US Punishes Russia for Election Hacking Ejecting Operatives

[barracuda]

https://twitter.com/christogrozev/statu ... 7261620226

https://twitter.com/mwr_dbm/status/819253060782489601

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 26901.html

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[MacCruiskeen]

^^Just googled this guy's name. It's good to know your sources and whether or not they might have an axe to grind.

Bellingcat authors: Christo Grozev

Christo Grozev for many years supervised the radio operations of a public US company in CEE and Russia. [What? Which company?]

Currently owns and operates national radio stations in the Netherlands and Ukraine. [How many? Which ones?]

Christo is a senior researcher at Risk Management Lab, a think-tank with a focus on security threats at New Bulgairan University (Sofia). In his work he focuses on Russia-related security threats and weaponization of Information [Ah. Right.]

https://www.bellingcat.com/author/christo-grozev/

Wikispooks on Bellingcat/Brown Moses/Eliot Higgins

[MacCruiskeen]

By the way, why is no one bothered about the United Kingdom undermining the US election?

Christopher Steele: Former British spy alleged to have created dossier on Trump-Russia Relations

The co-director of Christopher Steele’s private intelligence firm said he cannot ‘confirm or deny’ (lol) the reports
Feliks Garcia New York |

Thursday 12 January 2017

A former (sic) British spy has been named as the man who compiled the dossier containing explosive, if unverified (lol), allegations against Donald Trump.

Ex-MI6 officer (lol) Christopher Steele, 52, who is now a director of the London based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, is believed to have prepared the documents for Mr Trump’s Democratic and Republican opponents during the US presidential primary election, according to the Wall Street Journal.

...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 22786.html

Will a predator drone be enough to take Steele out, or is Washington going to have to nuke London too?

I wonder if there's room for him in the Bolivian Embassy. He could enjoy some fascinating conversations there, until the bomb falls.

[seemslikeadream]

Trump and Russia have undermined the election

on edit


Gen. YellowCake Flynn helped also

[seemslikeadream]

thanks

the internet never sleeps

https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/819961187261620226

https://twitter.com/mwr_dbm/status/819253060782489601

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 26901.html

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[seemslikeadream]

ONTRIBUTOR
Why Won’t American Media Fully Investigate What Could Be The Biggest Story In U.S. Political History?
01/12/2017 11:19 pm ET | Updated 18 hours ago

Seth Abramson
Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.

What percentage chance that the incoming president has been compromised by a hostile foreign power is acceptable?

Most Americans, and the U.S. Constitution, would say “none.”

But right now Democrats and Republicans in D.C., along with almost the entirety of mainstream American media, are answering this question by ignoring it altogether.

Meanwhile, the media apparatus of our nation’s closest ally, England, has taken an entirely different approach: they’re reporting doggedly on the story, comparing the credibility of its two main players—former FBI asset and top MI6 agent Christopher Steele, and serial exaggerator and compulsive liar Donald Trump—and playing out various scenarios, including the possible impeachment of Trump not long after he is inaugurated.

Around the same time as The Guardian was pondering aloud how and whether Trump could be impeached for high crimes, the U.S. Speaker of the House was on CNN saying that the story of Trump’s possible compromising by a foreign power is so insignificant that it shouldn’t even be mentioned in U.S. media.

So why are the Brits looking out for Americans’ (and the world’s) interests so much more than our own elected officials and media outlets? Why, in England, is even a 5 percent or 10 percent chance of a U.S. president who committed treason to gain office unacceptable, while here in America one is told by top government officials to not even ask the question, and officials themselves are refusing to do so as well?

There are scary times, so it behooves us to compare British and American reports on Trump’s Russian controversy and try to determine (a) how we as citizens in a democracy should expect the story to be covered, and (b) what market forces in American media might be preventing our cable and network news, and many of our newspapers, from doing their jobs. The reason to ask these questions is that the intelligence services we rely upon to investigate questions such as this are less likely to feel the pressure to do so from our elected officials if our elected officials aren’t feeling pressure from the media—and therefore, in effect, from the American people.

So first things first: if you were alive and older than six in 2016, you know that Donald Trump repeatedly made inaccurate statements during the Republican primary and the general election, and has continued doing so near-daily in the current presidential transition period. I’m not going to waste page-space confirming this, except to note that—on the issue of the memos written by Christopher Steele from months of human intelligence work with trusted Russian sources—Trump, who claims the memos are 100 percent false, has already lied about them repeatedly.

That’s pretty inexplicable, given his proclamations of innocence. Innocent men, absent strenuous interrogation by law enforcement, don’t lie about things they didn’t do. It’s practically a maxim in criminal law—which I used to practice—and it certainly applies here.

Now compare Mr. Trump to Mr. Steele, who was trusted by the FBI to do extensive work for them, who rose in the ranks at MI6 to run their Russia desk, who’s been described (in The Guardian) by former UK government officials as “one of the more eminent Russia specialists for MI6”; “very credible”; “sober, cautious, and meticulous”; “[a man] with a formidable record”; “not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip”; “an experienced and highly regarded professional”; “a very straight guy”; “not prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way”; “highly professional, very effective”; and someone who, “if he puts something in a report, believes there’s sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering.”

