sign onto any sort of public statement that would condemn Russian interference. But I will condemn you and the Obama administration for trying to mess up this election."
McConnell doesn’t have that card to play in the lead-up to the 2020 election, another one that he appears to be just as committed to helping Russia fix. As we speak, McConnell continues to refuse to take up legislation to protect the next election, falling back on that old saw, “states’ rights.” His excuse is that “Democrats would like to nationalize everything” and that they “want the federal government to take over the election process because they think that would somehow benefit them.” It does happen to be true that clean elections in which all eligible voters are able exercise their franchise tend to result in Democrats winning. That’s McConnell’s tell right there—he doesn’t want a clean election.
McConnell also argues that the Trump administration did a “terrific job” in working with state and local officials in the 2018 election and asks, “Where is the applause for that?” That’s in spite of the fact that bipartisan attorneys general were pleading with a then-Republican Congress to give them some help just a few months before the election, alarmed at the threat they knew existed.
A week ago, the Democratic House passed an expansive election protections bill, [zoe?] with mandatory back-up paper ballots and post-vote audits to ensure that elections systems won’t be compromised by hacking. Democrats have got more legislation coming, hoping a barrage of bills will force McConnell to respond to bipartisan pressure to break his blockade. Thus far they haven’t been able to make a dent in his refusal to consider the bills.
McConnell’s obstruction might have something to do with the past big campaign donations he’s received from pals of Putin and the millions those same Russian oligarchs are pouring into his home state of Kentucky, in the form of capital investment in an aluminum plant. It probably has everything to do with the fact that he’s just about the least popular politician in the nation and that he’s up for reelection himself this cycle, and is underwater in his home state, with a “razor-thin” lead over a generic Democratic opponent.
So, no, Obama and Biden aren’t to blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election. Granted, Obama could have ignored McConnell’s threat and gone ahead with his warnings, but he was well aware of the lengths McConnell would go to to poison the election—he was right in the middle of McConnell’s blockade of the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination and knew that there are no depths to which McConnell will not sink. He’ll happily do it again to win.
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no lnx
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued the indictment against Roger Stone, a long-time ally of President Donald Trump, he filed it while noting that it was connected to another case: the indictment of Russians who hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign.
Stone has been charged with lying to Congress, tampering with a witness, and obstructing justice.
Stone’s lawyers objected to the assertion that the cases were connected, a motion that could have triggered the case to be assigned to a different judge. But on Friday, Mueller responded to the lawyers’ objections and revealed why the cases are connected:
In Netyksho, eleven Russian military officers are charged by indictment with, inter alia, conspiring to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
…
As alleged in the Netyksho indictment, in 2016, the Netyksho defendants stole documents from the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Clinton campaign chairman. Those defendants then released many of the stolen documents, including through a website maintained by Organization 1. In the course of investigating that activity, the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release. Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1. Evidence obtained from those search warrants resulted in the allegations that the Netyksho defendants hacked and stole documents for release through intermediaries, including Organization 1, and that Stone lied to a congressional committee investigating, among other things, the activities of Organization 1 regarding those stolen documents.
Here, “Organization 1” refers to WikiLeaks, which published the stolen emails.
Mueller also argued that Stone’s actions are part of the same “alleged criminal event or transaction” as those at issue in Netyksho.
He explained that the “criminal conduct alleged in Netyksho was a central focus of the congressional investigation that the defendant is alleged to have obstructed, and therefore the activities underlying the crimes charged in that case are part of the same activities underlying the crimes charged in this case.”
Since Stone’s lies came up in the context of an investigation the Russian election interference and possible connections to the actions of Americans, the cases are linked.
“The defendant’s false statements did not arise in a vacuum,” the filing said.
Reporter Andrew Prokop noted that further discussion of the warrants in question was filed along with the documents, but it was under seal.
==
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
OPERATION INFEKTION: A THREE-PART VIDEO SERIES ON RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION
RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION: FROM COLD WAR TO KANYE
CreditCredit
By Adam B. Ellick and Adam Westbrook
398
WATCH: This is a three-part film series. Scroll down and click to play any episode.
Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.
EPISODE 1
MEET THE KGB SPIES WHO INVENTED FAKE NEWS
We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-internet era. Meet the KGB operatives who invented it and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.
Video
EPISODE 2
THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS OF FAKE NEWS
The Pizzagate playbook: same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories.
Video
EPISODE 3
THE WORLDWIDE WAR ON TRUTH
Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.
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AN
President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was pressured by a Russian oligarch over his debts, Timemagazine reported Saturday.
Former Russian intelligence officer Victor Boyarkin “was a key link” between Manafort and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”
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recap overview 2016
https://theconversation.com/how-the-russian-government-used-disinformation-and-cyber-warfare-in-2016-election-an-ethical-hacker-explains-99989
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-russian-spies-love-american-universities
Under the alias Cynthia Murphy, Russian spy Lydia Guryeva attended Columbia Business School, and ingratiated herself with a key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Guryeva’s instructions from Moscow, according to a 2010 FBI complaint, were to “strengthen…ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info” and to report “on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service.”
Now another graduate student at an urban East Coast university, who similarly cultivated powerbrokers and political operatives, is accused of being a Russian spy and taking orders from high-ranking officials in her homeland. Maria Butina,who received a master’s degree in international relations this past spring from American University in Washington, D.C., courted the National Rifle Association’s top guns and sought access to Republican presidential candidates Scott Walker and Donald Trump. She pleaded innocent last week to charges of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.
