the worst part for me is the stories were generally factually accurate, i mean c'mon you can't say that's fair
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:40 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:41 pm
by 0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:47 pm
seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:41 pm wrote:so what ...what does this have to do with Russian mobsters?
and people indicted or pled guilty to Conspiracy Against the U.S.
money laundering
drug money
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:47 pm
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
The Drug Trafficker Donald Trump Risked His Casino Empire to Protect
The Donald and his sister, federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, both took helicopter flights with a guy who had a lot of ways to get people high.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
10.19.16 1:03 AM ET
With Donald Trump calling on Hillary Clinton to take a drug test before their third debate Wednesday evening, it’s the perfect time to bring up one of the biggest campaign issues that major news organizations have avoided: His long, deep, and strange involvement with a major cocaine and marijuana trafficker.
Trump presents himself as the most ardent law-and-order politician ever. Yet throughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon.
Long ago, when Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum, to whom he also entrusted maintenance of the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter. Spy, a satirical magazine that often made fun of Trump, reported that Weichselbaum—at that point a twice-convicted felon—personally piloted the Trumps in that copter.
Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia and shipping them from Bradford Motors, a Miami-area car dealership he partly owned, to Cincinnati.
When Weichselbaum got caught, his case was handled in a most unusual way, with both Donald Trump and one of his siblings in starring roles.
This relationship between the Republican presidential nominee and a major drug trafficker, revealed in court filings and other public documents, has never been explained by the candidate. Trump should be asked in every venue right up to Election Day for a complete and detailed accounting of this relationship.
Trump’s loud sniffling through the first two debates prompted all sorts of speculation. His lagging performance at the end of the first debate, when he lost focus and went off on yet another attack on comedian Rosie O’Donnell, further fueled that speculation. Former Vermont governor and prominent Democrat Howard Dean suggested that Trump snorted cocaine ahead of the first debate, an especially fraught diagnosis even for a physician.
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The candidate says that he does not drink or use drugs and never has. I have no evidence to the contrary.
Dean’s rank speculation, and the questions raised on social media about Trump’s sniffling in the second debate, might have been the end of the issue except that Trump decided to breathe new life into it. At campaign rallies Trump said that it seemed to him that Clinton was the one on drugs. Trump declared, against the visible evidence, that Clinton was the one exhausted by debating, suggesting this was because the effects of drugs had worn off.
Trump is well known for projecting—taking things that apply to himself and saying that they apply to others. His comments about Clinton, who was alert and stood with good posture through both debates, did not help him.
But any questions about his personal drug use are small potatoes compared to his long, deep embrace of Weichselbaum. Trump risked his lucrative casino license to demonstrate his unflagging loyalty to a convicted drug trafficker.
The unusual relationship between Trump and Weichselbaum deserves at least as much attention as the Republican nominee’s refusal to make public any of his tax returns or the questions about what was contained in the Democratic nominee’s tens of thousands of emails that she says were private and that State Department staff deleted.
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Yet, to use Trumpian language, I alone am raising the issue of his drug-distributor pal.
Law enforcement reports long ago identified Weichselbaum as a Mafia associate. At one time he was actively involved in cigarette-boat racing in Miami, a sport that attracted a number of high-level criminals ranging from fellow drug traffickers to corrupt financiers like Charles Keating, the poster boy for the savings-and-loan scandals of quarter century ago, who came in second in a race where Weichselbaum ran third.
Trump needed helicopters to fly high-rollers to Atlantic City. The selection of Damin Aviation was odd given that there were better-financed helicopter companies with longer track records. Damin was set up as a lightly financed tax-sheltered operation that benefited from lavish state of New Jersey subsidies. Despite that structure, it soon went bust and reemerged as Nimad—Damin spelled backward. It went bust again.
Through all this Trump stayed with Damin, run by Joseph’s brother and continuing to him, instead of switching to any of the other helicopter providers.
Because Weichselbaum was then a twice-convicted felon, New Jersey gambling regulators eventually insisted he not be involved with providing helicopter services to the Trump casinos.
Yet Weichselbaum continued collecting a $100,000 salary (more than $220,000 in today’s money) and a company car and driver from Nimad. And Trump kept using the company that paid Weichselbaum even though he was supposedly no longer involved, which technically met the requirements imposed by casino regulators.
