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 5:20 am

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Follow the money ... cleaning #TrumpRussia $ or "manipulating currency"

By annieli
Monday Mar 20, 2017 · 9:57 PM CDT

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Christ Driving the Money Changers out of the Temple Valentin de Boulogne
There’s just so much there there with the POTUS45* cabinet cabal, yet “currency manipulation” is a feature not a bug, and the irony of declaring the PRC a “currency manipulator” suggests an interesting projection distracting us from some of the real (estate) reasons for #TrumpRussia.

At some moment, can Christ ever cleanse the Temple … Wilbur (a Horse is a Horse) Ross, like Rex Tillerson is our Montgomery Burns and Trump Tower is the Augean Stables.

The entire affaire de Trump boils down to bucks regardless of wrangling over “leaks” and the subjugation of peoples.

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Serrano, M., & Kenny, P. (2003). The International Regulation of Money Laundering. Global Governance,9(4), 433-439. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800495
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The White House has been accused of withholding information from Congress about whether Donald Trump or any of his campaign affiliates have ever received loans from a bank in Cyprus that is partly owned by a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

A group of Democratic senators have been waiting for two weeks for Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who has served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus since 2014, to answer a series of questions about possible links between the bank, Russian officials, and current and former Trump administration and campaign officials. Ross also received a second letter on Friday from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey with more detailed questions about possible Russia links.

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Ross, a private equity investor who has said he would step down from the bank after his final confirmation, had also been asked to provide more details about his own relationship with previous and current Russian investors in the bank, including Viktor Vekselberg, a longtime ally of the Russian president, and Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, the former vice-chairman of Bank of Cyprus who is also a former KGB agent with a close relationship to Putin.

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Ross recruited a high-profile banker with close ties to Russia, former Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackermann, to serve as chairman of the bank. In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Ackermann suggested his work for the Bank of Cyprus was an effort to “give something back to the people”.

IMG_0100-Hilary-Geary-Ross-and-Wilbur-Ross_1_.jpg
In his letter, Booker asked Ross to explain why he had appointed Ackermann as chairman of the bank, noting that Deutsche Bank is the Trump Organization’s largest creditor.

Ross’s investment followed a controversial 2013 bailout of the bank at the height of the European debt crisis that was agreed by the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. At the time, the deal was scrutinised by German politicians who expressed concern that taxpayer funds were being used to bail out a money laundering haven used by Russian oligarchs.

A German intelligence report cited by Der Spiegel at the time suggested that Russian deposits in Cyprus banks were worth between €8 to €35bn ($8.5 to $37bn).
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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/03/ ... g-currency





FBI Investigation Into Trump-Russia Ties Began 3 Months Before Elections
FBI chief confirmed that the agency was probing Russia's meddling in last year's presidential polls

Press Trust Of India | Washington | Updated: March 21, 2017 9:03 am 48

In a rare disclosure, the FBI chief confirmed that the agency was probing Russia’s meddling in last year’s presidential polls, including possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

According to sources, the investigations into the ties between Trump and Russia began from as early as 3 months before the elections.

Testifying before the powerful House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey said the decision to confirm the ongoing investigation is rare as the agency as a matter of policy does not confirm any ongoing investigation.

However, the Department of Justice in larger public interest has given its consent to do so in this case, he said.

“I have been authorised by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counter-intelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” Comey said.

“That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” he said.

Comey, however, refused to divulge any details of the ongoing probe.

Acknowledging that the work was very complex, the FBI Director said that there is no timeline to complete this investigation.

“I can promise you we will follow the facts wherever they lead,” he said.

“As you know, our practice is not to confirm the existence of ongoing investigations, especially those investigations that involve classified matters. But in unusual circumstances, where it is in the public interest, it may be appropriate to do so. This is one of those circumstances,” he said.

In his opening remarks, Congressman David Nunes, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence alleged that the Putin regime has a long history of aggressive actions against other countries, including the outright invasion of two of its neighbours in recent years as well as its brutal military action in Syria to defend the Assad regime.

But its hostile acts take many forms aside from direct military assaults, he said.

Nunes alleged Russia has a long history of meddling in other countries’ election systems and launching cyber attacks on a wide range of countries and industries.

The Baltics and other Russian neighbours have long decried these attacks, but their warnings went unheeded in far too many nations’ capitals, including our own.

The fact that Russia hacked US election-related databases comes as no shock to this Committee, which has been closely monitoring Russia’s aggression for years,” Nunes said.

Joining Nunes, the Ranking Member Congressman Adam Schiff said last summer at the height of a bitterly contested and hugely consequential presidential campaign, Russia, a foreign adversarial power, intervened in an effort to weaken US democracy and to influence the outcome for one candidate and against the other.

The direction in this regard was issued by “its autocratic ruler Vladimir Putin, in order to help Donald J Trump become the 45th president of the United States,” Schiff alleged.

“The Russians successfully meddled in our democracy and our intelligence agencies have concluded they will do so again. Ours is not the first democracy to be attacked by the Russians in this way. Russian intelligence has been similarly interfering in the internal and political affairs of our European and other allies for decades,” Schiff said.
http://newsworldindia.in/world/fbi-inve ... ns/251626/
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 5:29 am

Andrew Napolitano reportedly pulled from Fox News over debunked wiretapping claims
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... b2f7ec78fc


Administration Tries to Distance Campaign Aides From Trump
An FBI investigation into possible connections between Donald Trump "associates" and Russia is causing the White House to distance itself from two former senior members of the president's team.

| March 21, 2017, at 3:37 a.m


By JILL COLVIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is distancing itself from two former senior members of Donald Trump's team amid an FBI investigation into possible connections between Trump "associates" and Russia.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Monday referred to Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, as a "volunteer of the campaign." And he said Paul Manafort, who ran Trump's campaign for months, "played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time."

"And so to start to look at some individual that was there for a short period of time or, separately, individuals who really didn't play any role in the campaign and to suggest that those are the basis for anything is a bit ridiculous," he said.

Spicer wrongly claimed that Manafort was brought onto Trump's campaign "sometime in June and by the middle of August he was no longer with the campaign." In fact, Manafort was hired in late March as Trump's convention manager, and was promoted to campaign chairman in May. He resigned from the campaign's top post in mid-August, amid an onslaught of negative press having to do with his past work for foreign governments, including pro-Russian Ukrainian leaders.

Manafort issued a statement Monday defending himself against suggestions he played a part in Russia's efforts to interfere with the U.S. presidential campaign. He said he had "no role or involvement" in the cyber hack of the Democratic National Committee and disclosure of stolen emails.

Flynn, meanwhile, was one of the president's closest advisers throughout the campaign and the transition, frequently traveling on his plane. He was named national security adviser, but resigned from the White House last month after he was found to have misled senior members of the administration about his contacts with Russia's top diplomat to the U.S.

During a congressional hearing Monday examining Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible connections between Moscow and Trump's aides, FBI Director James Comey was asked about various campaign advisers and staffers, including Carter Page, whom Trump once named as one of his foreign policy advisers. Comey generally declined to talk about specific staffers.

In a letter to the Senate intelligence committee, Page, who has emerged as a key figure in the controversy surrounding Trump associates' connections to Russia, cast himself as a regular presence in Trump Tower, where the campaign was headquartered.

"I have frequently dined in Trump Grill, had lunch in Trump Café, had coffee meetings in the Starbucks at Trump Tower, attended events and spent many hours in campaign headquarters on the fifth floor last year," Page wrote. It is unclear whether that is true. After the campaign, Trump's lawyers sent Page at least two cease and desist letters.

