Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 6:45 pm

Grant Stern
https://twitter.com/grantstern



Dossier's Players Explained In A Single Infographic

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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 8:45 pm

Insider the Alt-Right/All-Russia Nexus

ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedMARCH 21, 2017, 7:17 PM EDT
5011Views
Now that we've learned that Breitbart and Infowars have somehow figured into the FBI's counter-intelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, I want to return to a topic we discussed late last summer and into the fall. At the time we saw a disconcerting pattern. Trump friends, associates and staffers would go on TV make some wild claim that no one had heard before. Then it would turn out that the only other place the story had appeared was on RT or SputnikNews or even some Russian language propaganda mill.

One example came in mid-August when campaign chief Paul Manafort went State of the Union with Jake Tapper told a story about how US troops at the NATO base at Incirlik, Turkey had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists. This was part of the campaign message of Obama weakness, which Trump could repair. The only problem was that nothing like this had happened. (This was relatively soon after the failed coup in Turkey.) So where had Manafort gotten this? It turned out that the only other publications which had reported anything remotely like this were RT and Sputnikness. Hayes Brown caught this at the time in Buzzfeed.

If you're of a conspiratorial mind you might say, wow, Russian disinformation and propaganda keeps ending in the mouths of top Trump staffers. That's kind of weird. Is Russia somehow supplying this disinformation directly to the Trump campaign? That seems a bit hard to figure. But as I explained in this post at the time, there was another explanation.

We know that at the time Donald Trump's Twitter feed, which was clearly where he got a lot of his information, was positively lousy with alt-right Twitter feeds, often of the harshest racist and neo-Nazi variety. The whole Trump crew, which was still fairly small at the time, was awash in this stuff. For whatever reason these streams were filled with stories from RT, Sputiknews and other rightist-European news sites which themselves often picked up stories.

Was rooted in ideological affinity? Were these streams being targeted by Russian propagandists? Or, important to consider, were these streams actually filled with "alt-right" Russian bots and sock-puppets presenting themselves feral Trumpers on Twitter? Who knows? But whatever the reason, if you spent a lot of time on alt-right Twitter (which we know Trump and his crew was) you'd see this stuff a lot.

Why were Trump surrogates always pitching Russian propaganda? Because it was filling their Twitter feeds. This was likely the main reason Trump kept getting in trouble for RT'ing tweets from notorious white supremacists.

The fact that these sites and their audiences were apparently targeted as vectors for spreading pro-Trump and anti-Hillary propaganda, although perhaps unwittingly, is probably the best explanation of why they're coming up in these probes.

But here's another thing to consider, something I knew nothing about at the time.

That Manafort interview above was on August 14th, 2016. We now know that only five days earlier top Trump foreign policy advisor Mike Flynn had signed a $500,000 deal to advocate for the Turkish government. He was actually retained by a Dutch firm, Inovo, owned by a Turkish-American business man Ekim Alptekin. But his job was to advocate for the Republic of Turkey, particularly its demand that the US extradite a Muslim cleric in exile in the US who the Erdogan government blamed for the coup.

I'd have to refresh my memory on all the ins and outs of that moment, whether this might have been something Flynn told Manafort, whether it might have seemed helpful to his advocacy. So this may have figured into this bizarre moment to. But the use of these far-right and alt-right sites as vectors for pro-Trump Russian propaganda was clear at the time. Little surprise that is being scrutinized today.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ins ... ssia-nexus
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 8:58 pm

Senator Reid letter to James Comey from Oct. 30, 2016 about Trump campaign and Russia.

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 9:18 pm

According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”

Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”



Russia’s radical new strategy for information warfare
By David Ignatius January 18

Russian President Vladimir Putin this month. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via Associated Press)
Last February, a top Russian cyber official told a security conference in Moscow that Russia was working on new strategies for the “information arena” that would be equivalent to testing a nuclear bomb and would “allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser, made the startling comments at the Russian national information security forum, or “Infoforum 2016,” held Feb. 4 and 5. His remarks were transcribed by a Russian who attended the gathering and translated for me by an independent European cyber expert.

Krutskikh’s comments are important because they may help explain the radical strategic doctrine that underlies Russia’s hacking and attempted manipulation of the 2016 presidential campaign in America, as well as Russian political subversion in Europe. His title is “special representative of the president for international cooperation in the field of information security.”

A senior Obama administration official described Krutskikh as a “senior-level adviser” to President Vladimir Putin and “a long-standing player in cyber issues” at the foreign ministry. The official said he couldn’t confirm the details of Krutskikh’s remarks, but that “they sound like something Andrey would say.”

According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”

Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Putin’s cyber adviser stressed to the Moscow audience the importance for Russia of having a strong hand in this new domain. If Russia is weak, he explained, “it must behave hypocritically and search for compromises. But once it becomes strong, it will dictate to the Western partners [the United States and its allies] from the position of power.”

Krutskikh’s comments may have been a precursor of a new doctrine for information operations announced publicly by the Kremlin in December. The senior administration official described the Russian strategy: “They think of information space as a domain of warfare. In the U.S, we tend to have a binary view of conflict — we’re at peace or at war. The Russian doctrine is more of a continuum. You can be at different levels of conflict, along a sliding scale.”

Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign, as outlined in the unclassified report released this month by U.S. intelligence agencies, is an example of Russia’s use of new tools in this continuum of conflict, the U.S. official said. “Certainly, I believe the Russians are working to increase their capabilities in cyberspace, because they’ve realized they can use cyberspace to pursue their foreign policy goals,” he said.

In Russia’s view, America is pushing just as aggressively in the information space, but denies it. “Things we perceive as free speech, they perceive as aggressive behavior from the West,” noted the senior U.S. official.

Putin, for example, saw Hillary Clinton’s support for anti-Putin dissidents as an attempt to foment a “color revolution.” Russians also claim (without public evidence) that the U.S. orchestrated last year’s disclosure of the “Panama Papers,” which included allegations of Russian money laundering, and last year’s allegations by the World Anti-Doping Agency of drug use by Russian athletes.

In Putin’s mind, the United States attacked first in the information war. Russia is now strong enough to retaliate, as Krutskikh signaled in his February 2016 speech.

Krutskikh and other Russian cyber experts don’t appear to have been deterred by public warnings or sanctions. Krutskikh was quoted by the Russian Information Agency Dec. 29 describing U.S. sanctions announced that day as “the agony of the ruling elite,” reflecting “the personal hatred” of President Obama, and “an attempt to prevent future cooperation.”

“We don’t exclude the lifting of the sanctions after Trump enters office,” Krutskikh said.

Krutskikh’s comments highlight the emerging world of information warfare, where “fake news” and hacking are tools for covert warriors in many nations. The senior administration official warns: “The Russians are particularly advanced — in technology, organization and doctrine. They’re at the head of the pack. But there will be others.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/po ... 06e86091a2



POLITICS 03/11/2017 01:54 pm ET | Updated Mar 13, 2017
Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Faced A Fake News Tsunami. Where Did It Come From?
The trolls set out to distract and divide the invigorated left.
By Ryan Grim , Jason Cherkis

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Facebook groups backing Sen. Bernie Sanders were slammed with fake news links last year.
WASHINGTON ― Last June, John Mattes started noticing something coursing like a virus through the Facebook page he helped administer for Bernie Sanders fans in San Diego. People with no apparent ties to California were friending the page and sharing links from unfamiliar sites full of anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda.

The stories they posted weren’t the normal complaints he was used to seeing as the Vermont senator and the former secretary of state fought out the Democratic presidential primary. These stories alleged that Clinton had murdered her political opponents and used body doubles.

Mattes, 66, had been a television reporter and Senate investigator in previous lives. He put his expertise in unmasking fraudsters to work. At first, he suspected that the sites were created by the old Clinton haters from the ‘90s ― what Hillary Clinton had dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

But when Mattes started tracking down the sites’ domain registrations, the trail led to Macedonia and Albania. In mid-September, he emailed a few of his private investigator friends with a list of the sites. “Very creepy and i do not think Koch brothers,” he wrote.

Mattes and his friends didn’t know what to make of his findings. He couldn’t get his mind around the possibility that trolls overseas might be trying to sway a bunch of Southern Californians who supported Sanders’ run for president. “I may be a dark cynic and I may have been an investigative reporter for a long time, but this was too dark ― and too unbelievable and most upsetting,” he said. “What was I to do with this?”

By late October, Mattes said he’d traced 40 percent of the domain registrations for the fake news sites he saw popping up on pro-Sanders pages back to Eastern Europe. Others appeared to be based in Panama and the U.S., or were untraceable. He wondered, “Am I the only person that sees all this crap floating through these Bernie pages?”

He wasn’t. Bernie supporters across the country had been noticing dubious websites and posters linked back to Eastern Europe long before Mattes did ― and even before The Washington Post reported in mid-June that Russian government hackers had stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee. They had been warning each other that something weird was going on, posting troll alerts and compiling lists of fake news sites.

There is enough real news to fight over, they thought, without arguing over anti-Hillary conspiracy theories from Macedonia.


STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS
Bernie Sanders’ supporters started seeing fake news in early 2016.
Sometimes it was hard to tell who was doing the trolling and for what purposes. Aleta Pearce, 54, who lives in Malibu, California, was an administrator of half a dozen pro-Sanders Facebook groups and a member of many others. In May 2016, she posted a memo to various Facebook groups about the fake news issue, warning of bogus sites.

“The pattern I’m seeing is if a member is repeatedly posting articles that are only from one URL that person is just there to push advertising,” Pearce wrote. “They probably have a sock account with little to no content. They are often from Russia or Macedonia.” (A “sock” or “sock puppet” account uses a false identity to deceive.)

Pearce added, “Please share this with other Bernie groups so we can put an end to this spam bombing that’s filling up our pages and groups. It’s time to chase the mice out of the hen house and send them a message. They don’t know who they are messing with.”

