Active Measures Bak
estb 7 25
primary 220 on mcguire fired for telling congress schiff that vlad at it again
MERRI OK
see disinformation
719 disambig but also aggregation disinfo
for domestic see election/ fraud tamper
see collusion (which i guess is more about cooperation between putin and the trump campaign? whereas this is about cyberwar against election integrity
see mueller?
see ukraine 2 crowdstrike on rudy try to shift blame from putin
capt 520 resigned
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:{:{---}:
guk agence fr 15 Aug 2024
Russia is putting generative artificial intelligence to work in online deception campaigns, but its efforts have been unsuccessful, according to a Meta security report released on Thursday.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram found that so far AI-powered tactics “provide only incremental productivity and content-generation gains” for bad actors and Meta has been able to disrupt deceptive influence operations.
Meta’s efforts to combat “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platforms come as fears mount that generative AI will be used to trick or confuse people in elections in the United States and other countries.
Musk’s ‘fun’ AI image chatbot serves up Nazi Mickey Mouse and Taylor Swift deepfakes
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/14/musk-ai-chatbot-images-grok-x)
Russia remains the top source of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” using bogus Facebook and Instagram accounts, David Agranovich, Meta’s security policy director, told reporters.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, those efforts have been concentrated on undermining Ukraine and its allies, according to the report.
As the US election approaches, Meta expects Russia-backed online deception campaigns to attack political candidates who support Ukraine.
Facebook has been accused for years of being used as a powerful platform for election disinformation. Russian operatives used Facebook and other US-based social media to stir political tensions in multiple US elections, including the 2016 election won by Donald Trump.
Experts fear an unprecedented deluge of disinformation from bad actors on social networks because of the ease of using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or the Dall-E image generator to make on demand content in seconds.
AI has been used to create images and videos, and to translate or generate text along with crafting fake news stories or summaries, according to the report.
When Meta scouts for deception, it looks at how accounts act rather than the content they post.
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Influence campaigns tend to span an array of online platforms, and Meta has noticed posts on X, formerly Twitter, used to make fabricated content seem more credible. Meta shares its findings with X and other internet firms and says a coordinated defense is needed to thwart misinformation.
“As far as Twitter (X) is concerned, they are still going through a transition,” Agranovich said when asked whether Meta sees X acting on deception tips. “A lot of the people we’ve dealt with in the past there have moved on.”
X has gutted trust and safety teams and scaled back content moderation efforts once used to tame misinformation, making it what researchers call a breeding ground for disinformation.
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Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape proving otherwise. | Vox
no lnx
Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is layering lie upon lie to rewrite the history of his encouragement of Russian hackers.
by Aaron Rupar
Sep 29, 2020,
Trump accused reporters this weekend of mischaracterizing comments he made in July 2016 publicly encouraging Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton. But the way he described those comments is completely at odds with reality, and there’s video to prove it.
“Do you remember when I said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails,’ or whatever the hell I said? ‘Find her emails,’ and then we all laughed together, 25,000 people in a stadium,” Trump said at a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. “They cut it off exactly before we all started to laugh together, right? And for two years they’ve been saying, ‘He dealt with Russia. He asked Russia to please get her emails,’ or whatever the hell we were asking ... the whole place cracks up with me ... this is how dishonest these people are.”
This is no doubt part of his never-ending effort to discredit the media.
Watch:
Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated.
Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:
Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”
The president seems to be trying to turn reality on its head, even though there’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is spitting on his supporters and telling them it’s raining
Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend.
Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided 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.”
Trump has made clear in the years since that he doesn’t think foreign interference in American elections is a bad thing, insofar as it helps him. In October 2019, Trump flatly told reporters that he thought the Chinese and Ukrainian governments “should investigate the Bidens.” Those comments were widely condemned but were defended as just a joke by Republican members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt, even though footage of the comment showed Trump was serious.
Trump’s comments about the July 2016 news conference were especially shameless, but they were far from the only brazen lie he pushed in Middletown. He told his supporters that just prior to the coronavirus hitting the US, “we were coming together ... I was getting calls from stone-cold, hard-line Democrats,” even though in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial. He claimed 35,000 people attended his Friday evening rally in Newport News, Virginia, but local reports indicate there were around 4,000. And he appeared to fabricate stats about excess mortality in order to mislead people about how hard the US has been hit by Covid-19.
Trump once advised his supporters in 2018 to “just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He’s not subtle about it.
See More:
2020 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Politics
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an 11 24
Russia made an audacious public attempt to blackmail the incoming U.S. president, according to a military expert.
Vladimir Putin and his ministers are already trying to mess with Donald Trump's head when Kremlin intelligence chief Nikolai Patrushev claimed in an interview that Trump had "relied on certain forces" to win a second term in the White House and warned that he had "corresponding obligations" that he was "obliged to fulfill," wrote Slate columnist Fred Kaplan.
:{:{"This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare!" Kaplan wrote. "The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.Did this make Trump wonder: WTF?"}:
The FBI, the director of national intelligence and the top cybersecurity agency all confirmed that Russia was sowing disinformation against Kamala Harris during the election campaign, and law enforcement blamed the foreign adversary for bomb threats called into polling stations in Black neighborhoods.
"However, there is no evidence — nor has anyone claimed — that Trump or his campaign staffers colluded in, or knew anything about, these videos or the bomb threats," Kaplan wrote. "If Trump did have some involvement, or if Russia possesses some other form of kompromat (compromising material) on Trump, Patrushev’s message constitutes an extraordinarily bodacious threat of blackmail, delivered in public, against an American president-elect.
"If Trump did not have any involvement in this escapade, Patrushev’s gambit shows — some would say, confirms— that Russia’s main goal, in all these misinformation ventures, is to sow chaos, breed mistrust, and weaken the sinews of democracy in Western countries, especially in the U.S., regardless of who is the president," Kaplan added.
Trump and the MAGA movement have long sought to improve relations with Russia, but Kaplan said the Kremlin's reaction to his re-election should serve as a warning.
"One can only wonder what Trump will do — whether he’ll change his position, whether he’s capable of changing his stance — when he realizes, if he realizes, that Putin is not his friend," Kaplan wrote. "Trump certainly should not act as if he is."
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december 19, 2018 at
Russian national Maria Butina recently pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent for her government during the 2016 presidential campaign, revealing how well Russia knows the fault lines of U.S. politics and culture, and the extent to which it will go to divide and conquer American democracy.
Russia’s target was the National Rifle Association, which represents the zenith of discord and dysfunction in U.S. politics. With a stranglehold over Republican officeholders, the organization has stoked the most polarizing cultural fracture in the United States: the gun debate.
The debate is deeply polarizing, even though consensus exists on both the left and the right about the need for greater regulation, evidenced Tuesday by the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks. Yet the NRA has spent decades inflaming fears of “big government” by pushing the concept that any common-sense gun control represents an attack on the Second Amendment. Russia seized on the gun debate because it is ripe for misinformation that can further polarize Americans, even when Americans agree more than they disagree.
Founded in 1871 by a Union army veteran to encourage greater marksmanship and sports shooting, the NRA has only recently become a powerful, and controversial, political force. The group began to develop an interest in politics during the 1930s, but it was not until 1975 that the NRA created its Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) to defend the Second Amendment from supposed legislative threats.
Although the NRA was influential in forming federal gun laws between the 1930s and 1960s, it was not until the mid-1970s that politics became its raison d’etre. That shift happened just as the politics of the group began to change. Before 1977, the NRA represented the national consensus on common-sense gun regulations, even agreeing with the need for sales of handguns to be subject to background checks. Enter Harlon Carter. Carter took charge of the ILA in its first year of operation and demanded that the NRA become more politically focused, leading to his dismissal in 1976. At the NRA’s annual convention in 1977, however, Carter regained power after being elected executive vice president. From this position, he dictated the NRA’s rise to power as an anti-regulation lobbying force.
The NRA’s political turn transformed it into a prominent partisan group with a highly engaged membership and, eventually, the ability to defeat any meaningful gun-control legislation. There was a clear synergy between the political rhetoric of the NRA and Republicans’ opposition to federal initiatives that supposedly transgressed American liberties. As the NRA became a powerful fundraiser, supporting congressional candidates for the first time in 1980, Republicans became submissive to its demands.
Over time, that left it an increasingly partisan organization, as Democrats sympathetic to the NRA’s agenda and Republican proponents of gun control left office. The NRA gained newfound political might after Democrats muscled the Assault Weapons Ban through Congress in 1994 and lost control of both chambers the same year, with veteran Democrats crediting their defeat to the NRA’s opposition. Party leaders concluded that crossing the NRA in the future would be politically deadly.
The NRA also became an increasing political powerhouse, thanks to prolific fundraising. In the first presidential election cycle following the 1999 Columbine massacre, then the United States’ deadliest school shooting, the NRA raised $20 million for elections on both the federal and state level. By 2016, the NRA dwarfed this figure, disbursing $419 million in an attempt to avoid a continuation of Obama-era gun control advocacy under Hillary Clinton.
The organization also wasn’t shy about working to defeat Republicans in primary elections who crossed its priorities.
As a result, despite tragic and horrific school shootings, like the mass shooting that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., six years ago this month, gun-control measures remain bottled up in Congress. The inability of Congress to protect American citizens through bipartisan legislation at the federal level has resulted in a patchwork of gun regulations across the country, with so many loopholes that states’ stricter laws are rendered largely meaningless as people and guns cross state lines.
In October 2017, following the massacre in Las Vegas, there was a brief moment of bipartisan reconciliation as people became familiar with the accessibility of bump stocks, which allow a semiautomatic weapon to become akin to a fully automatic killing machine, producing the carnage that occurred on the Strip.
And yet even with the support of President Trump, the ban on bump stocks was delayed for almost 15 months, due to the intransigence of some lawmakers and the persistent lobbying of the NRA. Depending on where one stands on this issue, the ban indicates either Trump’s lack of appreciation of the hold the NRA has on his party or the faintest glimmer of moral courage (or at least an ability to read the polls).
Russia’s infiltration of the NRA represents an ingenious maneuver to sow greater disunity among U.S. voters. It’s also instructive to Americans about the danger of the NRA. The group exacerbates fault lines in the ongoing culture wars, even though Americans have far more in common on gun laws than the NRA would like them to believe. The power wielded by the organization distinguishes it as a special interest that contorts democracy, making it the perfect tool for Russia.
Russia understands that the NRA’s ability to polarize Americans are part of a self-destructive tendency within American political debates. The Parkland shooting in Florida earlier this year and the March for Our Lives movement that followed quickly turned into a partisan brawl during this midterm election year.
While checks and balances protect U.S. democracy, there are only limited checks on accessibility to guns. The proliferation of mass shootings and increasing gun violence — just-released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data revealsthat more people died from guns last year than in any other year since at least 1968 — exposes how the greatest threat to American peace and prosperity is sometimes divisions among Americans themselves. The Russians understand that. It’s past time Americans understand it, as well.
Laura Ellyn Smith teaches at Oxford University while undertaking a second doctorate in U.S. history. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Richmond the American International University.follow on X @OvalOfferings
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7 25 ggl
AI Overview
Based on information from various sources, here's a summary of Russia's interference efforts related to the 2024 US election and its impact on the campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris:
Russia's Interference Efforts:
Russia engaged in disinformation and propaganda campaigns primarily aimed at undermining Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and promoting those who favored less U.S. involvement in international affairs, particularly concerning Ukraine and NATO. They employed various tactics, such as creating fake videos, manipulating content, and spreading false narratives on social media and through fake news sites, to sow division and erode trust in the election process.
After Biden's withdrawal, Russian efforts shifted to targeting Kamala Harris and her supporters, including the creation of a fake video attempting to show ballots being destroyed. U.S. intelligence assessed that Russia preferred Trump's election due to his perceived skepticism of U.S. support for Ukraine, and Russian state media often portrayed Trump favorably while criticizing Harris. Russia also recruited right-wing influencers to spread pro-Kremlin content and conspiracy theories, and non-credible bomb threats linked to Russian email domains briefly disrupted voting on Election Day.
Impact on Trump and Harris:
Generally, Russia's influence efforts aimed to benefit Trump, although he dismissed the allegations. Russia targeted Harris and the election process after Biden's withdrawal, spreading disinformation to denigrate her.
U.S. Response:
The U.S. government countered these efforts through actions such as sanctions, indictments, and seizing websites used for propaganda.
Overall Impact:
While these influence efforts were widespread, researchers indicate there is currently no evidence suggesting they significantly altered the overall outcome of the 2024 US elections. However, the nature of these attempts underscores the ongoing threat of foreign interference in democratic processes.
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ggl 7 25
[### Review: 'Active Measures' Looks at Links Between Trump ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2018/08/30 › movies › acti...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/movies/active-measures-review-trump-russia.html)
Aug 30, 2018 — Directed by Jack Bryan, this documentary starts by summarizing Vladimir V. Putin's career through the time of his election as Russia's president ...
- Opinion | The Worldwide War...
- The Best Books to Read on...
- Too Much Information About...
- Russia Escalated Sabotage to...
- Putin Authorized Russian...
- Opinion | The Seven...
- 5 Takeaways From the House...
[### Opinion | The Worldwide War on Truth
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › video › opinion › counterin...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188105/countering-disinformation-active-measures.html)
Nov 12, 2018 — Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia's ...
[### Operation InfeKtion: How Russia Perfected the Art of War
YouTube · The New York Times
1.8M+ views · 6 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo)
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 ...
7 commandments
find the cracks, polarize old yng, rich poor blk wht...--. demoralized, destabilized --> crisis
2 big lie
3 kernal of truth
4 conceal src origin
5 useful idiots
6 deny all
7 long game cumulative effect on politics
internet transformative 100k in big paper;
anon, ubiq, immediate
mh17 shot dn by ukr fighter
isis chem explos lA; brexit; 7 aug 2014 rt ebola ft detrick ; zika jan 1016 GMO engr RT
mar 2016 podesta email pizzagate GRU = cia, use real emails wikileaks hide src
IRA 50k corrd accts unprecedented
rt 80?% legit
sorta ignored 30 yrs cold war, dignify by reply
~ RR
[### The Best Books to Read on Disinformation
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2022/06/09 › books-disinfo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/books/books-disinformation-fake-news.html)
Jun 9, 2022 — False statements, misdirection, half-truths and outright lies: When promoted and repeated in the echo chambers of social media, ...
[### Too Much Information About Disinformation?
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2018/11/18 › reader-center](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/reader-center/russian-disinformation-video.html)
Nov 18, 2018 — What started as a one-off opinion video about Cold War-era Russian disinformation soon became two videos and then three as news of 2016 election meddling ...
[### Russia Escalated Sabotage to Pressure U.S. and Allies on ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/us/politics/russia-sabotage-attacks-europe-ukraine.html)
Mar 18, 2025 — Anger at Russia's covert efforts, which included targeting undersea cables, warehouses and railways, has the potential to influence European ...
[### Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/election-interference-russia-2020-assessment.html)
May 27, 2021 — The assessment was the intelligence community's most comprehensive look at foreign efforts to interfere in the election.
[### Opinion | The Seven Commandments of Fake News
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › opinion › what-is-pizzagate](https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188102/what-is-pizzagate.html)
Nov 12, 2018 — We've reverse engineered the seven commandments of russian disinformation a time-tested step-by-step recipe to creating the perfect fake news story.
[### Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News | NYT Opinion
YouTube · The New York Times
353.5K+ views · 6 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5WjRjz5mTU)
The KGB is a department that specializes in planting false stories and forged documents.
[### 5 Takeaways From the House Report on Russian Election ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/us/politics/takeaways-house-intelligence-committee-russian-election-interference.html)
Apr 27, 2018 — The report into Russia's election interference by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee blamed American intelligence agencies for failing to discern ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/us/politics/takeaways-house-intelligence-committee-russian-election-interference.html
no lnx
5 Takeaways From the House Report on Russian Election Meddling
The report into Russia’s election interference by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee blamed American intelligence agencies for failing to discern the objectives of President Vladimir V. Putin.Credit...Mikhail Klimentyev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Charlie Savage and Matthew Rosenberg
April 27, 2018
WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released on Friday the results of its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and Democrats issued a dissenting report. The accounts reached dueling interpretations of a litany of information about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians.
Here are five takeaways:
No Evidence of Collusion — or a Failure to Search for It?