Spicer described Page and other individuals mentioned during the hearing as "hangers-oner on the campaign."

"Those people, the greatest amount of interaction that they had with the campaign was the campaign apparently sending them a series of cease and desists," he said
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... from-trump




House Intel Committee schedules 2nd round of Trump-Russia hearings; Senate also sets start date
By Bill Palmer | March 20, 2017 | 0

The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee managed to pull off something surprising with yesterday’s hearings on Donald Trump and Russia. Despite lacking a majority on the committee, and despite getting little help from their Republican counterparts, the Democrats were able to turn the proceedings into an eye popping indictment of Trump. And that’s just the beginning, both because the House has scheduled a second round, and because here come the more crucial Senate Intel hearings on the same subject.

For reasons known only to Republican House Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, he more or less allowed the Democrats to walk all over him during the House proceedings. Popular Democratic figures like Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro teamed with sudden rising stars like Jackie Speier and Eric Swalwell as they collectively painted a picture of Trump and his advisers as being little more than a puppet of the Kremlin. At times the Democrats asked FBI Director James Comey the right questions so he could factually dismantle Trump’s defenses and protestations. At other times they simply used questions they knew Comey couldn’t answer in order to air out key evidence before the cameras.

The House Intel Committee has announced that it will be holding a second round of public hearings on Tuesday March 28th (source: CNBC). This may be key, because four scheduled witnesses still have yet to testify. Among them: former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump after she warned him that Michael Flynn was dirty on Russia. Nunes seemed willing to let the Democrats have their way with the hearings, perhaps because public sentiment is increasingly on their side when it comes to Trump-Russia, and he may do so again on the 28th. But the House Intel investigation itself may not lead to anything, as the Republicans hold a 13-9 majority on the committee, and none of them (with the possible exception of the increasingly dissenting Ileana Ros-Lehtinen) seem to have any inclination to seriously expose Trump’s Russian collusion.

With the Senate Intelligence Committee, it’s a very different story. The Republicans hold just a one seat majority on that committee to begin with, and that was essentially reversed a month ago when Republican Senator Susan Collins publicly threw her weight behind aggressively investigating Trump-Russia. The shift in power is why the committee has done everything from poring over binders of classified CIA intel at Langley, to formally targeting Trump adviser Roger Stone this week. The members have publicly shared little about the nature of their upcoming hearings, but yesterday they did quietly reveal the date.

Thursday, March 30th will see the start of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s televised public hearings on Donald Trump and Russia (source: CNBC). Committee chair Richard Burr already announced five days ago (source: Newsweek) that they won’t be wasting any time on Donald Trump’s phony wiretap claim, due to a lack of evidence – and that was before Comey definitely resolved that matter yesterday by confirming that there is in fact no evidence.

The initial witness list for the Senate Intel Committee hearings hasn’t yet been publicly posted. But this week they instructed Roger Stone not to destroy any Trump-Russia evidence. This typically means the committee already has the electronic evidence in question, and is trying to bait Stone into deleting it, which would be crime they can then use to leverage him into flipping on his co-conspirators. So it seems likely that Stone, along with the likes of Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn may be the star witnesses when the Senate hearings begin in nine days
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/house- ... date/2005/
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 5:41 am

:lol: :lol:
Spicer says Manafort played a 'very limited role' in the campaign

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/p ... ign-236269


Comey Disclosures Leave Trump Alone On Island of Conspiracy Theories
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-h ... es-n736101


Josh Marshall‏Verified account @joshtpm 6h6 hours ago
With White House now saying Flynn & Manafort were peripheral figures in the campaign, hard to imagine scale of desperation now.


Manafort sought for questioning – in D.C. and Kiev
Authorities in Washington and Kiev are seeking testimony from Trump’s former campaign chairman.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL, JOSH MEYER and DAVID STERN 03/20/17 09:50 PM
By JOHN A. FARRELL

American and Ukrainian officials are pushing to question President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in separate investigations related to his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine once headed by that country’s disgraced former president Viktor Yanukovych.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) told POLITICO that Manafort “would certainly be at the top of my list to testify” before the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.


The panel held its first public hearing Monday, featuring hours of testimony from FBI Director James Comey, who publicly acknowledged for the first time that his agency is investigating the possibility of Russian coordination with members of Trump’s campaign team. “Of all of the characters in and around the Trump campaign and administration, Paul Manafort’s relationships with Russians are by far the longest-standing and the deepest,” said Himes, who is a member of the committee. “And he has some pretty unsavory contacts.”

At the same time, an investigative department within a top Ukrainian law enforcement agency intends to ask the U.S. Department of Justice for help questioning Manafort about his possible relationship to Yanukovych during the 2014 riots that drove Yanukovych from power, according to Serhiy Gorbatyuk, the head of the department for special investigations within the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine.

Gorbatyuk’s section of the office had previously sought the DOJ's assistance with an ongoing investigation into allegations of illegal government spending during Yanukovych’s time in office, including payments to a Washington law firm that assisted Yanukovych in a legal battle with an imprisoned political foe.

But Gorbatyuk said the DOJ did not respond to seven previous requests for assistance from the prosecutor’s office — two formal requests followed by five “reminders.”

One missive was sent directly to Comey, whose agency is an arm of the DOJ, CNN reported on Sunday.

Gorbatyuk acknowledged that the office was at least somewhat confused by the lack of cooperation from the FBI, which has an evidence-sharing agreement with the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. “I would call it a lack of understanding why it's taking so long to fulfill our requests,” he said.

The Ukrainian inquiries would be hampered without the DOJ's cooperation, Gorbatyuk added. “For our investigations, it is important to receive the materials that fulfill our requests and these include interviews with [the Washington law firm] and Paul Manafort,” he said.

Manafort said he had not been contacted by the FBI or anyone in the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office, and he cast the scrutiny of him as “a blatant attempt to discredit me and the legitimacy of the election of President Trump.”

In a statement distributed by a public relations consultant he hired recently to deal with a rising number of media inquiries, Manafort declared that he had “no role or involvement” in the theft and public dissemination of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the personal email account of John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. intelligence community has attributed the hacks to Russia.

Manafort said “I have never spoken with any Russian government officials or anyone who claimed to have been involved in the attack.”

He added that “despite the constant scrutiny and innuendo, there are no facts or evidence supporting these allegations, nor will there be.”

As the focus on Manafort intensified Monday, the White House sought to distance Trump from the veteran GOP operative. Manafort took control of Trump’s campaign during a pivotal stretch last spring, when the candidate was working to clinch the GOP nomination and unite the party, remaining at the helm until mid-August, when he was forced to resign amid scrutiny over his work in Ukraine.

Press secretary Sean Spicer declared from the White House briefing room podium that Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

At Monday’s intelligence committee hearing, Comey said his agency is investigating Russia’s interference in the U.S. election to benefit Trump, as well as “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

But the handling of the inquiries as they relate to Manafort could fuel questions about whether investigators are putting their full weight into investigations related to ties between Trump, his team and Russia.

Democrats on the intelligence committee have accused Comey of being less than forthcoming with information about the investigation. And some Democrats are grumbling that the FBI has assigned fewer agents to the Trump-Russia case than it had working on a case involving the mishandling of classified information by Clinton when she was secretary of state.

It’s not clear whether the committee’s Republicans, whose control over the panel gives them more sway over witness lists, will allow Manafor or other witnesses connected to the president to be called.

During Monday’s proceedings, Himes drew attention to questions about the FBI’s participation in the Ukraine investigation, asking Comey why his agency hadn’t responded to earlier requests for assistance from the Ukrainian prosecutor general.