One former UK Foreign Office official added, as if it were necessary to make the point in any clearer terms, that “the idea that his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false—completely untrue.” Nigel West, the noted intelligence historian and novelist, says that Steele is “James Bond.” He’s so well-trained, according to a recent report, that he trains other spies. And as to his now-famous memos, while they were originally drafted for top names in Trump’s own Republican Party, Steele continued trying to get the memos into the hands of journalists and Congressmen long after he was no longer in the Republicans’ (or anyone’s) employ, and even after the election was over—striking behavior for a top spy, and suggestive of a firm belief that at least a significant portion of the intel contained in the memos he wrote is true.

Want more? Okay. The New York Times reports that Steele is “known in British intelligence circles for his knowledge of the intricate web of Kremlin-tied companies and associates that control Russia.” The Times adds that a former CIA agent says Steele has a “good reputation” and is considered credible. More recently—on the subject of Trump, rather than Steele—Rolling Stone reported that American intelligence has advised Israel not to transmit sensitive data to the Trump administration, as the Russians “have ‘leverages of pressure’ to use against Trump.”

If one of our closest allies refusing to send us intelligence because our government may be run by Russian puppets isn’t a constitutional crisis, nothing is.

All of which means the Steele memos must be fully investigated now.

Not the day after tomorrow, not in a week, not in a month.

Now.

It seems the only three people in America who are convinced Christopher Steele willfully authored a fictitious, fanciful piece of creative writing are Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne Conway: all people who could face charges for conspiracy to commit treason, or worse, if even a portion of Steele’s 35-page document is accurate.

So is it accurate? We don’t know. But one thing you don’t do is trust, as to the subject of a document’s veracity, the very people who’d be implicated by that document if it’s accurate.

Meanwhile, our intelligence agencies, with one voice, have said that they’ve made “no judgment” on the accuracy of the document—whatever suspiciously exculpatory lies Donald Trump has already told about that determination.

Okay, so then why is Chuck Todd of NBC calling the Steele document “false information”?

Why is Andrea Mitchell calling it a “smear campaign”?

Why is NBC reporting that the 35 pages of human intelligence gathered by Steele from Russian sources long considered reliable by him (and frequently relied upon by the United Kingdom) is “disinformation”—meaning, information planted by the Kremlin or made up from whole cloth by Steele himself?

What evidence is there for any of those claims?

The strange behavior of journalists on NBC and MSNBC may be partly explained by the strange behavior we’re now witnessing on CNN. Instead of covering what multiple experts on cable news have already called the greatest story in U.S. political history if true, CNN is engaged in a tit-for-tat with the Trump team over whether CNN accurately reported the events of a Trump briefing with intelligence services. Who cares about this feud? Well, CNN—and much more than the news story behind the feud, obviously—and perhaps also NBC and MSNBC. The latter two networks watched with dismay as CNN’s Jim Acosta got frozen out of Trump’s Wednesday news conference and publicly tarred as a purveyor of “fake news.”

The best part? It turns out that CNN was simply being trolled by the Trump transition team; today, CNN’s reporting that Trump was briefed directly about the Russian report was confirmed. Who briefed Trump? FBI Director James Comey himself.

Chalk that up as yet another lie from Trump: he sent Kellyanne Conway out on the Seth Meyers’ program on Wednesday to say that her boss knew nothing about the report until it appeared on Buzzfeed.

But perhaps American media is intimidated by a President-elect so unpredictable that he’ll call a news organization “fake news” for correctly reporting a story he himself lied about?

In any case, this much can be said: when a news network repeatedly frames the news in a way that directly contradicts its own reporting, something is wrong. And that’s exactly what’s happened at MSNBC over the past three days, and it’s beginning to become a real concern for those Americans hoping that the memos written by a long-reliable source like Christopher Steele will be accurately covered by the U.S. media.

MSNBC reporting that the memos were “disinformation” is unacceptable journalism, as that term, again, denotes propaganda deliberately developed to mislead readers. Neither MSNBC, nor any other television network, nor anyone in the intelligence community in the U.S., has determined that the Steele memos are “disinformation.”

The only way the Steele memos could be considered “disinformation” is if the U.S. intelligence community had evidence that Steele’s sources in Russia—developed over a decades-long career as a spy, and found repeatedly to be reliable by the United States—were in fact Kremlin agents. If MSNBC had this information, it would have reported it, and it would have been a bombshell. Instead, with no new reporting MSNBC continued to use the word “disinformation” throughout the day on Tuesday and Wednesday, including on Chris Matthews’ nightly program. Amazingly, even Trump himself hasn’t claimed that the Kremlin was behind the Steele memos—that would involve saying the first critical word about Vladimir Putin he’s ever said—satisfying himself with merely raving that the memos are false, garbage, a “witch-hunt,” and so on.

The reality? As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote in a public summary of his recent phone call with President-elect Trump, “no judgment” has been made about the veracity or sourcing or the memos.