If the charges against Butina are accurate, she’s only the latest in a long line of Russian agents to infiltrate U.S. universities. Dating back to the Soviet era, Russian spies have sought to take advantage of academia's lax security, collaborative, global culture, and revolving door with government. Russian intelligence understands that today’s professor of international relations may be tomorrow’s assistant secretary of state, and vice versa. Although cyber-spying and hacking offer opportunities to glean secrets at less personal risk, the traditional strategies of human espionage persist, and sending a spy to school is prominent among them. In that respect, little has changed since 1938, when Semyon Markovich Semyonov became the first Soviet agent to enroll at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and made contacts vital to stealing scientific secrets. Or since 1958, when KGB officer Oleg Kalugin entered Columbia’s journalism school. After graduation, posing as a Radio Moscow correspondent at the United Nations, Kalugin attended events at Columbia and reported back on them to Moscow. His report on a speech about U.S.-Soviet relations by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a Columbia professor and later national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, earned kudos from the Communist Party’s Central Committee.
After that, “I went all across the country, from Harvard to Columbia and the West Coast, listening to what people said and reporting it if I thought it was interesting,” Kalugin told me. He rose to head the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence branch before falling out of favor in Russia, moving to Washington, D.C., and becoming an American citizen.
Sometimes, Russian agents join the academic community as students or instructors. Of Guryeva and the other nine “illegals” — sleeper agents without diplomatic cover — who pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiring to act as foreign agents and were swapped back to Russia, seven went to U.S. universities, including Harvard, The New School, and the University of Washington. One taught politics for a semester at Baruch College, lambasting American foreign policy.
In other cases, agents hold diplomatic posts at an embassy or consulate and forage in nearby campuses for recruits and information. It’s easier, cheaper and less conspicuous for Russian intelligence to enlist a student or professor who can be steered to a federal agency than to lure someone already in a sensitive government position. Exploiting open campuses, spies slip unnoticed into lectures, seminars and cafeterias, where they befriend the computer scientist or Pentagon adviser sitting beside them.
Butina enrolled in American University’s School of International Service in the summer of 2016, university spokesman Mark Story said. She concentrated in cyber policy and became a research assistant at the university’s Kogod School of Business. With research funding from the Kogod Cybersecurity Governance Center, she and two professors, Mark A. Clark and J. Alberto Espinosa, co-authored a March 2018 paper on “Cybersecurity Knowledge Networks.” (The paper is still on the center’s website.) Clark and Espinosa declined comment.
University spokesman Story declined to say whether Butina’s involvement with the center raises any concerns, or if the university plans to review her activities. He added that the center doesn’t do classified work and has no contracts with intelligence agencies.The cybersecurity center was founded in 2015 to provide “guidance specifically to boards of directors, senior executives, and other leaders so that they can make informed decisions about cybersecurity.” It has a partnership with defense contractorRaytheon Co., and was headed from June 2017 to March 2018 by a former lawyer for the National Security Agency.
Raytheon spokesman Michael Doble said, “There is no connection between our support of this respected school and what one of its students may or may not have done.”
Butina participated in February 2017 in a “weekend of seminars and cultural immersion” in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which brought together 10 American University students from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Azerbaijan with a dozen students from Gettysburg College to discuss U.S.-Russian relations in the post-Soviet era. Susan Eisenhower — a frequent adviser to businesses and the U.S. Department of Energy, and an expert on foreign policy and national security issues —led the seminars as well as a tour of the Gettysburg home of her grandfather, President Dwight Eisenhower....
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https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week
...
12 Russian officials who were indicted by the Grand Juryof the District of Columbia. It is the fact that these people were indicted that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to insist that American President Donald Trump turn over Americans like one of our former ambassadors, Michael McFaul, over to his government in order to be interrogated.
The key difference, of course, is that Putin is fabricating charges against McFaul and others like whistleblower Bill Browder, while the accusations against the 12 Russian officials are rooted in serious investigative work. Yet who are these dozen Russians that have been identified by Robert Mueller's investigation?
According to the indictment, the Russian officials singled out by the government were Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov and Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. With the exception of Kovalev, the indictment describes all of these individuals as "GRU officers who knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the 'Conspirators'), to gain unauthorized access (to 'hack') into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election."
The indictment claims that these individuals hacked the email accounts of staffers and volunteers at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by at least March 2016, hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee by at least April 2016 and began releasing tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents by at least June 2016, continuing to do so through the month of the presidential election.
And who are they specifically?
According to the indictment,Netyksho is a Russian military officer whose unit (Unit 26165) "had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC,as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Antonov was assigned to that same unit and oversaw a department within it that was "dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with spearphishing emails and other computer intrusion activity." Antonov is accused of having "supervised other co-conspirators who targeted the DCCC, DNC, and individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Badin held the title of "Assistant Head of Department" in that unit and supervised various attacks on the Democratic and Clinton-related targets chosen by the Russian government.
Then there is Yermakov, who the indictment claims was a master of aliases, using "various online personas" in order to engage in a number of hacking operations. These names included "Kate S. Milton," "James McMorgans" and "Karen W. Millen."Lukashev was a senior lieutenant in the Russian military and, like Yermakov, used a number of online pseudonyms, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." Lukashev "sent spearphishing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign."Morgachev, by contrast, was in charge of a department at the unit that developed and managed malware, including one hacking tool called "X-Agent," and is charged with supervising the agents who implanted the X-Agent malware on DCCC and DNC computers and then monitored it.