One after another, the Republican report explains away links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. It declares that the committee “did not find any evidence of collusion, conspiracy, or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians. While the committee found that several of the contacts between Trump associates and Russians — or their proxies, including WikiLeaks — were ill advised, the committee did not determine that Trump or anyone associated with him assisted Russia’s active measures campaign.”
But in their dissent, Democrats argued that the Republicans’ conclusion was not credible. They said the investigation ended prematurely, and they accused Republicans of failing to interview key witnesses, to force others to answer questions or to subpoena important documents.
“As with so many of the majority’s findings, the majority did not uncover evidence because it refused look for any,” the Democratic report said.
Russia Didn’t Want Trump to Win — or Did It?
The intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government carried out an influence campaign targeting the 2016 election, and the House committee largely agreed. But its majority raised doubts about one key finding of intelligence agencies: that the Russian government wanted to help Donald J. Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, rather than just to sow discord.
Those “judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election,” the Republicans wrote, “failed to meet longstanding standards.” But they offered no analysis or evidence supporting that claim, instead alluding vaguely to still-classified matters and saying the committee would put out additional material later.
In their dissent, Democrats pointed out that many of the social-media messages Russians had disseminated lauded Mr. Trump or were damaging to Democrats, as was the hacking and release of Democratic emails. They also said they had reviewed the same still-classified materials that Republicans had and asserted that they did not support the Republican findings. They suggested that the Republicans were trying to sow doubt about the intelligence community’s "credibility and reliability on this matter and perhaps to appeal to President Trump.”
Some Right-Wing Takes Get a Congressional Imprimatur — But Not All of Them
The Republican report echoed several talking points circling among Mr. Trump’s allies on conservative news and opinion outlets. For example, the report dovetails with the script-flipping narrative that a dossier alleging complicity between Trump associates and Russia compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was itself a Russian plot. “The committee is concerned with the degree to which the Kremlin may have sought to influence information that was ultimately provided to Steele,” the Republicans wrote.
However, the Republicans rejected a conspiracy theory that has been promoted by some of Mr. Trump’s key allies: the notion that WikiLeaks obtained Democratic National Committee emails not from Russian hackers but from Seth Rich, a staff member of the Democratic National Committee who was murdered in Washington in July 2016. WikiLeaks published the emails, and the Fox News commentator Sean Hannity and others promoted the theory that they came from Mr. Rich, not Russia.
But the majority report said that the intelligence case for attributing the email theft to Russians was “significant” and that it had found “no credible evidence,” including in still-classified intelligence reports, supporting the alternative theory of “an insider.”
Pro-Trump Statements Are Portrayed as Credible and His Opponents With Skepticism
The Republican report was often skeptical in tone about statements and testimony by people who put forward information that could be damaging to Mr. Trump, and more credulous about statements in his favor. For example, when discussing Mr. Steele, the Republican report uses suspicious terms, like saying he “claimed” to have obtained his allegations from “purported” high-level Russian sources. But when discussing testimony by witnesses who explained away various meetings with Russians, the report instead presents what they said with neutral terms, like “stated,” or uses words connoting the idea that they were acknowledging a truth.
One example of that concerns testimony by Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump campaign officials and Russians. He wrote in an email to Donald Trump Jr. that the visitors wanted to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” But Mr. Goldstone later told Congress that he had no evidence supporting that statement, saying he had embellished his email with inaccurate information to get a response. The report says Mr. Goldstone “admitted” this exonerating account.
An Attack on Leaks, and James Clapper
The Republican report is scathing about leaks to the news media that have brought to light various information about Trump-Russia contacts. Against that backdrop, it declares that James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, gave “inconsistent testimony” about his discussions of the so-called Steele dossier with Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor. (Many news outlets had copies of the dossier but did not report on its existence because they were unable to verify its contents. But in January 2017, CNN reported that intelligence officials had briefed Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, about the dossier, and BuzzFeed published it shortly after.)
The Republican report said that Mr. Clapper initially denied discussing the dossier with journalists but subsequently “acknowledged” having discussed it with Mr. Tapper and “admitted” possibly talking about it with other reporters, too. The Democratic report portrays this passage as written to “smear” Mr. Clapper with a “dark insinuation,” saying it promotes a “narrative that former Obama administration officials, such as Clapper, leaked classified or sensitive information to the media.” The Democratic report notes that the dossier was not classified.
It also provides an excerpt from a transcript of Mr. Clapper’s testimony. It shows that he was asked whether he had discussed the dossier or intelligence related to Russia with journalists and replied “no.” But then, asked whether he confirmed or corroborated the dossier’s contents to Mr. Tapper, Mr. Clapper acknowledged discussing the dossier with Mr. Tapper but said that was “when it was out all over the place.” The transcript is ambiguous about whether that meant they discussed it before or after CNN reported the briefing.
On Twitter, follow Charlie Savage @charlie_savage and Matthew Rosenberg @AllMattNYT.
See more on: Donald Trump, U.S. Politics, Democratic Party, James Clapper Jr., Christopher Steele, Seth Rich
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an ah 2 23
When former special counsel Robert Mueller released, in 2019, his in-depth report on Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump was quick to describe it as a total exoneration of him — a claim that was echoed repeatedly by a long list of right-wing media outlets. In reality, the Mueller report was more complex than that.
Mueller, a conservative Republican and former FBI director, concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians did not rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But the Mueller report, when one really digs into it, shows that those interactions were at least questionable.
Moreover, Robert Mueller never said that the Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 election; that interference, according to Mueller, was quite real. And Mueller’s investigation led to criminal prosecutions of some of Trump’s close associates, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
READ MORE: Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'
CNN’s Michael Warren, on April 18, 2019, pointed out, “Mueller’s report concludes that it ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the election interference activities.’ That’s as clear as it can be, but Mueller also concluded that both the Russian government and the Trump campaign believed the other would be beneficial.”
Nonetheless, MAGA Republicans continue to dismiss Russiagate as an example of “Trump derangement syndrome” run amok. But libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, in a lengthy article published by The Bulwark on February 8, stresses that Russiagate is “hardly” the “hoax” that “Trump cultists” claim it is.
Young cites two reasons why “Russiagate skeptics” were feeling giddy in January. But neither of them, she writes, mean that Russiagate was a mere “hoax.”
“Committed skeptics of ‘Russiagate’ — the scandal around Russian interference in the 2016 election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump, and the Trump campaign’s collaboration with this effort — had a good month in January,” Young explains. “First, a study released on January 9 concluded that Russian disinformation and propaganda on Twitter, while a real phenomenon, did not significantly affect American attitudes — partly because the notorious Russian bots were, as The Intercept put it, ‘a small speck when compared to homegrown posters’ — or influence the results of the 2016 election.”
Young continues, “Then, on January 30, Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part report on Russiagate with a scathing analysis of media coverage by veteran investigative journalist Jeff Gerth. It concluded that the news media repeatedly fell short of professional standards in their handling of the story, compromising their objectivity and contributing to polarization and erosion of public trust in journalism. The reaction from the skeptics — a motley crowd that includes everyone from hardcore Donald Trump cultists to anti-anti-Trumpists to critics of America’s national security apparatus and various anti-establishment contrarians — was downright exuberant.”
But Young goes on to say that none of that means that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election didn’t happen.
“Some Democrats, shocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, did fall back on exaggerated claims of Russian interference — including claims that there had been actual vote-tampering — instead of examining Clinton’s very real flaws as a candidate,” Young argues. “But it is no less true that plenty of conservatives have used the supposed ‘Russia hoax’ to promote narratives of Republican victimization…. Examining and critiquing the media’s handling of Russiagate is important and necessary,but it can be done without downplaying Russia’s very real assaults on election integrity in the U.S. and in other democracies.”
Young adds, “Otherwise, the ‘Russia hoax’ quickly becomes an excuse for everything from Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election to the enabling of Russia’s foreign aggression: in other words, the last refuge of scoundrels.”
READ MORE: Trump goes on hours-long rant against FBI after J6 committee criminal charges — and admits he lost
Read The Bulwark’s full report at this link.
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rudy ukraine BS
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118
Treasury Sanctions Russia-Linked Election Interference Actors
September 10, 2020
Washington – Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated four Russia-linked individuals for attempting to influence the U.S. electoral process. Russia uses a variety of proxies to attempt to sow discord between political parties and drive internal divisions to influence voters as part of Moscow’s broader efforts to undermine democratic countries and institutions. In the United States, Russia has used a wide range of influence methods and actors to target our electoral process, including targeting U.S. presidential candidates.
Treasury designated Andrii Derkach (Derkach) pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13848 for his efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Derkach, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services. Derkach has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election. Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference. This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated. The Administration is working across the U.S. Government, and with state, local, and private sector partners, to make the 2020 election secure.
“Andrii Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”
Derkach’s Election Influence Efforts
From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United Statesdesigned to culminate prior to election day. Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.
Between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials, and he levied unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures. Derkach almost certainly targeted the U.S. voting populace, prominent U.S. persons, and members of the U.S. government, based on his reliance on U.S. platforms, English-language documents and videos, and pro-Russian lobbyists in the United States used to propagate his claims.
Treasury Continues to Hold Russian Actors Accountable
Today’s designation of Derkach is another example of the Treasury department promoting accountability for Kremlin-linked individuals seeking to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic processes. Treasury has previously designated the Russian troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and its Russian financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Prigozhin has been designated by the United States pursuant to E.O. 13661, E.O. 13694, as amended, and most recently by E.O. 13848 for providing material support to the IRA’s influence activities against the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.
Today, Treasury also designated three IRA actors pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended by E.O. 13757, and E.O. 13848 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the IRA, an entity designated pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended, and E.O. 13848. Russian nationals Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova, as employees of the IRA, supported the IRA’s cryptocurrency accounts. The IRA uses cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their ongoing malign influence operations around the world.
OFAC coordinated today’s action against the IRA with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the United States Secret Service.
As a result of today’s designations, all property and interests in property of these targets that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them. Additionally, any entities 50 percent or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked.
View identifying information on the individuals designated today.
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https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf
march 2021
Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections
Key Judgment 1: We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the
voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting
results. We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without
detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around
voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits. The IC identified some successful compromises of state
and local government networks prior to Election Day—as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts—that we
assess were not directed at altering election processes. Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or
inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and
results.
Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government
organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the
Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process,
and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016,we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts
to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment; Russian state and proxy actors
who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect US public perceptions in a consistent manner. A key element of
Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence
narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media
organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and
his administration.
Key Judgment 3: We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut
former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public
confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the
US. We have high confidence in this assessment. We assess that Supreme Leader Khamenei authorized the campaign
and Iran’s military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber operations.
Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy
influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this
judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as
being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools—
primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy
regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine
former President Trump’s reelection.
Key Judgment 5: We assess that a range of additional foreign actors—including Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and
Venezuela—took some steps to attempt to influence the election. In general, we assess that they were smaller in scale
than the influence efforts conducted by other actors this election cycle. Cybercriminals disrupted some election
preparations; we judge their activities probably were driven by financial motivation
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an 11 22
A Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin is finally admitting to have interfered in the United States’ elections, and is promising he still is and will continue to do so.
“Gentlemen, we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” boasted Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef” for his lucrative Kremlin catering contracts, the Associated Press reports.
Prigozhin’s statement came “from the press service of his catering company…on the eve of U.S. midterm elections in response to a request for comment.”
The U.S. Dept. of Justice has not commented, but in February of 2018 announced that Prigozhin was part of a large grand jury indictment via Robert Mueller.
“The Department of Justice announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia … returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office,” the DOJ’s statement reads. “The indictment charges thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies for committing federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system, including the 2016 Presidential election. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called ‘information warfare against the United States,’ with the stated goal of ‘spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.'”
That statement specifically names “Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin,” alleging he “funded the conspiracy through companies known as Concord Management and Consulting LLC, Concord Catering, and many subsidiaries and affiliates. The conspiracy was part of a larger operation called ‘Project Lakhta.’ Project Lakhta included multiple components, some involving domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in multiple countries.”
Calling him the “Russian who orchestrates Putin’s private army,” The Daily Beast adds that Prigozhin “did not specify which election the Russians have intervened in, but he is well aware that there has been intense focus, and several indictments, surrounding Russia’s alleged efforts in the election of Trump, when there was reason to believe that Kremlin wanted the former reality TV star to be victorious.”
Prigozhin, according to Reuters, “has been formally accused of sponsoring Russia-based ‘troll farms’ that seek to influence U.S. politics.”
Last week CNN reported Prigozhin has been growing his influence inside the Kremlin by leveraging his “brutal” Wagner Group mercenaries “who are operating in Ukraine.”
Watch that video below or at this link.
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an 1021
Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.
Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.
Nance explained that it was a tactic Russians used where they combined an information warfare strategy where they flood a country with so much misinformation that a country would welcome an invasion without a war.
"That didn't really happen" in the United States, Nance explained. "What the Russians did in the year 2016 is they created an information bubble in which the Trump campaign was seen as friendly and then, the Trump data team took that information, including stolen information from the Democratic National Committee, and created their own information sphere. Once the Russian bubble was popped after the 2016 election, the Trump team took the ball and ran with it. The Russians barely have to do anything."
Nance explained that the Trump team and their control over conservative television stations like Fox News and OAN enabled them to indoctrinate their own followers into believing some of the most insane things ever crafted, "to the point where they view it."
He talked about a kind of radicalization that gives Trump's supporters the confidence their actions are not only patriotic but that "violence is the only solution and they're carrying out a second Lexington, a second Concord, as your other guests said, 1776 2.0."
"They think they're restoring the United States, despite the fact they are physically attacking the United States, and believe me, the way that ammunition prices went up within the last year on the public market, I think these people really believe they're going to affect the revolution at some point," said Nance.
Earlier in the conversation, Nance addressed Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holding up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a "peaceful protest" and treatingitems used in the attack as their own kind of religious relic or a "talisman" as Nance characterized. "As if it's going to give them some connection deeper to Donald Trump."
"It all flies in the face of their own storyline, their story arc in which it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter that carried out the attack," said Nance. "Now, on some signs, we see them actually not only recognizing that they've carried out this event but, as I said in the video, a peaceful protest at the Capitol and now carrying an American flag, which took part in that. It's absolutely disgraceful that any of this is happening. But what you're seeing, it is a strategy by the Republicans and Trump play out where they're now embracing the popularism of that violence."
See his full take in the video below:
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Russian disinformation[
Clint Watts and two others in the FBI began to notice Russian disinformation campaigns starting in April 2014.[59] Watts said that Russian-driven efforts to spread misinformation were involved withJade Helm 15.[59] In 2017, Facebook shut down a page called "Heart of Texas" which was found to be associated with a Russian company promoting disinformation, including promoting the Jade Helm conspiracy.[60]
On May 3, 2018, The Texas Tribune reported that Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA said that the "hysteria" surrounding the training exercise "was fueled by Russians wanting to dominate 'the information space.'"[61]Hayden said that Russian bots were used to spread misinformation.[62]
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/putins-favorite-congressman-offered-julian-assange-a-pardon-if-he-covered-up-russian-meddling-lawyers/}:}:
raw story
american prosecutors said this week that former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon from President Donald Trump if he agreed to help cover up Russia’s role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
*The Daily Beast* reports that witness Jennifer Robinson has testified that she attended a meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange in 2017 in which he made a direct quid-pro-quo offer.
Rohrabacher was joined in the meeting by Charles Johnson, a pro-Trump racist internet troll, and the two men led officials at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.
“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said. the White House has denied that Trump was ever aware of such a scheme, however, and attorneys representing the U.S. government seemed to dispute Rohrabacher’s claims.
“After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim,” The Daily Beast reports. “They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/7-bombshell-allegations-in-a-damning-new-trump-administration-whistleblower-report/
a new whistleblower complaint from U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee Brian Murphy released Wednesday provided a slew of provocative and disturbing allegations of criminal behavior and abuse of authority within the Trump administration.
The document was released by the House Intelligence Committee, and it actually summarizes numerous previous complaints that Murphy, the principal deputy under secretary for the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has previously filed with the inspector general.The complaint alleged that he has since faced professional retaliation from his superiors because of his previous allegations, despite the fact that he is protected from such actions by federal law.
While the retaliation is condemnable on its own, most striking are the series of allegations the complaint described. It paints a picture of a department completely warped by the president’s distorted priorities and determined to cater to his whims and prejudices, regardless of the facts — sometimes putting the country in danger.