Then there was Chuck Todd’s Wednesday interview with Ben Smith, the Editor of BuzzFeed, who published the memos on Tuesday. Todd repeatedly charged that the memos constituted “false information” and “fake news”—without providing any explanation for why NBC, which has not reported that anything in the memos is either definitively false or definitively true, would leap ahead of its own reporting in this way. Nor did Todd explain how publishing material with repeated notices that it was “unverified,” in a context in which that material was already in the hands of government officials and media operatives—and was, moreover, beginning to drive public policy and intelligence analysis nationally—would qualify as publishing something “fake.”

Today, Fox News declared that Trump had successfully “stuck a knife in” the dossier story. How? By tweeting about it, of course—and with, per usual (and here’s a correct use of the term) disinformation, as Trump falsely called Steele a “failed spy.” Fox News offered no correction of Trump’s mischaracterization of Steele, indeed it gave its readers no additional information about Steele’s career whatsoever, thereby letting the President-elect’s intemperate and dishonest tweet stand as its own proof.

Russia Today and Vladimir Putin would be proud—as under Trump, the media is learning its place.

On Thursday, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell noted on-air, in passing, that Steele had been “hired to find salacious details” about Trump—suggesting that the well-respected intelligence agent had decided what he needed to find, and intended to find, before he’d even spoken to a single clandestine source in Russia.

In fact, Steele is now on the run for his life—fearing retribution, presumably, from Putin or Trump allies—so no one has spoken with him about his thinking on the memos or his motives in writing them.

Indeed, if anything we know three facts suggesting that Steele very much believes in the integrity of the information in the memos: (1) he continued trying to disseminate them to U.S. media and politicians even after he was not being paid to acquire new information, indeed even after the U.S. presidential election was over; (2) the BBC and other sources have confirmed that Steele is considered reliable by U.S. intelligence, one reason our nation relied upon his work in investigating corruption at FIFA; and (3) he and his family now fear for his life and are on the run, something we wouldn’t expect to see if Steele believed that everything in his memos was fanciful pap. Of course, we might also add, in addition to Steele’s decades-long history of trustworthiness and professionalism, that no one in the U.S. media has supplied for its American audience previous examples of meticulously detailed, 35-page intelligence memos written by an intelligence agent with a strong reputation and excellent sources that turned out to be—as Mitchell was suggesting of Steele’s work—entirely false and malevolently salacious.

But perhaps most concerning statement made in American media about the Steele memos was a statement made by Mitchell on-air on Thursday, which extended MSNBC’s entirely unsupported narrative discrediting the memos even further.

Mitchell is now calling the memos a “smear campaign” against Trump, again without any evidence. Such language runs the risk of turning America against what appears to be an active investigation into possible acts of treason committed by the President-elect, which investigation is undoubtedly critical to the future of the nation. Certainly, we know that the FBI sought a FISA warrant on this case—and may well have received one—in October, and that the Steele memos may well have played a role in that warrant application.

So not only is MSNBC getting well ahead of its own reporting, it is directly contradicting and repeatedly undermining the stance taken by the intelligence community with respect to the current Russia controversy. And it’s doing so at a time when Trump himself is repeatedly lying about these memos—thereby making himself look guilty in the eyes of many.

So what’s going on? Why is the media tossing objectivity aside to offer cover to the Trump team?

Could it be that NBC and MSNBC are hoping to gain viewers lost by CNN following the latter network’s “erroneous” (in fact accurate) reporting about whether or not the Steele memos had been physically presented to Trump—as opposed to merely present in the room and available for presentation—during one of his intelligence briefings? Could it be that NBC and MSNBC believed that overstating the case against the memos would draw in Trump supporters who, because of those two networks’ reputations for left-leaning commentary, would not otherwise watch those channels? Could it simply be an overreaction to the fact that “everyone” in Washington had these memos for months and wasn’t able to corroborate them—likely because no one in the Washington media establishment has the necessary clandestine Russian sources to confirm intelligence like this, not because the intelligence was bunk?

We can’t know. But we should be starting to ask.

Because if America doesn’t investigate the validity of the information in the Steele memos in the next week, that investigation may never occur. And the consequences of that failure to doggedly pursue the truth on our nation’s standing in the world—even on our allies’ ability and willingness to work with us to keep the world safe—could be devastating.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why ... e1aa9dc49d

[seemslikeadream]

Malcolm NanceVerified account
‏@MalcolmNance
#BREAKING Do we have an Espionage problem in Trump campaign team? Did Trump & Flynn cut a deal w/Russia on its spies behind Obama's back?

[seemslikeadream]

Carter Page is going down first and this will come out in the Senate Intel hearing

[seemslikeadream]

Trump now says he does not know Carter Page

[barracuda]

It's good to know your sources and whether or not they might have an axe to grind.

Very true, and thank you, though I don't really expect much hard research on this issue to come from pro-Trump/pro-Russian sources. I'm honestly uncertain about the existence of individuals without tools that need sharpening, these days.

Another interesting unvetted theory:

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/ ... 3361435648

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[MacCruiskeen]

I don't know if the number of sudden deaths has increased on both sides recently; but remember this, from three weeks ago? (The Express is a bad source, but the first I found. The story was reported elsewhere too.)