The first tidal wave of spam was mostly anti-Bernie, Pearce recalled, posted by Clinton backers. (David Brock’s Clinton-backing super PAC had likely paid for some portion of those.) But after Clinton became the Democratic nominee in July, Pearce noticed a switch to anti-Hillary messages with links to fake news and to real news with obnoxious pop-up ads.

“Every site publishing those ― you clicked on the article, you would be slammed with ads and strange articles,” Pearce told HuffPost. “It was overwhelming. It was 24/7.”

She kept a list of fake news sites to watch for ― it grew into dozens. There were posts on the Clinton-has-Parkinson’s conspiracy and the Clinton-is-running-a-pedophilia-ring-out-of-a-pizza-shop conspiracy.

On the Sanders campaign, it was Hector Sigala’s job to connect with all the organic Facebook groups. He recalled seeing “a lot of trolls” try to convince people of something “that was obviously fake.”

Many of the interlopers, Sigala said, claimed to be Sanders fans who had decided to vote for GOP nominee Donald Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the general election and tried to convince others to do likewise. “It made it seem like the community as a whole was supporting that, but that wasn’t the case,” he said.

Sigala thinks most of them were just your average internet trolls. He said he found many were members of 4chan, a gathering place for the alt-right, white nationalists and plain old nihilists from which has sprung all manner of mischief.

The Sanders campaign had begun seeing this particular brand of fake news starting in early 2016. “The first time that we kind of fell for it, for like two minutes, was this link from what seemed to be ABC News,” Sigala said. It turned out to be ABC.com.co, a fake site that has no affiliation with the real news network. It had “reported” that the pope himself had endorsed Sanders.

It came in like a wave, like a tsunami. It was like a flood of misinformation.
Bev Cowling, who administered Facebook groups for Sanders supporters
In trying to wade through the flood of fake news, Sanders supporters had some serious trust issues. There was good reason to be skeptical of Clinton and the WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails was real, after all. But a steady diet of stories fabricated out of thin air can also feed into paranoia and flame wars.

Bev Cowling, 64, saw a sudden deluge of requests to join the Sanders Facebook groups she administered from her home in Toney, Alabama. All of a sudden, they were getting 80 to 100 requests to join each day. She and the other administrators couldn’t vet everyone, and the posts started getting bizarre. “It came in like a wave, like a tsunami,” she said. “It was like a flood of misinformation.”

Cowling, a retired postal worker, said some of her Facebook group members were ready to believe the bogus news links. “People were so anti-Hillary that no matter what you said, they were willing to share it and spread it,” she said. “At first I would just laugh about it. I would say, ‘C’mon, this is beyond ridiculous.’ I created a word called ‘ridiculosity.’ I would say, ‘This reeks of ridiculosity.’”

But Cowling got pushback. She was called a “Hillbot” and a Trump supporter. She ended up removing dozens of members who refused to stop pushing conspiracy theories. “I lost quite a few friends,” she said.

Matthew Smollon, a 34-year-old copy editor and page designer based in Knoxville, Tennessee, noticed an influx of posts linking to fake news as early as January 2016. So much of it, Smollon noticed, came from the same accounts. Almost all the sites he traced went back to Veles, Macedonia, which Wired magazine has since dubbed the “Fake News Factory to the World.” There wasn’t a single link he found that went to a pro-Clinton fake news story.

None of the fake stories stood out to Smollon. He described the Facebook groups as “being in a room filled with blasting televisions.” It was hard to pick out the loudest noises. “The ultimate goal of this wasn’t so much misinformation as distraction from valid info,” he concluded.

But Smollon had a hard time convincing other Bernie supporters that they were being played. “No one cared,” Smollon said. “At that point, you were a Hillary shill. It was like an echo chamber of anger.”

Even when pointing out that something like NBCPolitics.org was a fake site ― the real site is NBCNews.com/politics ― he drew criticism. He was eventually removed as a moderator from one of the pro-Sanders Facebook groups. “It’s the closest I’ve been to being gaslit in my life,” he said.

In June, Smollon posted a piece on Medium with the headline, “Dear Bernie Supporters: Stop sharing posts from dumpster fire websites.” He urged his fellow Sanders fans to wake up:

Guys, I sincerely love you. I love your passion. I love your fire. I love all of that. But when 400 people are circle-jerking clickbait links in between wondering how Hillary Clinton is behind the FEMA Earthquake drill that happens on several days with one of them being primary day?

Holy shit.

You are allowing yourselves to be manipulated. Through the practice of taking anything that agrees with your opinion at face value, actively refusing to believe anything but what agrees with your narrative and following that up with blatant disregard for doing two minutes of searching to verify the information: you become the myopic Trump supporter that you so vocally loathe.
Some people “liked” his Medium piece on Facebook and posted it on their walls, he said. Others did not. Smollon later updated his article to say he’d been banned from the group “Bernie Believers” because of it.

“This is a pretty solid case for admins/mods being part of the spam,” he wrote. “Not all of them obviously, but it only takes one person running with an ulterior motive to ensure the whole thing goes to shit.”
Image

SCREENSHOT
A Facebook user named Oliver Mitov posted dubious news links about Hillary Clinton.
In San Diego, Mattes was intrigued by a Facebook user named “Oliver Mitov” whom he saw constantly posting anti-Clinton propaganda.

Mattes first noticed Mitov posting in his Facebook group in September. But when he searched the page’s archives, he found that Mitov had been in the group since late July. He soon realized there wasn’t just one Mitov but four. Three had Sanders as their profile picture. Two had the same single Facebook friend, while a third had no Facebook friends. The fourth appeared to be a middle-aged man with 19 Facebook friends, including that one friend the other Mitovs had in common.

All combined, the four Mitovs had joined more than two dozen pro-Sanders groups around the U.S., including Latinos for Bernie Sanders, Oregon for Bernie Sanders 2016 and Pennsylvania Progressives for Bernie Sanders. Together, those groups had hundreds of thousands of members.

The Mitov posts would have been explosive if they’d been true. In one Aug. 4 post to Mattes’ page, Mitov wrote, “This is a story you won’t see on Fox/CNN or the other Mainstream media!” He then linked to a post claiming falsely that Clinton had “made a small fortune by arming ISIS.” On Sept. 25, he posted on several pro-Sanders pages a link promising game-changing information: “NEW LEAK: Here is Who Ordered Hillary To Leave The 4 Men In Benghazi!” The link went to a fake news site called usapoliticsnow.com.

The aim of Mitov’s activity seemed pretty obvious to Mattes: to depress the number of Sanders supporters who voted for Clinton in November.

“He was a ringer,” Mattes said.

Mattes tried to friend the various Mitovs and message them. None of them responded, he said. Attempts by HuffPost to reach Mitov were similarly unsuccessful.


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Mitov’s long list of pro-Sanders Facebook pages shows no other outside interests.
Keegan Goudiss, who ran digital advertising for Sanders’ presidential bid, had a different perspective on the trolling. He launched paid campaigns on social media and around the internet, so he was very familiar with the way that money can drive a meme.

Bots and trolls that spread fake news shouldn’t be ignored, he said, but “it’s like pissing in the ocean. There’s a lot of noise online.” One way to help your message cut through the noise is to spend money with Facebook, Google or an ad targeting platform that spreads links all over the internet, often at the bottom of stories. (Scroll down far enough on this page and you’ll probably see some of them.)

Goudiss recalled one telling example of how this worked: A Clinton ad appeared in the middle of a row of links, clearly paid for by a pro-Clinton group targeting potential donors and voters. To its left was a story making bogus claims about an illegitimate Clinton child. To its right was a piece on presidential mistresses. “There seems to have been a concerted effort to tarnish Hillary and people in her campaign’s reputation using paid placement,” he said.

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This screenshot captured by Keegan Goudiss during the campaign shows fake news to the left, Clinton fundraising in the middle and an anti-Clinton story to the right.
He can’t prove who was doing that, Goudiss said, but it’s probably worth trying to figure out.

“Was there a Russian entity supporting those websites that popped up?” he said. “That’s important and people deserve to know who influences our democracy.”

Some level of foreign participation in spreading disinformation about the left was comically apparent. The names of a few suspect Facebook groups reek of poor translation. One group with more than 80,000 members, claiming to be from Burlington, Vermont, is called “Bernie Sanders Lovers” ― the kind of name a non-English speaker might think makes sense, but that sounds wrong to native ears.

Image
Throughout the campaign, the Bernie Sanders Lovers page saw heavy engagement, and nearly every article it shared was from Bients.com, the pieces posted there by one Maximilian Gottlieb. Gottlieb, in turn, pulled articles from other sources, some more and some less reliable.

On Oct. 29, for instance, he put up 11 articles. A few praised Trump or gave Trump’s advisers space to attack Clinton. Others attacked Clinton’s campaign directly: adviser Huma Abedin had ties to radical Islam (false), the DNC email leak was authentic (true), campaign manager Robby Mook had deleted his entire Twitter feed (false).

Since the election, the Bernie Sanders Lovers page has shifted to urging the senator to run for president again in 2020. It no longer shares Bients.com stories. Instead, they all come from ThePredicted.com. Both sites were registered by a person name Hysen Alimi in Albania. (Feel free to check out the sites yourself, but Chrome will warn you your connection is “not secure,” so don’t enter any information there.)
Image

SCREENSHOT
A day of posts from Maximilian Gottlieb.
There had been rumblings that the Russians were specifically behind the DNC hack since last June. In early October, the U.S. intelligence community said it was “confident” that President Vladimir Putin’s government had both directed the hack and made sure the emails found their way to WikiLeaks. In January of this year, a more detailed intelligence report concluded that the Russian government had blended covert intelligence operations with overt efforts by, among others, “paid social media users or ‘trolls’” to try to influence the U.S. election.

A separate dossier on Russia’s role, assembled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and made public by BuzzFeed, claimed that the DNC leak had been an attempt to “swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump.”

“These voters were perceived as activists and anti-status quo and anti-establishment and in that regard sharing many features with the Trump campaign, including a visceral dislike of Clinton,” Steele wrote.