“That's not something I can comment on,” Comey said. “I can say generally we have a very strong relationship and cooperation in the criminal and national security areas with our Ukrainian partners. But I can't talk about the particular matter.”

An FBI spokeswoman would not comment on the requests or even confirm that they had been received.

A different federal law enforcement official urged caution in reading into a delayed response from the DOJ to the requests from Gorbatyuk, the Ukrainian prosecutor.

Requests under such so-called mutual legal assistance treaties often precipitate prolonged negotiations and usually involve government-to-government assistance as opposed to help in interviewing a private citizen. “This stuff just takes time,” the official said.

Gorbatyuk’s office can only investigate foreigners who are charged with committing crimes on Ukrainian soil, and it can’t approach foreigners outside the country for questioning without assistance from their country of citizenship.

Manafort is not a suspect in the investigation by Gorbatyuk’s office, he stressed.

“This is part of an investigation into the former president, Viktor Yanukovych, on suspicion of creating a 'criminal organization,’” said Gorbatyuk.

The office’s most recent line of inquiry — into Manafort’s possible relationship with Yanukovych during the months-long Euromaidan protests that began in late 2013 — stems from texts apparently hacked from the cellphone of Manafort’s daughter Andrea.

In one March 2015 exchange of text messages that appears to be between Andrea Manafort and her sister, Andrea Manafort seems to suggest that their father bore some responsibility for the deaths of protesters at the hands of police loyal to Yanukovych during the protests.

“Don't fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort wrote. “That money we have is blood money.”

Manafort has acknowledged that Andrea Manafort was hacked, and he corroborated the authenticity of at least some of the text messages, which were posted in a data file on a so-called darknet website affiliated with a hacktivist collective.

He has said he wasn’t in Ukraine during Euromaiden, and he asserted that his work in Ukraine was “open, transparent and focused on doing all that I could to promote policies that were pro-Western” and focused on “moving Ukraine into the [European Union].”

Another revelation about Manafort’s work in Ukraine surfaced Monday night, when The New York Times reported on documents that it said appeared to show that the Party of Regions tried to hide a $750,000 payment to Manafort by funneling it through an offshore account and disguising it as a payment for 501 computers.

A Ukrainian parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who has alleged that Manafort was paid millions of dollars illegally by the Party of Regions, released the documents to the Times, and announced a Tuesday news conference in Kiev ostensibly to highlight them. Before the Times story posted, Leshchenko wrote on Twitter that the documents would reveal “how Manafort legalized money paid by ousted President Yanukovych.”

A spokesman for Manafort told POLITICO that Leshchenko’s claims were “baseless.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/p ... sia-236286
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 6:16 am

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“That is a huge, huge deal, and yet, only 60 days into this administration, you hear that and you’re like, meh,” Meyers joked of Comey’s Russia-Trump investigation reveal. “At this point, Melania would have to take Trump on a high-speed chase in a Ford Bronco for us to say, ‘This is unexpected! This is a twist I didn’t see coming!’” :lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQbanqJT4Uc

He’s back — Comey drops bombshell on Trump
BY MORGAN CHALFANT - 03/21/17 06:00 AM EDT 0

© Victoria Sarno Jordan
FBI Director James Comey is once again shaking Washington to its core.

Comey, a pivotal character in the 2016 election who many Democrats say cost their party the White House, confirmed Monday that the FBI is investigating possible links between Russia and President Trump’s campaign.

“I can promise you we will follow the facts wherever they lead,” Comey vowed in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, which is also looking into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.

The announcement ensures that Comey and the FBI will hover over the administration for as long the investigation takes, frustrating Republicans who would like to move on from the controversies surrounding Trump and Moscow.

Comey, a thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton’s campaign throughout the 2016 race, is now becoming an irritant to the Republican president, who many Democrats say would never have reached the White House without the FBI’s actions.

The FBI director gave few details about the Russia probe, leaving it unclear just who is under investigation. Just as unclear is how long the investigation will take.

What is certain is that the probe is unwelcome news for the White House and the GOP.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who served on Trump’s transition team, described it as “a big gray cloud” over the Trump White House.

After the hearing, he expressed frustration with Comey, who dodged questions about whom exactly the investigation might cover.

“I think this is very problematic moving forward — that you can’t even say whether or not people in the White House or the administration are under some kind of investigation. I think that’s very problematic,” Nunes said.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) appeared to argue that Comey was hurting the political system with his decision.

He said the Russian government wanted to “put a cloud over our system” with its actions during the presidential campaign.

“Mr. Comey, your announcement today — there is now a cloud that undermines our system,” Turner said.

Monday’s dramatic developments are nothing new for Comey, who seems to thrive on drama.

While serving as deputy attorney general under former President George W. Bush, Comey once visited then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital bed to counsel him against signing papers reauthorizing a domestic surveillance program the Justice Department had determined was illegal.

The Ashcroft episode helped foster a narrative about Comey, who was said to be a public servant determinedly guarding the Department of Justice’s reputation.

But as Comey’s investigation of Clinton played out in the 2016 race, Democrats saw something different: a lifetime Republican unnecessarily meddling in an election.

In July, Comey announced the FBI would recommend no charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of State.

Comey also did damage to Clinton, however, by blasting the Democrat for being “extremely careless.”

It was to get worse for Clinton.

Just over a week before Election Day, Comey announced the FBI was looking into new emails in connection with its investigation of the private server.

Comey eventually announced just days before Election Day that the FBI had found nothing to change its earlier determination. But that was little solace to the Clinton campaign, which believes Comey’s decision cost Clinton the White House.

The Clinton campaign in a call to donors two days after Election Day argued that Comey’s letter announcing the continued investigation pushed voters in swing states away from Clinton.

Clinton officials were also angry that Comey and the FBI did not investigate Russia’s meddling in the presidential election to the degree to which they looked into whether Clinton transferred classified information through her private server.

“Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI,” Clinton campaign chief John Podesta wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post.

Comey has irritated members of both parties at different times over the last year.

Republicans howled when he did not recommend charges against Clinton, though Trump supporters cheered when he announced the FBI was looking into the new emails in November.

Comey’s latest revelation again puts him at odds with the GOP. It could separately inflame Trump’s feud with the intelligence community given leaked reports about contacts between his aides and Russian officials, which prompted the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn last month.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said there was no proof of collusion, citing previous statements by former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under the Obama administration.

“Investigating it and having proof are two different things,” Spicer said. “There’s a point at which you continue to search for something that everybody who’s been briefed hasn’t seen or found.”

There were questions after Trump’s election about whether he would keep Comey as FBI director.

He decided to do so, and even embraced Comey at a Jan. 22 White House event during which he praised the FBI director.

Spicer said Monday that there is no reason to believe Trump doesn’t have complete confidence in Comey — for now.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... l-on-trump
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 82_28 » Tue Mar 21, 2017 8:11 am

Thanks for that Closer Look link. I missed it last night. I don't think trump is going to last four or five more months.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:27 am

if anyone can get behind the paywall I'd like to read this article
TIA

New documents show Trump aide laundered payments from party with ...

20 mins ago - The documents released by a Ukrainian lawmaker claim Manafort ... New documents show Trump aide laundered payments from party with Moscow ties, ... Comey declined to say whether the FBI is coordinating with Ukraine on an .... New documents show Trump aide hid payments from Ukraine party with ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ne ... daaf9a68d0



I found part of it elsewhere

KIEV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian lawmaker on Tuesday released new financial documents allegedly showing that a former campaign chairman to President Trump laundered payments from the party of a disgraced ex-leader of Ukraine using offshore accounts in Belize and Kyrgyzstan.