Mystery as NATO Auditor General is found shot dead in suspicious circumstances

POLICE in Belgium are probing the death of a high ranking NATO official after his body was discovered in his car with a gunshot wound to the head.

By Siobhan McFadyen
PUBLISHED: 03:47, Tue, Dec 27, 2016 | UPDATED: 08:12, Tue, Dec 27, 2016

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/747 ... cumstances

Yves Chandelon, aged 62. It was later said to be a suicide.

Belgium is very spooky.

[seemslikeadream]

It's good to know your sources and whether or not they might have an axe to grind.

Very true, and thank you, though I don't really expect much hard research on this issue to come from pro-Trump/pro-Russian sources. I'm honestly uncertain about the existence of individuals without tools that need sharpening, these days.

Another interesting unvetted theory:

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/ ... 3361435648

Screen Shot 2017-01-14 at 11.56.55 AM.png

Screen Shot 2017-01-14 at 11.57.10 AM.png

Trump campaign manager’s Ukrainian clients have Panama Papers connections

By Adam Weinstein and Laura Juncadella

GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump sent shudders through US foreign policy circles and the international community this week, when he suggested that, as president, he might not fulfill America’s promises to defend NATO members against a Russian attack. That departure from historical American policies, and Republican wisdom, came days after the Trump campaign reportedly softened the GOP platform’s hardline stance against pro-Russian rebels fighting to control Ukraine.

Those moves were less surprising to critics of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who for more than a decade has cultivated business ties to pro-Russian politicians and industrialists in Ukraine.

Now, Fusion has learned that the names of several of Manafort’s connections appear in shell company records from the notorious Panama Papers and the Offshore Leaks, troves of information on offshore companies unearthed in recent years by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

From Washington to Kiev

After several fairly conventional decades in conservative American politics, Manafort won headlines in 2007 for his paid work rebranding former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych and his “Party of Regions” as mild-mannered reformers. That was no small feat for Yanukovych, a Ukrainian politician who had been described by the New York Times‘s Kiev reporter as “a divisive figure reviled by some here as a shady reactionary and Kremlin pawn,” and who was driven from power in 2005 amid allegations he’d tried to rig his re-election with Russian help. (His election opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, fell ill due to poisoning during the campaign — a mystery that still goes unsolved.)

“The West has not been willing to move beyond the cold war mentality and to see this man and the outreach that he has extended,” Manafort told the Times of Yanukovych.

Manafort’s efforts paid off: Over the next several years, the Party of Regions gained power in the legislative and judicial branches. By 2010, Yanukovych had made a stunning comeback, again winning the presidency, and overseeing a regime that held on to power by funneling government money to his “Family” of oligarchs and party apparatchiks. As a 2007 US embassy cable describing the Party of Regions inner circle put it: “Ukraine’s history is marred with non-transparent privatizations that have benefited a few well-connected insiders.”

Some of those party insiders were banned from travel to the United States or faced visa delays, based on allegations that they supported the pro-Russian forces who’ve occupied Eastern Ukraine since a 2014 popular uprising deposed Yanukovych, who remains in exile in Russia. Some of them have clear connections to Manafort. And some of them, or their relatives and associates, also appear in records of shell companies in the Panama Papers or Offshore Leaks.

As Fusion and its partners in the Panama Papers investigation have previously reported, there are benign reasons for individuals to set up offshore shell corporations. But the anonymity they provide owners, and the lack of transparency into where their money originates and is headed, make them attractive vehicles for funneling ill-gotten gains, concealing wealth, and sidestepping regulations and sanctions. A recent World Bank study of 213 major global corruption cases found that 70 percent of them involved the use of at least one secret corporation to hide true ownership.

It is unknown whether Manafort had any involvement with these shell companies; Fusion’s messages requesting comment from Manafort and the Trump campaign were not returned.

The Caribbean candy company

Manafort’s earliest engagement in Ukrainian affairs appears to have come in 2005, when he advised Rinat Akhmetov — the country’s richest man — on strategic communications for one of the billionaire’s many companies. But the pro-Russian Akhmetov quickly paired Manafort with his political ally, Yanukovych, for an image makeover.

Akhmetov, whose personal and political fortunes were allegedly enhanced by government funds and organized crime, does not appear in the Panama Papers — but his older brother, who stays out of the public limelight, does. Leaked records show that Igor Akhmetov was one of several secret beneficial owners of “Konti Confectionary Limited,” incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2014 and seeded with 23.4 million euros. The other beneficial owners included Boris Kolesnikov, another Yanukovich party insider and childhood friend of Rinat Ahkmetov’s who in 2007 praised Manafort as ‘one of a lot of good people” consulting Ukraine’s politicians.

The sour $26.3 million telecom deal

Many relationships Manafort made in Ukraine spilled over into US business relationships. These include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who has been called “Vladimir Putin’s favourite industrialist.” Deripaska, who is barred from US travel over alleged organized crime ties that he denies, partnered up with Manafort in 2007 to form a Cayman Islands-based investment company. Deripaska reportedly paid Manafort’s firm $7.4 million in fees, then invested $18.9 million to buy a Ukrainian telecom firm. But Deripaska eventually pulled out and asked for that money back; according to a lawsuit filed in Virginia by Cayman liquidators, Manafort never returned the cash. A lawyer for Manafort, Richard Hibert, did not answer Fusion’s request for comment, but he told Yahoo in April that Manafort had been deposed in the case, which is ongoing.