The intelligence report also said that the DNC hackers seemed to have financial ties to the Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg, Russia, company that has taken state-sponsored trolling to an industrial level. Its likely financier is “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence,” the report stated.

“Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history,” wrote The New York Times in a 2015 profile of the firm, “and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”

The “Internet as a democratic space” is the very thing that allowed the energy of the Sanders campaign to snowball into a movement for change. It was also the thing that allowed Oliver Mitov and his ilk to thrive.

Could the fake news tsunami have swung the election? It’s impossible to say for sure, but a YouGov survey recently asked people who voted for Sanders in the primary how they thought other people they knew who backed Sanders ended up voting in the general election. Thirteen percent said all of those folks voted for Clinton, and 48 percent said most of them did. But 20 percent said only some, 9 percent said just a few and 4 percent said none voted for Clinton.

In the survey, only 7 percent said that most or all of the Bernie people they knew wound up helping raise money or otherwise volunteering for Clinton. Fifty-four percent said that applied to just a few or none of the Bernie people they knew. Sanders backers were by far the most energized element of the Democratic coalition during last year’s campaign. Clinton’s inability to motivate them more broadly to back her candidacy undoubtedly hurt.

Asked what they themselves did, 12 percent of those who voted for Sanders said they went on to volunteer or raise money for Clinton. Only 16 percent of those who voted for Clinton in the primary said they also volunteered for her.

Of course, the propaganda didn’t create the chasm dividing left-wing voters. The belief that the DNC favored Clinton was widely held. Fifty-eight percent of all the survey respondents agreed on that. Among Democrats, the number was 55 percent. In the Midwest, which essentially elected Trump president, 67 percent agreed. Even 62 percent of those who voted for Clinton in the primary said that the DNC favored her.

But the legitimate skepticism opened the door to believing the more demented propaganda. And the more the fake news was passed around, the harder the divisions became. Clinton backers would charge Sanders supporters with being obnoxious, sexist “Bernie bros.” Many of those bros may have been trolls, not real Sanders supporters. Tell that to a Clinton backer, however, and you can be accused of dismissing the hostility they faced.

Aidan King set up a popular Reddit page for Sanders beginning in 2013 and went to work for the campaign in January 2016 as Sigala’s deputy. He dealt directly with many of the Facebook groups. After the Democratic convention, he said he noticed a strong shift away from the party in the tone of many of those pages.

“I’ve gone back and forth on it,” King said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying with any authority it’s a coordinated effort by trolls, but also wouldn’t feel confident saying it was exclusively pissed-off Bernie supporters.”

It might not actually matter if Vladimir Putin or a kid in Macedonia masterminded the flood of fake news. What matters is that it happened ― and it is still happening. People are deliberately seeding misinformation into the left-wing conversation. That’s a real fact. (Trying to measure the size and scope of the operation could make for a useful political science dissertation.)

For a wide swath of Sanders backers, the primary is still far too raw to even start to think about Russia. Mentioning foreign sabotage sounds like you’re throwing up a smokescreen to obscure the Democratic establishment’s own failure. But Mattes has tried to argue that two things can be true at once: Clinton was a terrible candidate and Russia intervened in the U.S. election.

“It’s wildly distressing that we were played,” Mattes said.

UPDATE: March 13 ― The Facebook page “Bernie Sanders Lovers” responded to this article on Sunday, saying: “We were never linked up with Russians and we will never be with them.”

“How come that we would write of Trump’s advantage and support him when we are democrats,” the page administrator wrote. “Even though we are democrats we do not support Hillary Clinton. We are not linked with the government to support someone that we do not like, to be encouraged to support someone, but we are those who desire and want progress.”

After reading this story, we’re curious what your view is on Russia’s role in the election. Take this brief survey, and we’ll post the results here on Sunday night.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ber ... 71826cdb36




“The FSB unit that [Dokuchaev and Sushchin] worked for, the Center for Information Security also known as Center 18, is also the FBI’s point of contact in Moscow for cyber crime matters,” McCord explained. “The involvement and direction of FSB officers with law-enforcement responsibilities makes this conduct that much more egregious.”

Russia, in other words, has some specific objectives (like acquiring information on domestic dissidents) and has shown it willing to employ tactics (partnering with cyber-criminals) that are very likely to hurt innocent civilians.

Russian strategic doctrine suggests that it sees cyber-espionage as a valid and increasingly important kind of warfare. In an influential 2013 article, Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery V. Gerasimov argued that "non-military means,” including “new information technologies,” have eclipsed traditional weaponry in their strategic importance.

“In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” Gerasimov writes. "The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”

This is why it makes sense to hack Yahoo, even at the expense of exposing tens of millions of innocent people to email scams from a random hacker. Putin’s regime sees the world as existing in a perpetual grey area of pseudo-conflict; stealing information on dissidents and corporations that play major roles in the US economy is one way of strengthening Russia’s hand in that fight. The Kremlin doesn’t really care who gets hurt in the process.

The Yahoo hack, as far as we can tell, isn’t linked in any operational sense to the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton aide John Podesta. “That’s an ongoing and separate investigation,” McCord said in response to a question about connections between the two.

But that hack, too, fits with the Gerasimov Doctrine.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/15/1493 ... ndictments


Breitbart and Infowars under investigation for ties to Russia: report

March 20, 2017
Peter Stone and Greg Gordon
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump's presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as "bots," to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.

The bots' end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year's elections.

Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia's operatives. Their participation, however, wasn't necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.

The investigation of the bot-engineered traffic, which appears to be in its early stages, is being driven by the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, whose inquiries rarely result in criminal charges and whose main task has been to reconstruct the nature of the Kremlin's cyberattack and determine ways to prevent another.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the inquiry into the use of bots.

Russia-generated bots are one piece of a cyber puzzle that counterintelligence agents have sought to solve for nearly a year to determine the extent of the Moscow government's electronic broadside.

"This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence," said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Bureau Director James Comey confirmed Monday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing what long has been reported: that the FBI is investigating possible links between individuals in the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian campaign to influence the election and whether there was any coordination between the two.

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia's intervention, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that there was "circumstantial evidence of collusion." There also is "direct evidence ... of deception, and that's where we begin the investigation," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

Howard's study of bot-generated Twitter traffic during last fall's Trump-Clinton campaign debates showed that bot messages favorable to Trump significantly outnumbered those sympathetic to Clinton.

He said his research showed that Americans who call themselves "patriotic programmers" also activated bots to aid Trump. In interviews, they described coding the computer commands in their spare time, Howard said.

Unlike counterintelligence investigators with more cyber sleuthing capabilities, Howard has not established that Russia was the source of the bot attacks he studied.

Russia also used "trolls," hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic.

"Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground," said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. "Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart."

"They very carefully timed release of information to shift the news cycle away from stories that clearly hurt Mr. Trump, such as his inappropriate conduct over the years," he said, referring to the October release of a video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women's genitals. That event corresponded with a surge in bot-related traffic spreading anti-Clinton stories.

An additional Russian tool was the news from its prime propaganda machine, Russia Today, with a global television and digital media operation and a U.S. arm, RT America.

Last Nov. 19, Breitbart announced that its website traffic had set a record the previous 31 days with 300 million page views, driven substantially by social media.

Breitbart, which has drawn criticism for pursuing a white nationalist agenda, was formerly led by Stephen Bannon, who became chief executive officer of Trump's election campaign last August and now serves as Trump's strategic adviser in the White House. The news site's former national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, was a national security adviser to Trump's campaign and presidential transition team. He now works as a key Trump counterterrorism adviser.

Breitbart's chief executive officer, Larry Solov, did not respond to phone and email requests seeking comment.

Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles. Bannon has been accused of taking anti-immigrant and racist positions. Last week, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that Gorka had taken a lifelong loyalty oath to a Hungarian far-right group that for decades was allied with the Nazi Party.

The White House declined to respond to questions about Gorka.

Breitbart is partially owned by Robert Mercer, the wealthy co-founder of a New York hedge fund and a co-owner of Cambridge Analytica, a small, London-based firm credited with giving Trump a significant advantage in gauging voter priorities last year by providing his campaign with at least 5,000 data points on each of 220 million Americans.

InfoWars is published by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host known for embracing conspiracy theories such as one asserting that the U.S. government was involved in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During the 2016 campaign, InfoWars.com was a loyal Trump public relations tool. Trump was on Jones' show and praised his reporting.

"It's the major source of everything," Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and campaign adviser, said last fall. Stone, who has regularly appeared on Jones' show and was on Monday, has said he invites an FBI investigation into his campaign role. The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Stone to preserve documents in connection with the Russian election inquiry.

Jones responded to questions from McClatchy on his talk show.

"I'm not gonna sit here and say, 'I'm not a Russian stooge,' because it's a (expletive) lie," he said, denying any contact with the Kremlin operatives about bots. He said this issue stemmed from "this whole ridiculous narrative of the bitching left."

"It's as if we didn't build InfoWars," he said. "It's as if we don't have a huge audience."

Noting he had appeared on RT "probably 100 times or more," he said sarcastically, "There's my Russian connection."

Boosted by bots, the surge in readership for such websites amplified Clinton's negatives. Some stories falsely described her health problems as dire. Jones said Monday that people gravitated to his website "because we were the first to report Hillary Clinton falling down." He referred to Clinton appearing to collapse last Sept. 11 after visiting the World Trade Center memorial. She was diagnosed with pneumonia.

"The full impact of the bots was subterranean and corrosive," Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman, told McClatchy in an interview. "The distribution channels were being flooded with this information. ... We perhaps underestimated the strategy of pushing fake news out through social media and how it impacted the race."

Donna Brazile, the former interim director of the DNC, said that neither the party committee nor the Clinton campaign had used bots to widen the reach of their anti-Trump messages.

At least one of the congressional committees investigating the Russian meddling is looking into the bots.

The Senate Intelligence Committee "intends to look actively at 'fake' news and the ways that Russian bots and trolls were used to influence the election," said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel's ranking Democrat.