The new documents may revive questions about the ties between the Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and the party of the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who has been in hiding in Russia since being overthrown by pro-Western protestors in 2014. He is wanted in Ukraine on corruption charges.

Manafort, who worked for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions for nearly a decade, resigned from Trump’s campaign in August after his name in connection with secret payments totaling $12.7 million by Yanukovych’s party. Manafort has denied receiving those payments, listed in the party’s so-called “black ledger.

The latest documents were released just hours after the House Intelligence Committee questioned FBI Director James Comey about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow, which also touched on Manafort’s work for Yanukovych’s party in Ukraine



Image
Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko holds pages showing allegedly signings of payments to Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort from an illegal shadow accounting book of the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych during a press conference in Kyiv on August 19, 2016
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 liminalOyster » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:49 am

SWIM has learned that opening a WAPO paywall-restricted URL in an incognito tab in Chrome seems to work.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 11:13 am

that's amazing ..thank you very much I appreciate the help liminalOyster


New documents show Trump aide laundered payments from party with Moscow ties, lawmaker alleges

By Andrew Roth March 21 at 10:42 AM

KIEV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian lawmaker released new financial documents Tuesday allegedly showing that a former campaign chairman for President Trump laundered payments from the party of a disgraced ex-leader of Ukraine using offshore accounts in Belize and Kyrgyzstan.

The new documents, if legitimate, stem from business ties between the Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who enjoyed Moscow’s backing while he was in power. He has been in hiding in Russia since being overthrown by pro-Western protesters in 2014, and is wanted in Ukraine on corruption charges.

The latest documents were released just hours after the House Intelligence Committee questioned FBI Director James B. Comey about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The hearing that also touched on Manafort’s work for Yanukovych’s party in Ukraine.

Comey declined to say whether the FBI is coordinating with Ukraine on an investigation of the alleged payments to Manafort.

[Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking]

Four controversial figures Paul Manafort did business with Play Video1:40
As a lobbyist and political consultant in the 1980s, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with international clients that included two dictators who were then allied with the United States. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
Manafort, who worked for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions for nearly a decade, resigned from Trump’s campaign in August after his name surfaced in connection with secret payments totaling $12.7 million by Yanukovych’s party. Manafort has denied receiving those, listed in the party’s “black ledger.”

Serhiy Leshchenko, a lawmaker and journalist, released a copy of an invoice on letterhead from Manafort’s consulting company, based in Alexandria, Va., dated Oct. 14, 2009, to a Belize-based company for $750,000 for the sale of 501 computers.

On the same day, Manafort’s name is listed next to a $750,000 entry in the “black ledger,” which was considered a party slush fund. The list was found at the party headquarters in the turmoil after Ukraine’s 2014 revolution. The ledger entries about Manafort were released by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, a government law enforcement agency, last August.

Leshchenko alleges that Manafort falsified an invoice to the Belize company to legitimize the $750,000 payment to himself.

“I have found during this investigation that [Manafort] used offshore jurisdictions and falsified invoices to get money from the corrupt Ukrainian leader,” Leshchenko said during a news conference in downtown Kiev, where he provided a copy of the invoice to journalists.

[If Moscow tried to influence the U.S. election, things aren’t going as planned]

He said he received the invoices and other documents in January from the new tenants of Manafort’s former offices in downtown Kiev. The documents were left behind in a safe, he said, adding that Manafort’s signature and his company seal were proof that the documents were authentic.

Leshchenko said he was not aware of any formal Ukrainian investigation of the documents. He declined to comment on whether he had discussed the documents with U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Nazar Kholodnytskyi, a deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine whose department specializes in corruption cases, said in an interview on Tuesday that the documents hadn’t been confirmed by law enforcement or, to his knowledge, submitted for examination. There is an ongoing investigation into the black ledgers, he said, but Manafort was not a target of that investigation.

Manafort has previously accused Leshchenko of blackmailing him by threatening to release harmful information about his financial relationship with Yanukovych. That correspondence between Leshchenko and Manafort’s daughter was released in February as the result of a purported cyberhack. Leshchenko has called the exchange a forgery.

Manafort was involved in crafting the political strategy that brought Yanukovych to power after a crushing defeat in the 2004 elections. Yanukovych’s party has been accused of ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, particularly through wealthy oligarchs from the country’s east with interests in both Russia and Ukraine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ne ... 6e8881cb27
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 4:49 pm

When you start piecing together the Trump story, basically everywhere you look, whether it's residents in his Trump-branded buildings, or his business associates or investors in his projects, Trump is - there's simply no other way to put it - tied up with it not just Russians but in many cases Russians tied to the criminal underworld and money laundering.




Donald Trump, GoodFellas Edition

Pablo Martinez Monsivais
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedMARCH 21, 2017, 4:24 PM EDT
So there was an FBI wiretap in Trump Tower! Just not placed there by Barack Obama and not targeting Donald Trump. Between 2011 and 2013 the FBI had a court approved warrant to eavesdrop on a Russian organized crime and money laundering operation out of the 63rd floor of Trump Tower.

Here's one interesting little nugget.

For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” Tokhtakhounov was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.

Five months after the April 2013 indictment and after Interpol issued a “red notice” for Tokhtakhounov, the fugitive appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Moscow Miss Universe pageant. Trump had sold the Russian rights for Miss Universe to a billionaire Russian shopping mall developer.

On the one hand this may seem like guilt by association. Trump has a bunch of buildings. Some tenants must be crooks. But the context is important. When you start piecing together the Trump story, basically everywhere you look, whether it's residents in his Trump-branded buildings, or his business associates or investors in his projects, Trump is - there's simply no other way to put it - tied up with it not just Russians but in many cases Russians tied to the criminal underworld and money laundering.

People still remember when Trump joked that he could shoot a guy dead on 6th Avenue and still keep his supporters on Team Trump. Well, one of his tenants, Eduard Nektalov, a diamond dealer from Uzbekistan, actually was shot to death in broad daylight on 6th Avenue in a gangland assassination. He was reported cooperating at the time with the Feds.

Many are cases like this one in which Reuters looked at various public records to show that a substantial proportion of the units sold in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in Florida were sold to people with Russian passports or those with addresses in Russia. The vast majority of units were purchased by LLCs which hid the true owners identity. So the real number is likely much higher. That is likely no more than targeting well-off Russians looking for a place to stay in the US and a place to park money.

But many other cases are more sinister.

As I told someone yesterday, sometimes it's helpful to clear away any suggestion of geopolitical or intelligence shenanigans from the Trump story and see what's left. What's left is a guy who almost lost everything and then clawed his way back with a lot of pretty unsavory money. Look at Trump, any of his business partnerships and really anything else and you keep finding Russians with tons of money and frequent attention from the FBI. The idea that Trump associates may have connived with a Russian intelligence operation against the US electoral process is such a shocking and singular possibility that it tends to obscure this pretty shocking set of facts that are pretty much in plain view.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/don ... as-edition




pretty much in plain view
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 21, 2017 4:58 pm

The episode of Intercepted a few weeks ago with the Trump Goodfellas skit was great. I actually laughed out loud in public.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 5:31 pm

Reince Priebus’ FBI contacts suddenly look even worse
03/21/17 10:19 AM—UPDATED 03/21/17 11:03 AM
By Steve Benen
When there’s a major development in an ongoing controversy, it’s important to consider the news at face value, but it’s also important to reconsider previous details in light of new evidence.