As Fusion’s reporting partners in the McClatchy DC bureau reported last April, Deripaska shows up in the Panama Papers as the secret owner of a Mongolian coal company formed in the British Virgin Islands that sold part of itself to another of Deripaska’s Russian metal companies in 2006. Deripaska’s mother, Valentina, is also listed in the ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks as a beneficial owner of the BVI-incorporated “Bennet Select Corporation,” whose activities are unclear.

The billion-dollar firm that couldn’t pay its employees

In another lawsuit against Manafort and several associates, former workers in company he formed with an ex-Trump real estate employee allege that they didn’t receive their promised salaries. That company, according to court filings, set up a billion-dollar US-based property-investment vehicle for Dmitro Firtash, another controversial Yanukovych insider and billionaire. The filings allege that Manafort and Firtash also worked together on other deals, including an abandoned $850 million plan to buy the Drake Hotel in New York.

Firtash is now wanted by authorities in Washington on suspicion of bribery and organized criminal activity; he was arrested in Austria in 2014 and the US has sought his extradition since. (His company has called the charges a “misunderstanding.”)

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Today in Panama Papers: Works of art, political backlash, bank CEO resigns

Firtash is listed in ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks database; he set up an offshore holding company in 2006 for assets related to his government-aided businesses.

He also has business ties to what the ICIJ calls one of the Panama Papers’ key “malefactors,” Ukrainian mob boss Semion Mogilevich — a man the FBI once called a “global con artist and ruthless criminal” implicated in “weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale.” According to an internal State Department cable, Firtash told the US ambassador to Ukraine “that he needed, and received, permission from Mogilievich when he established various businesses.”

Big government in Russia and Ukraine

Observers have long argued that one basis for most of these Russians’ and Ukrainians fortunes was their support for Yanukovych — and Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s desire for close coordination between the Moscow and Kiev regimes. Both times Yanukovych gained the presidency of Ukraine, Putin offered him incentives to keep the country in Russia’s orbit; those incentives included an eye-popping $15 billion aid package in 2013.

That same year, Forbes Ukraine reported that Yanukovych had taken advantage of relaxed government rules to award a lion’s share of state contracts to his inner circle. Two of the top contract-winners are former partners of Manafort’s: Akhmetov and Firtash. In the first 10 months of 2012 alone, they had raked in contracts worth billions of dollars.

In early 2014, just before Yanukovych and his cronies were thrown out of power for the last time — and several months before Akhmetov’s brother and other party associates set up the candy company listed in the Panama Papers — Akhmetov alone had won 31 percent of Ukraine’s state contracts, according to Forbes.

A murky record

How much money did Manafort make for his years of work on behalf of some of Ukraine’s richest, most influential pro-Moscow billionaires and politicians? The answer is unclear; consultants don’t have to publicly disclose their fees. Such campaign consulting relationships can typically command seven- or eight-fee figures. Department of Justice records show only that in 2008, Manafort hired the communications firm Edelman to lobby for Yanukovych’s party for $35,000 a month; the company collected $63,750 on the contract in the first half of that year.

Manafort “told a congressional oversight panel in 1989 that his firm normally accepted only clients who would pay at least $250,000 a year as a retainer,” according to Bloomberg View.

Manafort, the Trump campaign, Firtash, Deripaska, and Rinat Akhmetov did not respond Fusion’s requests for comment; Igor Akhmetov and Mogilevich could not be reached for comment, their whereabouts unknown.

Panama Papers
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39684&hilit=panama+papers

[seemslikeadream]

I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

Alexander Litvinenko
21 November 2006

From Fruh's post in the Data Dump:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=33323&p=627091#p627091

https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-man-behi ... 21154.html

The British ex-spy behind the Trump dossier was an FBI asset
[Yahoo News]
Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsJanuary 11, 2017



The man behind the sensational story concerning information the Russian government had supposedly collected about Donald Trump is a former British intelligence operative and was a longtime intelligence source for the U.S. government who had assisted the FBI during an investigation into corruption by FIFA, the world soccer association, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The operative — identified today by the Wall Street Journal as Christopher Steele, a former Russian operations officer for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency — had worked as a consultant for the FBI’s Eurasian organized crime section, helping to develop information about ties between suspected Russian gangsters and FIFA, said one of the sources, who is directly familiar with Steele’s work.

Steele had been hired originally to investigate Trump by his political opponents, and he decided to share his information with the FBI last year. The preexisting relationship between Steele and U.S. officials is one reason the FBI took the operative’s allegations seriously when he first turned over a written dossier, filled with uncorroborated “raw intelligence” about Trump, to one of the bureau’s agents in Rome last summer, the sources said.