READ MORE: Donald Trump, Brexit and the Russians: A dangerous turning point in "World War IV"
Kozachek is described in the indictment as a lieutenant captain who had been assigned to Morgachev's department within Unit 26165 and employed pseudonyms like "kazak" and "blablabla1234565" in order to do his job. He also "developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016." Yershov, meanwhile, is accused of having "assisted Kozachek and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use." Malyshev, on the other hand, was a second lieutenant whose work for Morgachev's department involved monitoring X-Agent malware that had been implanted on Democratic Party machines. He used pseudonyms like "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr."
Osadchuk is a Russian colonel and the commanding officer of Unit 74455, which "assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU." Meanwhile Potemkin was a Russian military officer assigned to Unit 74455 who supervised a department "responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by Potemkin's department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas."
Throughout the document, considerable detail is given about how various email accounts owned by either the Clinton campaign or other Democratic Party bodies were deliberately targeted by individuals or groups of individuals on this list. It explains how they hacked into these accounts and what they ultimately gained from doing so. Kovalev specifically is accused, among other things, of hacking the website of a state board of elections and stealing information about roughly 500,000 voters "including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers." He is also accused of hacking into the computers of a company that supplied voter registration verification software, targeting "state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 US. elections" and visiting the websites of counties in states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa in order to find vulnerabilities.
It is worth reminding the reader, at this point, of what McFaul told Salon earlier in the week — namely, that Putin is trying to create a false equivalency between the crimes he ordered committed by Russian officials and the fabricated charges he has created against McFaul and Browder.
"But let's be clear: What Putin was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin," McFaul told Salon. "To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America's national interest, from my point of view."
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-expected-to-announce-new-indictment-by-mueller/2018/07/13/bc565582-86a9-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html
no lnx
A dozen Russian military intelligence officers were indicted Friday on charges they hacked Democrats’ computers, stole their data and published those files to disrupt the 2016 election— the clearest connection to the Kremlin established so far by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of interference in the presidential campaign.
The indictment against members of the Russian military agency known as the GRU marks the first time Mueller has taken direct aim at the Russian government, accusing specific military units and their named officers of a sophisticated, sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the charges at a midday news conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, did not attend the announcement. Court records show that a grand jury that Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.
The suspects “covertly monitored the computers, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents,” Rosenstein said. “The goal of the conspirators was to have an impact on the election. What impact they may have had .?.?. is a matter of speculation; that’s not our responsibility.”
The indictment comes days before President Trump is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Rosenstein said he briefed Trump earlier this week on the charges.
Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Twitter that the indictments “are good news for all Americans. The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved.” He then called on Mueller “to end this pursuit of the president and say President Trump is completely innocent.”
Who has been charged in Russia probe and why VIEW GRAPHIC
The 11-count, 29-page indictment describes in granular detail a carefully planned and executed attack on the information security of Democrats, as Russian government hackers implanted hundreds of malware files on Democrats’ computer systems to steal information. The hackers then laundered the pilfered material through fake personas calledDC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0,as well as others, to try to influence voters.
One of their conduits, identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1,” was WikiLeaks, the global anti-secrecy group led by Julian Assange, according to people familiar with the case. The indictment describes WikiLeaks communicating with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain material.
On July 6, 2016, according to the indictment, WikiLeaks wrote, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” referring to Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). WikiLeaks explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary .?.?. so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”
WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the convention later that month, providing an embarrassing look at party operations and attitudes toward the Sanders campaign.
[Read the indictment of 12 Russians charged with hacking Democrats]
2:43
Rod Rosenstein announces indictment of 12 Russian agents
The deputy attorney general announces the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents in connection with hacking during the 2016 election. (The Washington Post)
A former Justice Department official who was previously involved in the Russia probe said the charges should serve as a warning for the United States to buttress its election security as Americans prepare to vote in congressional elections in November.
“The detailed charges in this indictment make it unmistakably clear that the United States faces an aggressive, sophisticated adversary bent on using cyber means to subvert our democratic processes and institutions,” said David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. “Now is the time for unequivocal recognition of this threat by both the executive branch and Congress, and for a unified and well coordinated commitment to confront it.”
The indictment offers troubling new accusations about the extent of Russian hacking efforts and interactions with Americans.
“On or about August 15, 2016, the conspirators, posing asGuccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” the indictment states. “The conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The indictment does not identify the candidate.
The indictment also describes an online conversation between the GRU, posing as Guccifer 2.0, and a “person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.”
People familiar with the case said that person is longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. In August 2016, the hacker persona wrote: “please tell me if i can help u anyhow .?.?. it would be a great pleasure to me.”
Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith said, “It is clear from the indictment issued today that our client, Roger Stone, was not in any way involved with any of the alleged hacking of the 2016 election. As he testified before the House Intelligence Committee under oath, his 24-word exchange with someone on Twitter claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 is benign, based on its content, context and timing.”
U.S. officials identified one of the GRU sections that carried out the operations as Unit 26165, which worked out of a building about four miles from the Kremlin. It was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to the indictment, which accuses Viktor Netykshoof being the military officer in command of Unit 26165 at the time.