According to his indictment, Weichselbaum’s more lucrative business was having drugs delivered to Bradford Motors, the Miami-area car dealership he had an ownership stake in. At one point, he helped load up to 1,500 pounds of drugs at the time into cars that mules drove to the Cincinnati area for distribution in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, testimony and his confession established.
Trump learned of the indictment shortly after it was filed in October 1985, New Jersey Casino Control Commission records show. At that point Trump should have cut off all connections to Weichselbaum because failing to do so could cost him his casino license.
The New Jersey Casino Control Act requires owners to prove by clear and convincing evidence that they do not consort with criminals. The United States Supreme Court upheld this law because a casino license is a privilege, not a right.
Instead of abandoning Weichselbaum, Trump did him the first of several favors.
Two months after the indictment, Trump rented apartment 32C in the Trump Plaza Apartments on E. 61st St. in Manhattan to the Weichselbaum brothers, according to New Jersey Casino Control Commission records. Trump personally owned the unit.
It was an odd arrangement. The brothers were to pay about half the rent in cash and the rest in unspecified helicopter services, which would be hard to establish without a thorough audit, according to those casino regulatory files.
Meanwhile, Weichselbaum agreed to plead guilty in Federal District Court in Cincinnati. His Ohio lawyer, Arnold Morelli, asked that sentencing be done either in Miami, where Bradford Motors is located, or Manhattan where the confessed drug trafficker lived.
Instead the case somehow ended up in New Jersey—and in not just any courtroom, either. It came before Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s older sister.
After three weeks Judge Barry recused herself, explaining to the chief judge that her husband, Trump casino lawyer John Barry, and she had flown in the helicopters of a confessed drug trafficker. At the time, there was only a signed order reassigning the case, but not explaining the reasons for doing so. Six years passed before Barry’s reason for recusal—potentially damaging to the federal judiciary—emerged in a book by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
Then Trump wrote a letter on Trump Organization stationery pleading for mercy for Weichselbaum. He called him “a credit to the community.” Trump also described the drug trafficker as “conscientious, forthright and diligent,” not the sort of language a law-and-order presidential candidate would be expected to apply to a drug trafficker who moved more than 11 pounds of cocaine in one shipment alone and more than three quarters of a ton of marijuana in another.
When New Jersey gaming regulators first asked Trump about this letter he denied writing it. When they came back with a copy of the letter, Trump said under oath that his signature was on the page. What else he may have been asked is unknown because the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming Enforcement’s report did not indicate that Trump was asked the obvious questions:
What prompted you to write the letter knowing you could lose your casino license over it?
What were your business dealings with Weichselbaum beyond helicopter services?
Did you invest in the drug deals?
Trump has never answered questions about this, including when he called me at my home on April 27 to tell me that unless he liked what I wrote about him he would sue me, something no other candidate for office has ever done in my half century of reporting.
Trump’s letter worked. Weichselbaum served just 18 months, while the mules who merely drove the drugs got sentences of up to 20 years.
When time came for parole, Weichselbaum said he had the required job and a place to live. He told authorities he would be Trump’s helicopter guy. Then he moved into Trump Tower.
It’s more than reasonable, indeed critical, that Trump be pinned down on just what motivated his unusual actions in the Weichselbaum case. He needs to be asked why, as he is now doing with Vladimir Putin, he went out of his way to make sure Weichselbaum knew that in Donald Trump he had a totally loyal ally who would never turn on him.
Having a tax cheat in the White House four decades ago and another a heartbeat away was bad enough. Why in the world would we want the ally of a drug trafficker anywhere near the Oval Office?
Wednesday evening, debate moderator Chris Wallace will have the opportunity to ask Trump why he stood by this convicted felon, risking his casino empire in the process.
Until Trump offers real answers, we have no way of knowing whether he simply displayed the kind of bad judgement he attributes to Clinton or was knowingly involved in Weichselbaum’s drug business.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-drug- ... to-protect
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:48 pm
0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 4:47 pm wrote:seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:41 pm wrote:so what ...what does this have to do with Russian mobsters?
and people indicted or pled guilty to Conspiracy Against the U.S.
money laundering
drug money
Well exactly!
by 0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 6:12 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 6:46 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 7:29 pm
Scott Stedman
I ask everyone to take all of this with a grain of salt. Everything I’m reporting here is vetted and legit but the Russian government likes to play games. Keep your guard up.
Scott Stedman
Breaking: A new twist in the Rybka/Deripaska case. Rybka's associate Alex Lesley works for Viktor Vekselberg at the Skolkovo Foundation. Vekselberg and Deripaska are fierce enemies.