The credibility of some of those allegations is now in question after Trump, at a news conference, denounced the claims as completely false and attacked the news media for circulating them — and the intelligence community for including a two-page summary of the explosive charges in a classified briefing that was given to President Obama, to congressional leaders, and to Trump himself.

“It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” Trump said at his Trump Tower press conference Wednesday. “It was gotten by opponents of ours. It was a group of opponents that got together. Sick people, and they got together and put that crap together.”

Steele, who now works for a London-based intelligence firm called Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by a Washington political research firm working for Democrats looking for damaging material on Trump. After contacting old sources in Moscow, he passed along reports of sensational — and unverified — accounts of compromising material that the Russian intelligence service had supposedly obtained about Trump during his 2013 stay in Moscow, when he was overseeing the Miss Universe contest. “Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB [the Russian intelligence service] has compromised TRUMP thorough his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him,” reads one of the operative’s reports, which was published Tuesday night by BuzzFeed.

The operative’s reports also included multiple other claims that are now in question: One of the operative’s reports alleges that Michael Cohen, a top lawyer in the Trump organization, had met with Russian officials in Prague involved in hacking the election. On Wednesday, Cohen denied he had ever been to Prague and produced his passport to prove it. Another of Steele’s reports, first reported by Yahoo News last September, involved alleged meetings last July between then-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and two high-level Russian operatives, including Igor Sechin — a longtime associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin who became the chief executive of Rosneft, the Russian energy giant. After initially declining to comment, Page wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey after the story was published denying that he had ever met with Sechin; the Trump campaign, however, cut its ties to him.

Still, U.S. officials said the allegations were not easily dismissed, in part because Steele was a known quantity who had produced reliable information about Russia in the past. “He’s a meticulous professional, and there are no questions about his integrity,” said one U.S. official who has worked with Steele. “The information he provided me [about Russia] was valuable and useful.”

A senior law enforcement official declined to talk about the nature of Steele’s relationship with the FBI. But the official confirmed that he was known to the FBI and that the bureau had already obtained copies of his reports months before Sen. John McCain handed FBI Director James Comey a dossier of Steele’s material in December. Asked why a two-page summary of the uncorroborated reports was included as part of last week’s intelligence briefing on Russian hacking, the official said that “it was an intelligence community decision” to do so after officials learned that his reports had been widely circulating among members of Congress and journalists. “It seemed very clear that these were going to see the light of day in the next couple of weeks,” the official said. The conclusion was that “it might be a good idea to tell [Trump] about them before they were publicly released.”

The official declined to share U.S. officials’ current thinking about the reliability of the material, saying it is still being investigated. “It’s part of the larger look at the Russian influence campaign,” the official said.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to include the material in the briefing was justifiable in light of the expectation that it was likely to leak. “Are you going to tell the guy?” Hayden said, referring to Trump. “You almost owe it to him.” Besides the news media, other intelligence services were likely to get their hands on the material. “It’s awkward, but duty kind of dictates that you tell him.” Still, Hayden added, the rules about what intelligence to share — or not share — appear to be shifting in the Trump era. “We’re off the map here,” he said.

All that begs the question of what the public should make of Steele’s reports, in light of the “hall of mirrors” atmosphere that surrounds much intelligence reporting about the Kremlin. The format of the reports tracks the writings of professional intelligence reports, with each claim tied to a particular source, even if the sources (per standard procedure) are never identified. Steve Hall, a former top Russia operations officer for the CIA until 2015, said he found aspects of Steele’s reports to be credible, especially as they related to the Kremlin’s plans for hacking the U.S. election.

“I find some of it indeed has the ring of truth,” said Hall. But, he added, “other parts of it are problematic.”

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9355&start=255

Trump foreign policy advisor reportedly being probed for ties to Russia
Christine Wang | @christiiineeee
17 Hours Ago
CNBC.com

Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia.
Pavel Golovkin | AP
Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia.
One of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisors is being probed by U.S. intelligence officials to determine whether he has had private discussions with senior Russian officials, Yahoo News reported, citing sources.

In particular, members of the intelligence community are concerned that Carter Page has spoken with the Kremlin about the possibility of lifting economic sanctions on Russia, sources told Yahoo.

Page and Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The report comes amid growing concerns that Moscow may be trying to influence the U.S. presidential election. On Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff of California issued a joint statement expressing their concern about Russian hacking and called on President Vladimir Putin "to immediately order a halt to this activity."

"Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election," Feinstein and Schiff said. "At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election—we can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians."

Feinstein is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Schiff is a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/23/trump-fo ... ussia.html

Feds investigating Trump advisor’s meeting with Russian officials seeking to influence U.S. election
Harry Reid wrote the FBI, demanding action.


Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/PAVEL GOLOVKIN
U.S. law enforcement is looking into Donald Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page’s meetings with high-ranking Russian officials this summer, Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff reports.
Page, who Trump said was one of his five foreign policy advisors last March, is suspected of communicating with “senior Russian officials” about “the possible lifting of economic sanctions” if Trump becomes president, Yahoo reports, citing “multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.”
One of the officials Page allegedly met with, Igor Diveykin, is “believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” Russia is widely believed to be behind high-profile computer hacks that appear timed to influence the presidential election.
ThinkProgress obtained a letter from Sen. Harry Reid to the FBI, dated August 27, demanding an investigation into Page’s contacts with the Russians. Reid’s letter refers to Page as a “Trump advisor” with “investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom.”