Here are seven key details:
1. Murphy said he was illegally directed to manipulate intelligence assessments to support aggressive border policies.
On or about October 29, 2018, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that instructions from Mr. Taylor and Ms. Marquadt had been issued for Mr. Murphy to ensure the intelligence assessments he produced for Secretary Nielsen’s review supported the policy argument that large numbers of KSTs were entering the United States through the southwest border. Mr. Murphy declined to censor or manipulate the intelligence information, viewing it as an improper administration of an intelligence program, and stated to Mr. Glawe that doing what was being requested would constitute a felony.
2. The complaint makes a compelling case that former DHS Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress to exaggerate the threat at the border.
Murphy said that the secretary purposely tried to blur the distinction between “Known or Suspected Terrorists” (KSTs) and other categories of migrants, thereby misleadingly suggesting the border posed a greater threat of terrorism than it actually does. Even after he explained these distinctions to Nielsen, Murphy said, she consistently misled Congress about the matter:
Prior to Secretary Nielsen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 20, 2018, Mr. Murphy attended a preparation session that went over the information within the proposed testimony. During that session, Mr. Murphy sought to clarify for Secretary Nielsen the distinction between a KST and a Special Interest Alien (“SIA”). An SIA is a term of art created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection meant to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat but regarding whom there is no individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist. An SIA does not constitute a KST.
Notwithstanding the clarification provided by Mr. Murphy, he has a good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen subsequently provided on December 20, 2018, regarding KSTs constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. This assessment formed the basis of the anonymous OIG complaint Mr. Murphy submitted on November 2, 2018. On January 9, 2019, without consulting with Messrs. Glawe or Murphy, DHS issued a document – apparently crafted by Messrs. Wolf and Taylor, and Ms. Marquadt – entitled “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens”. The document contained erroneous information regarding the number of KSTs and SIAs encountered along the southwest border.
On March 5, 2019, Mr. Murphy participated in another preparation session with Secretary Nielsen, this time in advance of her testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Messrs. Wolf and Taylor were also present. During the session, Mr. Murphy provided Secretary Nielsen with documentation reflecting that the number of documented KSTs crossing the southwest border only consisted of no more than three individuals, not 3,755 individuals as she had previously attested to in her testimony on December 20, 2018. 3 Mr. Wolf and Mr. Taylor responded by saying Secretary Nielsen should claim the details were classified, state any KST crossing was one too many and deflect away from addressing the significant discrepancy in the data. Mr. Murphy advised Secretary Nielsen that he did not believe that was appropriate, and noted that the few “known” KSTs who were apprehended were derivative contacts, in so much as they merely had a name or phone number of a person who was known to be in contact with a terrorist. At that point, Mr. Murphy was removed from the meeting by Mr. Wolf. He then informed Messrs. Glawe and Hanna what transpired that evening.
It is Mr. Murphy’s good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen delivered on March 6, 2019, regarding KSTs again constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. Mr. Murphy outlined that assessment in his anonymous May 13, 2019, OIG complaint.
3. Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli illegally tried to distort intelligence reports he viewed as too favorable to asylum seekers, claiming they were concocted by the “Deep State,” the complaint said.
In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.
After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program.
4. Under Secretary David Glawe was reportedly almost fired by Trump after he testified about the threat posed by Russian election interference.
In approximately September 2018, Mr. Glawe testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Mr. Murphy was not present during the testimony. Immediately following that hearing, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that he had been “challenged” by Republican members of the Committee regarding Mr. Glawe’s confirmation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. Glawe was subsequently summoned to the White House a few days after his testimony. Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that Secretary Nielsen had warned him that President Trump had demanded Mr. Glawe be fired. However, Secretary Nielsen and White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had convinced President Trump to “give Glawe another chance”. After that meeting at the White House, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that while he (Mr. Glawe) would continue to support him on most matters he (Mr. Murphy) was on his own when it came to election interference assessments.
5. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop reporting on Russian interference and to focus on China and Iran, which Murphy believed “would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complaint said.
In mid-May 2020, Mr. Wolf instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.
6. Officials were concerned that discussing the threats posed by white supremacists and Russian intelligence operations would reflect badly on Trump, and they preferred that Murphy’s team work on “violent ‘left-wing’ groups” like “antifa.”
These changes would clearly better match Trump’s preferred rhetoric, though not reality.
In March 2020, Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed a Homeland [Threat] Assessment (“HTA”). Completion of the HTA was a requirement set forth by Acting Secretary Kevin McCleenan prior to his departure from DHS. Mr. Murphy was intimately involved in the editing and crafting of the HTA. Following its completion, the HTA was distributed by Mr. Glawe to Messrs. Wolf, Cuccinelli, and Gountanis. Shortly after the distribution, Mr. Glawe was informed that further distribution of the HTA was prohibited due to concerns raised by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding how the HTA would reflect upon President Trump. Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States. Mr. Murphy stated to Mr. Glawe that this constituted an abuse of authority by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli, and Mr. Glawe concurred with that assessment.
In May 2020, Mr. Glawe retired, and Mr. Murphy assumed the role of Acting Under Secretary. In May 2020 and June 2020, Mr. Murphy had several meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli regarding the status of the HTA. Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.
…
During multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to modify any of the intelligence assessments based upon political rhetoric, and advised both officials he would only report accurate intelligence information as collected by DHS I&A.
7. Classified material
Much of what is concerning about the complaint is what it doesn’t mention. At several points, the complaint makes clear it can’t repeat the substance of allegations regarding DHS officials because the material involved is classified. This is particularly concerning because other parts of the complaint indicate that officials abused the classification system to cover up embarrassing or inconvenient facts.
Additional point: One interesting point to note is that Murphy tried to push back on some reporting that was critical of DHS because it supposedly implied falsely that DHS was collecting intelligence information on journalists and reporters.
Murphy claims this didn’t happen. Putting aside the particulars, this detail in the report may be seen as bolstering Murphy’s credibility. Defenders of the administration will likely argue he’s a disgruntled employee trying to hurt Trump and DHS, but it’s notable that he seems to be willing to defend the department when he thinks the facts have been unfairly reported. This suggests Murphy is someone who cares about getting to the truth, rather someone who is trying to hurt the president and the administration no matter the cost:
To be unequivocally clear, the press reporting was significantly flawed and, in many instances, contained completely erroneous assertions. For example, DHS I&A never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized. There were, to be sure, efforts to track publicly available media reporting that included information that had been leaked from the U.S. Government, including publicly-accessible posts by journalists on social media, but DHS I&A did not seek authorization to and was not engaging in surveillance of journalists’ private data.
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2020 election
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-warning-lights-are-flashing-red-how-trumps-toadies-are-helping-him-collude-with-russia/}:
After reviewing classified intelligence reports about Vladimir Putin’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election over three weeks ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal tried to sound the alarm.
The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack.
This week, I reviewed classified materials in the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and received a similarly classified briefing on malign foreign threats to U.S. elections. I was shocked by what I learned — and appalled that, by swearing Congress to secrecy, the Trump administration is keeping the truth about a grave, looming threat to democracy hidden from the American people. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued astatement that only hints at the threats.
The facts are chilling. I believe the American public needs and deserves to know them. The information should be declassified immediately.
Blumenthal went on to say that what he learned makes “Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” We still, however, have no idea of what shocked him enough to write that op-ed in the Washington Post.
What we do know is how the Trump administration reacted. Last Friday, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, told Congress that his office would no longer brief them in person about foreign election interference, but would submit written reports. Clearly they don’t want to face probing questions from Congress. In defending his actions, however, Ratcliffe admitted that it goes beyond that.
[no twt]
ratcliffe’s initial argument doesn’t make any sense. He said that he is going to stop in-person briefings because members of Congress leaked classified information to the press. What he didn’t explain is how that would stop leaks. Classified information provided in writing is even easier to share with reporters.
In a scathing rebuke of Ratcliffe’s announcement, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out that the only so-called “leaks” came from the kind issued by Senator Blumenthal.
After the intelligence community briefed members of Congress in late July about threats to the upcoming election, Democrats expressed alarm about what they had learned — and about the fact that the information had not been shared with the American public. “The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in a Post op-ed, without disclosing any specifics…
[T]he only “leak” was the simple fact that the administration was withholding critical information about Russia’s interference — which, of course, is intended to help President Trump win reelection.
In that clip of Ratcliffe’s Fox News appearance, he eventually got to the point by saying that Democrats leaked information that “simply wasn’t true, that somehow Russia is a greater security threat than China.” In a case of obvious projection, Ratcliffe is telling us that the Trump administration doesn’t want Congress or the public to know what Moscow is doing to interfere in the election, but instead wants to change the narrative to focus on the distraction they’re offering about the threat posed by China. In other words, Ratcliffe is suggesting that he will now cherry-pick what intelligence is shared with Congress to provide cover for what Moscow is up to.
Added to that is a troubling story about yet another purge in the Justice Department by Attorney General Barr.
Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr’s recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
Barr has reassigned 23-year career professional Brad Wiegmann, who had been serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Law and Policy. As ABC News reports, “The office shapes government efforts by ensuring that new policies and executive actions don’t violate federal law.”
We’ve heard stories from former Trump administration officials who have said that they often found themselves having to tell the president that the actions he wanted to take were not legal. As former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor said, Trump would claim to have “magical authorities” to break the law.
Now Barr has removed the person whose job it is to tell the administration when they are breaking the law and replaced him with a partisan loyalist. While it might not be unprecedented to do that, the fact that it comes a couple of months before an election makes this one troubling. Here is the most telling part about Wiegmann’s replacement, Kellen Dwyer:
From 2018 to 2019, he served as a fellow at the conservative-leaning Leonine Forum, a non-profit organization that says its alumni are “committed to the cause of reintroducing the tenets of [the Catholic church] into the political, policy, legal, business, and cultural activities of society.”
The Leonine Forum was created by the Catholic Information Center (CIC), an extremist group founded by Father John McCloskey, who eventually left the organization over allegations of sexual assault. Several members of the Trump administration have close ties to the CIC, including Attorney General Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
What appears to be happening is that both Ratcliffe and Barr are paving the way for Putin and Trump, who speak regularly by phone, to illegally collude in their efforts to influence the election—this time from the Oval Office with the entire federal bureaucracy at their disposal.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/dhs-withheld-publication-of-intel-bulletin-showing-russian-plot-to-bidens-mental-health-report
according to ABC News, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security withheld publication, in early July, of an intelligence bulletin describing a Russian scheme to push “allegations about” Biden’s “poor mental health.”
ABC News has obtained a copy of the bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of U.S. Candidates to Influence 2020 Election.” And ABC reporters Josh Margolin, Lucien Bruggeman, Will Steakin and Jonathan Karl note that the document was submitted to the DHS’ office of legislative and public affairs for review on July 7.
“The analysis was not meant for public consumption,” according to the reporters. “But it was set to be distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement partners two days later, on July 9, the e-mails show.”
However, an e-mail obtained by ABC News shows that DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis intervened, asking DHS employees to “please hold on sending this one out until you have a chance to speak to” Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf. And almost two months later, according to ABC News, the bulletin has yet to be circulated.
the bulletin stated that DHS analysts believed, with “high confidence,” that “Russian malign influence actors are likely to continue denigrating presidential candidates through allegations of poor mental or physical health to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.”
Right-wing Republican Elizabeth Neumann, who formerly served as a DHS assistant secretary under the Trump Administration but recently voiced her support for Biden in a Republican Voters Against Trump video, told ABC News, “High confidence means what it sounds like: that they are highly confident that their assessment is accurate. And they don’t use that language very often.”
John Cohen, a former undersecretary of intelligence at DHS under President Barack Obama, expressed concerns that the Trump Administration is blocking intelligence information for political purposes.
Cohen told ABC News, “We are hearing concerns being raised publicly that, in this administration, intelligence community reporting is being modified or blocked for political reasons — or to not anger the president. By blocking information from being released that describes threats facing the nation, it undermines the ability of the public and state and local authorities to work with the federal government to counteract the threat.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-slam-shocking-abdication-of-responsibility-as-intelligence-officials-scale-back-election-security-briefings
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-slam-shocking-abdication-of-responsibility-as-intelligence-officials-scale-back-election-security-briefings
no lnx twt
Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 31, 2020
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) indicated on Sunday that his committee may subpoena intelligence officials, following Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s announcement that regular election security briefings will be scaled back ahead of the general election.
“This intelligence paid for by taxpayers doesn’t belong to Donald Trump, it doesn’t belong to the intelligence agencies, it belongs to the American people,” Schiff told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Democrats expressed outrage over the weekend after Ratcliffe announced that lawmakers will no longer be receiving in-person briefings on election security, even amid concerns that foreign powers are attempting to interfere with the 2020 general election.
In what Democratic leaders called a “shocking abdication” of responsibility, Ratcliffe sent letters to members of the Senate and House Saturday evening, indicating that only written briefings will be provided until the November election and blaming leaks from Congress for the decision.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schiff (D-Calif.) accused Ratcliffe of betraying “the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy.”
“This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be,” said Pelosi and Schiff, referring to intelligence shared in a briefing last month.
On Twitter, Schiff accused President Donald Trump of “lying and projecting” after Trump spoke about the decision in a press conference.
“They leaked the information,” Trump said of Ratcliffe’s decision. “And what’s even worse, they leaked the wrong information. And he got tired of it. So he wants to do it in a different forum, because you have leakers on the committee.”
The scaling-back of briefings comes a month after Politico reported on a classified security briefing given to all members of Congress by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. At the meeting, Evanina acknowledged that “Russia is again trying to boost President Donald Trump’s reelection and denigrate his opponent.”
Democrats in the briefing urged Evanina to acknowledge the information publicly and denounced an earlier public statement he made in which he warned of potential election interference by Russia, China, and Iran.
The vague statement was “almost meaningless” and not helpful to voters, Democrats said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of using Ratcliffe, a loyalist to the president who was elevated to his current position after serving in the House, “to hide the ugly truth from the American people—that the president is again receiving the help of the Kremlin.”
“DNI Ratcliffe has made clear he’s in the job only to protect Trump from democracy, not democracy from Trump,” said Schumer.
Previously, Trump and his postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, have overseen what critics call the sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service. Ahead of a general election in which millions of Americans will rely on voting-by-mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, DeJoy ordered cuts to overtime, the removal of mailboxes and mail-sorting machines, and changes to post office hours. The president has also baselessly claimed that the use of mail-in ballots will invite fraud, despite the fact that he himself has voted by mail, and openly admitted that undermining the USPS will ensure universal voting-by-mail is not possible.
In 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations including a government-supported “troll farm” with conspiring to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election. Trump had long accused Mueller of leading a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” about Russia’s involvement. The Mueller Report, released in 2019, found that Trump campaign officials had extensive contacts with Russians and that many lied about those communications, but stopped short of accusing the president and his advisors of conspiring with Russia in 2016.
This year, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub tweeted, “if America has a legitimate election, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s best efforts to prevent one.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial last year regarding the president’s attempt to bribe Ukraine to open a public investigation into Biden’s son, accused Ratcliffe and Trump of violating the country’s “national security and sovereignty.”
“For the DNI to curtail one of the most basic duties of our nonpartisan Intelligence Community—to keep the United States Congress fully informed about threats to our nation, in this case, about the real and rising threat of foreign election interference—is nothing less than a shameless partisan manipulation to protect the personal interests of President Trump,” said Biden. “And it is a betrayal of the oath sworn to the American people and our Constitution.”
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no lnx
National Security
Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds
By Karoun Demirjian and
Ellen Nakashima
August 18, 2020
:{:{}:
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President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.
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In its report, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee states that Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.
But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”
Document: Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election]
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel, significantly, agreed that the FBI overestimated Steel’s reliability and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence. But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.
The partisan divisions are a sign that the panel’s tome likely will not put to rest the political wrangling over how seriously to treat foreign interference in U.S. democracy as the country heads into its most divisive election in modern history.
“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statementinstead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.
“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”
Five Democrat senators — including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”
The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr(R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.
“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”
Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony
Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other Congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.
Though the committee’s probe covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe; the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation — a distinction that helps to explain some of nuanced differences between their conclusions.
The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians and the transition period following the 2016 election.
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At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.
“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”
The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.
“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting co-optee of the Russian the Russian intelligence services. The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful Campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”
The committee did find however that Putin personally directed the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.
Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, nonpublic knowledge” Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’s coming releases and shared with the campaign.
The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time. The panel’s request to interview Julian Assange was rebuffed.
The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”
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The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016 and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony.
After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chair who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.
:{:{}:
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:{:{Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.}:
}:
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ref
no lnx
National Security
Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony
Donald Trump Jr. departs Capitol Hill in June 2019 after meeting privately with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.]
By
Karoun Demirjian,
Ellen Nakashima and
Matt Zapotosky
August 15, 2020
The Republican and Democratic chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee notified federal prosecutors last year of their suspicion that several individuals, including President Trump’s family members and confidants, might have presented misleading testimony in the panel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, people familiar with the matter said.
The list of individuals included the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose accounts of their pre-election meeting with a Russian lawyer were contradicted by the president’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates in interviews that were part of the criminal investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what remains a highly politicized and sensitive matter.
Inside the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting: A droning Russian lawyer and hot pink jeans, but no Clinton dirt]
But the intelligence committee, one person said, reserved its harshest allegations for the president’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and private security contractor Erik Prince, saying it had reason to believe all three had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony.
The committee’s concerns were detailed in a formal letter sent to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, people familiar with the matter said. Existence of the letter was first reported by the Los Angeles Times late Friday night.
The Senate Intelligence Committee referred several individuals’ testimony to the Justice Department over the course of its 3½ -year probe, citing discrepancies in their accounts, three officials said.
The panel, which has prided itself on having pursued its investigation without the politically charged disruptions that have undermined similar probes undertaken by other congressional committees, already has issued reports affirming that the Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election while bolstering Trump. It is expected to release the final volume of its findings as soon as next week.
The committee’s referrals were signed by then-Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), officials said. Some letters went to Mueller, whose investigation focused not only on Russia’s activities in 2016 but also on whether anyone within the Trump campaign conspired with those efforts. Others went to the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department took action on the referrals. Officials there and with the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
A referral is a tip that Congress suspects a crime was committed but does not by itself spark an investigation, let alone a prosecution. Prosecutors generally view referrals from Congress with suspicion, often seeing them as partisan attempts to embarrass political opponents — although this referral was made with bipartisan agreement. Others fall short of alleging serious legal wrongdoing.
Burr acknowledged in 2018 that the panel had made criminal referrals — and that “in a lot of those cases, those might be tied to lying to us.” At the time, he said the intelligence committee had interviewed more than 200 witnesses. His office declined to comment for this report.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which viewed a copy of the referral letter, the committee told the Justice Department than Bannon may have lied about his interactions with Prince and others regarding a meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with an official close to President Vladimir Putin.Prince had told Mueller’s team that he briefed Bannon on the meeting, which occurred before Trump’s inauguration in early 2017; Bannon denied the conversation took place.
Last year, shortly after a report was released detailing Mueller’s findings, the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department for Prince, accusing him of intentionally misleading the panel during its examination of the 2016 election. The Times article also notes that Clovis was referred for possibly lying about his contacts with a Republican operative spearheading an effort to obtain undisclosed emails from a personal computer server belonging to Clinton.
William Burck, a lawyer for Bannon, declined to comment, saying “it’s impossible to respond to something I’ve never heard about before.”
Victoria Toensing, a lawyer for Clovis,said: “You mean former Chairman Burr, who is under investigation for insider trading, also doesn’t know the legalities of a false statement? Mr. Clovis testified at length before the special counsel’s grand jury and was never charged. After his testimony, we never heard again from the special counsel.”
The Justice Department has been investigating stock sales Burr made before the coronavirus pandemic crashed global markets, and in recent months seized his cellphone and executed a search warrant for his electronic communications. Burr stepped down as committee chairman amid the probe.
Matthew L. Schwartz, a lawyer for Prince, noted that Prince had testified to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017 and his testimony has been public for years. That committee made a criminal referral in April 2019. “It unsurprisingly went nowhere,” Schwartz said in a statement. “If members of the Senate likewise made a referral — which we don’t know anything about — there would be nothing new for the Department of Justice to consider, nor is there any reason to question the Special Counsel’s decision to credit Mr. Prince and rely on him in drafting its report.”
Democrats examine Erik Prince’s statements on Seychelles meeting
Prince, according to a person familiar with the matter, never testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, though he provided a copy of his House testimony to that panel.
The letter sent to prosecutors last year was divided into two sections, according to two people familiar with its contents. The first named those suspected of making false statements: Bannon, Clovis and Prince.
Its second section raised concerns about other witnesses whose testimony was contradicted by Gates, though it did not pointedly make a false-statements allegation, people familiar with the letter said. In addition to Trump Jr., that section of the letter also cited Trump’s former communications director Hope Hicks and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Schiff says Donald Trump Jr. refused to answer some questions
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Donald Trump Jr. did not answer some questions in a closed hearing on Dec. 6, 2017. (The Washington Post)
“We are fully confident in the testimony and information provided by Donald J. Trump, Jr.,” said Alan Futerfas, his lawyer. “In our view, this is a non-story.”
Trump Jr. says he’s ‘not at all’ worried about perjury charges
A lawyer for Manafort declined to comment. A representative for Kushner did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Hicks declined to comment immediately, citing a lack of familiarity with the referral.
Trump Jr., Kushner, Hicks and Manafort all either took part in or were involved in strategizing how to speak to the media about a June 2016 meeting at Manhattan’s Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer promising damaging information about Clinton.
Trump Jr., who first sat for a lengthy interview with the Intelligence Committee investigators in late 2017 and returned under subpoena to speak with the full panel in June 2019, told investigators that he never informed his father about the Trump Tower meeting. But Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen told investigators working with Mueller that he recalled otherwise.
Cohen told Mueller’s team of being present when Trump Jr. “told his father that a meeting to obtain adverse information about Clinton was going forward,” according to a report detailing the special counsel’s findings. Cohen said he did not remember whether the meeting was connected to Russia, Mueller’s report said. He was later sentenced to three years in prison for, among other crimes, lying to Congress.
Gates, meanwhile, told Mueller’s team that he recalled that in the days before the Trump Tower meeting, Trump Jr. announced at a regular gathering of senior campaign staff and Trump family members that he had a lead on negative information about Clinton’s family foundation, according to the special counsel’s report. Among those present, Gates told Mueller, were Manafort, Hicks and Eric Trump, another of the president’s sons.
Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.
Karoun Demirjian
Karoun Demirjian is a national security reporter covering Capitol Hill, where she focuses on defense, foreign affairs, intelligence and policy matters concerning the Justice Department. She was previously a correspondent based in The Post's bureau in Moscow. Follow
Ellen Nakashima
Ellen Nakashima is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering intelligence and national security matters for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 1995 and is based in Washington, D.C. Follow
Matt Zapotosky
Matt Zapotosky covers the Justice Department for The Washington Post's national security team. He has previously worked covering the federal courthouse in Alexandria and local law enforcement in Prince George's County and Southern Maryland. Follow
More from The Post
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings
no lnx vid many
russian propaganda and far-right media wildly exaggerated a story about Bible-burnings in Portland — and Fox News ran with it
There was no “stack of Bibles” being burned
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 08/12/20 10:39 AM EDT
screen grab]
Fox News and other right-wing media were aghast last week about a story from the ongoing protests and civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, in which a crowd supposedly burned a stack of Bibles as a widely seen political statement — which now turns out to have been a vastly exaggerated event, further enlarged and distributed by Russian propaganda.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that what actually occurred was that just a few individuals out of thousands present seemed to have used a single Bible, or possibly two Bibles, among other pieces of kindling to start a fire: “None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.”
The story about a supposed mass fire of Bibles originated, however, from the Kremlin-financed news channel RT, and was spread by its online video service Ruptly with adeceptively edited video.
Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book that was burned.)
The Ruptly video was further tweeted by Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Twitter personality based in Malaysia, who wrote: “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.” As the Times notes, Cheong was “wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed.” There was no actual stack of Bibles being burned, let along a crowd of people bringing them to a bonfire for a public burning.
Nevertheless, his tweet was in turn picked up by American conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump Jr.
“The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful,” the Times wrote. “Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread it.”
For example, The Federalist ran an article on August 1, headlined “As They Turn To Burning Bibles, Portland Rioters Show Their True Colors.” The New York Post ran a piece headlined “Protesters burn Bible, American flag as tensions rise in Portland.”
And the story got plenty of pickup on Fox News.
On the August 2 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth discussed the Bible-burning story with a Republican congressional candidate in Oregon, and even tried to grill House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) after he compared police brutality against demonstrators to what was done to the civil rights marchers he remembered from the 1960s....
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/
no lnx twt
how Trump is once again colluding with Russia
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020
Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.
tp kirk --> djt jr?]
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ted cruz retweet: This is who they are.
Ian Miles Cheong
@stillgray
Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1
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don jr
Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.
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tpkirk
BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland
The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it
Our faith is under attack.
If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings
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Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.
The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:
The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.
Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.
Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?
Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.
Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here.
Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.
Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”
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Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.
Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.
So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.
It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/
On Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.
“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”
The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.
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==
russians wd be stupid not to use Qanon? they are using it
720 srch: russia putin GRU qanon disinformation active measures
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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
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.
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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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Book review of Active Measures: The Secret History of ...www.washingtonpost.com › outlook › 2020/04/23
Apr 24, 2020 - The Russians manipulated our elections. We helped. The Military ...
Missing: putin ?qanon
Archive for the 'Disinformation' Category - Krypt3iakrypt3ia.wordpress.com › category › disinformation
Feb 27, 2020 - Right, some folks on the internet wanted a post about the disinformation around the Coronavirus (COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2) and I had been ...
Why the 2020 Election Will Be A Mess Part II: Beyond Russian ...www.justsecurity.org › why-the-2020-election-will-be-...
Mar 9, 2020 - Trends may shift, but the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism such as perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach, ...
Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon
Trump Still Doesn't Believe Russia Hacked the 2016 Election ...www.wired.com › story › trump-ukraine-call-russia-20...
Sep 27, 2019 - Trump has publicly played down Russia's role in the 2016 election. But even privately, he trusts conspiracy theories more than US intelligence ...
Dissecting the Trump-Russia Dossier - Coda Storycodastory.com › disinformation › dissecting-the-trump-...
Jul 25, 2018 - Most recently, federal investigators indicted twelve officers of Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, for hacking U.S. computers ...
When It Comes to America's Race Issues, Russia Is a Bogeymanforeignpolicy.com › 2020/07/06 › when-it-comes-to-a...
Jul 6, 2020 - As Black Lives Matter protests against police killings of Black people began spreading across the United States in late May, it did not take long ...
Coronavirus conspiracies are a gift to Russia's disinformation ...www.telegraph.co.uk › News › Politics
Mar 19, 2020 - The European Union's warning that pro-Kremlin media has “been prominent in spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 should come as no ...
Missing: GRU ?qanon
==
aha: seedisinfo GRU if goal is to divide, make cynical thus apathetic (elections are not legit) then whattabout/mirror/crypto is useful because THEY ALL DO IT
also/bonus. yes trump if grifter/corrupt, but you can't hold that against him ( // sharp smart bizman, only chumps pay taxes]
aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo?
aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam
plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real
note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs
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6/20
https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced
no lnx many pix
A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.
The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.
A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.
@OneVoiceUS
The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”
The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.
The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1
Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.
4chan ActBlue claim
The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.
The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.
Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim
On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.
Candace Owens ActBlue claim
Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence toQAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.
Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).
The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”
Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim
These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.
==
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activ meas doc: try to sow dissention: bernie FB, latinos? ~ EU, NATO 19 white women bodies , BLM
gru built community online then exploit (reverse of SOP?] work 12 hr days, quota per hr to post; "russia our friend" meme?
top 20 FB stories > real news? on?
==
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Who Are the Disinformers?
- Who Are Disinformers Targeting? (And Why?)
- Types of Disinformation to Look Out for
- How the Media Amplifies Disinformation
- Disinformation and Coronavirus
- Conclusion
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/
veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”
The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”
FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”
Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”
Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?468349-1/the-reality-game
JANUARY 29, 2020
The Reality Game
Samuel Woolley discussed the origins of online disinformation and laid out a plan to combat it in the future.
==
somewhere i read/heard that gru studying divisions in dem debate for 2020 taCTICS/SCHISM
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https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/21/21147801/bernie-sanders-russia-presidential-campaign-trump-election-interference
Russia is interfering in the Democratic primary to help Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign,US officials reportedly told the Sanders camp according to *The* *Washington Post. According to a subsequent report by *The New York Times, Sanders received the briefing about a month ago.
There are few details from either report about what substantive actions Russia took to advance Sanders’ campaign. The White House and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been briefed on Russia’s latest interference efforts.
In a statement responding to the news, Sanders harshly criticized the Russian government and any efforts at election interference. “Unlike Donald Trump, I do not consider Vladimir Putin a good friend. He is an autocratic thug who is attempting to destroy democracy and crush dissent in Russia,” Sanders said. “I stand firmly against their efforts, and any other foreign power that wants to interfere in our election.”
It’s a partial replay of the 2016 primary, in which Russian troll campaigns used social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to hurt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and back Sanders.
Earlier this week, Sanders was asked to disown online harassers that claim to support his candidacy, commonly referred to as “Bernie bros,” on the internet, at both a CNN town hall on Tuesday and Wednesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sanders responded, suggesting that the harassment campaigns could be led by Russian operatives, not just his real supporters.
“All of us remember 2016, and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in our elections and divide us up,” Sanders said earlier this week. “I’m not saying that’s happening, but it would not shock me.”
US intelligence officials have also notified lawmakers that the foreign country is also working to advance Donald Trump’s reelection, as reported by *The New York Times* on Thursday. As a response to this discovery, Trump cursed his acting Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire for allowing the briefing, apparently seeing it as giving Democrats a political advantage. Maguire formally resigned on Friday.
==
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0227-8
2/19
Divide and rule: ten lessons about Russian political influence activities in Europe
:{:{volume}:
5, Article number: 19 (2019)
}:
abstract
The purpose of this study is to improve understanding of how Russia is conducting political influence activities against Europe. It examines current thinking and perceptions on this topic among Western secret services and is based on an analysis of approximately 40 annual reports from 15 secret services in 11 Western countries, covering the period 2014–2018. This activity is by nature covert, and the analysis given in these reports from Western secret services complements other research and shows the broad range of tools and techniques employed for political influence, and much detail on the execution of these activities. According to these secret services, Russia is the foreign state that tries to influence European politics and decision-making most, and more so than China and other states. These influence activities support three main Russian strategic objectives: regime security, predominance in Russia’s near abroad, and world-power status for Russia. The long-term objective of Russian influence activities is to weaken NATO and the EU. In the shorter term, it is to lift the sanctions imposed after the Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014. Russia also has more specific objectives related to each individual country. Russia is targeting the West through a divide and rule approach, using multiple tools of influence. The population is mainly reached through media and social media, exploiting divisive issues. Minorities, refugees, and extremists are used to further this divide and rule approach. Human intelligence and cyber operations are important covert tools of influence. Russia also uses the energy sector, business, and corruption as venues for influence. It has an extensive network of allies and front organizations, and reconstructs reality and rewrites history to legitimize itself and undermine others. Finally, military force is Russia’s ultimate tool of influence. These influence activities are of large-scale, and the threat should be taken seriously, but the reports studied also indicate that the effects of these activities are limited.
Introduction
States, organizations, and individuals have always tried to influence others to achieve what they want. Multiple means and methods have been used, some legitimate, some not. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine brought the term propaganda back on the front pages of mainstream Western media. The U.S. presidential election campaign and subsequent investigations shattered any remaining illusions about Russian interference in Western politics. Concerns about fake news, cyber-attacks, and manipulation of elections abounded all over Europe, and it became clear that Russian secret services were not only involved in espionage, but also aiming to influence Western politics. Russia was conducting political influence operations supported by intelligence activities. The German security service described the close interaction between Russian intelligence and influence activities:
...
==
operation infektion
pt 1
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006210828/russia-disinformation-fake-news.html
7 cmd fake news 14 min
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188102/what-is-pizzagate.html
47 min
==
an 220
no lnx?
senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has addressed the great purge of intelligence officials who have warned about Russia’s ongoing efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of impeached president Donald Trump—leaving out the part, of course, that it’s Trump it’s trying to help. “Recent reports suggest that adversaries including Russia are likely continuing efforts aimed at dividing Americans,” he said, “sowing chaos in our politics, and undermining confidence in our elections.” Then he issued this bucketload of bullshit: ”Fortunately, in stark contrast to the failures of the Obama admin in 2016, the Trump admin once again appears to be doing the right thing—in this case, by promptly providing a specific counterintelligence briefing to the Democratic presidential candidate in question.” Like the briefing McConnell got in 2016, the one where he threatened the CIA under President Barack Obama with all-out partisan warfare if the public was warned that Russia was trying to help Trump win. Of course, the Trump campaign didn’t need to be briefed that Russia was intervening on Trumps’ behalf—the campaign leadership was in on it!
McConnell won’t do a damn thing now to try to stop Russia, so Democrats in the Senate are going over his head, or attempting to. Sens. Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Sherrod Brown are demanding that the Trump administration impose sanctions on Russia, an action that does not require Senate approval under existing authority. They’ve written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asking them “to immediately and forcefully impose sanctions on Russia’s government, any Russian actors determined to be responsible for such interference, and those acting on their behalf or providing material or financial support for these election interference efforts.”
The three write that “it is long past time for the administration to send a direct, powerful and unmistakable message to President Putin: the US will respond immediately and forcefully to continuing election interference by the government of the Russian Federation and its surrogates, to punish, deter and substantially increase the economic and political costs of such interference.”
The lawmakers declare, ”We urge you to immediately draw upon the reported conclusions of the Intelligence Community to identify and target for sanctions all those determined to be responsible for ongoing elections interference, including President Putin, the government of the Russian Federation, any Russian actors determined to be directly responsible, and those acting on their behalf or providing material or financial support for their efforts. Doing anything less would be an abdication of your responsibility to protect and defend the US from this serious threat to our national security, and to the integrity of our electoral process.”
The administration could do this without any further action from Congress under the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. It’s clear that McConnell won’t take up any of the legislation the House has passed to protect the election. It’s also pretty damned unlikely that the administration is going to turn away Vladimir Putin’s help in re-electing Trump, but it’s important to keep up that pressure. It should be amplified, maybe with some hearings in the House, with Pompeo and Mnuchin grilled about it with the cameras running.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/top-election-security-official-who-briefed-lawmakers-on-latest-russian-meddling-targeted-for-ouster-by-trump-white-house
no lnx
Top election security official who briefed lawmakers on latest Russian meddling targeted for ouster by Trump White House
Image via Screengrab.
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story February 23, 2020
During a discussion on the war on the intelligence community being waged by the Donald Trump’s White House, CNN host Victor Blackwell stated that sources speaking with the network stated that the intel official who briefed lawmakers for both parties on new efforts by Russia to meddle in U.S. elections could be on the way out.
Speaking with contributor Lynn Sweet, Blackwell asked about the so-called “purge” being conducted by the White House.
“It sends the signal once again that President Trump is not a respecter of the United States intelligence services with the bigger issue that a permanent director has not been in that office since last summer when Dan Coates was forced out,” Sweet explained. “This is a key position, subject to Senate confirmation and Trump hasn’t seen fit to have a permanent director for months now.”
“Now, post-impeachment, you also have the issue of whether or not part of his [Richard Grenell’s] role there it is to oversee a purge of people who are not seen as Trump loyalists,” she continued. “All of which goes to the heart of United States intelligence mission which is to get and gather information in a nonpartisan way to brief partisan officials to base their policy decisions on.”
“That’s exactly what Shelby Pierson was doing,” Blackwell said, describing the official who briefed the lawmakers on new Russian overtures. “She is the — this position was just created, she’s the person to oversee election security, going to brief members on the House Intelligence Committee about their assessment that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election. That they have a preference for President Trump.”
“What we’ve learned from sources is that inside the office of the Director of National Intelligence is she could be next to be pushed out of the office,” he added. “What’s the impact of getting rid of that person as we’re about eight months out from elections?”
“It is two levels of answers here, Victor,” Sweet replied. “One, you’re getting rid of a seasoned professional in what would seem like a retaliatory act for putting forth intelligence you don’t like. Again, it goes to the core of what intelligence is for: just to get unvarnished information. If, indeed, she’s presiding over election security issues, that’s the intelligence community needs to be on top of if she does leave. Will the mission still be carried out when election security is a top priority of the United States?”
Watch below:
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/russia-is-interfering-on-trumps-behalf-again-and-hes-enraged-that-congress-now-knows-it-report/
no lnx
Russia is interfering on Trump’s behalf again — and he’s enraged that Congress now knows it: report
Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos February 20, 2020
There’s a bit more clarity now to the story of the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee that may or may not have contributed to acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire’s departure from the Trump administration. According to The New York Times, the mysterious briefing that Republicans and impeached President Donald Trump so objected to was about Russia interfering in this election, the 2020 one.
Five people familiar with the matter told the Times that the Feb. 13 briefing included a warning to lawmakers that Russia was interfering to get Trump reelected, a “disclosure that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him,” as opposed to using it to try to secure the election and prevent Russia from mucking about in it again. The Times reports that the next day, Trump “berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place” and the fact that Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, was present to hear it was “a particular irritant.”
It’s not too much of stretch to figure out who filled Trump in on all the details of the briefing, as a committee official said that ” members of both parties attended, including Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the committee” and that it was indeed about the “integrity of our upcoming elections.” In what’s really not good news for the upcoming election, the Times reports that “Some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying that had official who delivered the conclusion spoken less pointedly or left it out, they would have avoided angering the Republicans.”
Not angering Republicans should not be the intelligence community’s concern at all. Not when they have credible information saying that this election is in jeopardy of Russian interference on behalf of the man who has already been impeached for trying to get another country to do the same
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-intelligence-community-erupts-as-trump-purges-everyone-opposed-to-russian-election-interference/
The intelligence community erupts as Trump purges everyone opposed to Russian election interference
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-names-right-wing-troll-to-lead-intelligence-agencies/
no lnx
Trump names right-wing troll to lead intelligence agencies
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon February 21, 2020
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has had a long career in politics, and I’m sure she has many accomplishments that she’s proud of. But I’m afraid she’s going to be remembered for one thing and one thing only: Her declaration that President Trump had “learned his lesson” after his impeachment trial in the Senate. That would have been a ridiculous rationale for voting to acquit any president on the evidence in that case, but saying it about Trump was downright laughable. He has proved that every single day since the trial ended.
Right out of the box he vowed revenge. He attacked Sen. Mitt Romney, the one Republican who voted to convict him in the Senate trial, and then immediately set about firing witnesses who had testified against him, including the twin brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, for no apparent reason.
Trump has pushed the Senate Republican majority and the Department of Justice to help him exact his vengeance by investigating professionals who were involved in the Russia and Ukraine investigation. His apparent collusion with Attorney General Bill Barr to interfere in criminal cases has caused a near-insurrection within the Department of Justice.
This week Trump went on a pardon spree, freeing a list of people who had been convicted of corruption, sending yet another obvious message to those inside and outside the justice system that he is unencumbered by the rule of law. It remains to be seen if he will pardon his old pal Roger Stone, now that he’s been sentenced to 40 months in prison. But if he has any fear that Stone has information to trade, you can be sure he’ll do it.
That’s just a partial list of “lessons” Trump has learned since the Senate failed to do its duty, and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. But the announcement on Thursday that Trump will name his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as the new acting director of national security may be the most shocking action of recent weeks.
Grenell is one of the most odious Trump toadies in the administration, and that’s really saying something. Like so many others, he came to Trump’s attention as a sharp-tongued Fox News personality. It’s likely that Trump didn’t know much about him other than the fact he was a big fan. That’s all it takes. Truthfully, if he’d known Grenell’s whole story he would like him even more.
Grenell held a few PR flak jobs in the government, working for the likes of John Bolton at the UN, where he was universally reviled.But he is best known as a Twitter troll, just like the president. He quit Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, where he’d been hired as a foreign policy spokesman, after his Twitter feed was revealed to be full of nasty comments. During the 2016 campaign, he got back in the game and really made a name for himself as a crude and vicious Trump supporter.
Needless to say, Trump loved it and gave him the plum job of U.S. ambassador to Berlin, where he immediately alienated everyone in sight. On his very first day on the job, referencing the fact that Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell tweeted that “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Obviously he had no authority to dictate any such thing, and people in Germany were not amused, to say the least. Leaders of two German political parties have called him a “brat” and a “failure” and requested that he be withdrawn. No such luck.
Grenell has gone on to cultivate the far right in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the “boyish face” of his country’s far-right government. Grenell told Breitbart that he wanted to “empower” Kurz and others like him in Europe, which exceeds the job description of ambassador just a wee bit.
Most recently, he was implicated in the baroque Ukraine scandal, and particularly in the side plot involving Lev Parnas and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas was reportedly instructed (perhaps by Rudy Giuliani) to ask Grenell for a heads-up if the Department of Justice decided to seek Firtash’s extradition to the U.S. Grenell apparently agreed to do it, which was probably illegal.
Grenell’s name has been floating all over the Trump administration for a while, mentioned as a possible national security adviser after Bolton’s departure or a potential secretary of state if Mike Pompeo quits. He has no qualifications for any such posts, other than his personal fealty to Donald Trump.
The professionals in the intelligence community are reportedly very alarmed by Grenell’s appointment, as they should be. The DNI oversees all the U.S. intelligence services and has access to all the most important capabilities and secrets. It is unclear whether Grenell even has a top-level security clearance or could qualify for one.
This appointment was announced as yet another “acting” assignment, which seems odd since an acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, was already in place. (He has filled the job since last August, when Dan Coats departed.) Administration sources have said that Grenell will only serve until Trump nominates someone for the permanent position, which would require Senate confirmation, and won’t resign his position in Germany. So why put in another placeholder?
Late on Thursday, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported the answer: Trump wanted Maguire out immediately because his department had briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week and told members that the Russian government is once again interfering in the presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf. As usual, Trump is livid that members of his administration actually performed their legal and constitutional duties, and is determined to punish those who did. He was especially angry that Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a major villain in Trump World, was given this information.
Aside from Maguire, the second-ranking official in the DNI’s office, longtime intelligence professional Andrew Hallman, also announced his departure, leaving the top echelon without experienced leadership. But never fear, another Trumpian hack is on the way. According to Politico, hyper-partisan henchman Kash Patel, the former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,who played an important role in House Republicans’ attempts to discredit the Russia investigation, will come on board as “senior adviser” to Grenell.
It’s clear that Trump has moved his most dedicated disciples into the DNI’s office in order to prevent any more briefings on Russian interference on his behalf and to ensure that the intelligence community is brought to heel. Between this and Bill Barr’s unlimited mandate to investigate the intelligence on election interference from 2016, one can assume that the purge of anyone Trump considers a threat within the intelligence agencies or the Justice Department is now in full effect.
So in a sense Susan Collins was right. Trump has learned his lesson: Only proven Trump loyalists will run national security and federal law enforcement from now on. What could possibly go wrong?
Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/
no lnx
random 220 what fresh hell
Relentless corruption and sheer madness are Donald Trump’s super powers
President Donald J. Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story February 16, 2020
This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.
Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
Seven days after he took office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which barred migrants from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Hundreds of travelers were detained as they arrived here and tens of thousands of people had their visas suddenly revoked. For many Americans, it was clearly a bridge too far. Some had hoped that he would grow into the job, or that his bigoted campaign rhetoric would give way to a more responsible tone after he won, and the Muslim ban was evidence that those hopes had been misplaced as Trump moved to codify xenophobia.
With minimal organizing, thousands of people took to the nation’s airports to protest the policy.
Today, three years and three weeks later, Trump is crowing on Twitter about a New York Times story detailing how he’s basing his re-election campaign on his simmering resentments and paranoia. He is using customs and immigration enforcement to openly extort New York state into dropping investigations into his personal businesses. He’s brazenly retaliating against his own regime officials for testifying in his impeachment hearings. Meanwhile, his Attorney General, hand-picked after writing a brief arguing that it’s kosher for a president to exercise his or her powers toward corrupt purposes, is overruling career prosecutors to grant leniency to Trump’s henchmen when their crimes are unearthed. While federal investigators look at potential crimes committed by Trump’s personal attorney as he sought to fabricate a scandal about one of Trump’s Democratic foes, others within the agency are simultaneously colluding with that very attorney to advance that effort. Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has adopted a relentless focus on finding support for the president’s* unhinged conspiracy theories.
As Trump rants and raves, there are no crowds gathering spontaneously outside of US Attorney’s offices around the country to protest Bill Barr’s unprecedented corruption of the Department of Justice, . We may be outraged, but we seem to run out of gas. Trump’s behavior is so consistently venal and outrageous that we’ve become inured to it. Abuses of power that would be huge scandals under any other president of either party elicit ritualistic condemnations, but are ultimately just Trump being Trump.
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Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.
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David Axelrod
@davidaxelrod
In this crazy world, almost nothing is said about the fact that @realDonaldTrump is rehiring his 29-yr-old former body man, forced from the WH earlier for failing a vet & with no personnel background, to direct hiring ACROSS THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top …
Johnny McEntee
Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of personnel - Axios
He's been hand selected by Trump, who sees him as the ultimately loyalist.
axios.com
9,798
4:49 AM - Feb 14, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
6,101 people are talking about this
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Speaking of the DOJ, an agency “anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials.” According to Reuters, “the awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General.”
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In related news, the FBI is revamping its efforts to curb homegrown terrorism after years of criticism that it downplayed or turned a blind eye to violent right-wing extremism. As part of those efforts, reports The Daily Beast, the FBI will now focus on “abortion violent extremism.” But they mean terrorists on “both sides” of the debate, despite the fact that the FBI could point “to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.”
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It’s hard to say whether these people are just trolling us at this point…
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.
The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.
Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.
*****
Probably not…
Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch.
Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaska’s allies made a deal with Treasury to limit Deripaska’s control over the companies in exchange for sanctions relief…. In the year since then, it’s been all quiet on the Deripaska sanctions front.
Until December, that is. What’s strange is that despite the signal, Treasury didn’t follow through and the sanctions—which would have targeted the unnamed people and entities because of their proximity to Deripaska—didn’t materialize. It’s been two months since the U.S. indicated that the new sanctions were about to come out, and there’s been no movement from Treasury on the oligarch. The two months of inaction has stirred suspicions of political interference in the sanctions process.
*****
Return on investment…
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“Trump has proposed a 25 percent cut to the signature military fund designed to offset Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, according to the Defense Department’s budget documents unveiled Monday.”
Rep. Val Demings
@RepValDemings
Today Senate Republicans blocked THREE election security bills.
Two would require that illegal foreign election interference be reported to the authorities.
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The other would make voting machines harder to hack.
All blocked.
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We are fortunate that these malignant and corrupt ideologues aren’t more competent…
Caitlin McCoy
@CaitlinMcCoy_
The final rule that went to OMB last month is "...sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked 'text forthcoming.' The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain." YIKES.https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1228065396554653696 …
Coral Davenport
@CoralMDavenport
The Trump administration has rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules. But Trump's attempt to take down his top regulatory target,the US's largest #climate change rule, are in meltdown. "They look like they’re headed to a legal train wreck."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/climate/trump-fuel-economy-rollback.html …
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2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Caitlin McCoy's other Tweets
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Type Investigations has an important story about how the Bureau of Land Management has, “over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act; approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a ‘clearinghouse for federal permits’; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development.”
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This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….
“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.
*****
Children aren’t born into this world harboring bigotry.
Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
*****
Last week, we mentioned that a 65-degree temperature recorded at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula set a new record for the continent.
That record appears to have held up for four days. This week, “a weather research station on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula registered a temperature of 69.3 degrees (20.75 Celsius) on Feb. 9.”
*****
And we leave you this week with a couple of pieces of good news, via the courts…
Washington Monthly
@monthly
#BREAKING:The D.C. Circuit Court just shot down Trump’s Medicaid work requirement. Last week, @r_m_larochelle & @lsdeprez wrote about this move as part of the administration's war on the social safety net. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/donald-trumps-assault-on-the-social-safety-set/ …
Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s Assault on the Social Safety Net
It's a policy of death by a thousand cuts.
washingtonmonthly.com
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9:11 AM - Feb 14, 2020
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Stephen Wolf
?
@PoliticsWolf
Whoa, this is a major win for Native American voting rights in North Dakota.The GOP passed a voter ID law that blatantly excluded most tribal-issued IDs, but the backlash against it helped activists raise money to provide free IDs in 2018 & Native turnout hit historic highs https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1227989452838010880 …
Kira Lerner
?
@kira_lerner
New: The North Dakota secretary of state settled two lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over the state’s strict voter ID law. The state agreed to accept tribal IDs and allow people who don’t have a residential address to vote https://campaignlegal.org/press-releases/secretary-state-agrees-settle-voter-id-lawsuits-entering-consent-decree-north-dakota …
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ransomware
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/feds-reviewing-previously-unreported-cyber-attack-on-florida-elections-office/
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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.
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mickey huff oct 22 h club talk US interfere w/ other 130x? over --yrs?
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/whats-behind-the-gops-disinformation-machine/
no lnx
What’s behind the GOP’s disinformation machine?
Written by Washington Monthly December 13, 2019
I got into a heated debate with a Russian intelligence officer years ago over America’s political system and society. I left with my head spinning. At the time, I was a diplomat posted overseas. Reagan was president and the Soviet Union was showing signs of intense stress, a lumbering oppressive empire on its last legs. Still, the Soviets were highly skilled spin artists, whose dezinformatsiya (disinformation) ops fooled millions, including some Americans.
Let’s call this gentleman Karimov; he’s still serving, so I won’t unmask him. He was a military intelligenceor GRU, officer under diplomatic cover. We chatted over coffee. A multilingual lawyer and graduate of Moscow’s prestigious diplomatic training academy, the thickset spy spun a very sophisticated line depicting the United States as a failing nation riven by endemic racism, corruption, and cut-throat capitalism. Unlike Radio Moscow’s simplistic propaganda, Karimov applied his intellect to weave together a picture that, I sensed, could be believed by many “low information” citizens.
Fast forward to today. We see a vastly transformed environment in which the digital age has become a multiplying force for disinformation. And too many Americans, I’m sad to say, really are falling for it.
The most gullible, ironically, are those on the right—traditionally hardline opponents of Moscow. From 2014 to 2018, Russia’s favorable rating among Republicans soared 22 points, according to a Gallup poll, forty percent of whom said Russia was an ally or friendly. By contrast, 25 percent of Democrats viewed Russia favorably.
Most worrisome, however are Republican politicians who wittingly, or not, put our national security at risk by falling for the obvious tricks of Vladimir Putin and his minions.
“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” GOP Senator John Kennedy said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton,” declared Senator Richard Burr, the GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?”
As former NSC official and Russia expert Fiona Hill told congressmen at the impeachment hearings, “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian Security Services themselves.” Why, then, are so many Republican politicians pushing the discredited line that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, despite the conclusion of the entire U.S. intelligence community that it was Moscow?
Former CIA director John Brennan doesn’t think it’s because they are stupid. Kennedy, a lawyer with degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, knows better: “He’s not being duped, he knows he’s being dishonest, he knows he’s trying to defend and protect Donald Trump at all costs, and so he’s not going to be honest with the American people.”
Other prominent Republicans who publicly regurgitate the Kremlin line include Congressmen David Nunes and Jim Jordan and Senators Ron Johnson, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Mark Meadows. Are they afflicted with Fever Swamp Syndrome, or is it something perhaps even more insidious?
I’m no disinformation specialist, but I’ve participated in government task forces to counter Russian deception operations. Here’s what I believe.
Politicians who slavishly parrot Russian propaganda fall into three categories: the Cynical (those who know better but peddle the lies anyway); Useful Idiots (those who are easily manipulated); and the Compromised (those who are actual Russian assets who do Moscow’s bidding because they were recruited one way or another).
The third category—being compromised by a foreign power—is the most sensitive. I therefore asked three intelligence veterans their views on the chances of some members of Congress being under direct Russian control.
First, I spoke with Jack Barsky, an East German recruited and trained by the KGB to serve as a “sleeper agent” in the U.S. for a decade. Eventually, Barsky turned on his masters and helped the FBI. He is now a U.S. citizen. He told me, “I do believe that politicians as a class are some of the most vulnerable targets for foreign intelligence. I believe that the damage done by the ‘useful idiots’ is far greater than that done by one or two active assets.” The chances of there being Russian controlled actors among members of Congress, he said, are “low but not zero.”
Second, I reached out to a former CIA senior officer with nearly three decades working primarily on Russia operations. The ex-official said, “I‘ve long worried about the existence of ‘controlled sources.’ Russian intelligence doctrine on active measures makes clear that the most important part of any campaign is recruited and controlled sources. I have no way of knowing if there are people in the Republican Party or Congress who are controlled sources but I’d bet my home that there are some high-level sources that have helped the Russians. If there aren’t any, it would be the first time ever.”
Then, I talked with a retired FBI special agent who led counterintelligence activities. He said he sees possible linkages involving the activities investigated by Mueller, prosecutors, and Congress, with Putin’s oligarchs as the common denominator. What stands out for him, though, is the large number of unreported Russian contacts among those in Trump’s circle. A seasoned FBI veteran, he believes Trump falls into the category of “useful idiot,” but can’t rule out his being a controlled asset. “What if there is a Russian agent among the few who can still whisper in Trump’s ear and get him to respond?” he speculated.
Are news pundits succumbing to near hysteria on Russian interference in our politics? To paraphrase a Cold War adage: Are we seeing a Russian under every bed?
Turns out, we may be overplaying Moscow’s dezinformatsiya prowess. At least, that’s the view of two disinformation experts.
Indeed, as former CIA analyst Cindy Otis wrote in USA Today, “Russia determined it did not need to be the driver of disinformation campaigns in most E.U. countries and primarily looked to amplify false content already being publicized by far-right groups.”She added, “If anything, domestic actors are poised to be the bigger information threat.”
This analysis is echoed by Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, who wrote in The Atlantic that the “fictional narrative about Ukraine was concocted and propagated first and foremost by American conspiracy theorists, not Russian disinformation puppeteers.” The Russians, he went on “did not ‘concoct” this version of the theory; they parroted the American far right.”
Once again, Moscow is using shrewd techniques to exaggerate its powers of influence, all as a means to keep its adversaries off balance.
But it has gotten an unprecedented boost from the maelstrom of lies being spouted by Republican leaders. To quote a once popular cartoon character, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
And yet, the external threat is very real. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, is unmoved. He’s currently blocking legislation that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to individual states to beef up election security to prevent a repeat of 2016.
The sad truth may be that changing the warped mindset of Republicans regarding Trump is a more urgent national security need than taking on Russian propaganda.
Until that happens, you can count on American democracy to keep unraveling.
James Bruno is a writer and former U.S. diplomat. Read his blog, DIPLO DENIZEN, and follow him on Twitter @JamesLBruno. The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/
no lnx
POLITICS
POLITICS FEATURES
NOVEMBER 25, 2019 9:02AM ET
That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It
Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.
By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN
Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.
Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.
On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.
The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.
We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.
Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.
Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.
As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.
This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.
Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.
These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends.Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”
The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.
While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.
...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/russian-operatives-are-back-for-the-2020-election-and-they-have-a-dangerous-new-strategy/
Russian operatives are back for the 2020 election — and they have a dangerous new strategy
Written by Bob Cesca / Salon November 26, 2019
We don’t hear this too often so it bears repeating: The ongoing Russian attack against the United States would’ve ultimately failed were it not for millions of unwitting American foot soldiers who helped it succeed. As accomplices, way too many of us were easily — willingly, in many cases — hoodwinked into sharing and retweeting propaganda designed to elect Donald Trump and, amid the chaos, undermine Western democracy.
In that respect, Russia’s active measures carried Vladimir Putin’s mission up to our doorsteps, but we were the ones who opened our virtual doors, welcoming in all the riffraff, treating the enemy like house guests, while suggesting all of our friends do the same. Putin and his operatives recognized a significant weakness here — the semi-distracted, drive-by gullibility of American social media users. As much as it pains me to say it, Putin was right. We might even be more gullible than he forecasted.
We’re a nation of suckers. Not everyone, of course, but enough of us to matter. And by the way, it’s not just rank-and-file American voters occupying the sucker demographic. The president, half of Congress, and the Red Hat entertainment complex are either deliberately or unknowingly marketing Russian agitprop in the form of the bogus Russia-didn’t-do-it gambit, the Ukraine-is-the-real-attacker nonsense, which, according to testimony by Fiona Hill, absolutely originated with Putin, not to mention Paul Manafort’s “man in Kyiv,” GRU trainee Konstantin Kilimnik, way back in 2016.
The Kremlin has successfully tapped into the thinking of millions of Americans, and it’s already looking like the 2020 sequel will be even trickier to navigate.
Two professors at Clemson University, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, just published a mind-blowing article for Rolling Stone about the next generation of active measures emerging from the ashes of the Robert Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency (IRA).
:{:{}:
As soon as Mueller squished the previous iteration of the IRA, it sprang to life again, even before the Mueller Report hit bookshelves earlier this year. At some point following the 2016 election, the IRA was folded into the Federal News Agency in Russia, which, like the IRA, is reportedly financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef.” And, naturally, the Kremlin’s active measures continue today under that barely disguised shingle.
}:
One of the IRA’s newer social media tactics uncovered during Linvill and Warren’s two year submersion in the underworld of professional Russian troll farms is a version of the classic bait-and-switch trick — simple enough if you know it’s coming, but just clever enough to outwit those of us who are most susceptible. For example, a Twitter account known as @IamTyraJackson posted a thing about NFL athlete Warrick Dunn’s charity work. The goal here was to build a massive audience for the account by tweeting something innocent yet irresistible. And irresistible it was, accumulating a colossal 290,000 likes.
The @IamTyraJacksonaccount was gratefully suspended, but not before the IRA gained all kinds of new followers for the short lifespan of the account, subsequently hammering those followers with disinformation — again, baiting followers with something sweet and cuddly, then bludgeoning them with “messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt,” as Linvill and Warren write.
Another IRA front, known as @PoliteMelanie, was given a very specific yet nefarious mission. Unlike other accounts intended to directly promote Trump, or to stir up a furious debate among users, Melanie’s mission was literally to sell “disgust.” Linvill and Warren reported that Russia is well aware of the power of this particular emotion: “Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.”
Driving apart the United States is exactly the point.
In this case, the Melanie account tweeted the results of a fake poll aimed at “educated, urban, left-wing Americans.” In the end, the account managed to build a following of 20,000 people, aided by the poll and its 300,000 likes. The fake poll, by the way, suggested that 55 percent of conservatives believed “homo sapiens” (sic) should be disowned by their family. And yes, apparently well-educated liberals were duped.
On top of everything else, the tweets and statuses by trolls across social media include simple opinions meant to foment insufferably endless threads in which users scream past each other, while other posts weaponize real news and legitimate issues for a similar purpose. The active measures are working because the enemy kinda’ looks and tweets like us now. Guerrilla trolling. This upgraded line of attack has achieved a seamless integration of trolls into the mix of normal people, not unlike money laundering where illegally acquired cash is slowly dropped into a legal income stream so auditors can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.
So how do we know?
The only way to outflank the attack is to stop doing what the IRA wants us to do. If you were a Twitter user reading tweets by either of the aforementioned Russian trolls, there was no real way of knowing they were Russians. No lengthy strings of numerals in the handles, no glaringly choppy English, none of the usual red flags to speak of — except one.
More than 90,000 people retweeted Melanie’s fake poll without having any idea who Melanie was or whether she was on the level. 90,000 people willingly and foolishly swapped virtual body fluids with a total stranger who happened to be a Russian operative. While the social media platforms themselves continue to devise new ways of weeding out the trolls, we all have to stop doing “stupid shit,” to borrow Barack Obama’s mantra about foreign entanglements. A little bit of thoughtfulness and self-control will go a long way toward repelling the attacks.
Linvill and Warren suggest a little civility, too, which can’t hurt.
The problem, however, with becoming more educated and significantly more cautious about how we use social media is that a significant cross-section of us don’t even believe we’re being attacked through these platforms in the first place, so they’re unwilling to be more cautious, while others, namely American political operatives, aka “ratf**kers,” are happy to retweet Russian agitprop because it supports their chaotic agenda. Trump’s Red Hat army is entirely on board with Putin’s narrative about Ukraine as the real attackers, while many Americans on the far left who identify with journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are, at best, skeptical of the Russian attack. Ironically, skepticism and outright disbelief about the very existence of the attack is obviously a key component of the attack itself, and in many cases, the IRA didn’t necessarily have to lift a finger to manufacture that skepticism.
Again, the social media front of the Russian attack would have failed if we had just exercised better social media habits. But knowing the IRA’s @IamTyraJackson account was still active as recently as August 2019 suggests we still haven’t learned this awful lesson, even after years of pain and the slow disassembling of our republic under our noses, institution by institution. But there’s almost a year to go before Election Day 2020, and we still have enough altitude to pull up before the whole thing smashes into the ground. Let’s hope we wise up and grab the stick with both hands in time.
==
no lnx
Facebook: Russian trolls are back. And they're here to meddle with 2020
Donie O'Sullivan
By Donie O'Sullivan, CNN Business
Updated 5:24 AM ET, Tue October 22, 2019
New York (CNN Business)People linked to the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll group indicted by the United States for its alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election, are laying the groundwork to do the same in 2020, new information released by Facebook on Monday suggests.
Profiles originating in Russia had since the beginning of this year been building a network of accounts on Instagram designed to look like groups in swing states, the company said. Instagram is owned by Facebook (FB).
Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.
The accounts Facebook revealed Monday, 50 of which were on Instagram and one of which was on Facebook, were designed to look like they were advocating on a broad range of issues across American life.
A fake Bernie Sanders' supporters page posted an image attacking the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden
A fake Bernie Sanders' supporters page posted an image attacking the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden
Accounts with usernames like @black.queen.chloe and @michigan_black_community_ looked like they were run by black activists. There were also pro and anti-Trump accounts, and accounts posing as feminists, LGBTQ rights advocates, and environmentalists. Other account names included @stop.trump2020, @bernie.2020__, @iowa.patriot, and @feminist_agenda_, according to Graphika.
Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.
"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business.
In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."
Nimmo also observed attacks on other candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but said those attacks seemed more the result of "character building" in which the accounts were sharing content to bolster their respective personas -- for instance, liberal-looking accounts attacked Trump, while conservative-looking accounts posted negative content about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Her son was killed — then came the Russian trolls
Her son was killed — then came the Russian trolls
"Among the accounts focused on black activism, there was strong support for Bernie Sanders along with a moderate amount of content opposing Kamala Harris," Graphika said in its analysis. "Education reform and student debt relief were two of the most commonly mentioned reasons for supporting Sanders, while Harris's record as a California DA was mentioned as a reason to oppose her candidacy. Mixed in with these was a small amount of content attacking Joe Biden, primarily due to gaffes related to his previous handling of racial issues."
Nimmo said the accounts sent just under 75,000 posts, the majority of which were not directly related to the 2020 election, but to broader political and social issues in the US.
Facebook said Monday those behind the operation had taken steps to conceal their identities and locations. The company did not publicly say how it had determined the accounts were linked to the Internet Research Agency but said it had shared details with law enforcement.
The campaign mostly recycled existing memes and posts from real American news organizations and political groups.
"This wasn't Russians targeting Americans with Russian content, this was Russians targeting Americans with American content," Nimmo said.
The decision to recycle existing content, rather than create new material, might have been part of the campaign's strategy to conceal its Russian links, Nimmo said. However, errors in some of the accounts' posts suggested the accounts weren't run by native English speakers.
"What the future for their children will be?" the caption read on one post apparently criticizing Americans who don't remember the Confederacy fondly. Another account posted "What a bullsh**."
From Russia with Love? Mystery Facebook account sent New York activist a bunch of roses
From Russia with Love? Mystery Facebook account sent New York activist a bunch of roses
Nathaniel Gleicher, who leads Facebook's team investigating foreign influence operations, said the company had caught the operation in its early stages and that the Russian group had been focusing on audience building. Gleicher said the accounts were "trying to make themselves look like ordinary citizens" in a way that could later have lent credibility to their posts.
Facebook has taken extensive steps to crack down on foreign disinformation on its platforms since the 2016 election, including hiring former intelligence officials to root out campaigns like those run from Russia. Gleicher said that the steps Facebook had taken appeared to make it difficult for the Russian accounts "to build the following among authentic communities."
"People in Russia are still trying this," Nimmo told CNN Business on Monday. But, he said, they are finding it a lot harder because the social media companies "are hunting them."