Here's proof of Alex Lesley (AKA Alex Kirillov) working at the Skolkov Foundation - owned by Vekselberg
https://sk.ru/net/1120122/p/teammember. ... 2e24f2549b
Vekselberg is one of Russia's richest men and has close ties to Putin. He has played both sides of the coin in American politics, donating to Trump's inauguration and the Clinton Foundation:A Putin-Friendly Oligarch’s Top US Executive Donated $285,000 to Trump
The head of Viktor Vekselberg’s American subsidiary helped finance Trump’s inauguration.
David Corn and Dan Friedman
Aug. 17, 2017 6:00 AM
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Renova Group Board Chairman Viktor Vekselberg at the Russia-USA Business Dialogue panel in St. Petersburg in June.Metzel Mikhail/ZUMA
Earlier this year, as Donald Trump, then the president-elect, was trying to counter news reports that Russia had hacked the 2016 election to help him win, the head of the American subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate owned by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin made a huge donation to Trump.
On January 6—the day the US intelligence community reported that Putin had approved a covert operation to subvert the presidential campaign to assist Trump—Andrew Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Intrater is the CEO of Columbus Nova, the lone American subsidiary of Renova Group, a giant holding company owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg with interests in the metals, mining, chemical, construction, transport, energy, telecommunication, and financial sectors in Russia and abroad. Intrater, an American citizen, is Vekselberg’s cousin, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Intrater also made a $35,000 contribution to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee.
Intrater has no public history as a major political funder; his Trump donations dwarf his previous contributions. According to Federal Election Commission records, his only past political donations were $2,600 in 2014 to a business associate running as a Republican for Congress, $1,200 to Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign, and $250 to the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts in 1995. Intrater’s hefty gift to the inauguration fund earned him special access to inaugural events, including a dinner billed as “an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,” according to a fundraising brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.
Vekselberg is one of Russia’s richest men. Bloomberg recently estimated his net worth at $15.5 billion. The same month that Intrater pumped that quarter of a million dollars into Trump’s inauguration bank account, Vekselberg publicly expressed hope for the lifting this year of the tough US and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia after it annexed Crimea and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting in Ukraine.
Vekselberg, one of Russia’s richest men, seems to be on good terms with Putin and the Kremlin.
During the campaign, Trump advisers hinted at the possibility of easing or removing the sanctions. After Trump took office, his administration reportedly considered unilaterally lifting sanctions on Russia and returning diplomatic compounds seized in December as retaliation for Russian interference in the 2016 election, moves Trump aides hoped would improve relations with Moscow. The White House also unsuccessfully opposed a congressional measure to bar Trump from undoing sanctions without approval from Capitol Hill lawmakers.
Vekselberg seems to be on good terms with Putin and the Kremlin. He heads a major Russian initiative to bring high-tech businesses into the country. In December 2015, he attended a gala dinner featuring Putin that celebrated the 10th anniversary of RT, the English-language, Kremlin-cozy media outlet. (Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, then an adviser to Trump, was an honored guest at the dinner and was paid $45,000 to speak at a conference that was part of this RT celebration.) In March, Vekselberg had a one-on-one meeting with Putin to discuss infrastructure projects involving his business. (Renova is constructing an airport in southern Russia as part of the nation’s preparations to host the 2018 soccer World Cup.)
Vekselberg certainly scored points with Putin with a pet project: his acquisition and repatriation to Russia of Fabergé eggs. In 2013, Vekeslberg told an interviewer he had spent more than $100 million to obtain the eggs, which once were owned by the late Malcolm Forbes. He noted that Putin personally thanked him for this: “I’ve seen the emotion of our president. It’s important to him that a Russian citizen has brought back this important collection.”
Like many Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg has faced accusations of corruption. One lawsuit claimed he used gunmen to gain control of a Siberian oil field. Two senior executives at firms controlled by Vekselberg were imprisoned last year in Russia on charges that they bribed regional officials.
Republicans were previously eager to highlight Renova and Vekselberg’s political contributions—to Hillary Clinton.
In 2014, Vekselberg’s Renova Group became a partner with American billionaire investor Wilbur Ross in the takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, which had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians—some of it presumably dirty money or funds deposited there to avoid Russian taxation. The bank had failed in 2013. Ross went on to become Trump’s secretary of commerce. During his confirmation hearings in February, Democratic senators sent Ross a list of questions regarding his relationship with Vekselberg. Ross has yet to answer them.