Page worked in Russia for Merrill Lynch for three years starting in 2004. Sergey Aleksashenko, who became head of the bank’s Moscow operation in 2006, told Reuters last month that he viewed Trump’s selection of Page as “a strange choice.”
Page traveled to Russia this summer and gave a speech criticizing U.S. foreign policy. From Yahoo:
Page showed up again in Moscow in early July, just two weeks before the Republican National Convention formally nominated Trump for president, and once again criticized U.S. policy. Speaking at a commencement address for the New Economic School, an institution funded in part by major Russian oligarchs close to Putin, Page asserted that “Washington and other West capitals” had impeded progress in Russia “through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”
Page isn’t the only Trump advisor whose connections to Russia have come under scrutiny. Last December, retied Gen. Michael Flynn, a prominent Trump military advisor, traveled to Russia and gave a speech during a tenth anniversary celebration for Russian state-owned media company RT. He’s refused to answer questions about who paid him for the appearance.
In March, Trump hired veteran Republican political operative Paul Manafort to lead his delegate-recruitment efforts. Manafort quickly rose to become Trump’s campaign manager, but left that position last month amid reports Ukrainian authorities were investigating him for allegedly receiving $12.7 million in illegal payments from Ukraine’s former pro-Russia ruling party.
During a news conference a month before Manafort stepped down, Trump brazenly encouraged Russian hackers to obtain emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Those comments came in the wake of a massive hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails that sparked controversy about how the party treated Bernie Sanders days ahead of the Democratic National Convention. State election databases have also reportedly been hacked.
On Thursday, the top Democrats on the intelligence committee pinned those hacks on Russian intelligence. A joint statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Adam Schiff said, “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election.”
“At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election — we can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians,” the statement continues, going on to say “that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from very senior levels of the Russian government.”
Trump, for his part, downplayed reports that Russia might be trying to meddle in American politics during an interview that aired earlier this month on the Russia-run RT network.
Trump has praised Putin, calling the man presiding over a country where opposition leaders have been killed under mysterious circumstances “highly respected within his own country and beyond.” During a presidential forum broadcast on NBC earlier this month, Trump said that if Putin “says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him” and commended Putin’s high approval ratings in Russia — a country known for stifling dissident journalists.
Around the same time as the forum, Trump surrogates, including campaign vice presidential nominee Mike Pence and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, defended Trump’s praise of Putin during TV interviews. Both echoed Trump’s statement that Putin is a stronger leader than President Obama.
In the Yahoo report, Trump spokesman Jason Miller says Page “has no role” in Trump’s campaign, adding, “we are not aware of any of his activities, past or present.” But Miller couldn’t explain why Trump would’ve cited him as an advisor in the past. And as recently as last month, Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks described Carter as an “informal foreign advisor.”
The full text of Reid’s letter is below:
https://thinkprogress.org/feds-investig ... .ka7vjlqir

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-12-27T194045Z_01_L27556531_RTRUKOC_0_US-POISONING-RUSSIA-YUKOS.xml&WTmodLoc=IntNewsHome_C2_worldNews-4

By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors said on Wednesday that Leonid Nevzlin, a former top manager of the YUKOS business empire, could have ordered the poisoning of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.

"A version is being looked at that those who ordered these crimes could be the same people who are on an international wanted list for serious and very serious crimes, one of whom is ... Leonid Nevzlin," Russia's prosecutor-general's office said in a statement posted on its Web site http://www.genproc.gov.ru.

The statement adds another bizarre twist to the Litvinenko saga and could indicate Russia plans to up the pressure on the former owners of YUKOS, which has been dismembered and is now bankrupt after facing billions of dollars of back tax claims.


The top news, photos, and videos of 2006. Full Coverage

Nevzlin's spokesman dismissed the prosecutor-general's allegations: "Everyone knows the KGB's methods. These statements are ridiculous and do not warrant a response."

A trusted business partner of jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin has provoked the Kremlin's ire by slamming Putin for the destruction of YUKOS, which he says was political motivated.

After Khodorkovsky's arrest in October 2003, Nevzlin fled to Israel and later received Israeli citizenship. He has a Jewish grandparent.

Litvinenko, who died in London on November 23, made a deathbed statement accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of his murder. The Kremlin called Litvinenko's allegations "nonsense".

His slow, agonizing death in a London hospital from poisoning by radioactive polonium 210 has prompted a five-nation police investigation and scorched the Kremlin's reputation, despite its repeated denials of any involvement in the murder.

MERCURY TRACES

The prosecutor general's office said traces of evaporated mercury had been found in cars, flats, cottages and offices in both Moscow and London. It did not say who owned or used the properties.

Significant amounts of polonium 210 were found in Litvinenko's body after his death, but it was unclear what role mercury could have played.


The top news, photos, and videos of 2006. Full Coverage

A single team has been created to investigate the Litvinenko and YUKOS cases, the prosecutor-general said.