Russia's offensive might have been anticipated from a speech a top Kremlin official made in February 2016.

In the speech in Moscow, Andrey Krutskikh told a conference of Russian computer security officials that the Putin government would be unleashing a cyber nuclear attack reminiscent of Russia's 1949 development of the atom bomb. Krutskikh, whose speech was first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and independently confirmed by McClatchy, also reportedly said the offensive would cause U.S. officials to gain respect for Russia's cyber capabilities.

"Russia has again figured out from its old Soviet playbook that its greatest weapon in the world is information," said Lauren Goodrich, senior Eurasia analyst at the Stratfor Corp., a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas. "Its information and disinformation campaigns have skyrocketed."

She said the Kremlin's budget for "public information" had quadrupled this year as it mounted similar cyberattacks on behalf of right-wing candidates in France, Germany and other European countries.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/breitba ... ia-report/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:04 pm

Image

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Paul Manafort, Former Trump Campaign Chief, Faces New Allegations in Ukraine
By ANDREW E. KRAMERMARCH 20, 2017

Paul Manafort speaking to reporters during the Republican National Convention last year. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
KIEV, Ukraine — After his name surfaced last August in a secret ledger listing millions of dollars in payments from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine, Paul Manafort not only lost his job running Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign but also assumed center stage in a bizarre internecine struggle among Ukrainian political forces.

On Monday, the intrigue took another turn, when a member of Parliament in Ukraine released documents that he said showed that Mr. Manafort took steps to hide the payments, which were tied to Mr. Manafort’s work for former President Viktor F. Yanukovych. The documents included an invoice that appeared to show $750,000 funneled through an offshore account and disguised as payment for computers.

Mr. Manafort, who denied the latest allegations, has asserted that the ledger is a forgery and that the member of Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, was involved in a scheme to blackmail him. Mr. Leshchenko insists that a letter appearing to show him threatening Mr. Manafort with the release of damaging information was itself a fake, and he denies any involvement in blackmail.

The latest development unfolded against the backdrop of a congressional hearing on Monday in which the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was asked about Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine. Mr. Comey declined to talk specifically about Mr. Manafort or any other individuals under scrutiny in the bureau’s investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.

Paul Manafort Quits Donald Trump’s Campaign After a Tumultuous Run AUG. 19, 2016

Ukraine Releases More Details on Payments for Trump Aide, Paul Manafort AUG. 18, 2016

Trump Campaign and Its Chief, Paul Manafort, Try to Move Past Ukraine Report AUG. 15, 2016

How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump JULY 31, 2016

Trump Aide Paul Manafort Promoted to Campaign Chairman and Chief Strategist MAY 19, 2016

Mr. Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations in Ukraine before taking the helm of the Trump campaign over the summer. But he was pushed out after anticorruption authorities in Ukraine disclosed that Mr. Manafort may have been paid $12.7 million from an illegal slush fund maintained by his client, the Party of Regions.

A handwritten accounting document for the fund, known in Ukraine as the Black Ledger, showed entries for Mr. Manafort’s advisory work. Mr. Manafort has dismissed the ledger as fraudulent.

On Monday, Mr. Leshchenko released an invoice that he said was recovered from a safe in Mr. Manafort’s former office in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, that seems to corroborate one of the 22 entries in the ledger from 2009. The invoice billed a shell company in Belize, Neocom Systems Limited, for $750,000 for the sale of 501 computers.

Mr. Leshchenko said the invoice, along with computer disks and debit cards belonging to former employees of Mr. Manafort, was found by a tenant who rented the space last year. A signature appearing to match Mr. Manafort’s as it appears in open sources can be seen on the four-page invoice printed on Davis Manafort letterhead, with an address in Alexandria, Va.

The invoice bills Neocom Systems Limited for the computers. The invoice listed detailed specifications, for example, one as coming equipped with “Intel Core 2 Duo E6300.” The contract specifies, “Payment under the contract is performed by means of bank transfer to the account of the seller.”

This was not the first time Neocom Systems had surfaced in a corruption probe. In a 2012 money laundering and stock fraud case in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Bank listed it as a shell company used for payments by AsiaUniversalBank, a lender seized by Kyrgyzstan’s Central Bank amid money laundering allegations.

Ukrainian money laundering through AsiaUniversalBank and its affiliated shell companies was extensive and “very well known” in Kyrgyzstan, Edil Baisalov, a former presidential chief of staff, said in a telephone interview. “Our country was a laundry machine.”

To Mr. Leshchenko, the payment through Neocom Systems Limited, “shows how corruption schemes work and why they should be exposed. This was corruption linked to Ukraine, and American law enforcement should investigate.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, referring to the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, dismissed Mr. Leshchenko’s allegations as “baseless, as reflected by the numerous statements from NABU officials who have questioned the validity of the so-called ledger evidence against Mr. Manafort.”

The statement continued, “Any new allegations by Serhiy Leshchenko should be seen in that light and summarily dismissed.”

Officials of NABU say they have never questioned the validity of the ledger evidence against Mr. Manafort. In fact, one corruption case has gone to court in Ukraine based on such evidence. The officials have said that their mandate is to prosecute only Ukrainian government officials.

American federal investigators are already scrutinizing Mr. Manafort’s compensation for his consulting work in Ukraine, which followed a four-decade career that included work in the United States for Republican politicians, starting with President Gerald R. Ford, and abroad for dictators, including Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mr. Manafort is also one of a number of people associated with the Trump campaign whose contacts with Russians are under investigation by the F.B.I. and congressional committees into Russian meddling in the American presidential election.

Mr. Manafort has acknowledged remaining in close touch with a former office manager of his business, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian military interpreter who was investigated in Ukraine last fall over possible ties to Russian intelligence. That investigation closed without any charges. Mr. Manafort has denied knowingly contacting Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.

The ledger and the circumstances surrounding its discovery appear to factor into a bizarre incident last month when a website used by Ukrainian computer hackers released some 280,000 text messages hacked from the cellphone of one of Mr. Manafort’s daughters, Andrea.

Among those was one asking her to relay to her father a message that appeared to be from Mr. Leshchenko. The message addressed Mr. Manafort as “Honorable Count!” – a reference to an old nickname — and the writer claimed to have “bulletproof facts” regarding illicit payments to Mr. Manafort in Ukraine.

The note threatened to turn the information over to American and Ukrainian law enforcement unless Mr. Manafort found a way “to work things out.”

Mr. Manafort has said that he believes Mr. Leshchenko sent the message and was trying to blackmail him. Mr. Leshchenko has denied ever having contacted Mr. Manafort or members of his family, or seeking payments to withhold information.

With the congressional and F.B.I. investigations moving ahead, President Trump has defended Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine as a legitimate pursuit for a campaign adviser.

“People knew that he represented various countries, but I don’t think he represented Russia, but represented various countries,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in February. “That’s what he does. People know that. That’s Mr. Manafort, by the way, a respected man, a respected man, but I think he represented the Ukraine or Ukraine government or somebody, but everybody knew that.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/worl ... .html?_r=0


Paul Manafort just got nailed for Russian money laundering; will likely have to flip on Donald Trump
By Bill Palmer | March 21, 2017 | 0

We may now have the answer as to why Donald Trump and his White House tried to distance themselves from Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort yesterday. Manafort ran the campaign of Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and has long been alleged to have illegally taken millions in Kremlin cash for it. But now Manafort’s signature has been discovered on Russian money laundering paperwork, all but proving his guilt – and it sets him up to flip on Trump.

The new revelation, released by the government of Ukraine and first published reported on by the New York Times, helps to confirm that Paul Manafort was indeed illegally on the take from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. In fact, unless he can demonstrate that his signature on the newly uncovered paperwork was somehow forged to frame him, he’s essentially finished. Immediately after FBI Director James Comey and and members of the House Intelligence Committee briefly discussed Manafort during public hearings yesterday, Trump sent his spokesman Sean Spicer to the podium to try to minimize the role that Manafort played in the Trump campaign, but that effort was largely laughed off.

I took that development as a sign that that as Trump was watching the hearings, something that was said about Paul Manafort made clear to him that the FBI had Manafort nailed. And so Trump tried to claim that Manafort had only had a brief and small role in the campaign, in the hope of insulating himself. Of course Manafort was Trump’s campaign chairman for much of the election cycle, meaning he was in charge of the campaign. So there’s no minimizing the ties between the two of them.

But now that we know how thoroughly screwed Paul Manafort is, it suggests that he’ll end up having to flip on Donald Trump in exchange for leniency considerations. It’s nearly a given that the FBI already knew about Manafort’s money laundering and has been privately pursuing him over it. Ukraine publicly released the evidence today (New York Times), in a seeming attempt at ratcheting up the pressure on the heels of the House hearings. No wonder Trump unsuccessfully tried to throw Manafort under the bus yesterday
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/la ... rump/2008/



Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 22, 2017 1:46 pm

House Oversight Committee Requests Flynn Docs From WH, FBI, DoD, DNI

Evan Vucci
ByMATT SHUHAMPublishedMARCH 22, 2017, 1:33 PM EDT
The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday requested documents related to ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn from the White House, FBI, Department of Defense and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In a committee statement, Chair Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said they requested “documents relating to Flynn’s foreign contacts and payments, security clearance applications, and other related documents between the time of his retirement in 2014 to present day.”

Flynn resigned on Feb. 13 after reports revealed he spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States about sanctions before President Donald Trump took office.

Since his resignation, more information has come to light regarding Flynn's business ties abroad, including to foreign governments.

On March 7, Flynn’s company, Flynn Intel Group, retroactively registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for work it had done for Inovo BV, a Dutch firm run by a Turkish businessman, during the presidential election. The group said in the filing that their work “could be construed to have principally benefitted the Republic of Turkey.”