Although the DNC was able to partially kick the Russian hackers out of its system in June 2016, the indictment says three months later, the GRU “successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service” which held “test applications related to the DNC’s analytics,” according to the indictment. The hacker stole that data from the DNC, the indictment said.
Another group of Russian military officers, Unit 74455, working out of a building that GRU officers referred to as the “Tower,” used fake online personas to spread stolen files, officials charged. The indictment identifies Col. Aleksandr Osadchuk as the commanding officer of that unit.
The indictment also notes an interesting development on July 27, 2016 — the day then-candidate Trump gave a press conference declaring his hope that missing Clinton emails would be found and made public, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
The indictment says “on or about” that same day, “the conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.
“It is unfortunate that distributing false information has become the norm in Washington, and that criminal cases are being initiated based on clearly political motives,” the ministry said. Referring to the Mueller investigation, the statement went on: “The question remains how long this shameful comedy that is embarrassing the United States will go on.”
Rosenstein said the hackers interacted with some Americans in the course of their efforts but noted that those people had not been charged with a crime.
“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on who was victimized,” he said. “There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”
Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. With the new indictment, his office has filed charges against 32 people on crimes including hacking, money laundering and lying to the FBI. Twenty-six of those charged are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.
In February, Mueller indicted a group of Russian Internet trolls who worked out of theInternet Research Agency, a company based in St. Petersburg and owned by a wealthy associate of Putin.
[Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference]
Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is in jail in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial this month on financial fraud charges brought by Mueller but stemming from activities that predated the Trump campaign.
Mueller’s probe has come under sustained attack from Trump and at a press conference in England on Friday before Rosenstein spoke, the president again labeled the investigation a “witch hunt.”
“I think that we’re being hurt very badly by the — I would call it the witch hunt,” said Trump as he stood beside British Prime Minister Theresa May. “It really hurts our relationship with Russia.”
Rosenstein said of his decision to brief Trump, “It was important for the president to know what information we’ve uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. He needs to understand what evidence we have of foreign election interference.”
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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-info 400 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
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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.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/europe/trump-russian-lawyer-fsb-kgb.html
MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. last year after his father had won the Republican nomination for president had once represented Russia’s top intelligence agency in court, according to at least two public records.
The lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, who is now at the center of the political intrigue over the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, represented a military unit founded by the Russian Federal Security Service in 2002, publicly available records show.
The service, known as the F.S.B., is the successor agency to the K.G.B. and was once headed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Ms. Veselnitskaya insisted after her June 2016 meeting with Mr. Trump’s son was first reported by The New York Times two weeks ago that she had no ties to the Kremlin and never worked for the Russian government. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, has said Ms. Veselnitskaya “has nothing to do with us.”
Still, the court documents showing the lawyer’s link to the Russian spy agency, which was first reported by Reuters, are likely to intensify interest in her by American investigators who are examining the relationships between the Trump campaign and Russia....
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Hackers and Hacks
Julian Assange
Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.
Guccifer 2.0
Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”
DC Leaks
The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.
Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence
RT and Sputnik
In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear
The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.
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WFB BS?
Ukrainian Rebel Commander Identified As Russian GRU Military Intelligence Colonel
Key figure in covert Russian subversion campaign in eastern Ukraine
Igor Vsevolodovich GirkinIgor Vsevolodovich Girkin
BY: Bill Gertz ed
June 20, 2014 5:00 am
A key figure in covert Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine is working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, according to U.S. officials.
Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin, who is currently using the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, has identified himself in press reports as "defense minister" of the self-proclaimed, pro-Russian "Donetsk People’s Republic. This week he called for Russia to send military aid to rebels in eastern Ukraine.
U.S. officials said Strelkov is considered a leading pro-Russian rebel who is undermining stability as part of a major Russian covert action program in Ukraine.
Officials said Girkin is a GRU colonel who was first identified by the Ukrainian SBU intelligence service. Girkin traveled to the Crimea in February and traveled to Donetsk in April. While in the Crimea was a military adviser to Sergei Aksenov, the current head of Russian-occupied Crimea.
He is also a close aide to the so-called Donetsk prime minister, Alexander Borodai, who is also a Russian. Borodai also worked with Aksenov in Crimea, an indication the Russians may be planning a similar annexation in the Donetsk region.
Girkin and Borodai were employed by a Moscow investment firm called Marshall Capital. That company is owned by Konstantin Valeryevich Malofeyev, who has been linked to funding of pro-Russian separatist activities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
On Friday, the Treasury Department imposed financial sanctions on Girkin and six other Ukrainian separatists for their role in seeking to destabilize Ukraine.
"The United States will continue to take action to hold accountable those persons engaged in efforts to destabilize Crimea and eastern Ukraine," said David S. Cohen, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. "These individuals have all contributed to attempts to illegally undermine the legitimate government in Kyiv, notably by falsely proclaiming leadership positions and fomenting violent unrest."
Girkin led the abduction of military observers in Ukraine, and attacked military brigade and stole a large cache of weapons, Treasury said in a statement.
Disclosure of GRU activities in Ukraine comes as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, criticized Moscow’s covert subversion.
"The tactic that Russia is using is one I would describe as proximate coercion, subversion, and misinformation," Dempsey told a Senate defense appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.
The strategy is to mass forces on the border and threaten the use of force and employ subversion through surrogates and proxies, along with misinformation to arouse ethnic populations, he said.