Columbus Nova, the Renova American subsidiary headed by Intrater, is a New York-based investment firm that claims more than $2 billion in investments in a variety of industries, including biofuels, real estate, health care, insurance, telecommunications, and construction.
Intrater and Renova and the Republican National Committee did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about Intrater’s donations to Trump, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “You would need to contact inaugural.” The Trump inaugural committee did not respond to a subsequent inquiry.
Republicans were previously eager to highlight Renova and Vekselberg’s contributions—but to another candidate. During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign and conservatives blasted Hillary Clinton for a link with Vekselberg because the Renova Group had donated between $50,000 an $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The Trump campaign issued a press release claiming that this contribution was evidence Clinton was actually the candidate in the race with “close ties” to Putin and had “sold out American interests to Putin in exchange for political and financial favors.” (That press release is no longer available online.) Conservative groups and media outlets—including the National Review, Investors Business Daily, and the Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page—have cited this relatively modest Renova donation as proof the Clintons were chummy with Putin’s regime. In 2015, David Bossie, a conservative activist who went on to serve as deputy campaign manager for Trump, said the Clinton Foundation’s connection to Vekselberg was “just another example of how the Clintons will take money from any source, good, bad, or ugly.”
Besides Intrater’s $250,000 donation—which has not previously been reported—Trump’s inaugural committee accepted other Russia-related contributions. Russian American businessman Alexander Shustorovich and Access Industries, a firm owned by Len Blavatnik, a Soviet-born American citizen and Vekselberg’s longtime business partner, each gave $1 million to finance Trump’s inauguration.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -to-trump/
Trump maligned Clinton for taking the donation (and attempting to set up a meeting between Bill Clinton and Vekselberg). Trump then accepted a Vekselberg donation for his inauguration. Vekselberg also attended the event.
Vekselberg and Deripaska fell out of favor in 2012 when Vekselberg left RUSAL amid tensions Deripaska. Since then they have become stark rivals with a ton of bad blood.RUSAL chairman quits in Russian oligarch fight
Megan Davies, Polina Devitt
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg quit on Tuesday as chairman of UC RUSAL (0486.HK), the world’s largest aluminium producer, saying the heavily indebted company was in deep crisis after a long battle with rival oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Vekselberg’s exit widens a rift with controlling shareholder Deripaska, who had sought to build a Russian metals and mining business on a global scale by merging RUSAL with Norilsk Nickel (GMKN.MM), the world’s top nickel and palladium miner.
Energy and metals magnate Vekselberg could now mount a legal challenge to Deripaska’s determination to keep a stake in Norilsk, which, if sold, would almost wipe out the company’s $11 billion debt burden and enable it to look at other merger opportunities.
“I regret to say at this time that Rusal is in a deep crisis caused by the actions of the management,” said Vekselberg, listed by Forbes magazine as Russia’s eighth-richest man with a fortune of $12.4 billion.
Deripaska said Vekselberg had failed to fulfill his chairman’s role by not attending meetings for a year and was jumping before he was pushed.
“The decision of Mr. Vekselberg to resign as chairman of the board pre-empted the anticipated consideration of this matter by the board,” a statement from RUSAL said.
RUSAL’s board will pick a new chairman from its slate of independent directors at a board meeting on Friday, Deripaska later told reporters.
RUSAL’s shares were suspended after falling 1.3 percent in Hong Kong on Tuesday. The company said it expected trading in Hong Kong and Paris to resume on March 14.
Deripaska, a theoretical physicist who emerged triumphant from Russia’s aluminium wars of the 1990s, bought a one-quarter stake in Norilsk through RUSAL four years ago, but the debt that financed the deal became a major headache when the global crisis hit.
RUSAL was forced into a debt restructuring, killing Deripaska’s dream of a mega-merger, but he blocked calls by partners Vekselberg and billionaire politician Mikhail Prokhorov to sell the stake back to Norilsk.
“RUSAL is a good company, but the (economic) cycle is not that simple,” Deripaska told reporters on a conference call late on Tuesday.
“The events that will influence the price of aluminium lie ahead. I would hardly advise anyone to sell. It is necessary to wait until the Asian and European markets rebalance.”