Last week, Cummings published documents he said proved that Flynn had been paid by the Russian state-funded RT network for his attendance at their 10-year anniversary gala in Moscow. Previously, Flynn had refused to say more than that he had been paid by his speaker’s bureau. But the documents appeared to show that that bureau, Leading Authorities, Inc., had been paid all of Flynn’s expenses, and its own commission, by RT.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Flynn did not sign Turmp’s ethics pledge upon beginning as national security adviser. That pledge would have prevented Flynn from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments for life, and from lobbying his former colleagues for five years.

“Gen. Flynn never had the opportunity to sign Trump’s ethics pledge, but he plans to abide by its terms,” Flynn spokesman Price Floyd told the publication.

Read the committee’s letter to the White House below:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/h ... -documents



Committee Requests All Documents on Flynn’s Foreign Contacts and Payments
Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) and Rep. Cummings (D-MD)

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 22, 2017 7:28 pm

there is more than circumstantial evidence now


“More than circumstantial evidence” of collusion in Trump/Russia investigation
By Leah McElrath |
MARCH 22, 2017
Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff dropped a bombshell when he revealed there was "more than circumstantial evidence" of collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and the Russians.

In what is proving to be the most significant political story of our lifetimes, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff revealed there is “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere with the electoral process in the 2016 presidential election. Watch as Schiff talks to NBC’s Chuck Todd:
.@RepAdamSchiff on Trump/Russia connection: "There is more than circumstantial evidence now…and is very much worthy of investigation."
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) March 22, 2017

TODD: You thought that at the time that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was too definitive when he said “no evidence of collusion” at the time that he served through essentially January 20th of this year. What basis can you feel confident saying that the Director of National Intelligence oversold something?
SCHIFF: Well, look, I don’t think it was deliberate on the director’s part, but all I can tell you is, reviewing the evidence that I have, I don’t think you can conclude that at all. Far from it.
TODD: But you admit it’s — all you have right now is a circumstantial case?
SCHIFF: Actually, no, Chuck. I can tell you that the case is more than that. I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now. So, again, I think —
TODD: So you have seen direct evidence of collusion?
SCHIFF: I don’t want to go into specifics, but I will say there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of investigation. So that is what we ought to do. Now, again, I think we have been dealt a serious body blow to the credibility of our ability to get answers by today’s events. And to me it underscores the importance of having an independent commission look at this as a supplement to anything Congress does.
Up until now, many Americans have been aware only of an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence regarding Trump’s ties to Russia and those of a number of his campaign and administration advisors. This critical mass has caused justified concern that there was coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to subvert the will of the American electorate in the 2016 presidential election. These concerns are significant enough that FBI Director James Comey took the unusual but necessary step of confirming the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into the matter.
This revelation by Schiff that non-circumstantial evidence exists of collusion between Trump and/or his associates and Russia takes the matter to an entirely different level. Depending on the findings, collusion with a foreign power against the government and people of the United States could constitute an act of treason.
For the sake of the survival of our republic, the American people must demand an independent commission to investigate Trump and Russia. If the GOP and Executive Branch fail to cooperate in this necessary action, we will be facing nothing less than a Constitutional crisis.

http://shareblue.com/more-than-circumst ... stigation/



Adam Schiff‏Verified account
@RepAdamSchiff
Today, Chairman Nunes shared information with WH still withheld from our committee. He cannot conduct a credible investigation this way.



Sputnik News has picked up on Devin Nunes' claims. And they're spinning them wildly out of context to discredit the FBI.
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Thanks to Devin Nunes, the Republican Party has begun throwing Donald Trump under the Russia bus
By Bill Palmer | March 22, 2017 | 0

Even before Devin Nunes staged his bizarre, counterproductive, and likely illegal Trump-Russia meltdown today, it was already clear that he was in over his head. Now that he’s either leaked real classified information or invented phony classified information in a panicked effort to protect Donald Trump from his Russia scandal, it appears Nunes has unwittingly forced his own Republican Party to throw Trump under the bus. And that shift is beginning already, in real time.
Devin Nunes made the surreal decision today to publicly make the assertion that Donald Trump’s transition team was indeed being wiretapped, for what he insisted were non-Russia reasons. He did so without saying who or where he got the information from, and he did so without running it past any of the Republicans or Democrats who sit on the House Intelligence Committee which he chairs.
This seemed a deliberate attempt at ensuring that his claim went public before anyone on his committee could see that his claim was nonsense. But what it really accomplished was that it merely pissed off everyone involved, and backed his fellow Republicans into a corner. Whether Nunes invented this idiotic plan himself or Trump instructed him to run interference today, it’s already prompting members of both parties to draw the line.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on Nunes’ committee, held a televised press conference and quickly voiced his view that Nunes had tainted the entire committee – and so he called for the formation of an independent investigation instead. Shortly thereafter, Republican Senator John McCain made a scheduled appearance on Greta Van Susteren’s MSNBC show, and he echoed Schiff’s call for an independent investigation.
This is specifically what Trump was looking to avoid, because he was hoping that his allies in Congress like Nunes would misuse their positions on the investigative committees to run interference for him. But now, leading voices in both parties of Congress are calling for the current investigations to be scrapped in favor of the kind of fundamentally serious independent investigation that Trump and his minions won’t be able to sabotage.
In so doing, these Republicans are throwing Trump under the Russia bus – not because they necessarily want to, but because today’s idiotic display by Devin Nunes left them with no choice. With their own credibility suddenly on the line, they’re choosing themselves over Trump, and not even thinking twice about it. And the fallout is just beginning.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/bus ... ican/2021/



Devin Nunes has most of his net worth tied up in a company that does business in Russia
By Bill Palmer | March 22, 2017 | 0

House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes went to extraordinary – and possibly illegal – lengths today when he announced that he had learned from unnamed “sources” that the Donald Trump transition team had been picked up on U.S. intel wiretaps, and that it all had nothing to do with Russia. Nunes is clearly trying to cover for Trump in a manner which goes beyond mere Republican Party lines. It turns out Nunes has his own personal financial ties to Russia which may be motivating him.
Nunes publicly revealed his supposed revelation today without saying where he got it from, without bothering to run it past anyone else on his committee first, and without consulting the FBI first, even though it’s actively investigating the Trump campaign due to its collusion with Russia. He then ran to the White House and briefed Donald Trump on the supposed information, leading to question of how Nunes could have classified information that Trump doesn’t have access to.
The stunt by Devin Nunes was clumsy, risky, suspicious, desperate, and likely to backfire on him. So why is Nunes putting himself at such great risk to try to create a distraction on Trump’s behalf? Let’s talk about the financial business that Nunes conducts with Russia. In addition to being a Congressman, he’s part owner of Alpha Omega Winery LLC. According to the Los Angeles Times he has $50,000 of his own money tied up in the winery, which is remarkable considering that the same report lists his total net worth at just $51,002. In other words, the winery is all Nunes has.
According to Scott Dworkin of the respected Democratic Coalition Against Trump, the Nunes’ winery has a Russian distributor who is close to Vladimir Putin. This means Nunes has the vast majority of his small net worth tied up in a business venture which partially relies on sales in Russia. At the least, Nunes benefits greatly if Trump remains in office long enough to continue repealing Russian sanctions. Is this why Nunes is so desperate to protect Trump?
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/russia ... rump/2019/

Scott Dworkin‏Verified account
@funder

Rep Devin Nunes owns part of a winery-that has Russian distributor-who's close to Putin


Image

Felony violation Nunes was not allowed to disclose this without prior authorization 18 U.S.C. §793 - §798


oh and Putin told Trump to hire Tillerson as Sec State that's what I think
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Wed Mar 22, 2017 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby SonicG » Wed Mar 22, 2017 8:11 pm

Tillerson? This is from the interview of his favored reporter on the Asia trip:

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.” He paused to let that sink in.

A beat or two passed before an aide piped up to ask him why he said yes.

“My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

After watching the contortions of my face as I tried to figure out what to say next, he humbly explained that he had never met the president before the election. As president-elect, Trump wanted to have a conversation with Tillerson “about the world” given what he gleaned from the complex global issues he dealt with as CEO of ExxonMobil.

“When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned.”

When Tillerson got home and told his wife, Renda St. Clair, she shook her finger in his face and said, “I told you God’s not through with you.”

With a half-worn smile, he said, “I was supposed to retire in March, this month. I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.”
...
Will he stick around for the whole term?

In a sign he’s picking up on the lingo, he crossed his arms and said just a little wryly, “I serve at the pleasure of the president.” It doesn’t seem like he regrets accepting the job.

“My wife convinced me. She was right. I’m supposed to do this.”
http://ijr.com/2017/03/814687-trumps-diplomat/
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 22, 2017 8:18 pm

^^^^^

maybe this slipped his mind or his good friends just didn't tell him?

What was he payin them for? :P

there's that Condi Russia thing again

WEDNESDAY, DEC 14, 2016 06:42 AM CST
Rex Tillerson’s name was suggested to Donald Trump by three establishment Republicans who represented him
Tillerson's company was a client of three insiders who suggested he be chosen to lead the Department of State

Rex Tillerson's name was suggested to Donald Trump by three establishment Republicans who represented him
(Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
When President-elect Donald Trump selected Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state, he consulted members of the Republican Party elite who have done business with ExxonMobil in the past.

Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Stephen Hadley were all instrumental in convincing Trump to choose Tillerson — the head of ExxonMobil, a client of their consulting firm RiceHadleyGates — according to a CNN report on Tuesday. A few weeks ago Vice President-elect Mike Pence contacted Rice and Hadley, who had served as George W. Bush’s national security adviser, to suggest candidates for the role.

The pair, along with former defense secretary Robert Gates (who had served under both Bush and Barack Obama), decided that Trump needed someone from outside the foreign policy establishment, and because Rice and Hadley had personally worked with Tillerson when he was CEO of ExxonMobil, they thought his international business experience and knowledge of Middle Eastern geopolitics recommended him for the job.

The moment of truth came when Gates met with Trump earlier in December, according to a report by The Washington Post on Tuesday. Team Trump was fiercely divided between supporters of Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, and retired Gen. David Petraeus, and Trump himself apparently had doubts about all of them. When it came time for Gates to meet with Trump, a source tells The Washington Post that it seemed like Trump was “looking for a way out” and asked Gates if there were any other options.

“I recommend Rex,” Gates allegedly told Trump. Although Gates said in a subsequent interview that he had not gone to the meeting with the intention of proposing Tillerson, he never proposed anyone else. He described Trump as being “intrigued” by the suggestion.
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/rex-til ... ented-him/



GOP heavyweights with ties to Exxon pushed Tillerson
By Theodore Schleifer, Elise Labott and Gregory Krieg, CNN
Updated 6:24 PM ET, Tue December 13, 2016
Trump in 2006: I wish Condi Rice was a 'bitch' when negotiating

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/13/politics/ ... ezza-rice/


friends keeping secrets....doesn't read the papers :roll:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 22, 2017 8:41 pm

US Officials: Info suggests Trump associates may have coordinated with Russians
By Pamela Brown, Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN
Updated 8:00 PM ET, Wed March 22, 2017

Washington (CNN)The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, US officials told CNN.

This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, according to one source.
The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.
In his statement on Monday Comey said the FBI began looking into possible coordination between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives because the bureau had gathered "a credible allegation of wrongdoing or reasonable basis to believe an American may be acting as an agent of a foreign power."
The White House did not comment and the FBI declined to comment.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer maintained Monday after Comey's testimony that there was no evidence to suggest any collusion took place.
"Investigating it and having proof of it are two different things," Spicer said.
One law enforcement official said the information in hand suggests "people connected to the campaign were in contact and it appeared they were giving the thumbs up to release information when it was ready." But other U.S. officials who spoke to CNN say it's premature to draw that inference from the information gathered so far since it's largely circumstantial.
The FBI cannot yet prove that collusion took place, but the information suggesting collusion is now a large focus of the investigation, the officials said.
The FBI has already been investigating four former Trump campaign associates -- Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Carter Page -- for contacts with Russians known to US intelligence. All four have denied improper contacts and CNN has not confirmed any of them are the subjects of the information the FBI is reviewing.
One of the obstacles the sources say the FBI now faces in finding conclusive intelligence is that communications between Trump's associates and Russians have ceased in recent months given the public focus on Russia's alleged ties to the Trump campaign. Some Russian officials have also changed their methods of communications, making monitoring more difficult, the officials said.
Last July, Russian intelligence agencies began orchestrating the release of hacked emails stolen in a breach of the Democratic National Committee and associated organizations, as well as email accounts belonging to Clinton campaign officials, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Russian operation was also in part focused on the publication of so-called "fake news" stories aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign. But FBI investigators say they are less focused on the coordination and publication of those "fake news" stories, in part because those publications are generally protected free speech.
The release of the stolen emails, meanwhile, transformed an ordinary cyber-intrusion investigation into a much bigger case handled by the FBI's counterintelligence division.
FBI counterintelligence investigations are notoriously lengthy and often involve some of the U.S. government's most highly classified programs, such as those focused on intelligence-gathering, which can make it difficult for investigators to bring criminal charges without exposing those programs.
Investigators continue to analyze the material and information from multiple sources for any possible indications of coordination, according to US officials. Director Comey in Monday's hearing refused to reveal what specifically the FBI was looking for or who they're focusing on.
US officials said the information was not drawn from the leaked dossier of unverified information compiled by a former British intelligence official compiled for Trump's political opponents, though the dossier also suggested coordination between Trump campaign associates and Russian operatives.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/22/politics/ ... index.html


US Officials Just Dropped the Trump-Russia Bombshell We’ve All Been Waiting For
BY GRANT STERN

PUBLISHED ON MARCH 22, 2017

The smoking gun has been found. This is grounds for impeachment, folks.

CNN just reported that the FBI has obtained bombshell information including travel records, electronic communications and more, proving collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia. Suspected targets of the FBI’s investigation include former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, ex-NSA Gen. Flynn, political dirty trickster Roger Stone and investment banker Carter Page. CNN reports:

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN. This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.

The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.
It’s highly probable that this is the same information that Ranking House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) relied upon earlier today to make the statement that there is “more than circumstantial evidence now.”

It’s illegal for a federal political campaign to accept anything of value from any foreign person, let alone a foreign government, which means that the current information probably pre-dates the release of the infamous dossier. CNN reports:

US officials said the information was not drawn from the leaked dossier of unverified information compiled by a former British intelligence official compiled for Trump’s political opponents, though the dossier also suggested coordination between Trump campaign associates and Russian operatives.
The Trump Administration is crumbling rapidly, as its deal with the devil to win the presidency is exposed by intelligence agencies with each passing day. This latest report should give Donald Trump immediate second thoughts about remaining President of the United States.

It’s time for him to resign; the sooner, the better. Not just for Trump himself, but for the country as a whole.
http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/03/22/u ... e-waiting/



emptywheel‏ @emptywheel 8h8 hours ago

Also note: Devin Nunes was a member of Trump's transition team.

So, uh, did Devin Nunes get incidentally spied on?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 23, 2017 9:36 pm

Judge Orders Exxon to Turn Over Tillerson's 'Wayne Tracker' Climate Emails
A deadline of March 31 is set for Tillerson's alias emails to be given to New York's attorney general, along with an explanation why they were withheld.
David Hasemyer
BY DAVID HASEMYER

MAR 22, 2017

Exxon officials have been ordered by a New York judge to explain how the company overlooked a shadow email account used by its former chief executive Rex Tillerson while the company was under subpoena by the New York attorney general's office.

Judge Barry Ostrager ordered Exxon to provide sworn affidavits describing the company's process for identifying and turning over documents. He also demanded an explanation of what documents may have been lost and how that happened.

Ostrager also gave the company until March 31 to surrender documents associated with Tillerson, now serving as secretary of state, and five other members of Exxon's management committee.

The hearing followed the recent disclosure that in addition to his Exxon email, Tillerson had used an alias email account under the name "Wayne Tracker," a probable reference to Tillerson's middle name.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman disclosed the existence of that email as part of its open investigation of Exxon in connection with possible securities fraud over whether the company misled shareholders and the public about climate change.

Tillerson used the Wayne Tracker email account for eight years to discuss climate change-related issues and the risks they posed to the company's business, investigators claim.

The company turned over a handful of the emails in January and explained then that they were overlooked because the company did not have the technical capability to identify them. Exxon now says, however, that locating Tillerson's emails was not one of the priorities originally spelled out by the attorney general.

Those explanations are nothing more than Exxon's "pattern and practice of hiding the ball" in response to the investigation, according to a letter from the attorney general's office filed with the judge prior to the hearing.

"In spite of Exxon's assurances to this Court that it would move 'heaven and earth' to comply with the subpoena, Exxon's conduct outside this Court reflects a pattern of stonewalling and disingenuousness."

New York investigators argued Exxon deliberately delayed the production of the Tillerson records and those of other top managers and that it has failed to confirm that it has preserved all of the records.

Exxon acknowledged it missed a year's worth of Tillerson's Wayne Tracker emails during three searches in 2016 while trying to comply with the subpoena. The Wayne Tracker emails surfaced in a fourth search in January 2017, but the company said it can't find emails from September to November 2014, according to a letter to the judge a day before the hearing.

The company said it focused on turning over records based on the attorney general's original 2015 subpoena that included a prioritized list of documents.

Exxon lawyers argued that the attorney general's "ever-shifting investigative theories" caused the company to first focus on turning over 109,000 documents associated with four employees who studied climate science. Emails from Tillerson and five other management committee members were not a priority, the company said.

"When these documents evidently refuted his investigative theory, the Attorney General informed ExxonMobil that his new 'priority' was documents" from an employee responsible for the preparation of a 2014 report called Energy and Carbon—Managing the Risks and those on ExxonMobil's greenhouse gas issue management team, Exxon's letter said.

Exxon lawyers explained to the judge the company made four exhaustive searches of its files for records in response to the attorney general's request. So far the company has provided a broad sweep of records—2.6 million pages so far—from nearly every corner of the company.

"Despite the Attorney General's assertion that ExxonMobil has not complied in good faith, at no point did ExxonMobil refuse to add a single custodian requested by the Attorney General," according to the letter from Ted Wells, the company's lead attorney.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2203 ... -326460285
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Grizzly » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:12 am

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:17 am

RNC paid intel firm for Clinton dirt
Firm started by ex-CIA officers initially denied probing Democratic presidential candidate.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and ELI STOKOLS 03/23/17 05:30 PM EDT

As the general election was taking shape last summer, the Republican National Committee initiated a series of payments to a low-profile firm started by retired Central Intelligence Agency officers that worked closely with an ex-Russian spy.

The payments attracted attention in political and intelligence circles, largely because the Virginia-based firm, Hamilton Trading Group, had particular expertise in Russia, which was emerging as a major campaign issue at the time.


RNC officials and the president and co-founder of Hamilton Trading Group, an ex-CIA officer named Ben Wickham, insisted the payments, which eventually totaled $41,500, had nothing to do with Russia.

Instead, they initially claimed the payments were entirely for an assessment by Hamilton Trading Group of building security concerns at the RNC’s Capitol Hill headquarters.

But RNC officials now acknowledge that most of the cash — $34,100 — went towards intelligence-style reports that sought to prove conflicts of interest between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State and her family’s foundation.

The firm produced two dossiers that tried to make the case that Clinton intervened in Bulgaria and Israel, respectively, on behalf of energy companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation, according to people briefed on the reports.

Wickham on Thursday explained that he initially insisted his work for the RNC was limited to the building security assessment because “any other work we may have done for them” was subject to a non-disclosure agreement. “I’m not denying that I wasn’t totally forthcoming, but I’m telling you why,” Wickham said. “The security stuff that we did, which is legitimate, was not covered by any kind of a confidentiality agreement, so I can discuss that.”

When a $3,400 payment to Hamilton Trading Group for “security services” first appeared in June on the RNC’s campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission, it raised eyebrows among political operatives, intelligence consultants and security experts.

That was partly because the firm had never previously received a disclosed payment from a federal political campaign or committee, and also because Hamilton Trading Group wasn’t well-known in the building-security consulting industry.

Adding to the intrigue are the firm’s intelligence connections in Russia, where it was known to perform background checks and provide security services for American officials and companies.

That work was handled by a former KGB agent named Gennady Vasilenko, a Cold War adversary-turned-friend of Wickham’s co-founder, Jack Platt, a retired CIA officer who passed away in January.

Vasilenko declined to comment.

But Wickham said “Gennady has very good contacts in Russia.”

Wickham and the RNC denied, though, that the firm did any work related to Russia for the RNC, and Wickham brushed off as coincidence the timing of the payments. They were made between May and August 2016, as Russia was emerging as a liability for the GOP nominee Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, including its then-chairman Paul Manafort.

Wickham added that he’s “never had any contact with … Trump or Manafort or their people.”

The RNC provided documentation that appeared to list the specific Clinton-related research projects for which Wickham's firm was paid.

As for the building-security payments, Wickham told POLITICO that his firm “did a security audit” to assess the vulnerability of the RNC’s headquarters to a range of hypothetical attacks, including a “McVeigh-type” explosive attack or a gunman “something like San Bernardino.”

He said that, while “we didn’t find anything too problematic,” the RNC did make some changes to address concerns raised by the audit.

Wickham conceded “We certainly are not widely known, as we have always been a two- to three-man company and have done little advertising.” But he said the firm has done plenty of security work, including training Amtrak police to do counter-terrorism-related security assessments and providing security years ago for the International Monetary Fund’s facilities in Moscow.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/r ... nts-236436


Dark Data: Trump Backers Bankroll Firm Developing Psychological Profiles of Every U.S. Voter
Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica, and how billionaires are profiling voters.
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now! March 23, 2017

One of the more mysterious parts of the Mercer family’s political orbit is Cambridge Analytica. The data firm claims it has psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. The firm was hired by the Trump campaign to help it target its message to potential voters. The Mercers have bankrolled the company and placed Steve Bannon on its board. We speak to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCdfgwdk_aM
TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We continue our conversation with Jane Mayer, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest piece is headlined "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency." The piece looks at how the secretive billionaire reshaped the political landscape.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the companies heavily funded by Robert Mercer is Cambridge Analytica, which claims it has psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. The firm was hired by the Trump campaign to help it target its message to potential voters. Steve Bannon even served on the company’s board. This is Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, speaking earlier this year.

ALEXANDER NIX: We started to look at issue models, predicting which issues, social and political, appeal to which members of the target audience, which voters. We actually assigned different issues to every adult in the entire United States. We could then take these models and put them into a matrix, a little bit like the dental health example, where we can categorize people or segment them according to how they’re likely to behave. Core Trump supporters, top right, may be more susceptible to a donation solicitation. Get out the vote: people who are going to vote Republican, but they need persuading to do so. Persuasion audiences: people who need shifting a little bit from the center towards the right. Once we’ve identified a segment, we can then subsegment them by the issues that are most relevant to them, and then start to target them with specific messages.

AMY GOODMAN: Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix. So, Cambridge Analytica has—claims to have psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. Jane Mayer, tell us its significance. Steve Bannon was on its board, funded by the Mercers.

JANE MAYER: Well, again, this is part of—if you look at the history, what happened was, after 2012, when Obama was re-elected, despite the fact that the Mercers had put millions of dollars into trying to defeat him, they were upset, and they wanted to try to get better political tools with more traction. So they put money into Breitbart. They put money into the Government Accountability Institute. And the third prong was Cambridge Analytica.

It was—at that point, they concluded, and so did many others, that the Republican Party’s data analytics for running campaigns were lagging behind those that the Democrats had. The Democrats—Obama had a famously good sort of computer operation and data team. And so, they tried to—they decided, "We’ll run our own." They bought a company. They basically invested heavily in building an—it’s an offshoot of an existing English company called Strategic Communication Laboratories. And the British company had been involved in psychological warfare operations for militaries and international elections and kind of some pretty interesting and sneaky-seeming things, which raised a lot of eyebrows when its offshoot was purchased, basically, created by this one hedge-fund family.

You know, when I looked into this, it seemed that there was less than meets the eye, in many ways, so far. Alexander Nix, who is running Cambridge Analytica, is a great salesman, and he’s got this pitch that makes it sound like something from, you know, the movie The Matrix or something, that they’re going to be conducting psychological warfare with this propaganda machine in this country. The truth is, during the Trump campaign, they never used any of their so-called secret psychometric methods. They simply performed like any other kind of data analytics company. And the stuff they did was no different from what the Democrats do and other campaigns do. You know, maybe at some point they’ll have some superpowers that have yet to be revealed, but they aren’t there yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Jane, before we wrap up, we want to go to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Neil Gorsuch, really interesting dialogue between Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse questioning Gorsuch on the $10 million dark money campaign supporting his nomination.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: If a question were to come up regarding recusal on the court, how would we know that the partiality question in a recusal matter had been adequately addressed if we did not know who was spending all of this money to get you confirmed? Hypothetically, it could be one individual. Hypothetically, it could be your friend, Mr. Anschutz. We don’t know, because it’s dark money. Is it any cause of concern to you that your nomination is the focus of a $10 million political spending effort and we don’t know who’s behind it?


JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Senator, there’s a lot about the confirmation process today that I regret.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Judge Neil Gorsuch being questioned by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Jane Mayer, in this last 30 seconds that we have, can you comment on this?

JANE MAYER: Well, yeah. I mean, the thing about dark money is, often the person who it’s benefiting knows; it’s just the public that’s not allowed to know. And there’s tons of money behind the Gorsuch nomination, and he probably knows who he owes the favor to.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain a little further the term "dark money."

JANE MAYER: Well, there are these organizations, 501(c)(4) groups, that are set up, where the donors’ hands are not seen. They can spend money on advertising, and the public doesn’t know who they are. They’re nonprofit groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network. And I’ve looked at that one. And, you know, you, as a reporter, and me, as standing in for the public, cannot trace the money. Yet it’s playing an active role in American politics.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jane Mayer, I want to thank you so much for spending the hour with us, staff writer for The New Yorker. We’ll link to your piece, "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency." Her book is out in paperback, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/robe ... -analytica



Samuel Oakford‏Verified account
@samueloakford
Such a remarkable way to look at your job... as a public servant. Tillerson seems to think he is still a CEO?
Image


Adam Khan‏
@Khanoisseur

Every time I think we've captured all the Trump-Russian links, a new one pops up–need a Wikipedia like effort on this @Parsifalssister
Image


The Post's View Opinion
Shut down Nunes’s investigation — and investigate him for leaking
Rep. Nunes apologizes for handling of Trump surveillance claim Embed Share Play Video1:11
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes apologized to committee colleagues behind close doors on March 23, after facing sharp backlash for going to the press and the White House before consulting with them about what he said was fresh intelligence about surveillance of the president and his associates. (Reuters)
By Editorial Board March 23 at 7:40 PM
REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-Calif.) on Monday denounced what he described as the illegal leak of classified information concerning conversations between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials. He insisted that those who described those contacts to the press be tracked down and prosecuted. He demanded that FBI Director James B. Comey confirm that such revelations “violate . . . a section of the Espionage Act that criminalizes the disclosure of information concerning the communication and intelligence activities of the United States.”

Forty-eight hours later, Mr. Nunes himself held a news conference in which he cited a confidential source to describe what clearly appeared to be classified information about intercepted communications involving Trump associates. He did this outside the White House, where he had rushed to brief the president about the intercepts — even though the House Intelligence Committee he chairs is supposed to be investigating the Trump campaign’s possible connections with Russia.

We’ve said before that it was doubtful that an investigation headed by Mr. Nunes into Russia’s interference in the election could be adequate or credible. The chairman’s contradictory and clownish grandstanding makes that a certainty. His committee’s investigation should be halted immediately — and Mr. Nunes deserves to be subject to the same leaking probe he demanded for the previous disclosures.

Mr. Nunes’s behavior provoked head-scratching from Republican colleagues, in addition to denunciations from Democrats; Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called it “bizarre.” But there was nothing really irrational about the representative’s actions: He was simply doing everything in his power to protect President Trump, for whom he has become a fierce, if erratic, guard dog. In denouncing leaks Monday, Mr. Nunes was doing his best to deflect attention from what appears to be a substantial ongoing FBI investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

In offering his own leak Wednesday, Mr. Nunes was trying to provide cover for Mr. Trump’s false claim that his campaign had been wiretapped on orders of President Barack Obama — a statement that Mr. Comey flatly described as groundless. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Trump declared hours later — again, falsely — that Mr. Nunes had proved him right.

In fact, as Mr. Nunes himself acknowledged, the intercepts he described were legal and appropriate, the result of routine surveillance of foreign targets, or that were approved by a secret court. The identities of the Americans who were picked up in the conversations were mostly masked — Mr. Nunes said he was able to figure out they were Trump associates because of the context. Quite possibly, the chairman revealed the same intelligence that sources described to The Post when it reported on conversations between Michael Flynn, then Mr. Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a disclosure Mr. Nunes tarred as criminal.

Mr. Nunes’s antics serve only to underline the urgency of a serious, nonpartisan and uncompromising investigation into Russia’s interference in the election and any contacts between Moscow’s agents and the Trump campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is also conducting a probe, may make a useful contribution, but as Mr. McCain said, “no longer does the Congress have the credibility to handle this alone.” It is time to discuss the formation of an independent, nonpartisan commission with full subpoena power, like those that investigated the attacks of 9/11 and the intelligence failures in Iraq. In the meantime, House leaders should put an end to the embarrassing travesty being directed by Mr. Nunes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ad95918f25


DEMOCRACY & GOVERNMENT
‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air’
FBI and NSA chiefs verify a Russia probe and refute the president's claims as Republicans scramble to pretend the "drip, drip, drip" hasn't started.