"I doubt that there'll actually be a full-blown invasion," he said. "But we've got to be alert to the other tools that [Putin] may use to actually undermine stability, notably in the Baltics and in some of our Eastern European allies."
Russia has "lit a fire" in Ukraine that is burning out of control and the country is facing a "very difficult path," Dempsey said.
In London, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Thursday that Russian troops were again building up along Ukraine's eastern border, and Russian forces were seen conducting troop maneuvers nearby.
U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said Russian covert action programs have been underway in Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as other areas.
The rebels downed a Ukrainian military helicopter on May 29, killing a key Ukrainian general and demonstrating they have advanced anti-aircraft weapons.
The rebels are known to have portable anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, and armored troop carriers.
The missile that downed the helicopter could not be confirmed as having been supplied by Russia, but other arms found after battles with rebels have revealed they were recently shipped from the Russian military.
Intelligence reports also indicate that Russia is sending Russian troops disguised as Ukrainian to support pro-Russian rebels in the region. Rebels have described the Russians as "volunteers," including Cossacks from southern Russia. Similar tactics were used prior to the takeover of Crimea in March.
Another indicator of covert Russian forces is the discovery of a unit called the Vostok, or East, Battalion, a well armed group of ethnic Chechen special operations commandos who are fighting with the rebels.
An earlier Vostok force was set up by the Russian military using ethnic Chechen special operations commandos who specialize in urban warfare and who were led by Russian officers. The unit was dispatched to earlier conflicts in Chechnya and in the battle with Georgia in 2008.
Officials identified the border town of Antratsyt, near Luhansk, as a key base for the infiltration of both Russian fighters and weapons.
The newly elected government in Kiev this week offered to halt its military operations against eastern pro-Russian separatists. Newly-elected President Petro Poroshenko offered amnesty to rebels that surrender. The amnesty was limited to rebels that were not involved in capital crimes. Poroshenko also offered to allow Russian fighters to return to Russia.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday that the plan will only work if the Russian government supports it, something that has not happened so far.
"Russia of course must support the peace plan instead of continuing to support the separatists on the ground," she said.
On Tuesday, Psaki said there were reports of renewed Russian troop movements close to the Ukrainian border.
"Our concern has been focused more, naturally, on the actions of the Russian separatists and the movement of military tanks and other equipment across the border," she said.
Other reports indicated Moscow is covertly delivering arms, including tanks and rocket launchers, to rebels in eastern Ukraine, in addition to the intelligence operatives.
Regarding Girkin, the GRU officer was quoted in a Russian newspaper on Monday as calling for Moscow to send military aid to two so-called "people’s republics," in Donetsk and Luhansk. The eastern Ukrainian cities are strongholds for anti-government rebels.
"I am calling on Russia as the commander of the [Donetsk People’s Republic] militia and as a patriot of Russia and the Russian people. It can be considered as an appeal on behalf of the Donetsk militia," he told the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
"If Russia does not take prompt and decisive action, they [the Ukrainian Army] will achieve their goal," he told another pro-Russian news outlet. "Several thousand militiamen near the Russian border cannot stand long against powerful enemy artillery and aviation."
Girkin said his militia lack funds and supplies. "We can ‘bite' the enemy, attack them from the flank, we can operate through sabotage and reconnaissance forces, but we cannot change the situation only with heroism," he told the pro-Russian LifeNews outlet.
The GRU, acronym for the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff, is playing the key role in Moscow’s efforts to destabilize Ukraine following the military annexation of Crimea earlier this year.
So far, several GRU officers have been exposed by Ukrainian authorities, including GRU Lt. Col. Kirill Koliuchkin, a naval attaché expelled by Kiev for spying activities.
The European Union in April imposed sanctions on more than a dozen Russian officials, including GRU Director Lt. Gen. Igor Sergun. The sanctions are largely symbolic but including Sergun on the list highlights the key role being played by GRU spies in Ukraine.
In addition to GRU operatives in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s Spetsnaz special operations commandos also are engaged in subversion.
Mark Galeotti, a New York University professor who writes the blog "In Moscow’s Shadows," stated in a recent post that the GRU has been given new life by Russian covert action in Ukraine.
The service, under Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former officer in the rival KGB, has faced large-scale cutbacks in personnel from 2009 to 2011.
Over 1,000 GRU officers and about 80 GRU generals were dismissed, retired, or transferred to other units, Galeotti stated. The cutbacks were the result of bureaucratic infighting with the civilian foreign spy agency SVR, acronym for Foreign Intelligence Service, and the domestic political police and spy agency known as the FSB, for Federal Security Service.
Galeotti said the GRU is a key element of Russian asymmetric military-political warfare tools. "They are less valuable as straightforward war-fighters and much more so as covert operators and the facilitators of other deniable operations," he said.
"Not only may the Ukraine conflict help stop–or at least bring a temporary ceasefire to–internecine struggles within the Russian security apparatus, it may well prove the savior of the GRU in its current configuration."
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FSB bak 719
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see russia, collusion
putin ussr oligarchs
new node GRU russia intel (disambig?)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/europe/trump-russian-lawyer-fsb-kgb.html
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how was hacked intel weaponized/
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mojo
Hackers and Hacks
Julian Assange
Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.
Guccifer 2.0
Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”
DC Leaks
The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.
Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence
RT and Sputnik
In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear
The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-height-of-russia-tensions-trump-campaign-chairman-manafort-met-with-business-associate-from-ukraine/2017/06/18/6ab8485c-4c5d-11e7-a186-60c031eab644_story.html August, as tension mounted over Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sat down to dinner with a business associate from Ukraine who once served in the Russian army. Konstantin Kilimnik, who learned English at a military school that some experts consider a training ground for Russian spies, had helped run the Ukraine office for Manafort’s international political consulting practice for 10 years.At the Grand Havana Room, one of New York City’s most exclusive cigar bars, the longtime acquaintances “talked about bills unpaid by our clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement provided by Kilimnik, offering his most detailed account of his interactions with the former Trump adviser.Kilimnik, who provided a written statement to The Washington Post through Manafort’s attorney, said the previously unreported dinner was one of two meetings he had with Manafort on visits to the United States during Manafort’s five months working for Trump. The first encounter was in early May 2016, about two weeks before the Trump adviser was elevated to campaign chairman.The August dinner came about two weeks before Manafort resigned under pressure amid reports that he had received improper payments for his political work in Ukraine, allegations that he has denied. anafort spokesman Jason Maloni said that Kilimnik was a “longtime business associate” who would have naturally been in touch with Manafort. Manafort told Politico, which first reported his relationship with Kilimnik, that his conversations included discussions about the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the release of its emails.“It would be neither surprising nor suspicious that two political consultants would chat about the political news of the day, including the DNC hack, which was in the news,” Maloni said.He added, “We’re confident that serious officials will come to the conclusion that Paul’s campaign conduct and interaction with Konstantin during that time was perfectly permissible and not in furtherance of some conspiracy.”Before joining Trump’s campaign, Manafort had built a practice in Ukraine as an adviser to the Russia-friendly Party of Regions and helped elect former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. Manafort kept his Kiev office open until mid-2015.Federal investigators have shown an interest in Manafort on several fronts beyond his work on behalf of Trump.Subpoenas in New York have sought information about Manafort’s real estate loans, according to NBC News. Justice Department officials also are exploring whether Manafort should have more fully disclosed his work for foreign political parties, as required by federal law.Former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia inquiry, and people familiar with his work said his office has now taken over investigations of Manafort’s conduct unrelated directly to the Russia probe.A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to discuss the subpoena there. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik shows the challenge facing investigators as they seek to determine whether contacts between Russian allies and Trump associates during the height of Russian interference in the campaign amounted to collusion or reflected routine interactions between people with relationships unrelated to the campaign.Kilimnik said he grew up in southeastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He said he moved to Moscow in 1987, when he was 17, and enrolled in the Military Institute of the Ministry for Defense, an elite academy for training military translators.Kilimnik said he was trained in English and Swedish and spent the early 1990s serving as a military translator, including in 1993 on a trade mission of a Russian arms company.He said the GRU, the military intelligence service that U.S. officials have linked to the 2016 cyberattacks, did not recruit from his language academy.“No one ever spoke to me ever about doing any intelligence work — neither Russians or Ukrainians or any other foreign country,” he said.Some experts disputed Kilimnik’s description of the Moscow academy.Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank, and a longtime former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, called the institute a “breeding ground” for intelligence officers.Mark Galeotti, a Russia security specialist at the Institute of International Relations, a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, said the school is one of the “favored recruiting grounds” of the GRU.In 1995, amid uncertainty in the post-Soviet economy, Kilimnik said he needed money and took a job as a translator for the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party.People who worked with Kilimnik said he was proficient in several languages and a savvy reader of people.“I relied on him,” said Sam Patten, who was Kilimnik’s boss at the Moscow office of IRI from 2001 to 2004.At the time, Kilimnik openly discussed his work in the Russian army, said Phil Griffin, a political consultant who hired him at the IRI. “He was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence,” Griffin said. “It was no big deal.”Julia Sibley, a spokeswoman for the IRI, confirmed that Kilimnik worked for the organization a decade ago but declined to provide additional information.In 2005, Griffin, who had left Moscow to work for Manafort in Ukraine, invited Kilimnik to join him there, according to both men.Kilimnik said he has worked largely in Ukraine ever since, although he declined to say whether he has become a Ukrainian citizen.Kilimnik’s role for Manafort grew over time. Beyond his work as a translator, Kilimnik would “help Manafort understand the political context and why people were doing what they were doing,” Patten said.People familiar with Kilimnik’s work in Ukraine for Manafort say his assignments included meeting with powerful Ukrainian politicians and serving as a liaison to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin and did business with Manafort.A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.In August, Volodymyr Ariev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who represents a party that opposed Manafort’s clients, requested that Ukraine’s top prosecutor investigate whether Kilimnik had worked with Russian intelligence services.A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond to questions from The Post. The prosecutor’s office told Politico in March that Kilimnik was “not being processed now as a witness, suspect or accused.”Others viewed Kilimnik as more aligned with Washington than Moscow....