RUSAL shares vs aluminium link.reuters.com/myv96s
OLIGARCH EGOS
“This escalates the conflict,” said Robert Mantse, metals and mining analyst at Otkritie, a Moscow-based brokerage.
“Although most of the disagreements ... are well known, the resignation of Vekselberg shows just how far he and Deripaska now stand apart in the running of the company.”
The shareholder dispute is complicated by the outsized egos of Russia’s resource oligarchs, with the principal players, including Norilsk’s main shareholder Vladimir Potanin, having a long history of troubled relations.
Russia’s mining sector is highly politicized, with oligarchs effectively owning their assets at the pleasure of the Kremlin. Vekselberg’s resignation follows Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s victory in a presidential election. Prokhorov, running in his first election on a liberal ticket, took third place, though some viewed his candidacy as creating a convenient illusion of democracy that worked to benefit Putin.
Prokhorov’s investment company, Onexim, declined comment, as did Norilsk Nickel. Vekselberg was not available for further comment.
Deripaska, having failed to secure influence in steering Norilsk, has spurned three offers by Potanin to buy back the stake at a steep premium to its current value.
After paying an estimated $14 billion in cash and stock for the holding in 2008, he turned down a $13 billion buyout offer from Norilsk in December 2010 and rejected two lower offers in spring and autumn of last year.
“If (Deripaska) looked silly for buying it at the top of the market, he could have looked smart now if he’d (sold) Norilsk in the spring of 2011,” said Steven Dashevsky, founder and chief investment officer at Dashevsky & Partners.
“But that required a focus on the value creation of the business,” he told Reuters.
No discussions about selling that stake have been held at RUSAL since last autumn, Deripaska said.
“I look at Norilsk Nickel optimistically,” he said.“We have not discussed this for a long time with anyone.”
United Company RUSAL Plc
5.3
0486.HKHONG KONG STOCK
-0.18(-3.28%)
0486.HK
0486.HKGMKN.MM
DEBT STRUGGLE
RUSAL, which floated in Hong Kong in early 2010, has a market capitalization of about $12 billion. Its 25 percent stake in Norilsk makes up the bulk of its equity market value, priced at about $9.4 billion.
Analysts and insiders said they see no short-term way out of the deadlock and that no plans are afoot to sell the stake.
One source close to Vekselberg’s camp said it had“only one way out — to sue Deripaska”.
While Vekselberg’s resignation tightens Deripaska’s grip as chief executive of RUSAL, the company faces a struggle to pay off its debt.
Aluminium prices fell sharply last year as China’s economic growth slowed, though they have recovered this year after global rivals such as Alcoa cut production. RUSAL’s stock, at HK$6.12, is now 43 percent below its IPO price.
Vekselberg is widely viewed as a financial investor who wants quick returns on his investments, while Deripaska has a bullish long-term view on world metals demand and has invested heavily to boost RUSAL’s output.
RUSAL said the board would meet on Friday to appoint a new chairman. It is expected to elevate one of its five independent directors, who include Anatoly Tikhonov, first deputy chairman at Russian state development bank VEB.
RUSAL STAKES
The move raised speculation that Vekselberg might sell his 15.8 percent stake in RUSAL, which he owns with partners, though the sources close to his camp said that was out of the question.
Deripaska said he enjoyed a pre-emptive right to buy the stake under a shareholder agreement.
“If they sell, we will discuss it,” Deripaska said, adding that he spoke with Vekselberg on Tuesday, and that the two had“different views and divergent positions”.
Prokhorov has also dismissed suggestions that he might sell his 17 percent stake in RUSAL, which he acquired in a cash-and-stock deal when he sold his one-quarter holding in Norilsk.
He told Reuters in a recent interview that RUSAL and Norilsk should either agree to merge or make a clean break.
“As a former chief executive at Norilsk Nickel, I have a personal opinion that it is better to sit at a table and to make an agreement - who is leaving - or to make a merger of Norilsk Nickel and RUSAL,” Prokhorov said.
Deripaska, through his investment vehicle EN+, owns 47.4 percent of RUSAL and has overall strategic control. According to Forbes magazine’s latest rich list, Deripaska’s wealth nearly halved over the past year to $8.8 billion.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rusa ... 7620120313
https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/statu ... 6707920896
Scott Stedman
Handwritten letter from Alex Lesley and Nastya Rybka (Deripaska’s mistress) that was delivered to US embassy in Bangkok. They are seeking asylum in return for information on the Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
“We have photo-video-audio of crimes of Russian government.”