BY MICHAEL WINSHIP | MARCH 21, 2017

Monday’s hearing of the House Intelligence Committee was proof positive of the absolute need for both a special prosecutor and an independent, bipartisan commission with subpoena power to conduct a full investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections with Russian intelligence — as well as Russia’s multipronged attack on our elections and Trump’s business connections with that country’s oligarchs.

And it’s proof more than ever that even if we get that prosecutor and inquiry, a free and independent press may be the only real way to ever get to the bottom of what ranking committee member Adam Schiff said may represent “one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history.”

Just as FBI Director James Comey officially revealed for the very first time (finally!) that indeed since late July the FBI has been investigating whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia’s interference with our elections, Republicans, led by committee chair and Trump enabler Devin Nunes did their best to blow smoke aimed at deflecting attention from what Trump and his team may or not have done. Instead, they asked question after question about the illegality of leaks of confidential material to the media — in particular, leaks about former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia.

(Note that there was agreement that leaks are illegal but no one mentioned that it’s the media’s complete and constitutionally guaranteed right to report on them. Nor was anyone asked how many times GOP members of the committee have done their own leaking.)

Trump did what he could to distract as well, firing a volley of five heated early-morning tweets just before testimony began, reiterating claims that disgruntled Democrats manufactured charges about Russia’s involvement in the election and contact with Trump aides. There were more during the hearing itself — from Trump or someone at the White House tweeting in his name — twisting the day’s testimony by Comey and National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers. Bizarrely, the two men then were placed in the position of having to rebut Trump’s allegations while they still were in the witness seats, correcting and putting the president in his place — virtually in real time.

Not only did Comey verify that the FBI was actively investigating Trump and his associates, he also flatly denied on behalf of his agency and the Justice Department that prior to January’s inauguration now-former President Obama had ordered eavesdropping on Trump Tower. Under normal circumstances this would seem to neutralize yet another of Trump’s wacky tweet storms, this one from two weeks ago, but as we’ve learned so well, the truth has never been a barrier to the social media madness of King Donald I.

And yet, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told The Washington Post, “There’s a smell of treason in the air. Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mindboggling event.”

But here we are, adrift in a Cloud Cuckoo Land of prevarication and incompetence in which little seems capable of boggling or driving our minds agog these days and where the truth shall not set you free but subject you to ridicule from the rabid trolls of the right.

And still there is hope. Even though neither Comey nor Rogers would reveal much of what they are discovering — continually citing the confidentiality they said was necessary to an ongoing investigation — the questions asked, despite the “no comment” answers, suggested ongoing areas of inquiry not only for investigating committees but also for the press.

For it is the free and independent media that continue to provide our clearest window into the extent of the investigation and the possible interface among the Trump campaign, Russia and the right. Late Monday, for example, McClatchy News reported:

“Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

“Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as ‘bots,’ to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.”

McClatchy reports that most of the stories were linked from social media posts and many of them connected to stories at Breitbart and Alex Jones’ InfoWars, as well as Russia Today and Sputnik News:

“Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.”

The spin machines are twirling at cyclonic speeds as the White House and the Republican Party counterattack or try to act as if none of this is happening. Like the refugee couple in Casablanca, they pretend to hear very little and understand even less. At the end of Monday’s testimony, intelligence committee chair Nunes actually told David Corn of Mother Jones that he had never heard of Roger Stone or Carter Page, two of the Trump/Russia story’s most prominent and tawdry players. Ingenuous or ignorant? You be the judge.

“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?” Adam Schiff asked at Monday’s hearing.

“Yes, it is possible. But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians use the same techniques to corrupt US persons that they employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know. Not yet. And we owe it to the country to find out.”

During Schiff’s questioning on Monday, Comey seemed to nod toward agreeing that Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee was not unlike the 1972 physical break-in at the DNC. You know, the one that precipitated the revelations, resignations and prison convictions of Watergate. Drip, drip, drip…
http://billmoyers.com/story/theres-smell-treason-air/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 11:47 am

Trump’s Longtime Lawyer Is Defending Russia’s Biggest Bank
Marc E. Kasowitz, who has represented Donald Trump for more than 15 years, was recently named a lead attorney in a federal civil lawsuit against Sberbank, which is majority-owned by the Russian government.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/anthonycormier ... .yb09goM2Z





https://twitter.com/SethAbramson

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(MEGA-THREAD) The plot to sell America's foreign policy for foreign oil _and_ steal an election in the bargain began at the Mayflower Hotel.

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1) Per @NYMag, Paul Manafort took over the Trump campaign on April 16, just 72 hours before Trump mathematically eliminated his competition.

2) The timing was intentional: Manafort, hired in March, was slated to become the campaign's key player as soon as Trump became the nominee.

3) On April 21, 48 hours after clinching, Trump announced the first major foreign policy address of his life. It was scheduled for April 27.

4) The speech, arranged by Jared Kushner in mid-March, was to be hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a conservative think tank.

5) The Center is _widely_ known to have "ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin," per Politico.

6) The speech was slated to be at the National Press Club, an august venue with a _long_ history of staging secure events with large crowds.

7) Less than 24 hours before the speech, it was cancelled. The Trump campaign (i.e., Manafort) declared the venue was too small and unsafe.

8) So Manafort moved the event to the Mayflower Hotel: a smaller, less secure site. The decision confirmed the campaign's excuses were lies.


Daniel Pincus
Is not The Mayflower often used as a house of prostitution? Same industry, different area.

Tom LeBlanc‏
As in "Mayflower Madam"? I do believe you are correct sir.

J. Smith-Cameron‏Verified account @j_smithcameron 12h12 hours ago
Actually, Sydney Biddle Barrows, The "Mayflower Madam", supposedly descended from a Mayflower passenger

J. Smith-Cameron‏Verified account @j_smithcameron 12h12 hours ago
Her "escorts" went to various hotels to meet their clientele (I don't think The Mayflower Hotel though)

Tom LeBlanc‏
Was it because she had relatives on the Mayflower? I guess I should google that

AnneTheWriter


1/ The Mayflower Descendants are a high-society clique that were "above reproach."

AnneTheWriter‏

2/ Barrows was born into money & society, but threw it away to be a high-priced madam.



The cover up continues....hearings scheduled for next week canceled by Nunes

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can trump delay all this until ALL the witnesses are DEAD?

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 4:12 pm

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 8810703874

Seth Abramson‏Verified account @SethAbramson 18h18 hours ago

(MEGA-THREAD) The plot to sell America's foreign policy for foreign oil _and_ steal an election in the bargain began at the Mayflower Hotel.

8) So Manafort moved the event to the Mayflower Hotel: a smaller, less secure site. The decision confirmed the campaign's excuses were lies.

9) The two things the Mayflower had that the NPC didn't were (a) 581 private rooms for private meetings, and (b) restricted, VIP-only areas.
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10) The latter was important because Manafort wanted Trump to hold an intimate, 24-person cocktail hour in the Mayflower's VIP Senate Room.

11) Among the 24 at the event: Trump, CNI event coordinator Heilbrunn, Jeff Sessions, Kushner, Lewandowski, Manafort, and four ambassadors.
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12) Another VIP at the event was Iran-Contra figure Bud McFarlane, one of America's chief advocates for a bargain with Russia on oil access.
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13) The four ambassadors were the only four ambassadors in the world (out of 195 total) that the Putin-linked CNI had invited to the event.

14) The _biggest oil deal in Russia's history_ occurred in December of 2016. It involved the coordination of entities from three countries.

15) Individuals from those three countries—RUSSIA, ITALY, and SINGAPORE—negotiated the sale of 19.5% of Russia's state oil company, Rosneft.
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16) The #Russiagate scandal involves claims Trump was given 0.5% of Rosneft and aid in getting elected in exchange for lifting US sanctions.
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17) The Rosneft deal closed Dec. 5-7. During that time McFarlane visited Trump Tower. It's believed Russian ambassador/spy Kislyak did too.
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18) WSJ wrote in April 2016 that Trump met separately with the ambassadors at the Mayflower and was effusive. Quote:
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19) “Trump met at a VIP reception with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. He warmly greeted Kislyak and 3 other ambassadors."

20) The ambassadors at the Mayflower: RUSSIA! ITALY! SINGAPORE! And the Philippines--which is routinely cited as a Rosneft expansion target.
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21) So Trump warmly, privately chatted with the 3 Rosneft-deal nations at a cocktail hour right before his _first big foreign-policy event_.

22) In his speech Trump called for a Russian detente: "We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia...we are not bound...
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23) to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests...an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia...
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24) is possible..[I hope to] make a deal under my administration that’s great for America but also good for Russia."
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25) Richard Burt, CNI and Russian Alfa Bank adviser, _crafted the speech_. He was also _Putin's pipeline lobbyist_.

Juan PerezBirdieMary PolveMatthew BaldwinChristine BJorlian GalvezKessem ErezMatthew MacomberLittle Niangua
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26) The only Kislyak meeting Sessions _never_ disclosed to Congress, _even after accusations of perjury_, was the meeting at the Mayflower.
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27) But per the organizer of the Mayflower Hotel event, Jacob Heilbrunn of the CNI, a third Sessions-Kislyak meeting _definitely_ occurred.

28) Heilbrunn on the VIP event: "At a reception in the Senate Room of the Mayflower, a number of politicians and Trump advisers, such as...

29) ... Senator Jeff Sessions and ambassadors [from Russia and the other nations] congregated before the event."

30) The VIP event _wasn't_ just a receiving line as Trump claimed. It was a "cocktail meet-and-greet"--a full event.

31) That Sessions would feel the need to hide his contact with Kislyak at the Mayflower event after accusations of perjury raises red flags.

32) The White House saying it has “no recollection” of any of the VIPs at Trump's _biggest-ever foreign policy event_ is also a red flag.


33) When Kislyak was asked if he’d met Trump or members of his team during the campaign he replied, "What do you consider a campaign?"
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

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