Take White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’ communications with the FBI, for example.

We learned about a month ago that Priebus spoke with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about Team Trump’s Russia scandal, and by some accounts, the White House chief of staff hoped to persuade FBI officials to reach out to journalists to downplay the significance of the controversy.

As we discussed at the time, there are rules in place that severely limit the communications between the FBI and the White House, though in this case, Reince Priebus either didn’t know or didn’t care about those restrictions. Politico had a report over the weekend – before yesterday’s testimony from FBI Director James Comey, obviously – about the communications.
Reince Priebus’s request that the FBI refute a report of Donald Trump associates’ contacts with Russian intelligence appears to have violated the White House’s policy restricting political interference in pending investigations, according to a copy of the policy obtained by POLITICO.

The policy says only the president, vice president and White House counsel can discuss specific investigations or cases with the attorney general, deputy attorney general, associate attorney general or solicitor general. Any other conversations require the approval of the White House counsel, according to the document.
In other words, Priebus’ chats with the deputy director of the FBI – communications that the White House has already acknowledged – were problematic on their face.

But in light of yesterday’s news, they seem quite a bit worse.

Based on what we now know, the White House chief of staff improperly communicated with a leading FBI official while an FBI counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was already underway. Priebus hoped to get the FBI’s help in knocking down reports of a scandal while the FBI was reviewing that scandal.

None of this requires any supposition. We now know the FBI investigation is real and confirmed; we know Priebus had improper communications with the FBI about the investigation while it was ongoing.

Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen added this morning that Priebus, confronted with last month’s reports, claimed that the FBI reached out to him, claims that were dubious at the time, but which now appear even worse. Why would the FBI want the White House’s help downplaying its own ongoing counter-intelligence probe?

What the White House intends to do about this remains an open question.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... even-worse
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 5:41 pm

TRUMP, COMEY, RUSSIA AND A SERIES OF STRANGER THINGS
BY JEFF STEIN ON 3/21/17 AT 7:49 AM

SPYTALKDONALD TRUMPJAMES COMEYRUSSIA
It was like a decomposed corpse washing up on the river bank during a massive flood. It came in the form of a brief, cryptic tweet in the whoosh of running online commentary on FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee: “After my sister visited Paul Manafort's hometown as part of her investigation: attempted home break-in, her phone/comp. Hacked, car trashed 2x.”

You had to be at least a part-time detective on the Trump-Russia beat to get the clues. The name of the tweeter, Andrea Chalupa, rang a bell. I looked her up. The sister she referenced was Alexandra, an operative for the Democratic National Committee who in 2015 had begun digging into the affairs of Donald Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. Since the bigtime D.C. lobbyist for developing world kleptocracies was close to pro-Russia elements in Ukraine, Chalupa began to suspect Moscow would have some sort of connection to the Trump campaign. She didn’t pay much attention at first, because Trump’s campaign was just a clown show. But then he got traction and she looked again. And then came the suspected Russian hacks of the DNC, including her own email account. Even stranger things began to happen, as her sister’s tweeted shorthand reminded everyone on Monday afternoon.

Yes, there had been an “attempted home break-in” last year, in her leafy, virtually crime-free neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C., as Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern reported in January. Her iPhone was hacked, too, and a death-metal track popular in Russia appeared on her playlist. Her car was broken into and trashed twice, with nothing stolen. The second time, the burglar left a red, traditional Ukrainian blouse draped across the back seat. She reported the incidents to the D.C. police and FBI, which by then had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian subversion. No arrests have been made.

Related: FBI Director Comey confirms probe into possible Trump-Russia ties

More strange things have happened since, to her and some of her friends, that she’s not ready to go public about. But she did say that, like virtually everyone else in official Washington, she was glued to the TV Monday for the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Moscow’s campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton, put Donald Trump in the White House and rattle Americans’ faith in their core institutions. Over five and a half hours, the star witness of the astonishing event, FBI Director James Comey, absolutely obliterated the credibility of the increasingly unhinged president of the United States.

Chalupa was heartened, she told Newsweek. The hearing “demonstrated the strength of the U.S. government. It was wonderful to watch members of Congress on both sides of the aisle working in partnership with the intelligence community to address an unprecedented national security issue.”

That last part was generous. Many of the Republicans on the panel gave faint praise to the FBI’s pursuit of Russian subversion, and to Comey’s inalterable declaration that the Russians “wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her”—Hillary Clinton—and “help him”—Trump. But the diehards in the GOP wanted to talk about leaks, not the substance of them.

Comey and his fellow intelligence chief at the witness table, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Rogers, ritually denounced the leaking of classified information as a crime—and no doubt they mean it in the wake of Edward Snowden’s massive theft and Wikileaks' “weaponization” of other stolen documents.

But they served up helping after helping of Russian subversion to Democrats hungry for vindication. Vladimir Putin, Comey said of the murderous Russian kleptocrat, “hated Clinton so much…he wanted Trump to win.”

One Republican on the panel, Mike Conaway of Texas, asked Comey how he could be so sure the Russians were for Trump. “Logic,” Comey answered, stifling a smirk. If they were against Clinton, who’d pressed a hard line against Putin’s multi-pronged “hybrid war” against Europe and repression of dissidents at home, that meant they were for Trump, whose ties to Russian oligarchs led the Kremlin to think it might get a better deal. At first the Russians “focused on undermining her presidency,” which until Election Day looked like a cinch, Comey said. Trump’s victory was an unexpected bonus.

Lest any Trump supporter hope the feds were through with him after the election, Comey relieved them of that illusion, too. The FBI, he said, was continuing to investigate “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

Translation: The bureau is conducting an open-ended counterintelligence investigation into whether any of Trump’s associates collluded with the Russians. The FBI generally does not open an investigation, much less continue one, unless there’s evidence of a possible crime. And unlike criminal investigations, which generally require indictments from grand juries at some point, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Russian subversion and Trump’s associates could remain open for months, even years. Comey also said the FBI will conduct “an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.”

The upshot: Barring some unforeseen development, the Trump White House will feel the drip, drip, drip of the bureau’s multiple probes for its entire time in office. No doubt the leaks have just begun.

The president might be wise to negotiate a resignation before he’s fatally wounded. Comey and Rogers slashed him so badly on Monday, with their emphatic eviscerations of his infamous tweets claiming President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, that his credibility on any issue, outside his adoring legions of cult-like fans, has been nearly destroyed. At some point, the Republicans may see their own salvation lies in deserting him for Vice President Mike Pence.

Comey and Rogers were clear. There is “no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said. And the G-man emphasized he was speaking with the authorization of the president’s own Justice Department, which had asked him “to share” its finding that “the department has no information that supports those tweets.”

The NSA’s Rogers, resplendent in his admiral’s uniform, bristled as he leaned into the microphone to destroy another empty assertion by the president, that Obama had asked British eavesdroppers to help intercept Trump’s communications.

“I’ve seen nothing on the NSA side that we engaged in any such activity, nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity,” Rogers said. He seemed personally offended that the president had slandered America’s closest ally, which had denounced Trump’s tweets as “nonsense and utterly ridiculous.”

Yet Trump refused to bow, even in the face of Comey’s blunt-force blows to his presidency. From the Oval Office at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, he dispatched an increasingly desperate-sounding froth of denials into the Twittersphere along the lines of, “Who you going to believe—me or your lyin’ eyes?” That classic Chico Marx line (from the 1933 classic, Duck Soup) would have fit the bizarre day well.