I ask everyone to take all of this with a grain of salt. Everything I’m reporting here is vetted and legit but the Russian government likes to play games. Keep your guard up.
What we know as fact: Rybka is on video with Oleg Deripaska and the Russian deputy PM in August 2016. What we don’t know: If she actually has information about possible coordination between Trump team/Russia.
My source is an American citizen. (S)he was the one that passed this letter to the American representative. It is legit. What remains unclear: Motivations behind this entire story. I’m not drawing any conclusions about the validity of Rybka’s claims.
I’m told that on Monday the NYT, Buzzfeed, and CNN will visit the jail to attempt to get an interview with Rybka.
Just got confirmation that this was personally written by Lesley.
Lesley handed it off to the American at the immigration detention center before being transferred to the jail in Bangkok.
https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/statu ... 4545424384
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 12, 2018 5:06 am
Putin: Maybe ‘Ukrainians, Tatars Or Jews’ Meddled In American Election
By Associated Press | March 11, 2018 11:54 am
Mikhail Metzel/TASS
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin says he doesn’t care about alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election because the actions weren’t connected to his government.
In an interview with American broadcaster NBC News that aired Saturday, Putin also suggested that some of the 13 Russian nationals indicted by the United States may not be ethnically Russian.
“Maybe they are not even Russians, but Ukrainians, Tatars or Jews, but with Russian citizenship, which should also be checked,” he said.
Putin responded brusquely when interviewer Megyn Kelly asked if he condoned the interference that was alleged in last month’s U.S. indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller.
“It’s all the same to me. To me it absolutely makes no difference because they do not represent the government,” Putin answered, according to the Russian-language interview transcript posted Saturday by the Kremlin.
Putin said Russia has neither the tools nor the will to meddle in elections. He repeatedly complained during the interview that Washington has brushed off Russian initiatives to work together on cybersecurity issues.
“But the U.S. refuses to work like this and instead throws 13 Russians to the media,” he said, going on to list the possible ethnicities that would make the suspects “not even Russian.”
“Maybe they have dual citizenship or a green card; maybe the U.S. paid them for this. How can you know that? I do not know, either,” the Russian leader said.
In the indictment, the 13 Russians are accused of an elaborate plot to disrupt the U.S. election including running a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Trump win. Among the 13 was Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been dubbed “Putin’s chef” by Russian media because his restaurants and catering businesses have hosted the Kremlin leader’s dinners with foreign dignitaries.
In the interview, Putin claimed that the United States interferes in Russian elections “all the time” but that it was “impossible for us” to do the same.
“First, we have principles whereby we do not allow others to interfere in our domestic affairs and do not get into the affairs of others….Secondly, we don’t have this quantity of tools,” he said.
The NBC News interview was conducted in two parts, on March 1 and March 2. Kelly noted that Putin made the remark about not having the tools to disrupt the U.S. election shortly after he announced that Russia had developed major new nuclear weapons.
“This isn’t missiles. This is an absolutely different sphere of activity,” Putin responded.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/puti ... n-election
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:54 am
Infamous St. Petersburg 'Troll Factory' Set on Fire
Moskva News Agency
The office of Russia’s infamous troll factory believed to be at the vanguard of Russia’s information war has been set on fire in St. Petersburg overnight.
An investigation revealed last year that the secretive troll factory had rebranded itself as a media conglomerate with 16 news websites generating more than 30 million pageviews every month. Its operational hub, a website called FAN (Federal News Agency), is based a stone’s throw from the troll farm’s original location in northern St. Petersburg.
Russia’s Infamous ‘Troll Factory’ Is Now Posing as a Media Empire
The Fontanka.ru news website cited police as saying that an unknown suspect broke the agency’s ground-floor window and threw a Molotov cocktail inside at around 3 a.m. on Tuesday.
Surveillance footage published by FAN showed flames erupting at one of the empty workstations and a female staffer stationed on the opposite end quickly exiting the office.
“I believe this is tied to FAN’s activities,” its chief editor Yevgeny Zubarev said. “We’re most often attacked online, but these types of attacks have already taken place offline.”
FAN said its office came under another arson attack on the eve of the 2018 presidential elections in March.
The troll farm is believed to be run by billionaire restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as President Vladimir Putin’s “cook.” A U.S. special counsel indicted Prigozhin and 12 other Russians this year on charges of defrauding the U.S. government by interfering with its political process.