== == http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/07/23/who-benefits-from-doubt-online-manipulation-and-the-russian-and-us-internet/ Who benefits from doubt? Online manipulation and the Russian – and US – internetPosted on July 23, 2015 by EthanI was asked by an editor at RBC, one of Russia’s best respected independent news organizations, to offer my thoughts on the Russian/US infowar. It was a great chance to think about Adrian Chen’s provocative tale about Russia’s Internet Research Agency (a topic that Global Voices RuNet Echo has done a terrific job of covering) and broader questions about skepticism, mistrust and who benefits from doubt. The piece ran on RBC today in Russian, but my English language text follows below. In early June, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a story by investigative reporter Adrian Chen about a Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, linked to Evgeny Prigozhin, reported to have close ties with Vladimir Putin. In the article, Chen interviewed Lyudmila Savchuk, a whistle blower who is suing the Internet Research Agency, her former employer, in hopes of shutting down their operations of posting pro-Kremlin comments on social media sites in English and Russian.Until Chen’s story, many American readers had never heard of paid Russian propagandists writing online. But followers of the RuNet, Russia’s online spaces, have seen the Russian internet as one of the world’s most fiercely contested online spaces. In 2011, internet researchers in the US and Canada published a book, “Access Contested”, which suggested that battles over online spaces were progressing from censorship – preventing the posting of controversial content or preventing a nation’s citizens from reading that content – to a more complex model of contestation, where governments used a wide range of methods to disrupt dialog online: harassing users with frivolous lawsuits, rendering sites unavailable via denial of service attacks, and flooding comment threads. While these tactics have become popular worldwide, anywhere governments wish to disrupt online speech, many of them were pioneered in Russian cyberspace. My coauthors and I documented some of these early attacks, including attacks on Novaya Gazeta, in a 2010 study published by the Berkman Center at Harvard University.What was surprising about Chen’s story was not that people were producing pro-government comments in Russian, but that this same Internet Research Agency appeared to be responsible for a set of fabricated news stories, released in English and intended to mislead US audiences. These stories have fascinated and baffled American media scholars. They are complex hoaxes, involving dozens of social media accounts, fake websites and fake YouTube videos, all towards the apparent goal of making American social media users believe that a chemical plant in Louisiana had been attacked by ISIS terrorists, or that there had been an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. These hoaxes were not successful in fooling many people for very long – they were quickly dismissed after mainstream news reports made clear that these tragedies had not occurred.These hoaxes suggest an interesting new chapter in the ongoing infowar between the US and Russia. The goal of the infowar may no longer be to promote or discredit either the Kremlin or the White House. The goal may be to destroy trust in the internet, in social media and in news.For decades, nations have worked to produce news that reflects their specific point of view. The United States Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti (for Cuban audiences), Al-Hurra TV and Radio Sawa (for Arabic-speaking audiences), Radio Free Asia, and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, which includes Radio Svoboda, aimed at Russian audiences. Defenders of these projects see them as providing objective news reporting in countries where press freedom is constrained. Others – including some US legislators – see these stations as pro-US propaganda. Until 2013, Voice of America was banned from broadcasting in the US because Congress believed that these broadcasts, played in the US, would function as pro-government propaganda. In recent years, BBG has broadened its remit beyond broadcasting, and proposed spending $12.5 million in 2016 to support internet anti-censorship technologies, intended to allow citizens of countries that censor the internet to access blocked content.It should not have been a surprise that Russia would take to international broadcasting to promote a national agenda, joining stated sponsored channels France24 (France), CCTV (China), and Al Jazeera (Qatar). These channels have experimented with different mixes of news reporting and public diplomacy, sometimes coming under fire for compromising journalistic standards in favor of national interests.Russia Today (RT) has taken some unusual and surprising approaches in deploying this tool of soft power. The network promotes a view of Russia as defender of the principle of international sovereignty in the face of relentless US-led globalization, a viewpoint that turns not only protests in Armenia into a US-led grab for power, but the arrest of FIFA officials for corruption into a plot to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup. While Al Jazeera, in particular, has worked hard to gain respect as a journalistic outlet rather than a government mouthpiece, Russia Today seems content to take an explicitly pro-Russian, anti-US stance.And then there’s the weird stuff. As Ilya Yablokov of the University of Leeds has observed, Russia Today seems to be trying to cultivate a US audience of conspiracy theorists. Yablokov notes that one of the first stories RT ran after launching RT America in 2010 was titled “911 Reasons Why 9/11 Was (Probably) an Inside Job”. The idea that the US government killed over 3000 of its own citizens, including 500 police officers and firefighters, as a pretext to invade Iraq, is deeply offensive to most Americans, and unlikely to win RT a broad US audience. But as Yablokov notes, that may not be the point.There’s a long history in American politics of conspiracy theories gaining wide audiences. Historian Richard Hofstadter identified this in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, a tendency for those who feel alienated and dispossessed to see America as controlled by a secret cabal. Knowing that it is unlikely to persuade the majority of Americans to see their government as a global hegemon and Russia as the tireless defender of sovereign nations, perhaps RT is appealing to those who are predisposed to “Question More”, as the network’s slogan suggests. While that approach won’t work for most Americans, it may work for the 19% of Americans who believe the government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev suggests that a Russian focus on conspiracy theories, especially about outside agitation in creating “color revolutions” is consistent with Russia’s preferred framing of the world – sovereignty versus agitation – rather than the US’s preferred framing – democracy versus authoritarianism. Brian Whitmore, a senior correspondent for RL/RFE, argues that conspiracy theories suggest a government incapable of taking citizen movements seriously documented attempts by the government of Azerbaijan to portray the internet as a dangerous and lawless space, linking internet usage to sexual abuse of children, trafficking of women, breakdowns of marriages and mental illness. The campaign has been quite successful, keeping 86% of Azeri women offline, and helping ensure that internet penetration in Azerbaijan has stayed far behind of its neighbors, Georgia and Armenia. Turkish media scholar Zeynep Tufekci suggests that Erdogan’s government has deployed similar tactics in Turkey, working to demonize social media in the hopes of keeping his large support base off these networks, which are heavily used by opposition organizers.Raising doubt in online media as a whole might help explain why a Russian firm would start easily dismissed rumors on American social networks. The net effect of these rumors has been to remind American Internet users that everything they read online should be doubted before being vetted and verified. And RT’s main brand message is that Americans shouldn’t trust their government or their media, as both are hiding the “other side” of the narrative, and the secrets behind far-reaching conspiracies.But the question remains: who benefits from doubt?Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have a possible answer. Their book “Merchants of Doubt” looks at techniques used by energy industry lobbyists in the US to create uncertainty and doubt about climate change. They trace these techniques back to the tobacco industry, which used similar tactics for decades to prevent tobacco from being regulated as a drug. Their key weapon was doubt. Tobacco companies sponsored legitimate medical research on other causes for cancer and heart disease. The net result was that they kept alive the appearance of a debate about whether tobacco use was the primary cause of lung cancer for far longer than there was an actual scientific debate. Similarly, climate scientists sponsored by energy companies insist that there is a diversity of opinion about humans’ role in creating climate change, relying on the media’s tendency to tell both sides of a story and keep a “debate” alive years beyond when it would otherwise be settled.Who benefits from doubt? Ask instead who benefits from stasis. So long as there was doubt that cigarettes caused cancer, regulators were less willing to label packages, restrict their sales or ban them altogether. So long as there is doubt about humanity’s role in climate change, governments are less likely to pass carbon taxes, ban the burning of coal or subsidize the shift to renewable energy. It’s not necessary to persuade people that cigarettes are safe to smoke or that we can burn coal indefinitely without raising global temperatures – it’s enough to raise sufficient doubt to lead to paralysis.Stasis benefits the Russian state. People baffled by claims and counterclaims over whether Russian troops are in Ukraine or whether the US toppled the Yanukovych government are less likely to demand NATO military intervention in Crimea. Russian citizens who wonder whether Alexei Navalny is an embezzeler are less likely to support his candidacy. Internet users who doubt whatever they see online are less likely to use social media to organize and topple those who are currently in power.It’s expensive to persuade someone to believe something that isn’t true. Persuading someone that _nothing_ is true, that every “fact” represents a hidden agenda, is a far more efficient way to paralyze citizens and keep them from acting. It’s a dark art, one with a long past in Russia and in the US, and one we’re now living with online. =http://www.spin.com/2017/03/infowars-breitbart-fbi-russia-inquiry/Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a congressional hearing that the Bureau is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now, McClatchy DC is reporting that the investigation includes an inquiry into Breitbart News and Alex Jones’s InfoWars, two outlets that worked hard to get Trump elected.McClatchy’s report, which is sourced to two anonymous people “familiar with the inquiry,” alleges that investigators are interested in a network of apparently Kremlin-controlled social media bots that published millions of links to articles from InfoWars and Breitbart, as well as known Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik News. The key question is whether anyone at the far-right American publications did anything to assist the Russian social media campaign.The existence of a Russian botnet created to help elect Trump isn’t hard to believe at all–it fits neatly with the Kremlin’s strategy of using a government-funded “troll farm” to influence American internet discourse. And it’s also not surprising that such a network would select InfoWars and Breitbart as publications to amplify, as both unambiguously favored Trump in the election, as did the Russians. What’s harder to believe is that the campaign would have required active assistance or collaboration from the sites themselves. You don’t need a publisher’s consent to tweet out their stories, and conducting a Twitter search for any randomly selected internet article will frequently turn up tweets that look like they came from bots–usually operated for some less nefarious purpose than destabilizing a government. It seems more likely that the Russians correctly recognized InfoWars and Breitbart as essentially pro-Trump propaganda outlets, and co-opted their content for use as actual propaganda.Jones denied the story to McClatchy reporters who reached him by calling into his show, telling them any allegations about InfoWars collusion with the Russian government are “a (expletive) lie.” But who knows? Either way, there’s a delightful irony in seeing Jones and InfoWars–longtime paranoiacs about covert state operations and shadowy global conspiracies–used as pawns in an actual international government information war, whether wittingly or not.= flynn sanctions nb no link yet=http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313108-declassified-report-putin-ordered-election-interference-to-help Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help TrumpBY 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."==http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/read-us-intelligence-report-russian-hacking-2016-campaign Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday released its declassified report on Russia's efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election by hacking Democratic outfits during the campaign.The report comes a day after top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the issue. During the hearing, Clapper said the intelligence community has grown more "resolute" in its assessment that Russian intelligence was involved in the hacks aimed at the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. On Friday, Clapper, Rogers, FBI Director Jim Comey, and CIA Director John Brennan briefed President-elect Donald Trump on the classified evidence linking Russia to the hacks and the leaking of the swiped emails. After the briefing, Trump released a statement noting that Russia is one of many actors that try to hack US targets, but the statement did not acknowledge the US intelligence community conclusion that Moscow had mounted the cyberattack against the United States as part of an operation to help elect Trump president. ==https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.Continue reading the main storContinue reading the main storyThe officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials. ...security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.oopz greeenwald:?In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished. IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them: