Russia Bak

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an 10 26

President Donald Trump's Republican Party acts less like a traditional political party than a cult of personality, according to a historian who specializes in fascism — and he points a finger of blame at Russia.

"How does the party go along, in lockstep with that?" podcaster Shane Smith asked historian Timothy Snyder in a video that dropped on Thursday. "I get that, and I probably agree with that, but that’s one person. How do you get the whole party, if not the whole country, to just overnight agree with you in lockstep?"

Snyder replied, "I’m going to answer that, but I’m going to qualify it first, because it’s not the whole country. The polling on the Russia-Ukraine war is actually pretty good. Even Republicans are about fifty-fifty, independents are mostly pro-Ukraine, and Democrats are overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. So I wouldn’t say the whole country. There has been a seismic shift in the American right. And I think there are a couple of causes beyond Trump, who has a lot of influence. Opinion polls on Russia among certain people change because of him. He does have a lot of influence on, let’s say, half the Republican electorate."

He continued, "But in addition to that, there’s the fact that a lot of Americans on the far right really like Putin’s ideology. They like the notion of civilization. They like the sexism. They like the racism. They like the conspiracy thinking. They like the anti-gay stuff. And then, to make matters a little more practical, Putin’s Russia shares money around with the far right. I worked on this in Europe. I’ve never worked on it in the US, but I’d be stunned if it weren’t true in the US as well. They support individual right-wing actors with money, and they also platform them. And they also coach them, like with Tucker Carlson."

Snyder later pointed out that Russia is no longer left-wing, as it was under the Soviet Union, but is right-wing under President Vladimir Putin.

"There’s the fact that Russia is no longer the communist Soviet Union; it’s right-wing Russia, which is naturally attractive to certain right-wing people," Snyder told Smith. "And then there are all the ops. The way we run social media in the US is basically laissez-faire: anybody can do what they want to do. And under Trump, that’s basically policy, which means that not just the Russians, but the Chinese and everybody else, are all over our social media. I think that’s some of the answer."

He added, "And then let’s not overestimate the American memory, or underestimate the American capacity for contradiction. Right now, the Republicans are trying to claim that the current midterm election is about anti-communism, when their guy admires a former KGB officer, fawns over the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and couldn’t say nicer things about the communist dictator of North Korea. So part of it is just an American capacity to not remember things and to embrace contradiction.

I wrote a book that was largely about the 2015–2016 Russian operations in the US. I’m forgetting now who said this, but he had his finger on something important. One of the Russian operatives was actually in the United States trying to figure out what they were going to do with the social media ops. He said, 'These people believe in anything they want, and I admire them for that.' That’s of course not true of all Americans, but there is a certain fluidity around the way we remember politics sometimes, which means the Cold War doesn’t really last as long as one might think."

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russia1026

primary 5/17 on comey

collusion

see disinfo tenet media

see ukraine war Zelensky

see also putin

see musk tulsi gabbard

ussr

russia-gate --> kash

APPLE? NAVALNY?

NO BAK

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an 10 26

Snyder later pointed out that Russia is no longer left-wing, as it was under the Soviet Union, but is right-wing under President Vladimir Putin.

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THOM GOOD RUSSIA SUMMARY

AN 10 26

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

THOM

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

Thom Hartmann October 13, 2026

Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that angry truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

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epstein

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) walked through all of the details that connect trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence. Those connections also link President Donald Trump.

According to Whitehouse, the pathway goes through Ghislaine Maxwell's father, which the senator read from his MI6 file that Robert Maxwell was "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia."

Whitehouse walked through all of the relationships that Epstein had with international assets, including Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Recently released files prompted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to announce they would do a wide-ranging investigation into Epstein's possible links to Russian intelligence.

One of those was Epstein's relationship with Oleg Deripaska, who also had a close relationship with Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The Senator walked through a number of documents and emails in the Epstein files showing that Russian girls were part of his recruitment for the men that he sought to manipulate.

Whitehouse cited one communication from French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel to Epstein saying he found "a teacher" to help Epstein with his Russian. "She is 2 times 8 years old and not blond," he said.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. identified more than $1 billion in suspicious transactions that it flagged to the U.S. government. The big bank identified about 4,700 transactions, saying that "they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein," reported The New York Times.

It also mentioned Epstein’s wire transfers to Russian banks, even referencing “his relationships with two U.S. presidents.”

Epstein also maintained connections with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), a close friend of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

"After Epstein's arrest in 2019, officials also discovered that he held an expired Austrian passport from the 1980s with his picture and a false name, which listed his residence as Saudi Arabia," CBS News and the New York Times reported.

Whitehouse cited one ex-girlfriend who recalled Epstein telling her, "I collect people. I own people. I can damage people."

Virginia Giuffre wrote in her book that Epstein had a "huge library of videotapes and a room in his home where monitors displayed in real time surveillance footage from his properties."

"He explicitly talked about using me and what I'd been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail so these men would owe him favors," she wrote.

She also recalled one instance in which he walked through his mansion and pointed out where all of the pinhole-sized cameras were. Epstein boasted that they recorded everything.

Florida police found two small cameras in clocks in his Palm Beach home, Whitehouse said.

He also said that former prosecutor Alex Acosta was quoted as saying that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and that the decision to let him off easy in 2008 was made "above his pay grade."

Epstein's mentor, Steven Hoffenberg, told The National Enquirerin an account published three years after his death, "Wherever Epstein was entertaining, he and Ghislaine were taping." The report was released in the summer of 2025, alleging that more than two dozen people connected to Epstein have died under mysterious circumstances.

The Enquirer said that Epstein was running a honey-trap, taping videos of sleazy VIPs with underage girls for blackmailing them.

The same assessment came from an intelligence source who spoke to the Daily Mail, saying the operation was "the world's largest honeytrap operation" run for the KGB. Epstein would "procure" young women for his associates and then film their interactions.

He added that Epstein was a liar and a criminal who would exaggerate his own power and influence.

"The Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens," said Whitehouse.

There are still many unanswered questions, he said, but there are many very powerful men who were "very mixed up with Epstein at various times, and Epstein was very mixed up with Russia."

He closed by blasting the Justice Department and its ongoing efforts to conceal connections between these powerful men and Epstein.

OMFG // BONDI LIFT SANCTIONS USSR DAY ONE?!

A prominent Republican congressman, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, appeared shocked on national television when he learned that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a top Pentagon agency, U.S. Cyber Command, to suspend operations and planning against Russia’s cyber offensives.

Secretary Hegseth’s “stand down” order, while allegedly temporary, is expected to “last for the foreseeable future,” according to The Record, a cybersecurity news site which first reported the news.

CNN reported that a senior U.S. official called Hegseth’s order “a major blow.”

According to the network, “planning for such operations takes time and research to carry out. The concern, the official said, is that the pause on offensive cyber operations against Russia will make the U.S. more vulnerable to potential cyberattacks from Moscow, which has a formidable cadre of hackers capable of disrupting U.S. critical infrastructure and collecting sensitive intelligence.”

READ MORE: World Leaders Rush to Support Zelenskyy as Americans Debate Trump’s Allegiance

The development has received widespread coverage over the weekend.

“Russia is not a significant cyber threat to the U.S. anymore, Trump’s new Defense Secretary says,” the science and technology website Gizmodo reported. “The policy shift represents a complete 180-degree turn from America’s posture over the past decade, which has consistently considered Russia one of the top cybersecurity threats. Credible reporting and government investigations have shown that Russia has hacked into U.S. systems countless times.”

Experts were also stunned.

Veteran cyber expert James Lewis, formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said “it’s delusional to think” the stand down order “will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” The Guardian reported. “They hate the U.S. and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The order appears to extend past the Department of Defense, suggesting it may have originated at the highest levels of the executive branch.

Analysts at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) received a new priorities directive that included China, but not Russia, The Guardian also reported. One source “said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.”

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” that source said. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.”

READ MORE: ‘What the Hell Is This?’: GOP Group’s Andrew Tate Invitation Draws Bipartisan Outrage

“People are saying Russia is winning,” they added. “Putin is on the inside now.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) has decades of defense experience in Congress, having served on several committees on the armed forces and veterans affairs, and as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence until January—when Speaker Mike Johnson unexpectedly removed him from that critical position. He is a strong supporter of Ukraine and opposes Russia.

At the time of his removal, The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol remarked, “If you’re going to sell out Ukraine to Putin, makes sense to get Turner out of the way first.”

Last year, Turner was also one of a few House Republicans who “were warning about how elements of their party had been infected by Russian propaganda,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted on Monday. (Video of Turner from last year here.) Turner, he added, “was removed 7 months later as chair of the House intel committee.”

In February 2024, Turner issued a “national security threat” warning on Russia’s activities in space so dire that President Biden’s National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby was forced to deliver a statement from the White House press briefing room.

On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” CBS News’ Margaret Brennan told Congressman Turner (video below), that “CBS has confirmed these reports that Defense Secretary Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to temporarily halt cyber operations and planning against Russia. The Washington Post reports that that’s as long as the negotiations continue. There are no negotiations under way. Does this concern you? Have you been briefed on this?”

A stunned and stammering Rep. Turner delivered his response.

“I can’t – I don’t – no, I’m not – unaware of that. And I don’t believe that that would be – there are too many, I’m certain, considerations there for that to be an accurate statement, so blanket,” he said, according to the official CBS transcript.

“But they have ordered Cyber Command to halt cyber operations,” Brennan reiterated.

“Considering what I know that – that – considering what I know what – what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would, I’m certain, not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States’ operations,” Turner insisted, despite multiple news reports confirming the stand down order.

“I’m confident, considering what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that the United States, the status against Russia would not be that, considering what we are facing from Russia operations,” Turner added.

Watch the video below or at this link.

factchecked by macron and starm UK --> ambush? omfg feelings?!

an 2 25

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance ganged up on and attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an Oval Office meeting that aired on national television in near-real-time. Experts decried the event, with some declaring Russia would be celebrating.

Politico described the meeting as an "ambush," and an "attack" by Trump and Vance on Zelenskyy.

In one exceptionally heated exchange, Trump attacked Zelenskyy and accused him of playing with "millions of lives."

"You’re in no position to dictate what we’re gonna feel," Trump told Zelenskyy. "You’re right now, not in a very good position."

"You're gambling with World War III," Trump alleged.

READ MORE: ‘What the Hell Is This?’: GOP Group’s Andrew Tate Invitation Draws Bipartisan Outrage

"Have you ever said thank you once?" Vance asked Zelenskyy, attacking him for "campaigning for the opposition" last year.

"You’re not acting at all thankful,” Trump later added.

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"So, so depressing to watch this s----show in the Oval," remarked Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

The New Yorker's Susan Glasser, whom has written books on Trump and Putin, called it, "the most shocking behavior by Trump and Vance I’ve ever seen in the Oval Office. An ambush."

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, responded: "VP Vance, who once said he did not care about #Ukraine, despicably provoked this fight in Oval Office. Vance is not #Russia’s agent. But he could not have done more damage and caused greater joy in Moscow were he a Russian agent."

Russian intelligence operations expert Olga Lautman of the Center for European Policy Analysis remarked, "At least Zelenskyy tried but as I said Ukraine and the rest of Europe are on their own and need to tell the Kremlin owned Trump regime to go to hell."

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The Financial Times' chief correspondent in Kyiv, Christopher Miller, described the event as "really, really bad," and wrote: "Look at Ukraine ambassador @OMarkarova grab the bridge of her nose. She knows this is a disaster."

READ MORE: ‘Did I Say That? I Can’t Believe I Said That’: Trump’s Remarks Again Fuel Memory Questions

Tom Nichols, a former Naval War College professor, and expert on Russia and nuclear weapons, wrote: "This is the video that the Kremlin needed and will celebrate."

In a series of social media posts in recent days President Zelenskyy has praised the "bipartisan" support he has received from the U.S., declaring his gratitude as recently as late Friday morning.

When it was all over, Trump angrily declared, "That’s going to be great television, I will say that.”

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Watch the videos above or at this link.

Alternet+ no lnx

Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse

Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024

The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?

I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?

If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.

So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.

Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.

Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.

And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.

Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.

Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.

Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.

So, what’s really going on here?

Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?

Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?

That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?

That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?

That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?

That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.

This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press he believed it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified.

It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:

“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …

“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.

“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”

Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.

Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our senior-most intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

Why would the world’s richest man be “f-----” if Trump loses?

Because under a Harris administration, Musk may be held accountable for his many abuses of power — for busting unions and mistreating workers, for using SpaceX and Starlink to monopolize America’s satellite and space infrastructure, and for using his social media platform to knowingly spread dangerous lies.

When I say “may be held accountable,” I don’t mean Musk would be punished for supporting Trump, as Trump has promised to punish his opponents. Instead, Musk’s many possible violations of the law, including some that are quite recent, may finally catch up with him under a Harris administration.

Musk’s daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaways to people who have registered to vote in battleground states appear to be clear violations of campaign finance law, which makes it illegal to pay money to people to register to vote.

Campaign finance law also makes it illegal for superPACs to coordinate with candidates. As the person in charge of one of the largest superPACs supporting Trump, Musk’s frequent conversations with Trump would appear to run afoul of these provisions, as well.

In addition, Pennsylvania — the state where Musk began his million-dollar sweepstakes — prohibits illegal lotteries and deceiving consumers by not providing a complete set of contest rules including odds of winning and details on how winners are selected. The district attorney of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit Monday to halt Musk’s giveaway.

Musk may also be held accountable for conflicts of interest between his being in “regular contact” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as reported byTheWall Street Journallast Friday, and his status as one of the most important national security contractors to the U.S. government through his SpaceX and Starlink enterprises.

The Journalreports that Musk’s regular discussions with Putin — confirmed by several current and former U.S., European, and Russian officials — have involved business and geopolitical tensions.

Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, has a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. It’s the primary rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon. It launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

To effectuate these contracts, Musk says he has top-secret security clearance.

How can someone who runs two of America’s most important military and intelligence agencies, and who has top-secret security clearance, be secretly meeting with Putin?

At one point, Putin reportedly asked Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to two people briefed on the request.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said The Wall Street Journal’s report should prompt an investigation.

Musk's conversations with Putin would clearly violate Musk’s security clearance if he failed to properly report them to the U.S. government. If classified information was leaked, Musk could be required to give up control of SpaceX, which holds the majority of his companies’ government contracts.

Musk has also been in contact with other high-ranking Russian officials, according toTheWall Street Journal,including Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. Last month, the U.S. Justice Department accused Kiriyenko of creating some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s X, where it was meant to erode support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the presidential election.

If Musk has been a witting conduit for Russian election disinformation, he could lose control of X. He could even go to jail.

Musk’s and Russia’s interests have increasingly overlapped. Russian forces occupying the country’s eastern and southern swaths have started using Starlink to enable secure communications and extend the range of their drones. Russian troops also began using Starlink terminals, brought in through third countries, undermining one of Ukraine’s few battlefield advantages.

Earlier this year, Musk gave airtime to Putin and his views on the U.S. and Ukraine when X carried Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Putin inside the Kremlin. In that interview, Putin said Musk was “a smart person” and “you need to find some common ground with him, you need to search for some ways to persuade him.”

But what may get Musk really “f-----” is his leading role in the emerging anti-democracy movement.

Since Musk was born in South Africa, he’s ineligible to become president of the United States. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping him. He’s planning to become CEO of the United States of America, Inc.

The anti-democracy movement includes Musk, along with Peter Thiel (the self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and who invested $15 million in JD Vance’s bid for the Senate), JD Vance, Blake Masters (in whose Senate bid Thiel invested $10 million), tech entrepreneur David Sacks, and blogger Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin, who comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement, has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding the social order.

Yarvin believes democratic governments should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people.”

The second step? We can only guess, but Trump has offered Musk a position in his administration to head up “government efficiency.”

In early October, Musk registered with the Texas secretary of state’s office a new corporation called United States of America, Inc.

If Trump becomes president, will Musk’s United States of America, Inc. replace the administrative state?

3 22 trade vote ukraine

The vote was 424-8.

Here are the eight “no” votes – all from Republicans:

Lauren Boebert (CO)

Thomas Massie (KY)

Matt Gaetz (FL)

Andy Biggs (AZ)

Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA)

Dan Bishop (NC)

Chip Roy (TX)

Glenn Grothman (WI)

an july 2x? russia trip

Two Senate Democrats have published a list of roughly three dozen lavish gifts Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas received from right-wing billionaires during his time on the Court.

On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Thomas for "possible violations of ethics and tax laws" in his "repeated and willful omissions" of gifts from wealthy benefactors.

"The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations," Whitehouse and Wyden wrote. "The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct."

READ MORE:Expert: Clarence Thomas could face 'criminal prosecution' by not paying taxes on gifts

On page 14 of the PDF Whitehouse posted to his Senate website, there are two lists of gifts to Thomas. The first list describes gifts from far-right real estate magnate Harlan Crow, and the second list shows gifts from other wealthy sponsors, like entrepreneur Anthony Welters — who "loaned" Thomas a luxury RV and then later forgave the loan — and billionaire Wayne Huizenga.

The gifts from Crow date back to 2003, and list excursions like "Yacht trip to Russia and the Baltics" and Helicopter to Yusipov Palace, St. Petersburg." Out of the roughly two dozen gifts Crow gave to Thomas, four are private school tuition payments for his grand-nephew. Many of Crow's other gifts were private jet flights and yacht cruises, including one Sens. Whitehouse and Wyden described as "around Greek islands."

And out of the gifts on the second list, three were from Huizenga, two were from Welters, and five were from former Berkshire Hathaway board member David Sokol. Billionaire Warren Buffett, who owns Berkshire Hathaway, forced Sokol out in 2011 after he learned that Sokol bought a stake in a company he later convinced Buffett's company to buy. Buffett called Sokol's actions "inexplicable" and "inexcusable."

"No government official should be above the law. Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code," the senators wrote. "We therefore request that you appoint a Special Counsel authorized to investigate potential criminal violations by Justice Thomas under the disclosure, false statement, and tax laws; pursue leads of related criminal violations by donors, lenders and intermediate corporate entities; and determine whether any such loans and gifts were provided pursuant to a coordinated enterprise or plan."

READ MORE:Clarence Thomas cut off contact with man he raised 'as a son' — now he faces decades in prison

In 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Davide Cay Johnston commented that it was possible Thomas could face "criminal prosecution" by not paying taxes on the previously undisclosed gifts from Crow and others. He opined that any lower-level court judge would not be able to avoid the charges if they failed to pay taxes on gifts worth millions of dollars.

"What Clarence Thomas has done would result in not only any judges in America being removed from the bench, but there is a good chance it would result in criminal prosecution for income tax fraud and for false filings in his mandatory financial ethics disclosure statements," Johnston said in December.

Last month, anti-corruption watchdog group Fix the Court totaled Thomas' gifts and found that the conservative jurist had received approximately $4 million in gifts dating back to 2004 – far more than any other justice on the Supreme Court. And of the 193 gifts Thomas received, he only listed 27 on his required financial disclosure reports.

Click here to read Whitehouse and Wyden's full letter to Garland.

READ MORE:[Clarence Thomas discloses billionaire Harlan Crow paid for two luxury vacations after decades of trips

loan money launder? jr

https://www.alternet.org/trump-jr-2659601326/

no lnx

Donald Trump Jr. personally approved sketchy loan now being probed as Russian money laundering

Travis Gettys and Raw Story March 15, 2023

A pair of sketchy loans to Trump Media now under investigation for possible Russian money laundering were personally approved by Donald Trump Jr.

Federal prosecutors in New York are scrutinizing two loans totaling $8 million from two Kremlin-linked entities, and company officials set aside their own concerns about the origins of the money because Donald Trump's eldest son had confirmed to Trump Media's lawyers that the transaction should proceed, reported The Guardian.

“Just want to keep you in the loop — no guaranty that these will get signed and funded, but we remain hopeful,” wrote John Haley, outside counsel for Trump Media, in a Dec. 24, 2021, email reviewed by the newspaper.

“Thanks john much appreciated. d,” Trump Jr. replied.

Trump Jr. had joined the board of the company along with the former president's ally Kash Patel and former Rep. Devin Nunes, who served as the tech company's chief executive.

Trump Media co-founder Will Wilkerson first alerted federal prosecutors on Oct. 23, 2022, to the loans, which came from Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust, both of which were controlled by an individual named Anton Postolnikov, who appears to be a relation of Vladimir Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov.

Wilkerson and Trump Media’s then-chief financial officer Phillip Juhan considered returning the money in spring 2022 due to their obscure origins but the company had only $12 million cash at hand at the time as it awaited approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a merger with the blank-check company Digital World.

Digital World's chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced the loan from Paxum Bank, which is known for providing services to the adult entertainment industry, in December 2021, and two months later an unexpected second $6 million payment showed up in Trump Media’s account from ES Family Trust.

Orlando, as an SEC-licensed broker-dealer, is obligated to comply with the SEC's “Know Your Customer” requirements to guard money laundering.

The former president was chairman of Trump Media at the time, but it's not clear whether he was aware of the origins of the loans, Wilkerson said, adding that he was not typically interested in managing day-to-day operations of the company bearing his name.

However, Trump was interested in the deal because he would receive 90 percent of the shares without putting any of his own money into the venture, although one source familiar with the matter said the ex-president did invest some money into Digital World, which would have allowed him to cash out twice if the merger went through.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/sanctions-facing-economic-oblivion-sanctions/

russia owns?

https://www.wired.com/story/parler-russia-privacy/

repost sum fkery

hmmn, if he really had goods, he would risk jail? cohen says trump did not want to win, just cultivate russian $ = putin

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fbi-is-sitting-on-classified-intelligence-that-could-destroy-trump-ex-agent-peter-strzok/

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok says he could have destroyed President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, but he was not willing to violate his oath by revealing classified intelligence.

Strzok — who has become a favorite target of the president and his Republican allies — told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he could have destroyed Trump’s campaign with classified information the administration was still hiding from the public.

“Absolutely there are things that are not known that would still be damaging,” Strzok said. “The decision to release that is up to the administration. You’ve seen them declassify material, which unsurprisingly tends to all be helpful to President Trump. There’s a lot of material that simply is classified and that I can’t talk about, but it’s there.”

“The American public has a right to know it, but that is a decision for the administration to do. I can’t go declassifying information,” he added. “I’m going to honor my oath to both the office that I held, as well as the security clearance that I held. That information, the American public deserves it, and the administration, frankly, deserves to have that known, as well."

strzok said the FBI knew Trump was lying in 2016 when he denied having financial interests in Russia, but he said the president’s entanglement went much deeper than negotiating a high-rise tower in Moscow.

“If you look at the scope of his businesses relationship to Russia, going back decades,” Strzok said. “If you look at the statement by one of his sons about the disproportionate amount of Russian holdings that represented the Trump financial assets, all of these things speak to an ability of Russian interests, of illicit interests, to hold him under their sway and get him to do things that, frankly, we can’t explain.”

“Why isn’t he speaking out against Russia placing the bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan?” he added. “Why isn’t he pushing back against, as you mentioned, the attempted assassination of [Alexei] Navalny? Why is he talking about withdrawing from NATO,from withdrawing 11,000 troops from Germany? The list goes on and on and on. None of these things are in America’s interest, most, if not all, are in Russia’s. It begs the question, why is he doing this? My answer, what I believe is, because there is leverage Russia holds over him that is causing him to act in his rather than America’s national security interest.”

1 22 an

no lnx

Echoing ‘Vladimir Putin’s talking points’ is putting Fox News at odds with ‘pro-Ukraine’ Republicans: conservative

Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,

Alex Henderson January 28, 2022

During the George W. Bush years, the right-wing media, including Fox News, were quick to parrot neoconservative talking points. But Fox News has since taken a much more Trumpian turn, and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, often promotes MAGA isolationism and a hypernationalist “America first” ideology. That isolationism, Never Trump conservative David Frum stresses in an article published by The Atlantic on January 28, is putting Fox News pundits at odds with more hawkish conservatives when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.

“Night after night,” Frum explains, “the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.”

Frum continues, “Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also, many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.”

President Joe Biden has had a much more hawkish tone with Russia and President Vladimir Putin than Trump, and Frum notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “backed the Biden Administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.”

“Broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers, especially on TV and social media, are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine,” Frum observes. “Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world…. As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too.”

Frum adds, “Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights, but they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world.” many twt

https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort

no lnx many

Craig Unger/March 18, 2022

How Republicans Spent Decades Cozying Up to Putin’s Kremlin

The man who once worked to connect Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff to Russia is now chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Any questions?

“Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?!”

—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking to NPR broadcaster Mary Louise Kelly in January 2020

Whatever Americans were thinking two years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron.

Consider that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis now calls Putin “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin “a ruthless thug who’s just invaded another sovereign country and killed thousands of innocent people.” And on Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for Putin’s assassination. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he tweeted. “You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”

For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.

But if you think this is hard-line Cold War tough talk from the Reagan-era GOP of yore, think again. It’s not just Donald Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed the relationship for years. “If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,” he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”

Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started byJewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.

Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack” Abramoff, the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for Hollywood. At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff.

In this case, the relevant clients linked to Abramoff were executives from Naftasib, the Russian energy giant. If DeLay’s lavish six-day excursion to Moscow in 1997 is any indication, the Russians made cultivating DeLay a high priority and spared little expense, as the junket involved golf, lavish dinners, and a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. But the icing on the cake was a $1 million contribution by the Russians to the U.S. Family Network. According to The Washington Post, Buckham told the former president of the U.S. Family Network that Russians made the $1 million contribution specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on legislation to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

Ultimately, DeLay was forced out of Congress, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy charges relating to campaign financing. In 2013, however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. Abramoff served 43 months in jail for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion. As for Buckham, he is now back in the fray, a top aide to one of the most controversial and extreme members of Congress. (Buckham did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this article.)

But Buckham’s and DeLay’s Russian intrigues paled next to those of Paul Manafort, the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin.Manafort’s ties with Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75 million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin oligarchs who were funding Manafort.

Manafort set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.

He also set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives. As Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In every ministry, he has a guy.” And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.

Manafort launched Yanukovych into the Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in 2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the presidency and flee to Moscow.

Text messages between Manafort’s two daughters, Andrea and Jessica, suggest they felt their father was responsible for the deaths that took place at Maidan. “Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort texted her sister. “That money we have is blood money.”

So by the time Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign manager, the die had been cast. Deeply in debt to Putin’s oligarchs, he maintained, according to the report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 cited above, ongoing contacts with Kilimnik that “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” because his “presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”

According to the Mueller Report, in August 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York and, according to an assessment by the Treasury Department, provided “Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and strategy,” presumably for use in influence campaigns on behalf of Trump.

Of course, Manafort was not alone among Republican lobbyists in carrying water for Putin. According to Open Secrets,quite apart from Manafort, Russian interests have spent about $182 million on lobbying, influence operations, and propaganda in the last six years.

As I reported in American Kompromat,Jones Day,the fourth-largest law firm in the land, represented at least 10 major corporations and organizations close to Putin. These included: Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element; the Alfa Group and Access-Renova Group, which jointly own billions in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest private commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company for assets in technology, oil, and gas; Rosneft, the world’s largest listed oil company; the Sapir Organization, which helped fund Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and more.

Likewise, Kirkland and Ellis is the biggest law firm in the world,with a star-studded cast of GOP power brokers in its ranks—among them, former Attorney General William Barr; former solicitor general and GOP attack dog Kenneth Starr; Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, and as such the secret power behind Fox News; and former national security adviser John Bolton, to name but a few. Its most prized Russian clients have included Alfa Bank, whose key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, were entirely dependent on Putin for their wealth, and Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, the largest producer of aluminum in the world outside of China.

Now that Putin has begun waging an old-fashioned war with bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, and is doing so in an astonishingly brutal and clumsy fashion, it is tempting to forget that in recent years, he has been far, far more successful with the kind of asymmetric hybrid warfare we saw in the 2016 election. So as the horrifying carnage in Ukraine flickers across our television screens, let’s not forget Russian trolls activating strategic influence operations on multiple social media platforms, the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.

Of course, now that there are far more forceful sanctions in play and Russia has become a pariah state and Operation Kleptocapture is underway, the once-close relationship between figures on the American right and the Kremlin was bound to change. It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Brogan, the powerful managing partner of Jones Day, could interact withpartners Don McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice, and in doing so talk to one man who served as Donald Trump’s attorney and another who was likely the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs. Things can’t be quite that cozy these days.

“The sanctions that have been put into place are intended to choke Putin’s entire system of economic as well as military power. In the near term, there is nothing but risk for those who engage with Russia, and intense pressure to withdraw from Russian relationships,” says Jonathan Winer, who is credited with coming up with the Magnitsky Act, applying sanctions to Russian officials who were responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax accountant for Hermitage Capital Management who uncovered massive corruption by Russian officials and was tortured to death. “The international law firms and accounting firms operating in Russia are mostly shutting down for now,” he added.

“Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s all over between Russia and the GOP. When Lindsey Graham calls for the head of Vladimir Putin, me thinks he doth protest too much. The relationship will continue. “Russia has been in the influence business a very long time, and it’s a core part of its military doctrine, especially during what others think of as peacetime,” says Winer. “Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person. Instead, they are likely to just go deeper underground.

“The oligarchs relied on twin pillars for support, both of which are under attack right now,” Winer adds. “Putin was the wallet, and the West provided entry into the global elite.”

As for the first pillar, the whole world can monitor Putin’s fate day by day, hour by hour, as his army slowly slogs its way across Ukraine getting shelled mercilessly in a showdown that had been billed as an easy win.

And as for the second, the consequences of truly harsh sanctions, of Task Force KleptoCapture, and of other efforts will become evident over time in terms of how much Putin’s oligarchs will be able to enjoy the riches of the West. “That is the great question,” said Winer. “What is our capacity to enforce money laundering? The EU finally made it illegal for corporations to pay bribes. But how will they enforce it?”

And finally, there are other areas, such as cryptocurrency, that are so new that one can’t make any predictions at all. “We know for sure the Russians use crypto for influence operations working out of their St. Petersburg troll farm,” Winer added. “But it is grossly unregulated.” What happens with crypto may be the biggest question of all.

Craig Unger is the author of five books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including, most recently, NYT bestsellers House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, which has just been published in paperback.

no lnx an

Two longtime Republican operatives indicted — and there's a Russia connection: report

Sarah K. Burris and Raw Story September 21, 2021

Reuters legal reporter Jan Wolfe revealed Monday evening that two Republican Party operatives have been indicted after helping Russians donate to political campaigns in 2016.

The Justice Department revealed in a statement that Kentucky's Jesse Benton and Florida's Roy Douglas "Doug" Wead were "charged with one count of conspiracy to solicit and cause an illegal campaign contribution by a foreign national, effect a conduit contribution, and cause false records to be filed with the FEC, one count of contribution by a foreign national, one count of contribution in the name of another and three counts of making false entries in an official record."

Benton was just pardoned by former President Donald Trump for a bribery scandal while working for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in Iowa in 2012. In that scheme, Benton and colleague John Tate bribed state officials to change their endorsements to Paul for the Iowa Caucus.

After being pardoned for that, Benton is now being indicted again along with Wead for arranging for a Russian National who wanted to donate to a 2016 presidential campaign to be able to meet with the candidate.

Developing: Two longtime GOP operatives have been indicted. They allegedly helped a Russian make a campaign contrib… https://t.co/pWOcezMw9U

— Jan Wolfe (@Jan Wolfe) 1632178809.0

"Benton reached out to individuals at Political Committee B, the national party committee for Political Candidate 1's political party," the indictment explains. "He then arranged for Foreign National 1 to attend a political fundraising event and get a photograph with Political Candidate 1, in exchange for a political contribution to Political Committee C, a joint fundraising committee comprised of the campaign committee for Political Candidate 1, Political Committee B, and related state committees. Foreign National 1 ultimately wired $100,000 to Company A, a political consulting firm owned by Benton."

He then tried to disguise the wire transfer by labeling it "consulting services" and crafted a "cover story."

Wead went to the fundraiser with the foreign national Sept. 22, 2016 with a translator (Foreign National 2). They all three had their photos taken with the candidate.

"Following the event, Benton repeatedly represented to a consultant working for Political Committee B and Political Committee C that he had already sent the promised contribution for the event, but in actuality he delayed sending the contribution," said the DOJ. "Benton ultimately filled out a contributor form, indicated that he was the contributor, and used a personal credit card to make a $25,000 contribution. Benton retained the remaining $75,000 of Foreign National 1's money. Because Benton falsely claimed to have given the contribution himself, three different political committees unwittingly filed reports with the FEC that inaccurately reported Benton, rather than Foreign National 1, as the source of the funds."

Read the full report at the DOJ.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/former-cia-official-reveals-why-intel-officers-are-terrified-to-brief-trump-on-russia/

U.S. intelligence officers responsible for briefing President Donald Trump on the country's potential threats are reportedly "terrified" to brief him on anything Russian-related due to concerns about his possibly explosive reaction.

During an interview with GQ magazine, former CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos weighed in on Trump's perplexing affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to like him. At this point, Polymeropoulos insists no one is willing to brief the president on anything involving Russia.

"No one's going to brief anything on Russia to the president," Polymeropoulos told GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe. "They're terrified of doing that. I know that from the briefers. Because he'll explode and the whole thing will get derailed, because he has this weird affinity for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."

When Polymeropoulos was asked why the subject of Putin and Russia are such delicate issues in the White House, insisted Trump "wants Putin to like him."

According to Polymeropoulos, the issue is sensitive for Trump because: "He doesn't want to be embarrassed in front of Putin, that's part of the dilemma. Polymeropoulos went on to recall how Trump interacted with the Queen as he noted that the president insists on being connected to people who have "glamour and cachet."

"Just look at how he behaves with the Queen. That's how he behaves with everyone who has any glamour and cachet," Polymeropoulos continued, adding, "Putin has everything he doesn't have."

The latest news comes as intelligence reports warn of the possibility of Russian election interference as election day fast approaches. In 2016, the former Soviet republic was accused of running disinformation campaigns in an effort to sway the election in Trump's favor. Now, reports suggest Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani may be Russia's new target to help circulate disinformation campaigns on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in a manner similar to the attacks on former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly refused to address situations involving Putin.

an 920

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ex-top-prosecutor-mueller-didnt-investigate-trump-finances-or-interview-ivanka-over-fears-of-a-blowback/

ex-top prosecutor: Mueller didn’t investigate Trump finances or interview Ivanka over fears of a blowback

Igor Derysh / Salon September 23, 2020

A former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over…

a former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over fears that the president would shut down the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Andrew Weissmann, who led the prosecution of former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, blamed Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s top deputy in the investigation, for stopping investigators from looking into the president’s finances in his new book “Where the Law Ends,” according to excerpts published by The Washington Post.

Weissmann wrote that Zebley also pushed another prosecutor to “stand down” from pursuing Trump Organization documents because it risked affecting the negotiations with the president’s legal team to set up an interview with Trump. Trump ultimately did not appear for an interview and submitted written answers largely claiming not to recall key details.

“Aaron had a way of gaslighting you, of making you question your own reality, that you were being too aggressive in your drive to pursue leads and push harder — like you were not enough of an adult,” he wrote. "Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point,” he added, according to a New York Times report on the book.

Weissmann also argued that Mueller was wrong not to issue a subpoena to compel Trump’s testimony.

“What are we saying to future presidents, and to future investigators, who will have our decision thrown in their face?” Weissmann said he told Mueller. “If we do not subpoena the president in this investigation, how can others justify the need to do so?”

Weissmann said he wonders whether the team had “given it our all” in light of the questions left unanswered by the probe.

“As proud as I am of the work our team did — the unprecedented number of people we indicted and convicted and in record speed for any similar investigation — I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more,” Weissmann wrote.

The former prosecutor listed a number of unanswered questions left open by the decision not to pursue Trump’s financial records.”We still do not know if there are other financial ties between the president and either the Russian government or Russian oligarchs,” he wrote. “We do not know whether he paid bribes to foreign officials to secure favorable treatment for his business interests, a potential violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that would provide leverage against the president. We do not know if he had other Russian business deals in the works at the time he was running for president, how they might have aided or constrained his campaign, or even if they are continuing to influence his presidency.”

Weissman noted elsewhere in the book that the same business account used to send hush money payments to Stormy Daniels after her alleged affair with Trump was also used to receive “payments linked to a Russian oligarch,” according to excerpts published by The New York Times.

6/20

https://www.ecowatch.com/oil-spill-russia-arctic-wildlife-2646152380.html

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rosenstein-blocked-fbi-from-probing-trumps-russian-ties-then-ordered-mueller-to-ignore-them-as-well

One of the many oddities of the now-terminated Robert Mueller probe into Russian election interference and its links to various members of the Trump campaign and family, and in fact of all known federal probes into Russia’s Trump-related actions, has been the seeming lack of any counterintelligence probe on Donald Trump’s myriad, longstanding financial connections to Russia—and what role those financial ties have played both in the Russian government’s actions on behalf of Trump and their possible leverage over the now-president.

A new story from The New York Times‘ Michael Schmidt reports that that’s because in the first months of the new Trump administration, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein shuttered that investigation—then ordered special counsel Robert Mueller to steer clear of it himself. It’s not that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s known ties to Russian crime figures, to money laundering, and his family’s stated reliance on Russian cash has been kept closely-held: It never existed. And it still doesn’t.

The accusation being leveled by acting Federal Bureau of Investigation director Andrew McCabe against Rosenstein goes further, suggesting that Rosenstein intentionally misled him. Schmidt reports that McCabe launched a counterintelligence probe into Trump’s Russian ties immediately after Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey, a move that was widely publicly speculated to be a Trump move to quash investigations into Russian election actions and into numerous of Trump’s top advisers and allies. The fear within the intelligence community was that Trump’s behaviors could be impacted by unknown Russian pressures, representing an immediate national security threat.

Rosenstein, however, ordered the probe shut down. Rosenstein did not tell McCabe that directly, says Schmidt, but instead left McCabe “with the impression that the special counsel would take on [that] investigation” as part of Mueller’s overall Russian interference inquiry.

but separately, Rosenstein told Mueller that he wasn’t to pursue the counterintelligence concerns either.

That means no federal investigation into Trump’s Russian cash have been undertaken during his presidency, despite numerous papers and journalists themselves identifying significant ties between Donald Trump’s finances and individuals close to the Russian government. Not by intelligence officials, not by the special counsel’s team, and not the Senate’s own Russia probes. Through the entirety of Trump’s term, all probes of financial ties to Russian interests—which he has retained, even in the presidency—have each been blocked.

Schmidt’s claims here seem impossible to fully believe. It would require that federal law enforcement officials turn a blind eye to a potentially massive national security threat—the very real chance that Trump was and is being intimidated into, or merely bribed into, pursuing Putin-preferred policies damaging to the United States. Trump’s moves to weaken NATO, his pressure on allies to weaken Russian sanctions and re-elevate Russia as economic leader, and his mostly-successful sabotage of the Ukrainian government’s ability to push back Russian forces during a key Russian military push have each been contrary to longstanding U.S. interests. None have been competently explained, not even by Trump’s own national security officials.

As expert Marcy Wheeler suggests, that both Rosenstein and Sen. Richard Burr specifically chose, in their probes, “not to look into the most obvious source of compromise suggests that someone knows what they would find.” After Trump’s continued pattern of gleeful lawbreaking, it’s now more plausible to believe Trump is acting for personal financial gain in his dealings with Russia than it is to believe his actions rest on any supposed ideological foundation. The Senate and Justice Department both continue to make rigorously sure, however, to leave those questions intentionally unanswered.

putin up for 36 yr term, into 80's, 1st female cosmo also in 80's?

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/14/815039722/trump-steps-in-to-help-oil-industry-facing-its-own-coronavirus-crisis

he tired to play it like shrew bottom feed strat but actually bailout to frakkers?

npr 3/14?

...Oil prices bounced back a bit after President Trump said the Department of Energy would buy crude for the nation's strategic petroleum reserve.

"We're going to fill it right to the top," Trump said Friday in a wide-ranging news conference at the White House. He said it will save taxpayers "billions and billions of dollars" while helping an industry that's been reeling.

While oil prices increased nearly 5% after Friday's announcement, that was just a fraction of the amount they lost earlier in the week.

In South Texas, Rudy Martinez immediately experienced the effects of the past week's collapse in crude oil prices.

"I actually have a little man camp and these guys are on the way out because they lost contracts," says Martinez, who has eight rooms he rents to out-of-town oilfield workers in Karnes City, Texas.

"The workers get their per-diem and I charge them $100 a person [per week]. Actually I'd like to charge them a little more than that, but now that it's tapered off, it's hard to charge them that because they can't pay it," he says.

The Coronavirus Crisis

Back when the oil business was really booming in Karnes City, Martinez says he could charge up to $2000 a week per person.

This is one small example of what declining oil prices mean for the rural communities that depend on the oil business. And there's a lot at stake for the U.S., the world's largest producer of crude oil.

Oil prices had been falling out of fears the coronavirus epidemic threatened world economic growth. Demand was also down as large gatherings were canceled and people started staying home to avoid getting sick.

Then prices plunged after Saudi Arabia and Russia failed to agree on production cuts and instead entered a price war last Sunday. In a stunning reversal, Saudi Arabia said it would actually boost oil production and offer a massive discount for its customers.

U.S. oil companies, especially smaller ones, are now looking to make deep cuts. Industry analysts warn of possible bankruptcies, especially if oil remains where it's fallen to, in the $30 per barrel range. Companies operating in Texas's Eagle Ford Shale need prices between $40 to $60 a barrel to remain profitable....

saudis targeting russian, frackers collateral damage!?

NB DESMOG TRACKING IMPENDING BANKRUPTCY? KEPT AFLOAT BY BANKS?

aha ish // disaster cap'l, never waste a crisis to dustoff wishlist

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/will-an-oil-tycoon-who-donated-500000-to-support-trumps-re-election-get-bailed-out-by-his-administration

no lnx

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 12, 2020

With oil prices plunging during the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is weighing a federal bailout for oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted a fracking boom under his administration, but oil and gas companies have seen profits drop amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“Alarmed” by the prospect that some of these companies, many of which are already in debt, [see desmog]could go out of business, White House officials have pushed for a federal bailout in the form of low-interest government loans, The Washington Post reported.

Among those pushing for the bailout is Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump adviser who owns Continental Resources, an energy companywhich lost half of its market value Monday.

Hamm told The Post that although he had not made “direct” contact with the president, he advised the administration to consider “any action that the administration might take to protect and preserve American interests at this time from being unfairly disadvantaged.”

Hamm has given more than $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election effort since 2017, the government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted.

Some Trump advisers told The Post that the administration was eyeing “targeted assistance” for the companies. Though under consideration, another official warned that “political blowback over the idea may eventually lead campaign advisers and others in [the] administration to talk Trump out of it.”

Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the outlet that he expects significant political backlash.

“It’s difficult when governments selectively target individual industries,” he said. “And there’s going to be pushback on it, because it’s political and may be tied to the administration’s contacts and the people it knows.”

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett, who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on economic policy, added that it was ridiculous to look out for big fracking companies while millions need relief.

“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt,” he said. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”

Trump also said that he was looking at bailing out airlines, cruise lines and the hospitality industryTuesday, as they reel from the impact of COVID-19, the disease spread by the novel coronavirus. But the bailout proposals have received public pushback from Republicans.

“They can take care of themselves,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Washington Examiner. “Why do you overreact just when there’s a little pain? That doesn’t make sense.”

Nick Loris, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said such a bailout “would not sit well” with fiscal conservatives.

“Not only would it potentially put taxpayers on the hook for future potential losses and bankruptcies, it would distort the risk-taking process that is so critical in making these investments,” he told the outlet. “We’ve seen the resiliency in the industry before, and I believe we’ll see it again.”

However, Alex Doukas, the lead analyst for advocacy group Oil Change International, predicted that Trump’s big-money donors would heavily pressure the administration to ignore the criticism.

“With oil prices in free fall, expect oil companies to turn to their age-old tactic of bullying governments for even more subsidies on top of the hundreds of billions they benefit from annually,” Doukas said. “Instead of more handouts to polluters, governments should make big investments in high-quality green jobs that will put people to work and ultimately end our dependence on the volatile fossil fuels that create climate chaos.”

Journalist David Cay Johnson described the lobbying effort as “corporate socialists” seeking “welfare from the Trump administration.”

“Bailing out the oil industry won’t help the workers who have to choose between their health and their paychecks. It won’t help the people who could go into medical debt from COVID-19,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted. “We need paid family leave and Medicare expanded to every American.”

“The American people are worried about missing paychecks, affording coronavirus tests, & being able to afford healthcare period. But [Trump] wants to bail out the oil industry?” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., added. “Leave it to Trump to prioritize his friends over the American people.”

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

320 an

What’s so scary about the inclusion of ‘God’ in the Russian constitution?

Katherine Kelaidis / Religion Dispatches, Raw Story

Last Friday, the House’s Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights heard testimony that Russia’s human rights record, including its record on religious freedom, is worsenin

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/opposition-urges-russia-without-putin-in-rally-for-slain-liberal/

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.

Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.

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

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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.”

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.”

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…

“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.

The other would make voting machines harder to hack.

All blocked.

52.5K

11:15 AM - Feb 11, 2020

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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 …

2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020

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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.”

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

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 …

apple maps makes crimea part of russia 1119

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/prosecutors-say-giuliani-associate-got-1-million-from-russia-in-september/

Prosecutors say Giuliani associate got $1 million from Russia in September

Written by Cody Fenwick December 12, 2019

Lev Parnas, the associate of Rudy Giuliani who has been indicted as part of an alleged campaign finance scheme, misled the government in his bail proceedings and hid the fact that he recently received $1 million from a Russian bank, prosecutors said Wednesday in a new court filing.

The prosecutors asked that Parnas have his bail revoked and that he enter the government’s custody, arguing that he poses a serious flight risk.

In addition to omitting the money he allegedly received from Russia, prosecutors said Parnas failed to reveal either the full payment amount he recently received from a law firm or the money he had in an escrow account, tied to a $4.5 million property he intended on buying.

They said with regard to the Russian funds, “While the majority of the money appears to have been used on personal expenses and to purchase a home … some portion of that money existed in Account-1 at the time Parnas submitted his financial affidavit.”

During his work with pretrial services, the document explained, Parnas has misled officials in other ways. It said that he falsely let pretrial services to believe that the court had allowed him to leave his home every day. The filing says that such action “confirms that even stringent conditions, of the sort he is currently under, are insufficient to secure his compliance with bail.”

As for the Russian funds, it’s not clear where they came from or what if any relationship they have to Parnas’s connections to Giuliani’s work in Ukraine.

Parnas’s lawyers said they are working on a response to the government’s new claims.

“We will file a written response in the coming days,” attorney Joseph Bondy told ABC News. “We look forward to a hearing next week in court.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/military-leaders-at-the-pentagon-panicked-as-us-troop-affinity-for-russia-grows-report/

no lnx deriv

Military leaders at the Pentagon panicked as US troop affinity for Russia grows: report

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story December 8, 2019

According to a report from Voice of America, military leaders at the Pentagon are growing increasingly concerned with the popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin within the military ranks due to the influence of Russian propaganda and Donald Trump’s boosterism.

The report states, “While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view is changing, most notably among the households of military members. The second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, found nearly half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as ally. Overall, the survey found 28% of Americans identified Russia as an ally, up from 19% the previous year.”

That same survey links Putin’s increasing popularity to the election of President Donald Trump.

“Pollsters found the positive views of Russia seemed to be ‘predominantly driven by Republicans who have responded to positive cues from [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump about Russia,’ according to an executive summary accompanying the results,” VOA reports.

At the same time, Washington Monthly reports, “Now, due to purely partisan interests, the nation’s military is being warped into supporting the hostile foreign power–against our own values, geopolitical interests, and intelligence services It’s like the plot from a bad spy novel, except that it’s happening right out in the open. This is the situation as it stands between Trump, Russia, the Republican Party and Ukraine.”

“U.S. defense and security officials have told VOA that Russia has been targeting U.S. military personnel, specifically, with a ramped-up influence campaign, as far back as 2017 in preparation for the November 2018 midterm elections,” VOA reports. “Russia’s goal, they said, was not so much to swing the result of the elections but to seed U.S. military personnel with the right type of disinformation so that they would be predisposed to view Russia and its actions in a more favorable way in the future.”

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-is-aligning-the-us-military-with-the-russian-white-supremacist-criminal-syndicate/

no lnx

How Trump is aligning the US military with the Russian white supremacist criminal syndicate

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly December 8, 2019

GUK

russia wants to sell guns in US

The NRA not only spent a record $30m to help Trump, but gave him an earlier than usual endorsement at their May 2016 convention and critical early ad support before his campaign’s ad blitzes.

Besides Torshin and Butina, the other Russian who dined with Keene at the NRA meeting was Dmitriy Osipkin, who chairs the Foundation for the Development of Promising Defense Technologies, according to two sources familiar with the dinner.

1119

iran ups centrifuge

NYT: Major U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arms Treaty Could Expire Without Being Replaced

recall accident on missile

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-national-plot-against-american-global-leadership/

no lnx wa mo

nat'l plot against American global leadership

Written by Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

America is looking inward, resembling a sullen, sometimes confused navel-gazing couch-potato. It’s tired of going outside and bored with the world.

The president of the United States went to the United Nations last week to let foreign leaders know we were picking up our marbles and going home. He just told the entire world that globalism is dead. Long-live insular, parochial patriotism!

National pride, defense, and attention to domestic issues are keenly important, of course. But America’s two wide oceans and friendly neighbors do not divorce us from the rest of the world’s trade, economy, or politics, even if our national “Netflix and Chill ” attitude makes foreigners seem distant and irrelevant.

As America sits in darkness, twiddles its thumbs and fiddles with its video-game controller, our country is also desperately trying to figure out how to reckon with our failed overseas adventures. How do we extract ourselves from our foolish foreign wars. Recent steps forward seem instead to take us down a notch. We’re still trying to reconcile how we spent such unjustifiable amounts of our nation’s blood and treasure in places we bombed and occupied, uninvited, after 9/11.

During this expensive 18-year distraction and our current global withdrawal, the rest of the world has taken advantage of our insecurity and division, recognizing that this is the moment for our adversaries to grow their influence and stretch their borders—a chance to build their global futures.

China is busy constructing islands to expand its territory, Russia is building bridges to physically tether its illegally occupied neighbor to the motherland. America’s strategic power competitors are actively developing, squatting or usurping land to grow their power and presence beyond their current boundaries. They are sparing no expense to buy and bully their way further onto the world stage.

What about the United States? Under the current leadership, it’s still trying to get Mexico to sign an IOU to build a border wall with a “big beautiful door.” Instead of bridges, America is building walls.

America’s new foreign policy lens is a monocle focused on China’s meteoric growth and insatiable ambition. Our policymakers should instead be wearing bifocals. Better yet, progressives should see the whole picture, becauseas America actively tries to ground a high-flying China, it has lost sight of a Russia quietly spreading its wings.

Russia’s recent 12-mile, $4 billion dollar bridge to its occupied and annexed Crimean peninsula is the most obvious of connectors to an expanded future. Less visible are Moscow’s growing military and economic ties to various nations around the world.

In Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s presence is increasingly permanent. From Syria to Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, Moscow’s strategic and regional interests are an exercise in thuggish petro-politics. Its unstated “Energy First” security policy is driving its aggressive meddling in Venezuela. Most concerning, the Kremlin’s relationship with Beijing is warming up.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping now are besties who conduct joint military exercises and form a U.N. Security Council veto bloc. With Russia economically sanctioned and China in the U.S. penalty box, these two nations are accommodating each other’s needs and finding common cause. They are witnessing a fracturing, anti-globalist and increasingly insular West ready to forsake the world entirely. New Russian relationships may seem like ephemeral convenient alliances, but Putin wants to make them enduring and permanent, beyond just friends with benefits.

President Trump may think his personal touch, Russian outreach, and Putin praising is going to entice Moscow to help contain Beijing, but this scenario is a policy fantasy. Russia pursues its raw economic and security interests in a cynical zero-sum game. It supports authoritarians and ignores abuses of human rights, press freedom, and democratic norms. This suits many world leaders perfectly.

Erdogan, Orban, Sisi, Assad, Xi—a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and assassins make up Moscow’s expanding universe. These nations together seek to challenge the previously stable Western-dominated world order and are maneuvering to limit Washington’s influence.

The Trump administration favors bilateral agreements over multilateral institutions and alliances, hoping for weaker partners and better deals by dumping allies to pursue an America First folly. This practice allows Russia both to build bridges and destroy American inroads. It helps give Xi a boost when America threatens his economy. It keeps Nicolás Maduro in power—despite Vice President Mike Pence forcefully telling Caracas he must go.

China and Russia are going for broke in this great game by building ports, dams, roads, railways, pipelines, communications infrastructure, and political partnerships around the world—and, eventually, all the way up to America’s borders. They may be making an expensively bad geopolitical bet. Or not.

Trump doesn’t really care. Instead of countering or matching our adversaries’ expansionist global strategy, America’s developer-in-chief wants to build only one permanent thing: a solid, reliable, and exclusively nativist political movement at home.

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is a foreign affairs columnist for McClatchy News, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and President and Publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/russian-history-gives-america-an-ominous-warning/

no lnx

Russian history gives America an ominous warning

Kremlin

Written by History News Network August 17, 2019

Russia is often in the news these days – corrupt and repressive at home, aggressive and malevolent in relation to neighbors and rivals. Yet this Russia is heir to a country that shaped the twentieth century and had a formative impact on the cultural and political history of the modern world. It cannot be dismissed as a plaything of Vladimir Putin’s arrogant ambitions. Over the past hundred years, Russia has been a bellwether, not an exception. We should take heed.

Russia has more than once demonstrated the ease with which complex societies can fall apart. It has shown how difficult it is to uphold the legitimacy of nations and to install and sustain democratic regimes. The country we know as the Russian Federation changed names, borders, and political systems twice in the course of the twentieth century. We remember the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A megapower suddenly vanished–the ideology that sustained it deflated like a punctured balloon. The periphery defected – fourteen former Soviet republics emerged as independent nations. Nevertheless, Moscow remains the center of a multiethnic territory that continues to span the Eurasian continent. Democratic in form, authoritarian in practice, Russia is still a major player on the international stage.

In 1991 the center not only held, but other structures also persisted. Positions of power within the Soviet hierarchy translated into opportunities to amass personal fortunes. Alumni, like Putin, of the Soviet political police, the former KGB, used their insider status and institutional leverage to shape a new form of authoritarian rule.A pseudo-capitalist oligarchy arose on the ashes of Soviet Communism, while the welfare of the majority of the population eroded. What we now deplore as the increasing disparity between rich and poor in the developed industrial nations in Russia was an instant product of Communism’s collapse. Much has improved in the post-Soviet sphere; open borders, an uncensored press, freedom of speech and assembly (though increasingly imperiled), prosperity for the better off, not just the elite. But the rule of law is a mere fig leaf and the hope that free markets would result in a free society has not been fulfilled.

This recent transition – by now thirty years old – was not the first time the center held, against all odds, and the promise of liberation was disappointed. Seven decades earlier, between 1917 and 1921, an entire civilization collapsed and a new one was founded. In 1913 Tsar Nicholas II celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty; in August 1914 he took Russia into World War I on the side of the Allied powers. In March 1917 mutinies in the imperial armed forces, bread riots by working-class women, industrial strikes in the key cities, and peasant revolts in the countryside led to the defection of the military and civilian elites. For years, a burgeoning civil society and a disaffected radical fringe had been dreaming of change – the one of the rule of law, the other of socialist revolution. When Nicholas renounced the throne, a seven-month experiment in democratic politics ensued – at the grass roots in the form of elected soviets (councils), on the scale of empire in the form of elections to a Constituent Assembly. Millions voted at every level; democracy was in the air. Yet, the Provisional Government, which honored Russia’s commitment to the Allied cause, could not cope with the same war that had proved the monarchy’s undoing. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, arrested the liberal ministers, took control of the soviets, and heralded the installation of the world’s first socialist government.

...

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.

https://www.ecowatch.com/moscow-nuclear-power-protest-2639327154.html

Their signs read "We want to live!" and "Road to Death," and many bear the bright yellow symbol warning of radiation. On Monday, several hundred protesters gathered in the south of Moscow outside residential housing blocks that overlook a nuclear waste site.

Russian Polar Bear 'Invasion' Is a Sign of Something Much Bigger ew

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/were-dying-how-russian-government-spread-vicious-propaganda-against-rescue-workers

Amid a flood of reports of Russian interference in US democracy and around the world, the investigative site Bellingcat issued a report Tuesday detailing the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign about the White Helmets, a rescue group operating in Syria.

The White Helmets risked their lives throughout the Syrian conflict to rescue civilians from regime and Russian bombardment. They’ve also recorded conflict in opposition-held areas, beaming out regime atrocities to the world.

According to a Bellingcat report titled “Chemical Weapons and Absurdity: The Disinformation Campaign Against the White Helmets,” Russian and Syrian government sources repeatedly tried to link the Syrian Civil Defence (SCD), as the White Helmets are officially called, to chemical attacks.

“During mid-2018 this disinformation campaign appears to have focused on attempting to associate the SCD with chemical attacks in Idlib,” the report's authors note.

“From August to November of this year, the Russian and Syrian governments and state-controlled media continually repeated narratives involving the SCD and movement, or use of, chemical weapons around rebel-held areas of north-western Syria, primarily Idlib.”

The site finds the claims to be false, or at least that there’s no compelling evidence the White Helmets aided in chemical gas attacks.

Meanwhile, multiple international bodies have found the Assad regime to have used chemical weapons, in a breach of international law.

“Despite continual claims that chemical attacks were imminent or had already taken place, no chemical attacks were accurately predicted. Considering the Syrian government’s continual use of chemical weapons throughout the conflict, as well as the obfuscation of this issue by the Syrian and Russian governments, this is unsurprising,” Bellingcat continued.

Eight of the 22 accusations came from Russian Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in Syria (RCROSS). The remaining accusations came from “Russian government-controlled sources, such as Sputnik, the Russian Ministry of Defense, or representatives of the Russian government.”

In conclusion Bellingcat found that, “The extraordinarily low level of evidence supporting these accusations, the absurdity of some of the claims and the continual failure to predict a chemical attack exposes these accusations for what they are: a continuation of a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign against a humanitarian organization operating in the most difficult of circumstances.”

As the Washington Post reports, the propaganda campaign has a real impact on the ground.

“This isn’t just buzz on the Internet,” a former White Helmet, who was arrested and tortured by Syrian forces earlier this year, told the Washington Post. “It has real-life consequences. We’re dying for this.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/12/09/us-joins-saudi-arabia-russia-to-weaken-climate-change-report/

David Nakamura and Darryl Fears

The United States joined a controversial proposal by Saudi Arabia and Russia this weekend to weaken a reference to a key report on the severity of global warming, sharpening battle lines at the global climate summit in Poland aimed at gaining consensus over how to combat rising temperatures.

Arguments erupted Saturday night before a United Nations working group focused on science and technology, where the United States teamed with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to challenge language that would have welcomed the findings of the landmark report, which said that the world has barely 10 years to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.

“There was going to be an agreement to welcome the … report,” said Jake Schmidt, the managing director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program, who is in Poland. “The U.S. wanted to note it, which is saying in essence that we know it’s out there but we have no comment.”

The U.S. position lines up with the views of the Trump administration, which is plowing ahead with a raft of aggressive policies on coal power and oil exploration that are likely to worsen the effects of climate change — steamrolling over dire environmental warnings issued by the administration’s own team of experts in a major report just two weeks ago.

“The United States was willing to note the report and express appreciation to the scientists who developed it, but not to welcome it, as that would denote endorsement of the report,” a State Department spokesman said. “As we have made clear in the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and other bodies, the United States has not endorsed the findings of the report.”

...

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/07/30/american-ethane-nikolaev-trump-russian-spy-maria-butina

Kremlin is rooting for Republicans to keep their congressional majorities, according to a Russian media analyst -- and its state TV hosts are confident they'll win.

President Donald Trump hasn't done much to counter foreign efforts to influence the midterm elections, and has even suggested the Kremlin will work to benefit Democrats, but Russia's state TV paints a different picture, wrote journalist Julia Davis for The Daily Beast.

“Global empires like the United States are destroyed from within," said filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov on Russia's "60 Minutes." "The U.S. is deteriorating. They won’t find other fighters like (Sen. John) McCain. There won’t be any others like him. This process is irreversible.”

Russia hopes to help Trump by promoting his economic successes and create joint business opportunities, and by cultivating relationships with Republican elected officials -- some of whom have traveled this summer to Moscow.

"Naturally, Trump’s team — if they aren’t suicidal — will find arguments in support of the president," said Konstantin Zatulin, a leading figure in Putin’s United Russia party. "Those who don’t, won’t be on his team — or maybe they won’t be in Congress."

Olga Skabeeva, host of "60 Minutes," and Russian government officials have openly bragged about using active measures to promote their agenda through U.S. politics -- which they believe will further compromise Trump.

"Help him, direct him, support him -- and then you'll say he isn't ours," Skabeeva said.

Russian media reports that sanctions proposed by Trump will never be enforced and were just for show before the elections, and they say the president and his Russian counterpart quietly agreed in Helsinki to establish a business council to "unite" U.S. and Russian business interests.

“We can seriously benefit from these deals, there’s potential profit at stake," said Dmitry Abzalov, director of the Center for Strategic Communications in Moscow. "We shouldn’t let Trump down right now, our main goal right now is to help him with correct arguments. He will follow through with an internal agenda and economy.”

The Kremlin's overarching goal is to see the U.S. give up its role as the world's dominant superpower and retreat to domestic affairs and global commerce, according to Davis.

“With Americans, it’s all very clear,” said Russian state TV host Evgeny Popov. “In Iowa or someplace in Montana, they’re more concerned with the price of corn or beef than Crimea.”

However, Russia plans to pursue an even more aggressive foreign policy.

"Turns out, the first President of Russia was threatening [Bill] Clinton that the Communists will come back, take the Crimea and Alaska," said Skabeeva, the "60 Minutes" host. "We already took the Crimea, albeit without the Communists. Now it's Alaska's turn."

#Russia's state TV:

Host of "60 Minutes" Olga Skabeeva:

"Turns out, the first President of Russia was threatening [Bill] Clinton that the Communists will come back, take the Crimea and Alaska. We already took the Crimea, albeit without the Communists. Now it's Alaska's turn." ©️ pic.twitter.com/uAoiWJgoIM

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 31, 2018

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

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

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

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,” Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject.

“What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no link

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/russia-trump-putin-scandal-key-players-dossiers/

mojo

Hacker, Banker, Soldier, Spy: A Guide to the Key Players in the Trump-Russia Scandal

Get up to speed on the growing controversy engulfing the presidency.

HANNAH LEVINTOVA, AJ VICENS AND ASHLEY DEJEANJUN. 1, 2017 1:00 PM

Noma Bar

Keeping track of the relentless news on the widening Trump-Russia investigation—from revelations about the president’s inner circle to the role of Russian oligarchs and other assorted players—isn’t easy. As part of our project to cover this scandal, we’ve assembled dossiers on the sprawling cast of characters who populate this stranger-than-fiction controversy threatening to engulf the presidency. We’ll be adding to and updating these, so check back regularly.

Donald Trump

Despite his claims to the contrary, the president’s ties to Russia are long, deep, and, above all, mysterious. In the 1980s, before the Soviet bloc crumbled, Trump was already trying to get a foothold behind the Iron Curtain. Since then, he has on at least three occasions announced plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in partnership with various power players and oligarchs. Before his campaign came under investigation by the FBI and assorted congressional committees, the mogul happily touted his Russian dealings: “I’ve done a lot of business with the Russians,” he once bragged to David Letterman.

Trump’s relationship with Russia, and his refusal to condemn the Kremlin as evidence of its election interference became clear, raised questions during his campaign. Not only did Trump praise Vladimir Putin, but his campaign pushed to remove a plank from the Republican Party platform that called for arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian forces.

He also surrounded himself with aides and advisers with curious Russian connections, including lobbyist Paul Manafort and little-known consultant Carter Page, who traveled to Moscow at the height of the presidential campaign to deliver a speech critical of US foreign policy. That same month, a former British spy and Russia expert named Christopher Steele, who had been hired by a US research firm to look into Trump’s Russia ties, grew so worried by what he was finding that he provided his intelligence reports to the FBI. Mother Jones was the first outlet to report on the existence of the memos and the spy’s effort to get them into the hands of American authorities. Steele’s dossier contained a series of hair-raising—though as yet unverified—claims: Russia had been cultivating Trump for years, it possessed blackmailworthy material on Trump of a sexual nature, and the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Kremlin as it mounted a hacking operation to tarnish Trump’s opponent.

The president has called the Russia scandal a “hoax” drummed up by the “fake news media,” and said, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me.” But he has grown increasingly enraged by the various investigations swirling around him and his associates, denouncing them as a “witch hunt.” At one point, his White House, with the help of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, staged a clumsy effort to redirect the controversy to Obama administration surveillance. As the scandal snowballed, Trump abruptly fired James Comey, the FBI director overseeing the bureau’s investigation into ties between Trumpland and Russia. But far from disappearing, the scandal is poised to define Trump’s presidency. It could even end it.

Vladimir Putin

Despite a once-hopeful move toward democracy, Russia can’t seem to shake its Soviet legacy. A major reason is the former KGB spy and USSR functionary who has led modern Russia for most of its 26-year existence. Putin is rumored to be one of the richest men—if not the richest man—in the world. Not bad for a guy who has spent his entire career in government service. After graduating from law school in 1975, he entered the KGB and ascended rapidly, eventually becoming the head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor organization, in 1998. Putin’s rise in politics was even more rapid: In 1999, he was named deputy prime minister and then acting prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin; months later, when Yeltsin resigned, he became acting president. He has led the country ever since.

Did Team Trump conspire with the Kremlin? Here’s a timeline of everything we now know about the attack on the 2016 election.

Many Russia experts believe Putin’s main goal is to restore Russia’s place in the world as a major power by challenging the dominance of Western democratic values. This goal fueled the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, Russia’s opposition to Eastern European countries joining NATO or the European Union, and more recently a campaign by the Kremlin to undermine US and European elections with cyberattacks. Within Russia, Putin has also stoked the image of the West as an enemy, spreading fake news like his claim that Hillary Clinton instigated mass protests in Moscow in 2011 following Putin’s reelection as president.

Putin has long had an admirer in Trump. In a 2007 TV interview, Trump said Putin was “doing a great job” in “rebuilding Russia.” In his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough, Trump lauded Putin’s “grand vision” for Russia and its surrounding countries. Trump’s pronounced admiration has since been reciprocated, if only tepidly: During the 2016 campaign, Putin called Trump “a colorful and talented man” and “bright,” and he later applauded the future president for “reaching the hearts of the voters” and “representing the common people.”

The Family

Ivanka Trump

The “first daughter” is so tight with Dasha Zhukova, the wife of Russian oligarch and Putin ally Roman Abramovich, that she reportedly invited Zhukova to attend her father’s inauguration. Ivanka has also helped her father pursue business deals in the former Soviet bloc. In 2006, Donald Trump asked formerly “Mafia-linked” businessman Felix Sater to “squire” Ivanka and her older brother, Don Jr., around Moscow, according to the Washington Post. And Ivanka was deeply involved with a failed effort to build a Trump Hotel in Azerbaijan, where the Trumps had joined forces with a family whom a government minister had accused of corruption and who had possible ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Donald Trump Jr.

“I have nothing to do with Russia,” President Trump has declared. “No deals. No loans.” That’s not quite true. Just ask his oldest son, who serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. told investors in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Weeks before the election, Trump’s son was reportedly paid $50,000 to address a pro-Russian group in Paris whose leader nominated Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize in December.

Eric Trump

In a May interview with Boston radio station WBUR, golf journalist James Dodson recalled asking Trump’s second-oldest son a few years ago about who was funding his father’s courses. “We don’t rely on American banks,” he replied, according to Dodson. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric, who manages the Trump Organization with his older brother, called Dodson’s account “completely fabricated.”

Jared Kushner

The president’s son-in-law reportedly failed to disclose “dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months” on his application for security clearance, including meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a Russian state-owned bank. According to the Washington Post, Kislyak reported back to Moscow following their sit-down that Kushner had proposed “setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities.” Kushner reportedly strongly advocated Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey in May—further raising questions about his role. In late May, the Post and other news outlets reported that Kushner had become a focus of the FBI’s Russia probe, with investigators digging into his contacts with Kislyak, Gorkov, and other Russians. The 36-year-old real estate scion has volunteered to be interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and his lawyer has said Kushner “will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”

Cabinet Players

Jeff Sessions

“I did not have communications with the Russians,” the former Republican senator from Alabama said during his confirmation hearings in January. That statement quickly came back to haunt the new attorney general, after the Washington Post reported that Sessions had met at least twice with Ambassador Kislyak during the presidential campaign—including the day after then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested publicly that Russia was behind the Democratic National Committee hack. Congressional investigators reportedly are looking into whether Sessions may have had additional contact with Kislyak. In March, Sessions said he was recusing himself from any investigations of Russian election meddling, but he later played a key role in firing the senior Justice Department official overseeing the probe—Comey.

Rex Tillerson

The secretary of state and former Exxon Mobil CEO, who was once deeply involved in the company’s operations in Russia, forged deep bonds with oligarchs and Kremlin officials. In 2013, Putin awarded him the Russian Order of Friendship.

Wilbur Ross

In 2014, the billionaire (and “king of bankruptcy”) led a group of investors in a takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, an ailing financial institution with deep ties to Russia. Other top investors included oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and former KGB official Vladimir Strzhalkovsky. During Ross’ confirmation process for commerce secretary, Senate Democrats asked him for more details about the bank, including any loans made to Trump or his company. The Trump White House blocked the release of that information. But this probably isn’t the last we’ve heard about the bank: US Treasury officials are probing payments routed to lobbyist (and former Trump campaign chairman) Paul Manafort through Cyprus—a hotbed of illicit Russian cash. In March, the Associated Press reported that $1 million was directed to a Manafort-linked company in 2009 via the Bank of Cyprus.

All the President’s Men

Michael Flynn

The former Defense Intelligence Agency chief memorably led Republican National Convention attendees in chants of “lock her up.” Now Flynn—ousted less than a month into his job as Trump’s national security adviser—is facing legal jeopardy of his own. According to members of the House Oversight Committee, the retired lieutenant general may have broken the law by failing to disclose payments from Russian and Turkish interests, including for a Moscow speech he gave at an event celebrating RT, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster, where he was seated next to Putin. Barack Obama personally warned Trump about hiring Flynn, whom Obama had fired from his DIA post. In January, acting Attorney General Sally Yates urgently told the Trump administration that Flynn had lied about his contacts with Ambassador Kislyak and could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. When that news emerged in the Post three weeks later, Trump fired Flynn and blamed the media, calling Flynn a “wonderful man” who had been treated “very unfairly.” Flynn has offered to testify if offered immunity. In May, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed records from him and his business associates.

Paul Manafort

A lobbyist out of central casting, Manafort has repped some of the world’s shadiest autocrats and dictators, once flying to Angola in the ’80s amid the country’s bloody civil war to pitch warlord Jonas Savimbi. (In hacked text messages made public in February, Manafort’s daughter Andrea allegedly said her father had “no moral or legal compass” and described her family’s wealth as “blood money.”) Brought on to the Trump campaign at the urging of his former business partner Roger Stone, Manafort helped to guide it through the Republican convention. Manafort was ousted in August, as details emerged about his work for deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, which allegedly involved $12.7 million in secret cash payments earmarked for Manafort. Scrutiny of Manafort, who is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the Treasury Department, has expanded to include his business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate and Putin ally who was denied a visa to the United States because of alleged ties to organized crime.

Roger Stone

The 64-year-old, who proudly sports a tattoo of Richard Nixon across his back, has made a career of political subterfuge. He cut his teeth at 19 as a Nixon dirty trickster, once hiring a GOP operative to infiltrate George McGovern’s campaign. He later co-founded the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater in the early 1980s. He has advised Trump for decades, lobbying on behalf of Trump’s casino interests and serving as campaign manager of the real estate mogul’s short-lived presidential campaign in 2000. During the 2016 campaign, Stone seemed to possess uncanny knowledge of what WikiLeaks had in store for Hillary Clinton. On October 1, he tweeted, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Less than a week later, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Stone claimed he was in touch with WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and that he exchanged direct messages with Guccifer 2.0—the handle for the alleged Russian hacker(s) who posted the stolen DNC emails. Reportedly under investigation by the FBI, Stone has strenuously denied any collusion with Russians and has volunteered to testify before Congress. But anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt—his mantra, after all, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”

Michael Cohen

In the dossier produced by the ex-British spy Steele, Trump’s pugnacious personal lawyer surfaced as an alleged liaison to Russian officials—a charge he strongly denies. He has long-standing business and family ties to Ukraine. In January, he hand-delivered a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia to then-national security adviser Flynn, according to the New York Times. The effort also involved Trump’s business associate Sater and Andrii V. Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker.

J.D. Gordon

The former Navy officer and Pentagon spokesman, who advised the Trump campaign on national security policy, has reportedly acknowledged advocating a controversial platform change at the Republican National Convention: removing language calling for the provision of “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Gordon was also one of several Trump campaign aides who met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Republican convention.

Rick Gates

As Manafort’s right-hand man, Gates helped him lobby on behalf of Putin-allied Ukrainian President Yanukovych and was involved in at least two multimillion-dollar deals with Russian oligarchs—one with Deripaska and another with Ukrainian natural-gas titan Dmitry Firtash. Like Manafort, Gates did not disclose his work as a foreign agent to the Justice Department last year, a possible violation of the law. Following the election he helped form a nonprofit promoting Trump’s agenda, but he departed after the Associated Press reported Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.

Michael Caputo

The veteran PR consultant ran communications for Trump’s 2016 primary campaign in New York. But before that, he spent years working in Russia, first for the US Agency for International Development and then for his own Moscow PR firm. In 2000, he was hired by Gazprom Media to burnish Putin’s image in the United States. At one point, fearing Russian organized-crime figures were hunting him, Caputo (and his parrot, August West) took refuge on a boat in Florida.

Carter Page

“I think he is an idiot”—so said one Russian spy to another of a 2013 effort to recruit Page as an intelligence asset. (“I didn’t want to be a spy,” Page has said. “I am not a spy.”) Washington foreign policy hands scratched their heads when Trump cited the obscure energy consultant, who had once worked for Merrill Lynch in Russia, as one of his campaign advisers. And Page’s July 2016 speech in Moscow, where he sharply criticized US foreign policy toward Russia, drew notice at the FBI, kicking off the bureau’s ongoing probe into Trump associates. Page, a central figure in the Trump-Russia imbroglio, recently gave a series of bizarre interviews in which he dodged questions but also seemed to implicate himself. He acknowledged meeting with Kislyak during the GOP convention and, after first denying that he had discussed the easing of sanctions with Russian officials, hedged in an interview with George Stephanopoulos: “Something may have come up in a conversation. I have no recollection.”

Erik Prince

In January, according to the Washington Post, the founder of notorious private security contractor Blackwater—whose sister is Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos—held a secret meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian close to Putin in an effort to establish an unofficial back channel between Moscow and Trump. Prince also reportedly advised Trump aides, including Flynn, during the transition. (Prince denies both claims.)

Ezra Cohen-Watnick

The 30-year-old National Security Council official is a member of the “Flynnstones,” as the dwindling cadre of Flynn loyalists on the NSC are known. After Flynn’s firing, incoming national security adviser H.R. McMaster attempted to remove Cohen-Watnick from his position, but top Trump advisers Kushner and Steve Bannon intervened to save his job. Cohen-Watnick—known for his hawkish views on Iran and for clashing with CIA staffers—was among a trio of White House officials involved in an effort to lend credence to the president’s baseless claim that he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration. The NSC staffer—along with White House lawyers Michael Ellis and John Eisenberg—helped provide Rep. Devin Nunes with access to classified documents that the House Intelligence Committee chairman cited as evidence, wrongly, that Trump associates had been inappropriately “unmasked” in surveillance intercepts.

Investigators and Intel

John Brennan

In August, the then-CIA director held urgent briefings with Congress’ Gang of Eight lawmakers about Russia’s efforts to get Trump elected. Before stepping down on Inauguration Day, he told Fox News that Trump lacks a “full understanding of Russian capabilities and the actions they are taking on the world.” On January 6, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI announced that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

James Clapper

In May, the former director of national intelligence debunked one of Trump’s favorite pieces of spin. The president loved pointing out that Clapper once said he’d seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But in congressional testimony, Clapper clarified that at the time he made that statement, back in March, he was not in a position to know of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s Russia ties. And he testified that Trump’s denials and downplaying of Russian election interference had aided the Kremlin.

Sally Yates

Six days after Trump’s inauguration, the then-acting attorney general paid an urgent visit to the White House to alert the administration that Flynn had lied about his interactions with the Russian ambassador and could be vulnerable to blackmail. “To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians,” she testified in May. Instead of acting on her warning, Trump waited another three weeks to ax his national security adviser, doing so only after the Washington Post reported on Flynn’s communications with Kislyak. A longtime Justice Department official who once served as US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Yates was abruptly fired in late January after she refused to enforce the administration’s hastily executed “Muslim ban.”

James Comey

When news of his firing flashed across a TV screen on May 9, Comey thought it was a prank. Trump had previously praised the Justice Department veteran after he briefly reopened the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails just before the presidential election. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump summoned Comey for a private dinner, where he asked for the FBI director’s political loyalty, the New York Times reported; Comey promised him “honesty.” The relationship went downhill from there. Comey perhaps sealed his fate when he publicly confirmed the bureau’s ongoing probe into the Trump campaign and dismissed Trump’s claims that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration. Trump recalled of his decision to fire Comey, “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'” News soon emerged that Comey kept detailed memos of his interactions with Trump, including on the president pressuring him to quash a growing FBI investigation into Michael Flynn.

Christopher Steele

A real-life James Bond who worked undercover for MI6 in Moscow in the 1990s and later oversaw the British intelligence agency’s Russia operations, the ex-British spy was hired by a US research firm during the presidential campaign to look into Trump’s business ties in Russia. His network of sources provided him with alarming allegations, including that the Putin regime possessed compromising information on Trump and had been cultivating the real estate mogul for years. His memos also contained salacious allegations regarding Trump’s personal conduct while visiting Russia. In July 2016, Steele passed his findings on to contacts in the FBI; after the election, US intelligence officials briefed Obama and Trump about the memos. The Senate Intelligence Committee may seek to question Steele as part of its investigation into possible Russian interference in the US election.

Robert Mueller

George W. Bush tapped the ex-Marine and federal prosecutor to head the FBI just days before the 9/11 attacks. He went on to lead the bureau for 12 years, becoming the longest-serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. Like his friend James Comey, Mueller has an independent streak and no qualms about taking on the powers that be. During the Bush years, he nearly resigned over what he saw as a rogue White House effort with the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. As special counsel in charge of an investigation that Trump has dubbed an unprecedented “witch hunt,” Mueller is likely to again butt heads with a sitting president.

Hackers and Hacks

Julian Assange

Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.

Guccifer 2.0

Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”

DC Leaks

The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.

Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence

RT and Sputnik

In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear

The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.

Russian Connections

Sergey Kislyak

Following the 2016 presidential election, it came to light that Kislyak—the Russian ambassador to the United States since 2008 and formerly Russia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs—held multiple private meetings and phone conversations with Trump campaign surrogates and aides, including then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon, and Jared Kushner. His pre-inauguration communications with Flynn—which included discussion of US sanctions targeting Russia—led to Flynn’s ouster. Kislyak told the Washington Post he was in contact with Flynn before the election, but he declined to say what they discussed. Some US intelligence officials allege that Kislyak is not just a diplomat, but a talented spy-recruiter.

Sergey Gorkov

A graduate of the FSB’s finishing school for spies, Gorkov heads Vnesheconombank, Russia’s state-owned development bank—effectively Putin’s slush fund. With its board seeded with Kremlin ministers, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, the bank was the majority lender for the Sochi Olympics, has helped Russia gain financial power in Ukraine, and is currently under US sanctions because of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. In December 2016, Gorkov attended a meeting with Jared Kushner brokered by Kislyak—after which Gorkov appears to have gone directly to meet with Putin.

Felix Sater

This Russian American businessman (and onetime FBI informant) has quite the rap sheet, including prison time for stabbing a man with the stem of a margarita glass and a guilty plea in a Mafia-linked racketeering case. Though Trump claimed in a 2013 deposition that he wouldn’t know Sater if they were in the same room, the pair in fact worked together on a variety of projects, including a potential Moscow hotel. Once a managing partner of Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with offices in Trump Tower and alleged organized crime ties, Sater reportedly worked as a senior adviser to Trump in 2010, with a Trump Organization email address and business card. In January, Sater met with Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker, to discuss a “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia.

Andrii Artemenko

Currently facing an inquiry by Ukrainian prosecutors into possible treason over his collaboration with Trump associates on the Russia-friendly peace plan, the Ukrainian parliament member claims to have evidence of corruption that could oust his country’s current pro-European president. Artemenko has spent time in prison on embezzlement charges (eventually dropped) that he says were politically motivated.

Tevfik Arif

The Kazakh founder of the Bayrock real estate firm was formerly a USSR commerce official. He hired Sater, who by 2005 became Bayrock’s managing partner; subsequently, the firm entered into deals with Trump to develop various hotel and condo projects. In 2010, Bayrock’s former finance director sued the company (but not Trump) over one of those joint ventures, the Trump SoHo, calling the building “a Russian mob project” financed with mysterious cash from Kazakhstan and Russia.

The Photo That May Help Unlock the Trump-Russia Scandal

Victor Podobnyy

At a January 2013 energy conference in New York, Podobnyy met future Trump adviser Carter Page. At the time, Podobnyy was a clandestine Russian intelligence agent working under diplomatic cover in Russia’s UN delegation. For the next five months, Page met with, emailed, and provided documents to Podobnyy about the energy business, believing that Podobnyy’s UN position would help him broker deals in Russia. All the while, Podobnyy and one of his colleagues attempted to recruit Page as an asset. In 2015, Podobnyy was busted by the FBI for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government, along with two other Russians, but avoided arrest and prosecution because of his diplomatic immunity.

Sergei Millian

The Belarusian American president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA first met Trump in 2007 at Moscow’s Millionaire Fair. Millian—whose given name is Siarhei Kukuts—says he later signed an agreement with the Trump Organization to market Trump properties to buyers in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. In June 2016, Millian shared a slew of allegations about Trump with an associate. These allegations, corroborated by other sources, according to the ex-British spy Christopher Steele, would later make it into Steele’s unverified intelligence reports on Trump’s Russia ties—where Millian is reportedly identified as source “D.”

The Oligarchs

Dmitry Rybolovlev

Known in Russia as the “fertilizer king,” this billionaire oligarch bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump in 2008 for $95 million—more than twice what Trump paid for it in the mid-2000s. It was a surprisingly high price, given Florida’s crashing real estate market and an appraisal for much less. At least twice during the campaign, Rybolovlev’s plane was in the same location as Trump’s, fueling speculation of deeper ties.

Dmitry Firtash

For years, this Ukrainian natural-gas titan cut deals with Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom. Putin’s administration sold him Russian gas at a steep discount, and Firtash resold it in Ukraine, reinvesting some of the profits into electing pro-Putin politicians, including Viktor Yanukovych. In 2008, Firtash partnered with Manafort on an $885 million deal to buy and redo a New York hotel. The deal fell apart, but a few years later Firtash and Manafort were together again—this time named in a lawsuit alleging that Firtash laundered money through a New York investment fund established with Manafort’s help to send back to Ukraine for political use. (The case was dismissed in 2015.) Since 2013, the United States has sought to extradite Firtash from Austria to face bribery charges in an unrelated case.

Oleg Deripaska

This billionaire aluminum magnate was denied entry to the United States in the mid-1990s because of suspected ties to the Russian Mafia. A few years later, Manafort helped Deripaska try to secure a visa to come to the United States. In 2006, Deripaska reportedly hired Manafort for a $10 million annual contract; Manafort reportedly pitched Deripaska on a plan to bolster Putin’s image in the United States and elsewhere. In 2014, Deripaska sued Manafort for accepting a $19 million investment and then failing to account for the funds. (The suit is pending.)

Aras Agalarov

This billionaire’s real estate company, Crocus Group, has secured multiple contracts from the Kremlin, and Agalarov personally received a medal of honor from Putin. In 2013, Agalarov partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, where it was hosted at one of his lavish properties. The day before the pageant, Agalarov helped organize a meeting for Trump with more than a dozen of Russia’s top moguls. Agalarov claims he and Trump made a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow following the pageant, a venture that never materialized.

Emin Agalarov

Trump starred in a 2013 music video with this middling Russian pop star (the son of Aras Agalarov). It was shot on the morning of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, where Emin performed two numbers. In a March 2017 interview, Emin described an ongoing relationship—including “messages” and a handwritten note—with the Trump family that continued after Trump’s inauguration. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends,” Emin said.

Viktor Vekselberg

The Ukrainian oil baron with past ties to the Kremlin is reportedly worth $12.8 billion. Through his company Renova, he holds a 5.5 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman of the board until his confirmation as US commerce secretary in March.

Watchdogs and Lapdogs

Sen. John McCain

After the presidential election, McCain obtained a copy of Steele’s dossier, passing it to Comey during a December meeting. “I think there’s a lot more shoes to drop from this centipede,” the six-term senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said this spring. While his fellow Republicans have tried to squelch probes into the scandal, McCain has pressed for a more aggressive inquiry, calling for a special congressional select committee or an independent commission. In mid-May, he said the growing scandal had reached “Watergate size and scale.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham

On the campaign trail, the South Carolina senator was a harsh critic of Trump, calling the real estate mogul a “jackass” who lacked “the temperament or judgment to be commander in chief.” Like McCain, Graham is one of few Republicans who have not sought to downplay the Russia scandal. His Senate Judiciary subcommittee has mounted an investigation into the Kremlin’s election interference that Graham has vowed is “going to find out all things Russia.”

Rep. Devin Nunes

The House Intelligence Committee chairman’s brazen attempt to provide cover for Trump’s wiretapping allegations backfired in epic fashion. After Nunes’ White House-aided effort was unmasked, he was forced to recuse himself from the Intelligence Committee’s probe of Russian election meddling. Now the California congressman, who served on Trump’s transition team, is himself under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for possibly disclosing classified information. At a private GOP fundraiser in April, Nunes echoed Trump’s ongoing claim that the purpose of the congressional investigations into Russian election interference was to justify Hillary Clinton’s loss.

Rep. Adam Schiff

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee has been described as “Trump’s public prosecutor.” During the panel’s first hearing on the Russia matter, Schiff laid out what amounted to an indictment in his lengthy opening statement. In his previous career as a federal prosecutor, he brought charges against the first FBI agent indicted for espionage. The congressman has been calling for an independent investigation from the start and clashed repeatedly with Nunes.

Sen. Mark Warner

One of the only Democrats with any real say in how the Russia probe plays out, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says the investigation is “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” It wasn’t until Warner threatened to boycott the hacking probe that Trump-boosting Sen. Richard Burr agreed to include possible Trump-Russia links in the investigation. Warner now says he has full “confidence” in Burr, but various reports indicate he has become frustrated with Burr’s slow pace.

Sen. Richard Burr

“There’s not a separation between me and Donald Trump,” Burr said during his reelection campaign. Burr also worked on the Trump campaign’s national security team and takes credit for instigating the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails. The three-term Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was enlisted by the White House in February, along with Nunes, to personally call reporters to push back on stories concerning Trump associates and Russia. No surprise, Burr originally said his panel’s investigation would not involve Trump’s campaign. He has since changed his tune, but concerns remain about whether he can lead a full and fair inquiry.

The Hyperventilators

Louise Mensch

Of all the self-appointed detectives propagating their theories on Twitter, Mensch, a novelist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament, is the most bombastic and controversial. The day before the presidential election, Mensch, who’s known for making fantastical claims, reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had granted the FBI a warrant to surveil Americans with ties to Trump as part of its investigation. Another two months would pass before the New York Times confirmed the existence of a warrant from the court in the case of Carter Page. Since then, Mensch has made claims that Page traveled to Moscow last July to explicitly request Russia’s help in hacking the election, delivering a prerecorded tape of Trump offering to make US policy more beneficial to Putin if elected. No reputable media have reported this.

John Schindler

The former NSA analyst declared in August 2016 that, regardless of who became president, Putin had already won the election by meddling with the American political system. Oddly, Schindler wrote about this in Jared Kushner’s New York Observer, where Schindler is a regular columnist. (Kushner has since stepped down as the paper’s publisher.) In his column and Twitter feed—which Schindler liberally peppers with blindly sourced intel community gossip—he confidently suggests it’s only a matter of time before Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin is revealed. Sample tweet: “Trump knows his illegal ties to Moscow will be exposed soon. Hence his panic. He will do anything to save himself. Even provoking civil war.”

ecowatch

Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey: What's Exxon Got to Do With It?

By Andy Rowell

Washington, DC is still reeling Wednesday with the news that Donald Trump sacked FBI director James Comey.

Ostensibly, the White House is saying that Comey's firing is all about his botched investigation into Clinton's emails. But everyone knows that is not the truth.

As Politico reported, behind the sacking is an "an enraged Trump, fuming about Russia." Two Trump advisors told Politico that Trump was angry about the ongoing investigation by the FBI into links between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

The Trump line that the FBI Russian investigation has nothing to do with it is being ridiculed in the papers this morning.

As David Leonhardt stated bluntly in the New York Times, "The president of the United States is lying again … First, it's important to remember just how often Trump lies. Virtually whenever he finds it more convenient to tell a falsehood than to tell a truth, he chooses the falsehood."

So why fire Comey? A blistering editorial in the paper argued, "The president of the United States, who is no more above the law than any other citizen, has now decisively crippled the FBI's ability to carry out an investigation of him and his associates."

The paper added, "By firing the FBI director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country's history."

The investigation could have had "potentially ruinous consequences for the administration." So Trump fired the man who could have been about to impeach him.

The timing is certainly interesting. As the Hill pointed out too, many people are questioning the timing of Comey's dismissal.

There may be other factors at play worth mentioning. Who is Trump meeting today in the White House? The president only has one publicly scheduled item later today and that is a meeting with Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia.

As the British Independent newspaper noted, "It will be impossible to separate the meeting from the unfolding political drama in Washington."

Before Lavrov meets Trump, he will hold a meeting with ex-Exxon boss and now Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

On the agenda are Ukraine, Syria and "bilateral issues," according to the State Department. It is the highest level meeting between Trump and the Russians since he took office.

Also co-incidentally or not, tomorrow Lavrov and Tillerson will travel to Alaska to attend the 10th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Fairbanks.

The Arctic Council is an international forum that promotes cooperation among Arctic states and includes Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S. Under President Obama's administration, the U.S. position focussed on climate change.

Working together on the Arctic is ideal to help thaw U.S.-Russian relations, according to some.

Indeed, according to the Council, the meeting "will convene to review and approve work completed under the two-year U.S. Chairmanship to improve sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic."

But those two years have passed. Obama may have championed environmental protection, but Trump does not. Obama wanted to preserve the Arctic. Trump does not. As the U.S. hands over the baton of responsibility at the Council to Finland, the old order is no more.

Trump wants better ties with Russia. In turn, Russia wants Exxon to help explore for oil. There is no doubt Exxon wants Russian oil. Exxon's old boss is now central to the Trump Administration. And by removing Comey at such a crucial time, Tillerson and Lavrovcan work on some smoke-filled backroom deals, without the threat of the FBI looking at U.S.-Russian relations.

Of course, much of this is speculation and analysis of an unfolding political situation. The Arctic meeting may not have been on Trump's mind, but Russia certainly was. And we all need to keep a watching brief on this fast-moving story, because no one knows where it will end.

grim ends under “mysterious” circumstances. These include the lethal spritz of polonium 210 that killed Russian secret police defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006; the shooting of journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment that same year; a dose of rare Himalayan plant poison for banker and Putin nemesis Alexander Perepilichny in London in 2012; a fusillade that felled opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in downtown Moscow in 2015; and four fatal bullets this March for refugee whistleblower Denis Voronenkov on a Kiev sidewalk, which Ukraine has denounced as “an act of state terrorism.”

hmn

http://news.fark.com/newdata/news?ad=2796262&bl=83097&ag=20&st=20&ct=adpreview&out=1

http://crooksandliars.com/2017/03/eighth-russian-connected-trump-found-dead

... hard out there for a potentially compromising conduit between Trump and Vladmir Putin.

This one strikes particularly close to home. Alex Oronov was found dead, according to a Facebook post by Andrii Artemenko, an Ukrainian MP. Oronov was apparently quite successful in agribusiness. He had an interest in an ethanol business set up by Michael and Bryan Cohen in the Ukraine. Michael Cohen is Donald Trump's attorney. Bryan, in addition to being Michael's brother, is Oronov's son-in-law. With Artemenko and others, Oronov had organized a "peace plan," which was described by The New York Times as a back-channel opportunity for the Trump administration:

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

[..]

Mr. Trump has confounded Democrats and Republicans alike with his repeated praise for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his desire to forge an American-Russian alliance. While there is nothing illegal about such unofficial efforts, a proposal that seems to tip toward Russian interests may set off alarms.

[..]

But the proposal contains more than just a peace plan. Andrii V. Artemenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, who sees himself as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine, claims to have evidence — “names of companies, wire transfers” — showing corruption by the Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko, that could help oust him. And Mr. Artemenko said he had received encouragement for his plans from top aides to Mr. Putin.

“A lot of people will call me a Russian agent, a U.S. agent, a C.I.A. agent,” Mr. Artemenko said. “But how can you find a good solution between our countries if we do not talk?”

Oh yeah, I'm sure this is completely altruistic on the part of Artemenko.

Artemenko's announcement of Oronov's passing does not include a cause of death (as best as I can tell from Facebook's translation app), but does point a finger at the stress brought on by The New York Times article to being too much for Oronov to bear. I'm sure it could be natural causes, but there is a disturbingly significant number of suspicious deaths surrounding Trump and Putin. And remember, even if the official cause of death is something like a heart attack, that doesn't mean his head wasn't bashed in.

Because that's the kind of thing that happens in Soviet....er, Trump's America.

(h/t to Josh Marshall, who offers this Occam's Razor theoryof what appears to be a snowballing story.)

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022017/russia-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-climate-change-paris-climate-agreement

As Donald Trump pushes the United States toward inaction on climate change, he is likely to find an ally in Russia.

Russia is the fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Yet the plan it submitted under the Paris agreement to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 is one of the weakest of any government and actually permits Russia to increase carbon pollution over time. The Paris agreement went into effect last November, but Russia is the only major emitter that has not ratified it. Instead, it has laid out a timetable that would delay ratification for almost three years.

"Russia will not artificially accelerate the process of ratification of the Paris climate agreement," Russia's special presidential representative on climate, Alexander Bedritsky, said last September.

A new alignment between Russia and a friendlier United States under Trump could slow climate action even more. Trump denies global warming more nakedly than Russian President Vladimir Putin, who pivoted from years of downplaying climate change tocalling it a grave threat in 2015, but has done little to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Russia's sluggishness on climate could bolster the Trump team's plans to abandon climate action, and vice versa.

The Russian Federation has a history of denial and inaction on the issue. The country is a petro-state: It was the world's second-largest exporter of oil in 2015, after Saudi Arabia, and biggest exporter of natural gas. Russia's top politicians and its largest companies have long been reluctant to reduce fossil fuel extraction and use. Recently, some in the government and Russian business have begun taking steps to shift away from fossil fuel dependence. But that progress may slow now that the United States, the world's second-biggest emitter, is shifting its priorities toward increased fossil fuel production, experts on Russian climate policy said.

Under the Paris accord, Russia's plan to cut greenhouse gases calls for reducing emissions by 25 to 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. But 1990 was a relatively high mark for Russia's emissions. Starting in 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Russian industry produced a steep drop in emissions.

In 2014, Russia hit its target of a 30 percent reduction from 1990 levels, according to Climate Action Tracker, a coalition of European scientific groups. In fact, Russia's greenhouse gas emissions have been rising by about 1 percent a year since 2000, according to a 2016 paper based on data from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"These targets have basically allowed the economy to develop along business-as-usual lines," the Norwegian authors wrote.

The Paris accord entered into effect after countries responsible for 55 percent of global emissions ratified it. On the same day, Russia, which accounts for about 7.5 percent of global emissions, issued a detailed schedule of study and reports. Ratification would not be completed until after its 2018 presidential election.

If Russia's commitment under the Paris agreement is so weak, why has Moscow been slow to ratify the accord? "It's not a question of logic, but rather one about ideology," said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy unit at Greenpeace Russia. The ratification question "is about whether Russia is ready to go green or not, phase out fossil fuels or not."

Russia has only recently begun to accept the scientific consensus that fossil fuel use is driving climate change. Further, it is coming to grips with the fact that pegging its economy to oil and gas exposes the country to great swings in fortune as prices of those commodities rise and fall, experts on Russian climate policy said.

Nonetheless, the political elites are divided about ratifying the Paris accord as swiftly as other nations have. On one side are many senior government officials, ministries, some banks and high tech companies that want to cut emissions, Angelina Davydova wrote in September 2016 article in The Conversation. Lined up against them, however, are many of Russia's largest corporations, mainly in coal, steel, oil and gas.

"Fossil fuels are richer and in a better lobbying position and they are much, much stronger" than the camp that backs climate action, Chuprov said. "The coal companies are the most aggressive but oil also doesn't want to ratify the Paris agreement because it would mean the stoppage of the oil economy and an end to all the subsidies oil gets."

The oil and gas sector also contributes a vast percentage of Russia's greenhouse gases, about 45 percent, according to the UNFCCC's 2014 inventory, wrote Alexey Kokorin of the World Wildlife Fund, Russia in a June 2016 paper in Russian Analytical Digest. Russia's methane emissions account for 2 percent of all global greenhouse gases, the equivalent of emissions from global aviation, Kokorin continued. The oil and gas sector, in turn, produces 75 percent of Russia's methane emissions.

It appears unlikely that Russia will rein in emissions or the expansion of the oil and gas industry, which contributes about half the revenues to the domestic budget. Oil production on land is falling, so Russia is looking to tap the vast petroleum and gas reserves offshore in the Arctic. A friendly administration in Washington could help. In 2011, Russia and ExxonMobil, under chief executive Rex Tillerson, signed a $500 billion deal to develop oil and gas in the Russian Arctic.

But sanctions imposed in 2014 by the Obama administration after Russia's invasion of Ukraine stalled the projects. Tillerson, now secretary of state, and Exxon lobbied against the sanctions. If the Trump administration and the GOP-led Congress lift the sanctions, oil and gas extraction in the Russian Arctic would proceed and unlock a vast amount of greenhouse gases.

So far, Russia has viewed emissions reduction as only an exercise in energy efficiency, not in deploying renewable energy, except for hydroelectric power, Kokorin wrote. But the sanctions have made it difficult to tap capital markets to raise money to improve energy efficiency in electricity transmission and in housing, said Davydova, a Russian environmental journalist and lecturer at St. Petersburg State University.

Russia has commissioned government studies of how ratification of the Paris agreement would affect its economy. It wants to see the agreement produce rules advantageous to Russia before it ratifies, such as calculations of the impact of forests and land use on emissions, experts said. Russia aims to present a draft plan of its 2030 emissions targets in March 2020.

Given how weak the 2020 Russian targets are, the effect of Trump could be minimal. "Russia's climate action can hardly get any less ambitious than it is now, so I can't see how the U.S. intentions can affect it," Maria Sharmina, a lecturer at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Manchester, England said in an email, adding she was more concerned that U.S. disavowal of Paris would lead the rest of the world to pull back from emission reduction plans.

Other Russian climate policy specialists think U.S. rejection of climate action would deal a blow to the emerging pro-climate voices in Russia. "Russia looks to the U.S. and China's plans on climate change," Davydova said in a phone interview. "China might be getting more climate-oriented but if the U.S. pulls out of Paris, it's a huge argument to Russia to go even more slowly."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY

DONALD TRUMP

PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

CLIMATE CHANGE

REX TILLERSON

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/russia-hired-edelman/

FLYNN former national security adviser was paid more than $500,000 last fall by a group linked with the Turkish government to discredit exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen, an enemy of the Turkish president. An Egyptian intelligence agency hired public relations firms Weber Shandwick and Cassidy & Associates to improve its image.Iraq sent letters to top Trump officials such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis requesting meetings in the wake of the new president’s first travel ban, which included Iraq. The second iteration of the ban took Iraq off the list.

These stories could not have been told without the help of filings required by FARA, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Passed in 1938 in response to secret Nazi propaganda efforts in the U.S., the law requires anyone representing a foreign government or quasi-governmental agency (as well as individual citizens of other countries and sometimes foreign companies) to file extensive reports with the Justice Department. The filings must disclose who they’re representing, how much they’re being paid, what they’ve been hired to do, the meetings and other contacts they’re having, the content of materials they’re distributing and more. But the data is normally locked in PDFs with limited search functions.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, theCenter for Responsive Politics today releases a tool that makes looking through FARA filings a whole lot easier: Foreign Lobby Watch.We standardized registrants, foreign principals and locations, and parsed the PDF text to allow for full-text searching. (We inherited this project from the Sunlight Foundation, which previously hosted a tool called Foreign Influence Explorer.)

For example, a quick search of “Russia” in our database found 77 firms represented 170 governmental or pseudo-governmental entities, pulling up 274 records since 1950. The last Russian lobbying registration shows that a group created by the Russian Federation hired the PR firm Edelman last year to help influence U.S. opinion on a massive court verdict involving the oil giant Yukos.

That ruling was the latest twist in a complicated set of events that started in the early 2000s, when the Russian government dismantled and sold off Yukos, Russia’s largest fully privatized oil company after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin jailed two high-ranking Yukos executives, including its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an act that was seen as retribution for Khodorkovsky’s political opposition to Vladimir Putin. (Khodorkovsky was freed and pardoned in 2013 and lives in exile.)

Yukos went bankrupt after the Russian government charged it with tax evasion, embezzlement and money laundering. Its former stakeholders sued the government, winning a $50 million verdict in 2014 at The Hague, the largest arbitration penalty ever. But a higher court overturned the award two years later.

Yukos stakeholders are appealing the ruling and have pending enforcement lawsuits in a half-dozen countries, including the U.S., in efforts to collect Russian assets. The D.C. case in the district court of appeals has been put on pause until 2019, as the Netherlands case will impact what happens in the U.S. proceedings.

Amid the wrangling, the Russian Federation created a task force, the International Centre for Legal Protection, headed by a former director in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andrey Kondakov, to help coordinate the various ministries involved in the case. And the task force hired Edelman to help turn the tide of public opinion — often suspicious of anything Russia — in their favor. Kondakov did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

Signing the contract on Edelman’s side was Randall Corley, the firm’s global compliance officer.

Filings can fall short

FARA filings are only as good as the filer, of course. We see Edelman was hired for public relations work, including drafting press releases, media outreach, helping build a website and “strategic counsel.” However, it’s not clear from the reports alone how much Edelman did. According to the FARA file, ICLP issued just one press release, on Aug. 8, which also appeared on PR Newswire: “Key Yukos Insider Reveals Billion-Dollar Bribery Scheme.”

The release describes a filing in the D.C. case from a Yukos insider, Dmitry Gololobov, who “learned firsthand how the Oligarchs rigged the Russian government’s ‘loans-for-shares’ auctions in 1995 and 1996 to illegally acquire ownership of Yukos.”

“Mr. Gololobov’s testimony represents another step forward,” said Kondakov in the press release. “It confirms the corruption, fraud and bribery perpetrated by the Oligarchs at the expense of the Russian people and it validates the position that the Russian Federation has maintained throughout the Yukoscase – that the Oligarchs’ arguments are just lies about lies.”

As for media outreach, Kondakov is quoted in a New York Times piece reporting the overturning of the arbitration fine, but that was published before ICLP hired Edelman in June 2016. Filings and the press release show at least nine people at Edelman were affiliated with the project, and the agreement was terminated on September 30, 2016.

An Edelman representative said that they do not comment on clients, and that they filed all the necessary paperwork with FARA.

The original filing said “Work for client has begun and the contract is still being negotiated. This filing will be amended to included the contract once a signed copy is executed.” Yet OpenSecrets Blog found no amendment or contract in the filings that followed. And an August filing that lists receipts and disbursements for other clients showed no line items for ICLP from Feb. 1 through July 31, 2016. It’s unclear, without the inclusion of the required contract, how much Edelman was paid.

“If you comply with FARA, the information is very extensive and does tell the public and the press most of what they would want to know,” said Joseph Sandler, Democratic attorney and FARA expert. “But there could be holes with what they actually include, or could include filings from nonprofit front groups and think tanks that are hard to immediately understand who is backing them.”

A history of Russian lobbying

There are plenty of other Russia-related nuggets in the FARA files. For instance, billionaire Oleg V. Deripaska paid Endeavor Group a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2009 and 2010 to provide “general legal advice involving his U.S. visa, as well as commercial transactions.” The State Department had revoked Deripaska’s visa in 2006 due to concerns about his possible links to organized crime ties, which Deripaska has denied.

“Endeavor Group expects to engage with the U.S. government regarding the status of the foreign principal’s visa application; interact with the United States Trade Representative office to encourage U.S. participation in the intra-governmental global aluminum discussions; and engage with the Department of Treasury’s Auto Task Force regarding the prospective acquisition of General Motor’s European operations,” the FARA filing says.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, also wrote a letter to Adam Waldman, the founder of Endeavor Group, asking for updates on the case and saying he appreciates the work the firm is doing.

“[O]ver the past several years, there has been certain ambiguity upon his visa status in the United States,” Lavrov wrote. “A persistent state of limbo regarding Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel freely between our two countries has become an impediment to the promotion of mutually advantageous contacts between the business communities of the two countries.”

State-owned banks also hired up in an effort to ease sanctions levied in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea. One of them, VTB Group, a financial services firm owned by the Russian government, brought on board Emaunuel Manatos (a lobbyist who bundled almost $40,000 for Hillary Clinton this election) in May 2016 for $17,500 a month to “lobby Congress and Executive that affect imposition of US sanctions on Russian-affiliated banks.”

And the name that crops up again and again is that of the PR firm Ketchum Inc., which has earned more than $60 million working for Russia over the past decade or so, according to a POLITICO analysis of FARA filings.

The Russians first enlisted Ketchum’s help for “communications support” when it hosted the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in 2006, paying the company $2 million. (The country was in need of a media revamp after Russia’s energy company Gazprom cut off natural gas to Ukraine.)

Ketchum also works with subcontractors such as Alston & Bird to monitor foreign policy legislation, and Clark & Weinstock and Venable LLP to lobby on behalf of Gazprom and keep an eye on energy policy.

ProPublica reported in 2012 that the Huffington Post and CNBC published pro-Russia op-eds linked to Ketchum without noting the connection to the Russian government in the pieces. A year later, Ketchum placed an op-ed by Putin in the New York Times.

Categories: Influence & Lobbying

russia biz

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/investors-oligarchs-mobsters-and-capital-flight-inside-shadowy-world-trumps-private

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

Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump

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

Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.alternet.org/media/new-york-times-russian-hacking

fail?

Talk about strange bedfellows joining forces to produce an unlikely media alliance.

That’s what happened when The New York Times reported on October 31, 2016, that FBI officials had not been able to uncover any evidence that Russian operatives, through allegedly hacking Democratic emails, were trying to help elect Donald Trump.

“Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” read the October 31 Times headline which relied on unnamed “law enforcement officials.”

Acting as an almost unofficial time-out, and one that came with the Times’ seal of approval, the article helped put the media brakes on the unfolding Russian hacking story; the same Russian hacking story that has now morphed into a full-scale Trump scandal.

The message on October 31 from the Times’ sources was unmistakable: There’s no conclusive connection between Trump and the Russians, and the Russians’ efforts were “aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” (Question: How do you not pick sides in a two-person election if you only undermine one of the candidates, the way Russian hackers only undermined the Democrat?)

The Times piece set off audible cheers within the conservative media, which usually holds the Times in contempt for its supposed “liberal media bias.”

In fact, pointing to the newspaper’s alleged Democratic leanings, conservative claimed that if even the liberal New York Times determined there was no Trump-Russia story, then it definitely must be true.

“And as far as liberals are concerned, the Democrats are concerned, when the New York Times clears you, you are cleared,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on November 1. “The New York Times carries as much weight as the FBI, and if the New York Times says there’s nothing to see between Trump and Russia and Putin, then there’s nothing to see.”

All across the conservative media landscape, the Times report was held up as putting the Trump-Russia story to bed.

However, to suggest the Times’ influential October 31 report “hasn’t aged well,” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently put it, may be an understatement, as the unfolding hacking scandal continues to gain momentum and more evidence tumbles out regarding claims that Russians were trying to help Trump. (Hayes also correctly recalled that "At the same time the FBI was leaking like a sieve about Clinton, people around it went out of their way to dampen the Putin talk.")

The problems with the Times article are many. First off, Sen. Harry Reid’s spokesman claimed that Reid had been interviewed for the Times’ article, pushed back against its timid premise about there being no connection, and that Reid’s comments were omitted from the story.

More recently, we’ve seen all kinds of information revealed that contradicts the Times’ often-quoted October 31 report. For instance, FBI Director James Comey testified in December that Russia had “hacked into Republican state political campaigns and old email domains of the Republican National Committee,” but did not release information from those hacks. As Reuters pointed out, that allegation “may buttress the U.S. intelligence view that Moscow tried to help Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign.”

More recently, the BBC reported that “a joint taskforce, which includes the CIA and the FBI, has been investigating allegations that the Russians may have sent money to Mr Trump's organisation or his election campaign.” Also last week, the Guardian reported that FBI investigators were so concerned with a possible Trump-Russia connection that they asked for a foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) warrant to monitor Trump aides during the campaign. (The warrant request was reportedly denied.)

Meanwhile, Britain’s The Independentreported that the former intelligence officer who wrote the recently revealed Trump dossier was frustrated that the FBI had “for months” ignored the information he passed along to the bureau about a possible Trump-Russian connection.

Note that just four weeks after the election, the Times itself reported, “Both intelligence and law enforcement officials agree that there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Russian hacking was primarily aimed at helping Mr. Trump and damaging his opponent.” (Emphasis added.)

And from NPR: “FBI, CIA Agree That Russia Was Trying To Help Trump Win The Election.”

Here’s the larger context for the Times report and why it was seen as such a game-changer at the time.

On October 31, the FBI was dealing with two breaking news stories that were spinning out of its control and reflecting poorly on Comey.

The bureau was under withering criticism from legal experts, journalists, Democrats, and even some Republicans after Comey inserted insert himself into the final days of the campaign by informing Congress that the FBI was reigniting its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state. That last weekend in October the bureau was also battling damaging news stories that suggested its leadership had been slow to respond to the Russian hacking controversy as it pertained to Donald Trump.

Comey’s letter to Congress about the emails was dispatched October 28. In the days that followed, a steady stream of revelations undercut his actions. On October 30, CNN reported that the FBI had known about the new emails for “weeks” before Comey decided to go public with the information just days before the election.

The following day, news outlets reported that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) had sent Comey a blistering letter , insisting the FBI director was sitting on “‘explosive’ information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.”

That same day, Mother Jones, foreshadowing the news last week about a dossier collected on Trump, reported that, “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” had provided to the FBI with “memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.”

And that same day, CNBC reported, “FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election.”

The contrast was startling: Comey had publicly reinvigorated the Clinton email investigation based on emails the FBI hadn’t even read (the emails turned out to be irrelevant), yet at the same time Comey allegedly sat on new information regarding claims that Trump had ongoing ties with Russia because Comey thought the optics would look bad.

Given all this, the FBI needed a way to stop the public relations bleeding. And late in the day on October 31, the Times provided the respite.

Specifically, the article helped push back on reports Comey didn’t want to go public with any Russian information close to Election Day.

“The reason Comey didn’t announce the existence of this investigation wasn’t because it was it was ‘explosive’ and could impact the election,” announced the conservative site, Hot Air, pointing to the Times article. “It was because the FBI had already figured out it was a dud.”

In other words, FBI PR problem solved. The problems with the Times report, however, were just beginning.

Eric Boehlert is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush.

omfg

Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State, according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough tweeted that while Trump thought his meeting with potential nominee Mitt Romney was “great,” he’s also started considering Tillerson.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. An Exxon spokesman also declined to comment on Scarborough’s report.

Texas native Tillerson has led the United States’s largest oil company since 2006 and has worked there for more than four decades.

Trump reportedly is also considering Romney, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee, as well as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, retired Gen. David Petraeus and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) for the top diplomatic post.

Romney's inclusion on the shortlist has sparked controversy with many from Trump's inner circle. Many close to Trump, including top aide Kellyanne Conway, have publicly blasted Romney, who was a sharp critic of Trump during the presidential campaign. Trump met with Romney on Tuesday night.

Tillerson's selection would put a spotlight on Exxon, a major corporation with a wide reach and operations in dozens of countries.

The company has numerous partnerships with Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and has lost more than $1 billion due to the sanctions the United States imposed on Russia, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news service.

Tillerson, who made $27.3 million last year, could clash with Trump on some high-profile issues.

For example, Tillerson believes in man-made climate change, which Trump has dismissed as a hoax.

Exxon supports the Paris climate agreement and wants the United States to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, both policies that Trump strenuously opposes.

The company has also been in a high-profile fight in the last year with environmentalists and some Democratic state attorneys general over its past position on climate change.

Greens say Exxon knew decades ago that fossil fuels cause climate change but tried to sow doubt publicly about it in order to fight policies that could hurt its finances.

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/308363-scarborough-trump-considering-exxon-ceo-for-secretary-of-state

ith its proximity to the Arctic, Russia is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But that doesn’t mean they’re doing anything about it. Climate-change denial may be going the way of the permafrost here in the United States (unless you’re a Republican running for president), but it’s still alive and well in Russia, and the blame for this sits at the very top.

Russian citizens know little about climate change because Vladimir Putin wants it that way. Reuters reports:

Russia’s official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians “spend less on fur coats” while “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”

The president believes that “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. “That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general.”

Just this year, Russia experienced massive wildfires that killed more than 29 people and left 6,000 homeless. Here in the West, the media looked at the epic North American wildfire season in connection to increasing temperatures due to climate change, but in the Russian media, “the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out,” writes Reuters.

“It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis,” Galina Timchenko, who runs the popular Russian news site Meduza, told Reuters. “Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public.”

It should be. But Putin’s climate denial has set the tone for the rest of the nation. The leader visited the Russian Arctic in 2010, and after seeing retreating ice caps, he acknowledged that the climate is changing but denied human responsibility. His attitude about the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Paris could be described as lukewarm at best. He has offered little in the way of promises, including one to cut carbon emissions to 70 to 75 percent of 1990 levels — which is actually an increasefrom 2012 levels.

So why the denial, Putin? It could be that the man is just plain delusional, but here’s an alternate theory: money, money, money. While climate change and extreme weather could potentially slow Russia’s economy by 1 to 2 percent a year, retreating polar ice also opens up new areas for oil exploration, and Russia is the world’s largest producer of oil. Not convinced? The other possibility is that Putin just really likes to go topless.

http://news.muckety.com/2014/03/24/why-the-us-hasnt-punished-russian-oligarchs/46311

blackrock morgam stanley, opperheimer, gazprom

Putin, Russian business and U.S. sanctions - July 22, 2014

U.S. adds Russian companies to sanctions list - July 16, 2014

Another look at Russians who aren’t being sanctioned - April 28, 2014

If you have a retirement plan, you’re probably an investor in the Russian economy - March 18, 2014

Top U.S. government contractors are also investors in Russia - September 5, 2014

Russian bank hires former U.S. senators - September 3, 2014

Russian missile maker was on sanctions list - July 18, 2014

U.S. business interests in Ukraine - August 4, 2014

Investigators name companies doing business with Iran - April 23, 2010

Clinton ally at heart of Ukraine strife - February 20, 2014

Dissent

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/wikileaks-and-the-2014-sochi-olympics

WikiLeaks and the 2014 Sochi Olympics

Jules Boykoff ? April 7, 2013

Dow-branded bobsled for the 2014 Sochi Olympics (photo by secretlondon123, 2012, Wikimedia Commons)

Precisely ten months from today, the 2014 Winter Olympics will open in Sochi, Russia. This weekend also marks the three-year anniversary of one of WikiLeaks’s most controversial interventions: the release of a video documenting American troops in Apache helicopters gunning down twelve people—including two Reuters employees—in Baghdad.

It turns out the histories of the Olympics and WikiLeaks intertwine in revealing ways. And WikiLeaks disclosures about past Olympics help us better understand what’s going on in Russia today as President Vladimir Putin and company prepare to host the Games.

In late February 2012, WikiLeaks began releasing “The Global Intelligence Files,” a trove of more than five million internal emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private spy firm headquartered in Texas. The documents contained politically explosive information, including speculation that Julian Assange would soon be indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. The Stratfor files also exposed the obsession Olympic sponsors have with political activists.

Coca-Cola—a Stratfor client and “Worldwide Olympic Partner”—was concerned that the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) might interfere with the smooth running of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. In a June 2009 email, one Stratfor employee discussed “a long list of questions regarding PETA/Animal Activism and the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver.” Among Coke’s queries were “How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?”; “How many of these are inclined toward activism?”; and “To what extent could non-PETA hangers-on (such as anarchists or ALF supporters) get involved in any protest activity?” PETA barely registered on the roster of resistance among anti-Olympic activists in Vancouver, but Coca-Cola wasn’t taking any chances. Like all corporate sponsors of the Olympic Games, Coke wanted to maximize profits and minimize political fallout.

As the London 2012 Summer Games approached, Dow Chemical—another Stratfor client—tasked the firm with tracking activism related to the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. After acquiring Union Carbide in 1999, Dow insisted it wasn’t responsible for the toxic debacle that killed thousands and sickened many more. As another “Worldwide Olympics Partner,” Dow—like Coca-Cola—forked over $100 million to the International Olympic Committee. It also supplied an $11-million decorative wrap for the Olympic Stadium.

Stratfor kept a Bhopal activism file for Dow, which included entries on campaigner Colin Toogood of the Bhopal Medical Appeal (BMA). Stratfor noted that Toogood had used Facebook and Twitter to circulate information critical of Dow’s Olympic sponsorship. Julian Cheyne of the online anti-Olympics group Games Monitor was also ensnared in Stratfor’s surveillance net after receiving a tweet from the BMA. WikiLeaks helped highlight the cash chasm that allowed Dow and other Olympic sponsors to remain one step ahead in the battle between corporations and campaigners in London.

Thanks to Wikileaks we also have evidence that U.S. government honchos view the Olympics as a way to leverage security cooperation from host cities.When Brazil experienced power outages in 2009, the United States sniffed opportunity. A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia read:

The newly heightened concerns about Brazil’s infrastructure as a result of this blackout, combined with the need to address infrastructure challenges in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, present the United States opportunities for engagement on infrastructure development as well critical infrastructure protection and possibly cyber security.

Such “opportunities” pave a path for private security firms to cash in, using mega-events like their own private ATMs.

The stash of more than 250,000 U.S. Embassy Cables that WikiLeaks released in late 2010 also paint a bleak image of Russia, the future Olympic host, in line with many critics of Putin’s government. One confidential document cited a Spanish National Court Prosecutor who dubbed Russia, Chechnya, and Belarus de facto “mafia states,” where the activities of government entities and organized crime groups were virtually indistinguishable. In a 2008 cable, the British Foreign Office concurred, stating that Russia’s “political system is best described as a corrupt autocracy.” Confidential cables portrayed modern-day Russia as a cauldron of kleptocratic corruption, not a reputable Olympic host-in-the-making.

The 2014 Sochi Olympics are one of Putin’s prized pet project. Putin sees the International Olympic Committee’s selection of Sochi as “not only a recognition of Russia’s achievement in sports” but as a wider “assessment of our country.” That positive “assessment” is already being besmirched by a bloated five-ring price tag, graft, and a burgeoning mafia turf war.

The Sochi Olympics are the most expensive Winter Games ever, now totaling over $50 billion—more than five times the original estimate. Corruption is rampant. One road connecting Sochi venues cost $200 million per kilometer; paving the road with Olympic medals might have been cheaper.

The Kremlin simply hasn’t been able to contain the fraud. Putin recently fired Akhmed Bilalov, the vice president of the Russian Olympic Committee, whose own construction company was behind schedule and 900 percent over budget for a ski jump. Putin made a point to publicly humiliate Bilalov as he gave him the axe. Yet, as British comedian John Oliver noted, Putin himself “wears the cologne of the corruption industry in extremely heavy squirts.” The president’s childhood friend and former judo buddy Arkady Rotenberg snagged $7.4 billion in contracts for the Sochi Games.

After the International Olympic Committee awarded Sochi the Games in 2007, the city saw a spike in suspected mafia violence. Tension recently intensified after the death of Aslan “Grandpa Hassan” Usoyan, a mafia boss with enormous property and business holdings in Sochi and Moscow. Mafia hostilities have been bubbling on low boil, with high-profile murders on the streets becoming routine. Usoyan himself was assassinated by a sniper while he dined in a Moscow restaurant. Now that Usoyan is dead, Sochi is a strategic battle zone, with mobsters jockeying for influence and lucre.

Sochi was one of Stalin’s favorite resort getaways—his once-secret dacha was eventually converted into a hotel. Although Russia is no totalitarian state, the ghost of Stalin lingers, with the Russian Duma passing a slate of draconian laws and authorities raiding international human rights offices to curb dissent in the lead-up to the Games. With less than a year before the opening ceremonies, there’s no pity in the Olympic city.

Jules Boykoff’s writing on the Olympics has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New Left Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of two forthcoming books: Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (Routledge) and Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London (Rutgers University Press). He teaches politics at Pacific University in Oregon. You can follow him on Twitter @JulesBoykoff.

9/14

Deepening Ties Between Exxon and Russia Run Counter to U.S. Efforts to Punish Putin

As tensions mount and U.S. lawmakers push for stiffer sanctions on Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis, oil giant ExxonMobil wants no part of it.