As the hours ground on, one Republican after another complained that the investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies had left “a cloud over this administration,” as Representative Mike Turner of Ohio put it. Of course, that cloud was entirely of Team Trump’s making.

Back across town, Alexandra Chalupa was hoping investigators will keep drilling into the many and complex layers of Russian subversion on Trump’s behalf. The burgeoning scandal is so grave nobody has dared to hang a “-gate” on it. Watergate really was a third-rate burglary compared to what became apparent on Monday: Moscow’s hijacking of the 2016 election, with the possible collusion of its occupants.

“Important concerns were raised” in Monday’s hearing, Chalupa told Newsweek, carefully choosing her words. But she’d really like the FBI to catch the people who hacked her phone, twice broke into her car, tried to get into her house and continue to threaten her and her friends today.

Just like in Watergate, capturing the thugs could well unravel the plot
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-comey-rus ... ngs-571349
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 5:55 pm

How far can FBI probe of Russia's role in US vote go? - Inside Story


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82fqgrLW2g


bloggingheads‏ @bloggingheads 37m37 minutes ago
More
What Comey revealed about the Trump-Russia investigation: @emptywheel interprets his testimony. w/@robertwrighter
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/45546?in=00:56&out=07:08
1 reply 3 retweets 6 likes
Reply 1 Retweet 3
Like 6


Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero) and Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel.net)

What Comey revealed about the Trump-Russia investigation 7:08
Was money laundering part of a Trump-Russia quid pro quo? 7:57
Did the Trump campaign collude with Russia? 7:48
Who gave the DNC documents to WikiLeaks? 3:47
Marcy’s theory about what led to Trump’s wiretapping claim 13:52

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/45546?in=00:56&out=07:08
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Rory » Tue Mar 21, 2017 6:35 pm

http://www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-co ... 76067.html

WASHINGTON —

An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.

The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists.

But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

The challenges to CrowdStrike’s credibility are significant because the firm was the first to link last year’s hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.

Alperovitch has said that variants of the same software were used in both hacks.

While questions about CrowdStrike’s findings don’t disprove allegations of Russian involvement, they do add to skepticism voiced by some cybersecurity experts and commentators about the quality of their technical evidence.

The Russian government has denied covert involvement in the election, but U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hacks were meant to discredit Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump’s campaign. An FBI and Homeland Security report also blamed Russian intelligence services.

On Monday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed at a House Intelligence Committee hearing that his agency has an ongoing investigation into the hacks of Democratic campaign computers and into contacts between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates. The White House says there was no collusion with Russia, and other U.S. officials have said they’ve found no proof.

Signature malware

VOA News first reported in December that sources close to the Ukraine military and the artillery app’s creator questioned CrowdStrike’s finding that a Russian-linked group it named “Fancy Bear” had hacked the app. CrowdStrike said it found a variant of the same “X-Agent” malware used to attack the Democrats.

CrowdStrike said the hack allowed Ukraine’s enemies to locate its artillery units. As proof of its effectiveness, the report referenced publicly reported data in which IISS had sharply reduced its estimates of Ukrainian artillery assets. IISS, based in London, publishes a highly regarded, annual reference called “The Military Balance” that estimates the strength of world armed forces.

“Between July and August 2014, Russian-backed forces launched some of the most-decisive attacks against Ukrainian forces, resulting in significant loss of life, weaponry and territory,” CrowdStrike wrote in its report, explaining that the hack compromised an app used to aim Soviet-era D-30 howitzers.

“Ukrainian artillery forces have lost over 50% of their weapons in the two years of conflict and over 80% of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal,” the report said, crediting a Russian blogger who had cited figures from IISS.

The report prompted skepticism in Ukraine.

Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, called the company’s report “delusional” in a Facebook post. CrowdStrike never contacted him before or after its report was published, he told VOA.

Pavlo Narozhnyy, a technical adviser to Ukraine’s military, told VOA that while it was theoretically possible the howitzer app could have been compromised, any infection would have been spotted. “I personally know hundreds of gunmen in the war zone,” Narozhnyy told VOA in December. “None of them told me of D-30 losses caused by hacking or any other reason.”

VOA first contacted IISS in February to verify the alleged artillery losses. Officials there initially were unaware of the CrowdStrike assertions. After investigating, they determined that CrowdStrike misinterpreted their data and hadn’t reached out beforehand for comment or clarification.

In a statement to VOA, the institute flatly rejected the assertion of artillery combat losses.

“The CrowdStrike report uses our data, but the inferences and analysis drawn from that data belong solely to the report's authors,” the IISS said. “The inference they make that reductions in Ukrainian D-30 artillery holdings between 2013 and 2016 were primarily the result of combat losses is not a conclusion that we have ever suggested ourselves, nor one we believe to be accurate.”

Erica Ma, operations administrator with IISS in the U.S., said that while the think tank had dramatically lowered its estimates of Ukrainian artillery assets and howitzers in 2013, it did so as part of a “reassessment” and reallocation of units to airborne forces.

"No, we have never attributed this reduction to combat losses," Ma said, explaining that most of the reallocation occurred prior to the two-year period that CrowdStrike cites in its report.

“The vast majority of the reduction actually occurs ... before Crimea/Donbass,” she added, referring to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

‘Evidence flimsy'

In early January, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying artillery losses from the ongoing fighting with separatists are “several times smaller than the number reported by [CrowdStrike] and are not associated with the specified cause” of Russian hacking.

But Ukraine’s denial did not get the same attention as CrowdStrike’s report. Its release was widely covered by news media reports as further evidence of Russian hacking in the U.S. election.

In interviews, Alperovitch helped foster that impression by connecting the Ukraine and Democratic campaign hacks, which CrowdStrike said involved the same Russian-linked hacking group—Fancy Bear—and versions of X-Agent malware the group was known to use.

“The fact that they would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling,” Alperovitch said in a December 22 story by The Washington Post.

The same day, Alperovitch told the PBS NewsHour: “And when you think about, well, who would be interested in targeting Ukraine artillerymen in eastern Ukraine? Who has interest in hacking the Democratic Party? [The] Russia government comes to mind, but specifically, [it's the] Russian military that would have operational [control] over forces in the Ukraine and would target these artillerymen.”

Alperovitch, a Russian expatriate and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council policy research center in Washington, co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011. The firm has employed two former FBI heavyweights: Shawn Henry, who oversaw global cyber investigations at the agency, and Steven Chabinsky, who was the agency's top cyber lawyer and served on a White House cybersecurity commission. Chabinsky left CrowdStrike last year.

CrowdStrike declined to answer VOA’s written questions about the Ukraine report, and Alperovitch canceled a March 15 interview on the topic. In a December statement to VOA’s Ukrainian Service, spokeswoman Ilina Dimitrova defended the company’s conclusions.

“It is indisputable that the [Ukraine artillery] app has been hacked by Fancy Bear malware,” Dimitrova wrote. “We have published the indicators to it, and they have been confirmed by others in the cybersecurity community.”

In its report last June attributing the Democratic hacks, CrowdStrike said it was long familiar with the methods used by Fancy Bear and another group with ties to Russian intelligence nicknamed Cozy Bear. Soon after, U.S. cybersecurity firms Fidelis and Mandiant endorsed CrowdStrike’s conclusions. The FBI and Homeland Security report reached the same conclusion about the two groups.

Still, some cybersecurity experts are skeptical that the election and purported Ukraine hacks are connected. Among them is Jeffrey Carr, a cyberwarfare consultant who has lectured at the U.S. Army War College, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other government agencies.

In a January post on LinkedIn, Carr called CrowdStrike’s evidence in the Ukraine “flimsy.” He told VOA in an interview that CrowdStrike mistakenly assumed that the X-Agent malware employed in the hacks was a reliable fingerprint for Russian actors.

“We now know that’s false,” he said, “and that the source code has been obtained by others outside of Russia."
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 21, 2017 6:39 pm

Rory » Fri Mar 17, 2017 5:27 pm wrote:https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/03/15/poll-president-trumps-approval-rating-is-on-the-rise/21897249/

President Donald Trump has seen a significant positive shift in his polling numbers according to the latest Morning Consult poll.

For the first time in his presidency, a majority of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, according to the Morning Consult/POLITICO survey. The president's approval rating is at 52 percent, which is the first time he's cracked the 50-50 mark in this specific survey.


there is Rory's truth and then there is the real the truth
Image



Trump Russia Dossier Decoded: Yes, There Really Was A Massive Oil Deal

Donald and Melania Trump with Qatari Airlines CEO Akbar Al Baker at the Trump Tower
The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and a secret buyer.
Donald Trump and Russia conducted the transaction in three phases; Phase 1 began in early 2016 with a meeting of the minds to start the deal and a due diligence period, Phase 2 began just before the Republican National Convention and continued through Election Day, and Phase 3 happened after Trump’s shocking win and concluding just days before Buzzfeed published the bombshell dossier describing the deal.
The end result allowed Russia to trade stolen emails to help to Donald Trump’s election campaign (as well as that of many Republican Congressmen), in exchange for help circumventing American sanctions to transact the sale of Rosneft, which Putin desperately needed to finance his budget deficit.
The Rosneft transaction also purportedly sent a $500 million dollar brokerage fee to Carter Page, or perhaps the Trump Organization.
For the first time here, we’ve broken down the entire Rosneft privatization transaction and US election, by using open source media stories to create a comprehensive timeline of events over three phases in a single graphic.
This is the transaction Ranking House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) described when kicked off Congress’ Russia hearings discussing Rosneft’s privatization deal, and the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Putin’s allies.
The most deal significant milestone was the “meeting of the minds” which occurred last April 27th at the “Center for National Interest.”
Four Ambassadors convened in Washington, DC, who represent the countries three definitely involved in the Rosneft privatization deal: Italy, Russia, Singapore, and also the Philippines.
They all attended Donald Trump’s foreign policy campaign speech.
Key players from every country involved were in that one room, for one night, one time only, and even now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was there.
The former Alabama Senator only admitted that he had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, publicly excusing his own lies maintaining that contacts both weren’t campaigning discussions, even though one meeting was at the RNC in Cleveland. The April contact makes a third undisclosed meeting by Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak.
After the-Republican candidate Donald Trump locked down the GOP nomination in early May against Ted Cruz, the plan described in Steele’s dossier leapt into action.
From the look of events, starting in July, a massive international oil privatization transaction began, and it was concluded in early January, right around the time the Electoral College certified Donald Trump as America’s 45th President.
The April 27th campaign speech at CNFI effectively concluded the due diligence or first phase of the Dossier’s privatization transaction and began a ‘quiet period’ before the pace of events quickened.
The second phase of the transaction began just before the Republican Convention and ran through election day.
The third phase happened after election day, and before the January 10th disclosure of the Steele Dossier, itself just a few short days after the Rosneft privatization sale finished.
Here’s our comprehensive infographic:
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This week, the Democratic Coalition just released a 40-page report which factually confirms more than a dozen major allegations of the Trump Russia Dossier published by Buzzfeed on January 10th. Our exhaustive research breaks down the findings of the Dossier chronologically and highlights the ties between Trump and the buyer of Russia’s oil company shares.
Oil-rich Gulf Arab nation of Qatar was the end buyer of a massive stake in the Russian, state-run oil company Rosneft’s privatization deal. The new Democratic Coalition report (below) reveals that Trump has hosted a Qatari state-run business in Trump Tower for many years, as well as numerous factual confirmations of the dossier’s findings.
Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin is set to advise a bipartisan group of Congresspeople this week on his factual findings, which back up the information contained in the Dossier that implicate President Trump in a foreign affair with Vladimir Putin.
He tells us this is his main advice:
“The Dossier and its contents are mostly real.”

The President’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador during the Transition period, with disgraced General Michael Flynn.
“Carter Page met with Rosneft in December to assist with the deal, and he’s on the record admitting it but claims he didn’t meet Igor Sechin,” said Dworkin incredulously. “Really? It must have been a webcast with an intermediary. Everything in the Dossier adds up, and it still leaves more questions than answers.”
A mighty brokerage fee to one of the Trump campaign advisors, Moscow-based investment banker Carter Page, is highlighted in the former MI-6 operative’s report.
Theoretically, the former Merryl Lynch investment banker, Page, may have only been the “bag man” or go-between and someone else is the recipient of the cash premium in the dossier. Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and conceivably, many members of the Trump Organization, or family, could be involved in a deal of that scope.
What is most unusual about the sale is that Qatar is on the opposite sides of the Syrian war from Russia. Not only that but in 2004 Russian agents openly assassinated a top Chechen rebel in Doha, the capital of Qatar, by bombing his SUV. However, Donald Trump and the Qatari state-run airline who paid him anywhere from $19,000–100,000 a month in rent since 2008, runs deep.
Rosneft began taking steps towards a sale in early 2016, which accelerated right around the time of the Republican National Convention. Russia’s state oil companies both declared that they would not privatize in 2016, right after Trump’s feud with a gold star family whose patriarch Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Putin announced the sale after new management changed the Trump campaign’s momentum in an exclusive Bloomberg interview in early September, which set the price at $11 billion dollars.
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Reuters: Rosneft stake Ownership Chart
Six countries are known to have participated in the massive privatization deal of Russia’s jewel, its state-run oil company, which left the end ownership of the stake impenetrable, and a purchase price of roughly $10.7 billion dollars, which Reuters reported about in January as:
“How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it.”
In early October, once Russia knew about their damaging cache of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, they re-ignited the privatization sales.
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had already spent $5 billion dollars to buy out a foreign stake in Bashneft, another massive Russian oil partnership, whose oligarch was compromised, and charged (as Putin often does) with criminal offenses. The Bashneft deal closed right before the damaging Access Hollywood political scandal, which would’ve swamped a presidential campaign without Trump’s collusive assistance from Putin’s massive propaganda machine.
After the Access Hollywood tape releases had seemed to doom Trump’s campaign, Putin even announced that the companies would buy their own shares if they had to — there was a serious budget hole to fill.
Nineteen and a half percent of Rosneft’s stock was agreed to be transferred on December 7th, before the board was informed of the transaction’s terms only after it took place.
The “matryoshka” (named after the famous nesting dolls) or complex deal structure is most likely designed to avoid American sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion against Rosneft, its CEO Igor Sessions and its parent company Gazprom.
The highlighted yellow company in the below organization chart is a total mystery and based in the Cayman Islands law firm Walkers.
This is the kind of financial engineering it took for the Italian bank Intesa, to lend money to the buyers of the Rosneft stake.
The end game for Russia was to funnel at least $5 billion dollars of new capital into state coffers to staunch some of the red ink expected to plague Putin’s budgets going into his 2018 elections, and through at least 2020 according to economists; and to do the deal while tiptoeing past American financial sanctions.
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Original Graphic by Grant Stern
That’s where the cash-rich Gulf Arab nation stepped in to make a deal. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is the known buyer of 50% of these shares of Rosneft.
Yet still, nobody knows where well over $2 billion dollars of equity for the purchase came from, as Reuters reports:
Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros. Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa [an Italian bank], that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros.
The QIA is coincidentally also the largest shareholder in the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore, who executed the purchase with a minimal direct investment, and used the “Singapore vehicle” or holding company to hold their Rosneft share. Glencore guaranteed the Italian bank Intesa’s loan for only 1/3rd of its value.
Donald Trump has had business ties to Qatar’s government for years, according to a Jan. 10th report in Time:
Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar.
It’s unclear when or if Qatari Airlines left Trump Tower, or when their lease actually expires, but a Jan. 28th story in Vox says that their operations have departed the President’s home building in New York.
What is clear is that Qatari Airlines’ CEO has publicly called Donald Trump a “good friend” and it is one of the countries excluded from the Muslim Ban, which coincidentally, does business with the President.
Recently, CEOs of American airliners met with Trump recently to decry government subsidized competition from Qatar and other foreign state-run carriers, which is an obvious conflict for President Trump.
If that wasn’t enough conflicted interest, Trump Organization announced a plan to build or license their brand in Qatar in 2015, but there are no further reports to substantiate the move.
The CEO of Qatari Airlines says that he was one of the first people to give congratulations after election day:
Qatar Airways’ Group Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker, who voiced support for Trump even after his comments about Muslims, welcomed his victory. “Our relationship goes way back, and I was one of the first to commend Donald on his well-deserved new leadership position,” he said in a statement to Reuters.
Qatari Airlines rented pricey office space at President Trump’s tower for many years. If their lease continues today, it would be a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents federal employees and the executive from accepting any foreign payments whatsoever.
Qatar’s complete and total involvement in the Rosneft deal is undeniable.
The small Emirate that just publicly participated in the purchase of Russia’s state-run oil and gas giant — happens to be extremely close to Donald Trump.
It’s unknown if the Philippines had any direct or indirect involvement in the Rosneft transaction, but their President Duarte is a staunch Trump supporter, who assigned one of the President’s business partners as a trade envoy. The island nation took the unusual step of hosting Russian naval ships in early January, which is extremely out of the ordinary for the longtime US ally and former colony.
Why Russia Needed The Money
At the heart of the Dossier’s disclosures is the Russian goal of ending economic sanctions, some of which specifically target Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who was Putin’s top deputy in government service just a few short years ago, in a country where the lines between business and government can be blurry.
President Obama’s 2014 sanctions have crippled the Russian economy when compounded with low global oil prices.
That caused a massive budget gap last year, which led Putin to privatize assets to pay current costs for the Russian government.
After President Obama leveled retaliatory sanctions in December 2016 and expelled diplomats in late December for meddling in our election, Vladimir Putin announced and then stunningly reserved retaliation.
That public “bromance” sparked speculation about a quid pro quo when Trump tweeted a love letter to the Russian dictator.