The head of holding company GML, YUKOS's main shareholder, said the accusations against Nevzlin were an attempt by Russian officials to divert attention.

"This is a typical, predictable Russian government ploy," Tim Osborne told Reuters by telephone.

"They are trying to blame Nevzlin but everyone else believes that either the Russian government or the FSB were behind the murder of Litvinenko. This is just a conjecture to throw the heat off them," he said.


Litvinenko's friend Alexander Goldfarb called the prosecutor-general's statement "sheer nonsense".

"This statement is a very clumsy effort to shift the blame for this murder and it only adds to the suspicion that the Russian government is standing behind this murder," he said.

Russia wants to try Nevzlin for a series of killings which a Russian court has said were carried out by the former head of security at YUKOS.

Khodorkovsky, who is serving an 8-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, has been moved to a detention center in Russia's Far East, possibly to face new charges, his lawyer said this month.


The top news, photos, and videos of 2006. Full Coverage

YUKOS was declared bankrupt in August and its assets are expected to be put up for sale within a year. Analysts expect state oil firm Rosneft to be the major beneficiary of YUKOS's break-up, with gas monopoly Gazprom also poised to snap up assets.

[seemslikeadream]

MONDAY, JAN 16, 2017 10:00 AM CST
We must know the truth: Investigations of the Russia hack and its consequences are crucial
Begrudgingly, some Republicans are coming around: If we are to save our democracy, we have to know what happened
GARY LEGUM

We must know the truth: Investigations of the Russia hack and its consequences are crucial

On Friday, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reversed course and grudgingly agreed to investigate Russia’s alleged meddling in November’s election. This announcement was preceded on Thursday by the inspector general for the Justice Department announcing he will investigate FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The I.G.’s move came as stories surrounding the leak of the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia, prepared by a former agent of the British intelligence agency MI6, were making their way into the press. According to one British newspaper, the former MI6 agent and an American colleague were convinced that a clique of FBI agents sat on their information on the Russian hack in order to keep the public’s focus on Clinton’s emails. There is a solid case that these bureaucratic shenanigans in the FBI, which led to Comey’s announcement of a quasi-reopening of the email investigation on Oct. 28, swung the election to Donald Trump. Why members of the FBI worked in a way that may have undermined the will of the voters is another strand of the story that deserves unraveling.

In short, while Trump supporters may want to claim there is no fire here, there is a hell of a lot of smoke. Which is why these two investigations should only be the start. Congress needs to consider all options, up to and including appointing an independent counsel with full subpoena power, to investigate the alleged Russian meddling. And that counsel should have the full resources of the federal government at his or her disposal.

The thought of investigations already does not sit well with a lot of people who are flailing for justifications to ignore the allegations. As best I can tell, the arguments against a full-scale investigation of the extent of any Russian-led disinformation campaign to influence the election boil down to the following reasons:

Russia says rumors of such a campaign are not true.
We have not actually seen solid evidence of Russian hacking. Stop this McCarthyism at once!
Russia is not responsible for Hillary Clinton failing to campaign in Wisconsin.
Republicans never questioned Obama’s legitimacy, so Democrats should not question Trump’s.
Democrats are just sore losers. Get over it, Clinton-loving snowflakes.
Of these arguments, only the second and third address the issue in any serious way. (The others are worthy of no more than a sarcastic “LOL.”) The second can be dismissed by noting that even with the lack of technical information in the ICA report released by the government two weeks ago, there are plenty of members of the intelligence community and the government – including a few Republicans – who were concerned about Russian interference months before the election.

The third argument can also be dismissed by noting simply that we can and must focus on more than one thing at a time. Yes, the Democratic Party has limitations with gerrymandering and demographic distribution of its voters, to say nothing of the coherence of its messaging, that it needs to overcome if it wants to regain power. Doing so likely involves an honest look at the mistakes of the Clinton campaign, what they meant and what, if anything, Democrats can do to not make them again.

That does not in any way diminish the importance of the allegations of Russian meddling. And any disinformation campaign that may have helped put Trump in the White House will not stop with his inauguration. It will continue on in support of his agenda, and it will be useful to advisers around him like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, “populists” who seek to align the incoming Trump administration with white nationalist movements in other nations.

There is no reason we cannot be concerned about all of this at the same time, and why we can’t deploy resources to address it.

Besides, who is to say that a full investigation would confirm the current evidence of Russian meddling? What if, for example, an investigation into WikiLeaks’ publication of the Democratic National Committee’s emails discovered that the documents were leaked by a disgruntled DNC staffer, and not as the result of a server hack by a mysterious collective of Russian-affiliated hackers? Imagine how much Trump and the rest of the GOP could gloat if that turned out to be the case.

The idea of an independent counsel assumes there are any Republicans willing to take such a step, at the risk of sucking up so much time that the party cannot work on passing its hard-right legislative agenda. Slim chance, I know. But given the wide split in November’s popular vote, the American people deserve to know if a foreign power helped to put them under the rule of a kleptocracy that is likely to inflict grievous injury on a majority of them.
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/16/we-must ... e-crucial/

[barracuda]

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