"In 2016, you could have set up an account posing as a Tennessee Republican and have it registered to a Russian phone number," he noted.
Facebook also announced Monday that it had removed several networks of Iranian accounts, some of which targeted Americans. One of the accounts directed audiences to content about Black Lives Matter -- a tactic that was very popular among the Russian trolls in 2016. The network had a relatively small following of more than 7,000 accounts.
While most of the focus on online foreign interference in the US has been devoted to Russia, over the past 12 months, Facebook has detected multiple Iranian campaigns targeting the United States.
CNN's Sarah Mucha contributed reporting.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/gop-sens-ron-johnson-and-marsha-blackburn-are-tied-to-russian-money-and-trump-conspiracy-theories-theyre-not-alone/
no lnx
GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn are tied to Russian money and Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not alone
Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 30, 2019
Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.
Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they’re in on it?
On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenkofor at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”
Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016” in order to receive military aid.
As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured “if President Trump has that confidence” that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, “then he’ll release the military spending.” Now, as the Post points out, Johnson’s “knowledge of key events” in the case may “complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate.”
Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.
Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.
As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.
“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.
When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a “kangaroo court” are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?
Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.
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i have not been able to figure her TG out; many ads on AN
no lnx
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that she thinks Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is being “groomed” by Russia to run as a third-party candidate in 2020.
Clinton made the allegations during an interview with David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager. During the interview, Clinton alleged that Russia used 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein as an “asset” and suggested that Gabbard would play a similar role in the upcoming election without mentioning her name.
“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton went on to label Stein a “Russian asset.”
“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-duplicitous-trolls-are-using-tulsi-gabbards-candidacy-to-foment-disruption-and-chaos/
nolnx
ous trolls are using Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy to foment disruption and chaos
Written byNancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 23, 2019
Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. At this point, her polling average at Real Clear Politics is 1.4%. Nevertheless, conservative media celebrated the fact that Gabbard won the online poll sponsored by Drudge Report after the first round of debates. Similarly, Gabbard won polls from both Breitbart and Drudge after her performance in the second debate. Those results were not replicated by any reputable polling firm.
Not long after the first debate, we learned what had prompted Gabbard’s success in those online polls.
Users from pro-Trump communities on 4chan and Reddit implored fellow members to vote for lower-polling candidates in online polls, specifically Tulsi Gabbard and Bill de Blasio, in the hours after Wednesday’s Democratic debate — a sign that digital manipulation efforts related to U.S. politics and elections remain very much alive....
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omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19
https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy
At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorneyRudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.
It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.
Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.
What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.
Here’s how it went down.
Key Takeaways
- Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
- In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.
- The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
- Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.
- During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times.
- Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.
- On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.
Key players
Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.
Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former businessassociate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”
Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.
John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.
Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.
The plan
According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.
The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.
In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.
Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.
As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure, the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.
Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.
NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”
The media strategy
Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon
Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.
In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:
- He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.
- Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.
- He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.
- He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated andreleased to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).
- He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.
- He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.
- And, of course, he claimedthat Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.
Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.
At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though.
Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”
Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox
The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to SeanHannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period.
The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.
However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.
Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.
The payoff
Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:
Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”
Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”
==
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forged docs macron le pen
https://twitter.com/Nico_VanderB
Verified account
:{:{}:
Director of Operations @ SaperVedereEU - Blogger / Chronicler on Crises, Influences and Social Media
Brussels - Paris
Joined September 2011
Born January 04
}:
==
(Reuters) - A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.
They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [https://en.riss.ru/], after the election.
The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office.
The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.
RELATED COVERAGE
http://bit.ly/2kMiKSA]
Russia Today’s most popular Clinton video - “How 100% of the 2015 Clintons’ ‘charity’ went to ... themselves” - accumulated 9 millions views on social media, according to the January report. [http://bit.ly/2os8wIt]
The report said Russia Today and Sputnik “consistently cast president elect-Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional media outlets.”
The report said the agencies did not assess whether Moscow’s effort had swung the outcome of the race in Trump’s favor, because American intelligence agencies do not “analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.” [http://bit.ly/2kMiKSA]
CYBER ATTACKS
Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election, according to four of the officials. The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.
The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.
Five of the U.S. officials described the institute as the Kremlin’s in-house foreign policy think tank.
The institute’s director when the documents were written, Leonid Reshetnikov, rose to the rank of lieutenant general during a 33-year-career in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, according to the institute’s website [http://bit.ly/2oVhiCF]. After Reshetnikov retired from the institute in January, Putin named as his replacement Mikhail Fradkov. The institute says he served as the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service from 2007 to 2016. [http://bit.ly/2os4tvz]
Reuters was unable to determine if either man was directly involved in the drafting of the documents. Reshetnikov’s office referred questions to the Russian institute.
On its website, the Russian institute describes itself as providing “expert appraisals,” “recommendations,” and “analytical materials” to the Russian president’s office, cabinet, National Security Council, ministries and parliament. [http://bit.ly/2pCBGpR]
On Jan. 31, the websites of Putin’s office [http://bit.ly/2os9wMr] and the institute [http://bit.ly/2oLn9Kd] posted a picture and transcript ofReshetnikov and his successor Fradkov meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Putin thanked Reshetnikov for his service and told Fradkov he wanted the institute to provide objective information and analysis.
“We did our best for nearly eight years to implement your foreign policy concept,” Reshetnikov told Putin. “The policy of Russia and the policy of the President of Russia have been the cornerstone of our operation.”
additional reporting by Warren Strobel and Arshad Mohammed
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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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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/disinformation-could-sway-the-2020-election-and-were-not-ready/
no lnx
Disinformation could sway the 2020 election — and we’re not ready
Written by The Conversation September 9, 2019
Paul M. Barrett, New York University
In 2016, Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to sow division among American voters and boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
What the Russians used to accomplish this is called “disinformation,” which is false or misleading content intended to deceive or promote discord. Now, with the first presidential primary vote only five months away, the public should be aware of the sources and types of online disinformation likely to surface during the 2020 election.
First, the Russians will be back. Don’t be reassured by the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency’s relatively negligible presence during last year’s midterm elections. The agency might have been keeping its powder dry in anticipation of the 2020 presidential race. And it helped that U.S. Cyber Command, an arm of the military, reportedly blocked the agency’s internet access for a few days right before the election in November 2018.
Temporarily shutting down the Internet Research Agency won’t be enough to stop the flow of harmful content. Lee Foster, who leads the disinformation team at the cybersecurity firm FireEye, told me in an interview that the agency is “a small component of the overall Russian operation,” which also includes Moscow’s military intelligence service and possibly other organizations. Over time, Foster said, “All of these actors rework their approaches and tactics.”
And there’s more to fear than just the Russians. I’m the author of a new report on disinformation and the 2020 election published by the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. In the report, I predict that the Russians won’t be alone in spreading disinformation in 2020. Their most likely imitator will be Iran, especially if hostility between Tehran and Washington continues to mount.
Disinformation isn’t just Russian
In May, acting on a tip from FireEye, Facebook took down nearly 100 Iranian-related accounts, pages and groups. The Iranian network had used fake American identities to espouse both conservative and liberal political views, while also promoting extremely divisive anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian themes.
As Senate Intelligence Committee co-chair Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, has said, “The Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook.”
While foreign election interference has dominated discussion of disinformation, most intentionally false content targeting U.S. social media is generated by domestic sources.
I believe that will continue to be the case in 2020. President Trump often uses Twitter to circulate conspiracy theories and cast his foes as corrupt. One story line he pushes is that Facebook, Twitter and Google are colluding with Democrats to undermine him. Introducing a right-wing “social media summit” at the White House in July, he tweeted about the “tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination, and suppression practiced by certain companies.”
Supporters of Democrats also have trafficked in disinformation. In December 2017, a group of liberal activists created fake Facebook pages designed to mislead conservative voters in a special U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Matt Osborne, who has acknowledged being involved in the Alabama scheme, told me that in 2020, “you’re going to see a movement toward [political spending from undisclosed sources] on digital campaigns in the closing days of the race.” He suggests there could be an effort to discourage Republicans from voting with “an image of a red wave with a triumphal statement that imbues them with a sense of inevitable victory: ‘No need to bother voting. Trump has got it in the bag.’”
Spreading fake videos
Also likely to surface next year: “deepfake” videos. This technique produces highly convincing – but false – images and audio. In a recent letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, wrote: “A timely, convincing deepfake video of a candidate” that goes viral on a platform “could hijack a race – and even alter the course of history. … The consequences for our democracy could be devastating.”
Just one example of a deepfake video.
Instagram could be a vehicle for deepfakes. Owned by Facebook, the photo and video platform played a much bigger role in Russia’s manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election than most people realize, and it could be exploited again in 2020. The Russian Internet Research Agency enjoyed more user engagement on Instagram than it did on any other platform, according to a December 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis,” the report added.
Companies could step up
The social media companies are responding to the problem of disinformation by improving their artificial intelligence filters and hiring thousands of additional employees devoted to safety and security. “The companies are getting much better at detection and removal of fake accounts,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Platform Accountability Project, told me.
But the companies do not completely remove much of the content they pinpoint as false; they merely reduce how often it appears for users, and sometimes post a message noting that it’s false.
In my view, provably false material should be eliminated from feeds and recommendations, with a copy retained in a cordoned-off archive available for research purposes to scholars, journalists and others.
Another problem is that responsibility for content decisions now tends to be scattered among different teams within each of the social media companies. Our report recommends that to streamline and centralize, each company should hire a senior official who reports to the CEO and is responsible for overseeing the fight against disinformation. Such executives could marshal resources more easily within each company and more effectively coordinate efforts across social media companies.
Finally, the platforms could also cooperate more than they currently do to stamp out disinformation. They’ve collaborated effectively to root out child pornography and terrorist incitement. I believe they now have a collective responsibility to rid the coming election of as much disinformation as possible. An electorate that has been fed lies about candidates and issues can’t make informed decisions. Votes will be based on falsehoods. And that means the future of American democracy – in 2020 and beyond – depends on dealing effectively with disinformation.
]The Conversation
Paul M. Barrett, Deputy Director, Center for Business and Human Rights, Stern School of Business; Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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new 819
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-biggest-facebook-supporter-is-a-chinese-cult-hoping-for-the-apocalypse/
no lnx
Trump’s biggest Facebook supporter is a Chinese cult hoping for the apocalypse
Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos August 20, 2019
This is not the death cult you expected. While Donald Trump may regularly count on the support of people who believe that supporting Israel means making sure that every Jewish citizen of that state is handy to be either converted or slaughtered in the any-day-now End Times, this is another group of religious fanatics counting on Trump to fulfill their world (and atheist) -destroying dreams. Until recently, the contents of website The Epoch Times have been so out there, so beyond the pizzagate conspiracy theories of Gateway Pundit and the black helicopter lizard men of Infowars, that it’s been regarded as too odd to be considered part of the right-wing “mainstream.” No more. Under Trump, all bets are off. And a group that’s willing to top the online spending of Democratic candidates to express its support for Trump is definitely welcome in the fold … even if they do want him for his finger on the nuclear trigger.
It’s easy to understand why any group looking for an apocalypse might look to Trump as just the man for the job. But not every cult manages to spend more on Facebook than presidential campaigns. The leaders of the group that is counting on Trump to begin the “Last Havoc” have now spent more than $1.5 million to buy 11,000 pro-Trump spots on social media.In April alone, those ads netted 3 billion views, making this foreign-backed group one of the top video creators on the Internet and a major player in American politics.
As NBC News reports, The Epoch Times may look like just another online conspiracy site belonging to another small cult of slavish Trump followers itchin’ for some good old-fashioned smiting from above. But this “small New York-based nonprofit” is actually controlled by Falun Gong, a Chinese religious group aiming to both bring down Beijing and democracy while cheering for the end of all things. If on the surface they look like another fundamentalist site attacking science, reason, and “humanists,” it’s because they are.
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if russia basically has no economy, at least exports except oil, why is it not more involved in denial?]
https://www.c-span.org/video/?461371-2/fall-books-2019-preview-author-discussion
my new book. which is called blowout.some of you may know, i have this t.v. show where i get to -- you guys still have tvs! [laughter] for most of you very soon it will be a phone show. but right now it's a t.v. show where i get to cover the news in my own way and is my choice as to which stories i cover and how and at what length. for that show, i read several thousand words a day. and as long as there are no swearwords among them and as long as i abide by nbc news rules and standards are pretty much can say all the words i write on my own terms on t.v. every night. which means i have the greatest job on earth. but that may also make you wonder why on top of that, i would be so greedy as to want an additional outlet. yet to further express myself and give my take on what i think is going on in the world. in the abstract, i don't. but in 2012 and i wrote my first book, drift, and this past year when i started working on blowout, i really felt like i ended up book rating almost despite myself because in the course of my day job, i found myself repeatedly getting stuck. just in doing my regular work trying to explain the days news, trying to make sense of larger dynamic in which the new cycle was unfolding. both in 2012 and this past year.
i kept feeling like i was getting caught in an intellectual bottleneck. there was this process that i could see at work in the world. a dynamic that came to think was pretty important for explaining the news on any given day. but it is an idea that's a couple of hundred pages long idea.
although i took incessantly a couple of hundred page long idea does not fit into my daily work. it is the same thing for me that happens in 2012. if any of you remember drift also the book when it came out it was about the use of american military power becoming unmoored from democratic decision-making. wars that never end and that the public never notices. and congress never votes on. i felt compelled to write drift because i felt that it was a tellable story about where it all came from. a fairly recent story and i felt it was a way to point out over a couple hundred pages why it didn't have to be that way forever. that was my first book.
my new book, blowout, came from a realization i had that sort of had me in the same way. which is that there is a fairly simple that i think uniquely destructive dynamic at work behind a bunch of news that we are living through right now. and it has to do with the oil and gas industry. it is a couple hundred pages long so it had to be a book. but the basic idea is that the democratic system of government and competent governance overall, both at home and abroad, they have a really potent and unrelenting enemy and not one industry. and oil and gas industry is a rich and dangerous sector of the business world but i think it also ought to be recognized as a political entity.
one has a track record of gobbling down even seemingly strong government and spitting out the bumps. part of the books subtitle is the phrase, rogue state russia. you may know that in my day job i have spent a -- amount of time on the russian attack on the 2016 election and its implications and aftermath. this book is not a book about that attack per se. but it does let me get off my chest a thing that i hope americans could better understand about why russia would have wanted to do a thing like that. and why they chose those weird methods. i think russia mounted the attack on our election from a position of profound economic and strategic weakness. for me, coming to understand that has been revelatory in terms of thinking about what they did but also what they've done since the attack and why and what makes for success in their own eyes when they mount these kinds of operations.
just one last point. i recognize that the oil and gas industry is a big bold committed thing. it is made up of many companies that are run by many executives that have many employees and many shareholders. each of whom is a person like who came from a mother. it is very nice. [laughter] i don't think the oil and gas industry is bad because it is made up of bad people. i think the story here is that it is a uniquely destructive entity particularly to our democracy and democracies abroad because of its inherent purpose and because of the profoundly cynical but rational expectations that industry has built for itself in terms of the way it does business. as you know, when used as directed, this is an industry whose products are in the process of ending the world. and sooner than we were really say expecting. but even before we get to the climate apocalypse, that's a ministry in the meantime really is doing its best to undermine our ability to govern ourselves effectively. and to make good group decisions about how to handle all of our challenges, including the ones that we get from them. so, i know, cheery, right?
there's a lot of oklahoma city, there are some siberia and equatorial guinea. there's a very talented -- there seats in hell -- there is a little bit of xena the warrior princess. some radioactive milk, and a comically terribly failed spy ring it up of terrible, terrible spies. and i know the cover, under the covers a little apocalyptic. actually briefly lobbied for the statute -- the statue of liberty to have a clown nose. my mother told me based on the cover she is afraid to read it. i will admit it is sort of about the end of the world. but i also think it is kind of a funny story. [laughter] so, in any case i hope that you like it. i want to thank you for this time. i want to thank you in advance. free interest, as i say it comes out on october 1.
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AN
no lnx vid
‘Visibly livid’ Mitch McConnell lashes out on the Senate floor over accusations he’s a ‘Russian asset’
C-SPAN
Written by Cody Fenwick July 30, 2019
It looks like the “Moscow Mitch” taunts actually got under that skin of Senate Majority Leader McConnell.