Last month, disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn was fired as NSA, apparently just for discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian Ambassador in late December. This month, Flynn revealed that he was secretly an unregistered Turkish foreign agent ‘volunteering’ his time to the Trump campaign, and Congress revealed proof this week, which he was simultaneously on the payroll of Russian state-sponsored RT “News.”
Strategically, Russia is desperate to shake the larger economic sanctions, but America’s Congress is seeking more, not less economic retaliation against Putin’s regime. Shortly after taking office, President Trump did indeed relax sanctions against Russia’s lead spy agency, the FSB, but most observers said was a minor concession.
Into that void, Trump’s lawyer and a group of his Ukrainian family connections and lawmakers, and the notorious Felix Sater appeared with a “peace plan” that would’ve accomplished the end of sanctions.
One of the ‘peacemakers,’ a Ukrainian relative of Trump’s trusted lawyer Michael Cohen, has already perished under mysterious circumstances since then.
If America lifts sanctions against the Putin regime, then the value of Russia’s public oil companies stands to skyrocket.
Already, Donald Trump’s presence has sparked a market rally on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange.
US Media Is Connecting The Dots On Steele’s Dossier
Open source journalism confirms some of the more important political elements of the Trump Russia Dossier.
Our original report two weeks ago revealed a major point of affirmation in CNN’s interview with former Trump campaign associate, J.D. Gordon, whose remarks confirmed a serious political allegation in the Trump Russia Dossier.
Then, Rachel Maddow echoed the essence of our report on MSNBC a few days later and added that Politico linked a participant in the RNC Ukraine policy changes to one of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort’s associates, who is himself a foreign national being investigated by the FBI.
Wikileaks involvement to assist Russia in Trump’s campaign is a cornerstone of the dossier’s claims; it was seen as essential for Putin and Russia to maintain plausible deniability for political interference.
Sure enough, new factual data shows that the anti-secrecy organization switched to their web hosting to use a Russian DNS server right before releasing the most damaging email material during last year’s elections.
That means Vladimir Putin certainly has knowledge of the physical location of Wikileaks’ servers and allows their messages to be broadcast using Russian soil.
Trump’s former top advisor Roger Stone admitted to communicating with Russian hackers in August 2016, during the election about releases of information through Wikileaks.
“When the dossier became public it generated more questions than answers,” says Scott Dworkin. “Over the last several months we’ve corroborated the dossier with the facts. The deeper we dig, the more truth we find in it. Just look at the author — Christopher Steele — who is a former MI-6 agent who’s saved more lives than Trump ever has.”
“He’s the real person people imagine James Bond to be.”
The Trump Russia Dossier describes the Rosneft privatization deal almost exactly, and Putin’s resulting purge of Russian allies and ex-officials looks like the kind of deadly cover up a dictator would apply, to erase his friends who knew about the deal.
Scott Dworkin says to expect full confirmation of the report within a week from official sources, or when Steele testifies in front of Congress in person or via remote link.
“A majority of the dossier and its contents are factual,” says the intrepid investigator Dworkin, who began making #TrumpLeaks posts in October. Now, when he tweets @funder 3 million people per day see and share his research. “The dossier is more real than anything Trump’s ever said.”
“A majority of it is factual and news reports over time have proven some of those facts.”
This weekend, the Republican Chair of the House Intel Committee said that only one person is being investigated for treason in the White House by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division.
There’s no way a deal of this magnitude would completely envelop the Trump Campaign, its manager, its outside affiliates and inside agents so thoroughly, without the principal or head of a group knowing that something was happening.
Any reasonable person would have to conclude that Donald Trump is the FBI’s target, based upon the bevy of circumstantial evidence tying RNC campaign events to Russian oil, economic sanctions, and the simmering conflict in Ukraine.
Nearly three decades ago, Trump admitted on national television to participating in a straw-man transaction with the Sultan of Brunei and infamous Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi, through which he acquired a large yacht, so we’ve got proof that the Trump Organization has engaged these kinds of multi-national transactions in the Middle East.
The most important commodity traded in the oil business or politics is money.
The privatization deal described in Christopher Steele’s dossier has played out on the pages of Bloomberg and Reuters for a year — shows that there was a whole lot of money in brokering oil deals for Donald Trump’s associates, and a rapid profit by Qatar if sanctions are released this year.
The only question that’s not even pondered in these many public reports, and which must be a central focus of the American intelligence community’s investigations:
Where is the $500 million dollar brokerage fee today?
Where did the other $2 billion dollars come from?
What is Donald Trump’s true role in the deal?
Here’s the complete Democratic Coalition report:
Democratic Coalition Report On Trump Russia Dossier by Grant Stern on Scribd
https://medium.com/@grantstern/trump-ru ... .3l8n5vezi
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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