St. Petersburg police told the RBC news website that they were looking for the culprit and planned to launch criminal proceedings.
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/infamou ... fire-63130
by seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:51 am
The Feds Have the Russian Troll Farm Receipts
New indictment sheds light on Russian election meddlers secretive “Project Lakhta”
10.19.18 8:23 PM ET
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast
Federal prosecutors made it clear Friday that they have a pile of Russian troll farm receipts. Like Eliot Ness going after Al Capone’s accountant, prosecutors in a new complaint named the Internet Research Agency’s top accountant, Elena Khusyaynova for her role as the bookkeeper for Russia’s social media meddlers in a case that appears to tie in with Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation. While Khusyaynova is unlikely to ever see the inside of a U.S. courtroom, the complaint hints that the feds have a lot more granular information about how the Internet Research Agency works than they’ve previously far let on. So what does the money trail show?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Uncle Sam has receipts: In noting that Khusyaynova kept "detailed financial documents that tracked itemized Project Lakhta expenses" and "kept track of requests to Concord for funds to cover those expenses," prosecutors tipped their hand that they’re sitting on a mountain of evidence about how money, the lifeblood of any organization, moved around the IRA and the many activities it subsidized. Unless you’re willing to believe that IRA employees did work for free at times, the feds probably have a receipt for whatever work they’ve done under the umbrella of Project Lakhta. Lakhta, prosecutors wrote, was the IRA’s line item for activities to "spread distrust towards candidates for political office and political system in general."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-feds- ... itter_page
Justice Dept. charges Russian woman with interference in Midterm elections
Devlin Barrett
The Justice Department on Friday charged a Russian woman for her role in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2018 U.S. election, marking the first criminal case prosecutors have brought against a foreign national for meddling in the upcoming Midterms.
Elena Khusyaynova, 44, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors said she managed the finances of “Project Lakhta,” a foreign influence operation they said was designed “to sow discord in the U.S. political system” by pushing arguments and misinformation online about a whole host of divisive political issues, including immigration, the Confederate flag, gun control, and the NFL national anthem protests.
The charges against Khusyaynova came just as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that it was concerned about “ongoing campaigns” by Russia, China and Iran to interfere with the upcoming Midterm elections and even the 2020 race — an ominous warning that comes just weeks before voters head to the polls.
In a statement, the Director of National Intelligence said officials “do not have any evidence of a compromise or disruption of infrastructure that would enable adversaries to prevent voting, change vote counts or disrupt our ability to tally votes in the midterm elections.” But the statement noted, “We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies. These activities also may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.”
The announcement, which was joined by the Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security, comes on the eve of a trip National Security Advisor John Bolton is making to Moscow, where he is expected to raise the issue with his counterparts.
Court papers said Khusyaynova’s operation was funded by Russian oligarch Yeveniy Prigozhin and two companies he controls, Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering. A criminal complaint filed against the woman charges that she managed the finances of Project Lakhta, including detailed expenses for activities in the U.S. such as paying for activists, advertisements on social media, registering domain names, the purchase of proxy servers, and promoting news postings on social media.
Between 2016 and 2018, Project Lakhta’s proposed operating budget exceeded $35 million, although only a portion of that money targeted the U.S., prosecutors said.
Investigating Russian interference in U.S. elections has largely been the purview of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III — though his probe is focused on the 2016 election and the Trump campaign.
Mueller, whose work is ongoing, charged a dozen Russian military officers with hacking Democrats’ computers, as well as 13 people and three companies who his prosecutors’ allege ran an online propaganda operation to push voters away from Hillary Clinton and toward Donald Trump in 2016. What remains to be seen is how and whether Mueller can connect President Trump or his campaign to those efforts.
The Justice Department has separately been assessing how it should respond to foreign influence operations in U.S. elections, and this summer, issued a lengthy report on the topic. U.S. officials have warned repeatedly about foreign attempts to influence the 2018 Midterms.
Both the FBI and the Homeland Security Departments have set up foreign influence task forces to detect such operations and share threat information within the government, with tech firms and state and local election officials. Senior officials have said that while foreign actors continue to engage in activities targeting social media and election systems, they have not seen the level of activity that they witnessed in 2016.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in July announced a new policy to alert the public to foreign operations targeting U.S. democracy, such as the one Russia undertook in 2016. Trump also signed an executive order last month authorizing additional sanctions against countries or people who interfere in U.S. elections, though some lawmakers say the measure does not go far enough.