In a speech described by one observer as “visibly livid,” the Kentucky Republican took to the Senate floor Monday to lash out at his critics. McConnell had come under fire in recent days for blocking a series of election security bills, including a measure passed by the House of Representatives that would provide $600 million for the states to upgrade their voting systems. And yet the majority leader refuses to allow the bills to be brought up for debate.
As both the former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee sounded the alarms last week about the seriousness of the Russian threat to elections, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank declared McConnell a “Russian asset.”
He wrote:
This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.
00:01
00:33
Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding.
These accusations and others like them clearly bothered McConnell.
But when he fought back against the criticisms on Monday, his response displayed a laughable amount of hypocrisy. Everything he accused his opponents of, President Donald Trump is guilty of ten times over, yet McConnell offers little pushback to the cyberbully in chief.
“Among other things, keeping our republic means we can’t let modern-day McCarthyism win,” he said. “No matter how much they lie, no matter how much they bully, I will not be intimidated.”
Report Advertisement
Trump’s lying and bullying are plain to see, but he is also a direct descendant of McCarthyism. Trump was close to Roy Cohn, a top ally of Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Republican’s hunt for communists in the U.S. government. To this day, Trump still expresses admiration for Cohn and even repeatedly shared his desire to have an attorney general who would act as “my Roy Cohn.” And it’s Trump, not Democratic critics of Russia’s actual election interference and espionage, who invokes the spirit of McCarthyism as he stirs up baseless attacks on his perceived opponents as “communists.”
To defend against criticism, McConnell claimed that his record shows a history of standing up to Russia. And that may be true, but that makes it all the more baffling why he’s slow-walking election security bills now and refusing to bring up measures for the Senate to actually debate. Given his defense of Trump’s clear desire to work with Russia to win interfere in 2016 and 2020, the Republican Senate majority leader should take the issue much more seriously if he wants to distinguish himself from this conduct.
“Facts matter. Details matter. History matters. And if our nation is losing its ability to debate public policy without screaming about treason, that really matters,” McConnell declared.
But again, if McConnell really wanted to debate the “details” and “facts” of election interference, he could be moving bills through the Senate process. Instead, he’s blocking them.
Milbank detailed the legislation he has blocked without debate:
A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.
A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.
A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.
A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cybercrimes.
McConnell has prevented them all from being considered — over and over again.
And of course, all this is even more egregious because, as much as Republicans like to blame President Barack Obama for Russia’s 2016 interference, it was McConnell who threatened to undermine the White House if it took aggressive public steps to counter the Kremlin propaganda.
Moreover, if McConnell is truly concerned about overly incautious accusations of “treason,” he should cast a glance toward the Oval Office:[trmp twt treason]...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/this-is-what-moscow-mitch-really-wants/
...The truth about what really happened in 2016 has been a slow drip, to put it mildly. Since Nov. 8, 2016, the extent of Russian infiltration of the American democratic process has been routinely and frustratingly underestimated and lowballed, with details gradually expanding from nothing to a few states to 39 states and now, with the 2020 election 15 months away, we’ve reached a full 50 states and, according to the Senate report, “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure.”
With every horrifying new revelation, investigators keep saying there’s no evidence any votes were changed — no evidence yet — but given how our knowledge of the attack’s extent is growing broader, I’m expecting such news to drop eventually. The trendline is surely moving in that direction, though proof that votes were changed isn’t entirely necessary to prove a catastrophic, election-altering invasion by the Russians.
The social media agitprop front of the attack alone clearly changed the minds of American voters long before ballots were cast. Likewise, the Senate report determined that “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” In other words, it might be a red herring to look for votes that were artificially flipped from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, or, for that matter, in down-ballot races. If Russia could change enough minds via thousands of trolls equipped with marching orders that micro-targeted Facebook users ripe for being duped, combined with perhaps altered or eliminated voter registrations, then it’s totally unnecessary to actually change votes.
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racist memes 2016 IRA
https://www.thedailybeast.com/30-batsht-crazy-mostly-racist-facebook-memes-the-russians-used-to-corrupt-your-mind
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no lnx
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/new-senate-report-reveals-russias-targeting-of-the-2016-voting-process-was-more-expansive-than-we-knew/
New Senate report reveals Russia’s targeting of the 2016 voting process was more expansive than we knew
Written by Cody Fenwick July 25, 2019
Just a day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House of Representatives, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released its own much-anticipated report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
The report is the first of five volumes set to be released. It is centered around Russia’s targeting of American election infrastructure.
And while the report makes clear that it found no evidence to suggest that any actual vote tallies were changed in a way that would affect the outcome of the 2016 election, it details a more expansive foreign effort to “intrude” into the election system than has previously been revealed.
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“The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level,” the report said as its topline finding. “Election infrastructure” here is designated quite broadly, referring to “storage facilities, polling places, and centralized vote tabulation locations […] registration databases, voting machines, and other systems.”
“The Committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated,” it added.
Much of the report is redacted.
According to the committee, it is not entirely clear what Russia’s intent was in targeting election infrastructure given that it does not appear to have actually intervened in this way to influence the result.
“Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later,” the committee wrote. “Alternatively, Moscow may have sought to undermine confidence in the 2016 U.S. elections simply through the discovery of their activity.”
In June of 2016, the report noted, Russian actors breached Illinois’ voter registration database. While the hackers don’t appear to have made any alterations — alterations which could, theoretically, completely distort who is allowed to vote in crucial elections — the report said that “Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” It’s possible that, while the Russia government could have taken this step, it feared that the potential retaliation for doing so would have been extreme.
Previous reporting had revealed that the Russian government had apparently targeted U.S. election infrastructure, but the number of states that were actually subject to these cyber attacks was unclear, as LA Times reporter Chris Megerian noted. Some reports had suggested that as many as 21 states were targeted. (Mueller reported that the FBI concluded the GRU, a Russia intelligence agency, had successfully accessed the “network of at least one Florida county government.”)
But Michael Daniel, a former assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, told the committee “by late August 2016, he had already personally concluded that the Russians had attempted to intrude in all 50 states, based on the extent of the activity and the apparent randomness of the attempts.”
“My professional judgment was we have to work under the assumption that they’ve tried to go everywhere, because they’re thorough, they’re competent, they’re good,” he said.
The committee added: “Intelligence developed later in 2018 bolstered Mr. Daniel’s assessment that all 50 states were targeted.”
So how safe should Americans consider their election systems? The committee concluded that, while the Department of Homeland Security has made strides to address the problem, significant vulnerabilities remain:
In the face of this threat and these security gaps, DHS has redoubled its efforts to build trust with states and deploy resources to assist in securing elections. Since 2016, DHS has made great strides in learning how election procedures vary across states and how federal entities can be of most help to states. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), and other groups have helped DHS in this effort. DHS’s work to bolster states’ cybersecurity has likely been effective, in particular for those states that have leveraged DHS’s cybersecurity assessments for election infrastructure, but much more needs to be done to coordinate state, local, and federal knowledge and efforts in order to harden states’ electoral infrastructure against foreign meddling.
There’s another troubling aspect of the report. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) issued his own minority opinion, meaning that it was not shared with the rest of the committee, which urged that federal action is needed to secure elections and that local governments cannot be left to fend for themselves:
If there was ever a moment when Congress needed to exercise its clear constitutional authorities to regulate elections, this is it. America is facing a direct assault on the heart of our democracy by a determined adversary. We would not ask a local sheriff to go to war against the missiles, planes and tanks of the Russian Army. We shouldn’t ask a county election IT employee to fight a war against the full capabilities and vast resources of Russia’s cyber army. That approach failed in 2016 and it will fail again. The federal government’s response to this ongoing crisis cannot be limited offers to provide resources and information, the acceptance of which is voluntary. If the country’s elections are to be defended. Congress must also establish mandatory, nation-wide cybersecurity requirements.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/new-study-finds-states-need-more-funding-to-protect-elections-%e2%81%a0-funding-mcconnell-wont-allow/
New study finds states need more funding to protect elections ?— funding McConnell won’t allow
Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos July 22, 2019
A report released last week from the Brennan Center for Justice, the R Street Institute, the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy sounds an alarm about the urgent need for federal funding to secure state elections systems ahead of the 2020 election.
Choosing Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania as key states representing different regions, with varied population sizes to extrapolate from, the authors find that federal intervention is critical. “Elections are the pillar of American democracy, and, as we saw in 2016 and 2018, foreign governments will continue to target them,” the authors write. “States cannot counter these adversaries alone, nor should they have to. But at a time when free and fair elections are increasingly under attack, they can, with additional federal funding, safeguard them.” They say that while they “have limited their review to a sampling of six states, it is clear that the other 44 states and the District of Columbia have similar unfunded needs.”
Four of the states said they need funding to replace old equipment that’s vulnerable to cyber attacks, while several others require funds for training election officials in cybersecurity. Oklahoma needs funding for post-election audits to make sure their tallies are correct, and Pennsylvania identified a need for regular assessments of the security of its counties’ systems.
In 2018, Congress passed $380 million in grants through Help America Vote Act funding specifically for election security. The Elections Assistance Commission has estimated that 85% of these funds will be spent ahead of the 2020 election “to strengthen election cybersecurity, purchase new voting equipment, and improve postelection audits,” but this study’s authors find that it’s not stretching to the full need just in the six states they surveyed.
“Unfortunately, given the myriad security challenges faced by these states, the $380 million is not enough to address the needs of state and local offices,” they write, and “many have substantial election security needs that likely will not be met absent additional federal support.” That federal support is only going to happen if Mitch McConnell lets it. He’s blocked a very significant elections protection bill this year, and has made it clear that he won’t let one through.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-disinformation-hurricane-is-coming-in-2020-as-other-adversaries-emulate-russias-model/
no lnx
A ‘disinformation hurricane’ is coming in 2020 as other adversaries emulate Russia’s model
This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.
Written by Matt Osborne July 16, 2019
Shortly after the first debate between Democratic presidential contenders, trolls from the message board 4Chan boosted Tulsi Gabbard to the top of some online polls, earning credulous press attention with this sudden surge of support. At the same time, real and fake Andrew Yang supporters complained of supposed unfairness to their candidate, trending #LetYangSpeak on Twitter. While this is unlikely to make either longshot candidate the nominee, anyone looking to disrupt the Democratic Party has two new potential wedges.
After the 2016 primaries were decided, Russia exploited discontent among Bernie Sanders’ supporters to divide and distract Democrats. In 2020, there are several failing candidates whose supporters can be targeted with memes and fake news promoting conspiracy theories about party apparatchiks secretly conspiring against them. The potential scale of the spoiler problem is therefore much bigger and more fractured this time around. Gabbard is already a clear Kremlin favorite for this strategy, as her foreign policy leanings are quite friendly to Russia’s interests, but why stop at just one foil to the eventual nominee? Why not turn Joe Biden supporters against Elizabeth Warren, or Warren supporters against Sanders?
As the experts predicted months ago, adversaries are already hard at work attacking the 2020 election, and this time it won’t only be Russia that we have to worry about. The early signs of interference are already visible, and as we get deeper into the campaign, these threats are almost certainly going to come from new directions. Having seen Russia intervene in 2016, and win, and then get away with it,everyone from North Korea to China to Saudi Arabia will want to shape American electoral politics to their liking.
China has clearly ramped up their electioneering capabilities. In Taiwan, celebrity businessman Han Kuo-yu was elected mayor of Kaohsiung last year with help from Facebook groups “created, managed, and nurtured by what looks very much like a professional cybergroup from [mainland] China,” according to reporter Paul Huang at Foreign Policy. Now a favorite to run for Taiwan’s presidency in 2020, Han Kuo-yu is everything that Beijing could want in a Taiwanese politician. Would they hesitate to insert themselves in an American election in the midst of a high-stakes trade-war?
It is likely that these new players will attack from both sides of an issue the way Russia did in 2016 when, for example, Americans saw “separate ads, launched simultaneously, [that] would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.” About half of all the Facebook material put out by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, in 2016 was aimed at stoking racial animus this way. Then after the election, the IRA tried to organize simultaneous pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City. This is a standard element of all information warfare doctrine: always pit both sides against the middle.
We can also expect to see an even higher level of Twitter bot activity than ever before, as every new player will have their own army of fake accounts. They will do this because the evidence shows that these tactics are effective. A new study released earlier this month found that Russian bot activity had a greater impact than Trump’s own tweets in 2016, driving up his support among undecided voters in the last, critical days of the race. It is important to note that these activities did not reduce support for Clinton. Instead, they drove negative partisanship among potential Trump voters, appealing to baser emotions and stirring antagonism towards the Democrat in order to boost his turnout.
This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of what Russia’s Internet Research Agency did in 2016.Much of the material uncovered by congressional investigators wasnot explicitly political; instead of calls to vote, there was a lot of symbolism—eagles and flags and patriotic quotes. Yet there was an insidious program at work in those seemingly non-partisan materials. By promoting memes designed to appeal to right wing voters, the IRA created large echo chambers that amplified their messages on Facebook. Rather than change minds, they wanted people to ‘dig in’ and get whipped into a fury, making them more likely to turn out and vote.
Some have a hard time understanding that individual persuasion, while possible, is rarely an effective communications strategy. It’s much easier to turn out your own voters than convince new ones, and studies show that social media pressure is even more effective at firing up your base than organized canvassing or other traditional, in-person techniques. It is also far cheaper, and because social media incentivizes negative partisanship, such messages are much more “viral” than the positive messaging that Democrats prefer. Psychologists have long observed that people tend to be more responsive to bad news than good — they call it “negativity bias.”
The Clinton campaign made an error in 2016 by trying to persuade moderate Republicans rather than focusing on turning out her base. We’ve seen other examples of it since then. For example, when Beto O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections, his Facebook ad targeting was simplistic, and designed mainly to maximize views and clicks instead of drawing anyone into a community. Cruz, on the other hand, used Facebook ads to radicalize his base with disinformation and build on a set of shared values contrary to O’Rourke’s liberal message. Whereas O’Rourke disdained the Clinton campaign model of “triangulation and data-driven microtargeting,” he fell into the exact same trap of emphasizing positivity and “going high” in a medium that simply does not reward this type of material. Beto may have captured Democratic hearts but the Cruz campaign, which has always had a sophisticated digital GOTV machine, eked out a narrow victory thanks to high conservative turnout.
Russia has also played a major role in the Texas disinformation game. One secessionist Facebook group, Heart of Texas, reportedly received 4.8 million shares by November 2016—the most of any IRA account–through precision targeting and by emphasizing negative partisanship. The IRA is just one of a dozen The Kremlin’s campaign to influence US elections, known as ‘Project Lakhta,’ has been operational since 2014and Texas is a favorite target. Between these foreign and domestic disinformation schemes, there’s little hope for anyone to win a major election with a purely-positive, issues-based campaign on social media.
Unfortunately, we can’t expect Facebook or Twitter to take any effective actions to stop the flow of divisive content. Such measures as they have already taken are unlikely to stop anyone from abusing their platforms in new ways, or with new variations of the same techniques used in 2016. According to Robert Mueller’s indictments, more than a dozen Russian disinformation agents broke the law by purchasing identities to use within the United States. Now that there are Trump supporters who understand what happened and fully approve of the outcome there is nothing to stop the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, or anyone else from laundering their social media activity through willing, paid accomplices found in the United States.
And as The New York Times reported last year, during the 2018 midterms there was “a shift in the flow of online disinformation [and] falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame,” with more homegrown American groups emulating the model Russia demonstrated in 2016.
Neither Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will detect or prevent this activity because it is not in their interest to be proactive. The Federal Elections Commission will not get ahead of it either, defanged as they are by decades of Republican regulatory capture. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has systematically quashed all attempts to shore up American cyberdefenses, and Donald Trump is openly hostile toward any mention of beefing up our election security. Because there is no one in Washington tasked with this enforcement job, it simply will not happen. Multiple players will seek new avenues to hit Americans from all sides with the objective of reelecting Trump and keeping the Senate in Republican hands and there will be few cops on the beat to stop them.
Democrats are not ready to weather this storm. There are some free counter-disinformation tools available out there, but campaigns are too afraid of potential campaign finance violations to use them. The paid tools available are often unproven, inspiring little confidence that they will work. Vendors who offer to build up counter-disinformation capacities tell me that their proposals are often misconstrued as voter suppression, which of course is anathema to Democrats. So in the face of what is sure to be a disinformation hurricane in 2020, they seem resigned to their fate.
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