The issue is a particularly fraught one for federal prosecutors. Justice Department policies call for investigations of election-related crimes to be conducted in such a way that minimizes the impact the probe could have on the election, and prosecutors are generally instructed to avoid taking overt steps in cases near in time to an election. The Justice Department’s recent report, though, noted that “public exposure and attribution of foreign influence operations can be an important means of countering the threat and rendering those operations less effective.”
Former FBI Director James B. Comey faced criticism for talking publicly on the eve of the election about the bureau resuming its investigation of Hillary Clinton, while keeping secret the separate probe into possible ties between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 17a994ded8
The Trolls Within: How Russian Information Operations Infiltrated Online Communities
Kate Starbird
Oct 20
For researchers in online disinformation and information operations, it’s been an interesting week. On Wednesday, Twitter released an archive of tweets shared by accounts from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an organization in St. Petersburg, Russia with alleged ties to the Russian government’s intelligence apparatus. This data archive provides a new window into Russia’s recent information operations. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against a Russian citizen for her role in ongoing operations and provided new details about their strategies and goals.
Information operations exploit information systems (like social media platforms) to manipulate audiences for strategic, political goals — in this case, one of the goals was to influence the U.S. election in 2016.
In our lab at the University of Washington (UW), we’ve been accidentally studying these information operations since early 2016. These recent developments offer new context for our research, and in many ways confirm what we thought we were seeing — at the intersection of information operations and political discourse in the U.S. — from a very different view.
A few years ago, UW undergraduate (and now PhD) student Leo Stewart initiated a project to study online conversations around the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This research grew to become a collaborative project — with myself, PhD student Ahmer Arif, and iSchool assistant professor Emma Spiro. As the research evolved, we began to focus on “framing contests” within what turned out to be a very politicized online conversation.
The concept of framing has interesting roots and competing definitions (see Goffman, Entman, Benford and Snow). In simple terms, a frame is a way of seeing and understanding the world that helps us interpret new information. Each of us has a set of frames that we use to make sense of what we see, hear, and experience. Frames exist within individuals, but they can also be shared. Framing is the process of shaping other people’s frames — in other words, guiding how other people interpret new information. We can talk about the activity of framing as it takes place within classrooms or through news broadcasts, political ads, or a conversation with a friend helping you understand why it’s so important to vote. As you can probably surmise, framing can be a powerful political tool.
Framing contests occur when two (or more) groups attempt to promote different frames — for example, in relation to a specific historical event or emerging social problem. Think about the recent images of the group of Central American migrants trying to cross the border into Mexico. One framing for these images sees these people as refugees trying to escape poverty and violence — and describes their coordinated movement (in the “caravan”) as a method for ensuring their safety as they travel hundreds of miles in hopes of a better life. A competing framing sees this caravan as a chaotic group of foreign invaders, “including many criminals,” marching towards the U.S. (due to weak immigration laws created by democrats), where they will cause economic damage and perpetrate violence. These are two distinct frames and we can see how people with political motives are working to refine, highlight, and spread their frame — and to undermine or drown out the other frame.
In 2017 we published a paper examining framing contests on Twitter related to a subset of #BlackLivesMatter conversations that took place around shooting events in 2016. Please see our paper to see the methodological details and breadth of findings. In that work, we first took a meta-level view of more than 66,000 tweets and 8,500 accounts that were highly active in that conversation, creating a network graph (below) based on a “shared audience” metric that allowed us to group accounts together based on having similar sets of followers.
Figure 1. “Shared Audience” Network Graph of Accounts in Twitter Conversations about #BlackLivesMatter and Shooting Events in 2016
That graph revealed that, structurally, the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter conversation had two distinct clusters or communities of accounts— one on the political “left” that was supportive of #BlackLivesMatter and one on the political “right” that was critical of #BlackLivesMatter. (To learn more about the colors within the cluster on the right, read the paper!)
Next, we conducted qualitative analysis of the different content that was being shared by accounts on the two different sides of the conversation. Content, for example, like these tweets (from the left side of the graph):
Tweet: Cops called elderly Black man the n-word before shooting him to death #KillerCops #BlackLivesMatter
Tweet: WHERE’S ALL THE #BlueLivesMatter PEOPLE?? 2 POLICE OFFICERS SHOT BY 2 WHITE MEN, BOTH SHOOTERS IN CUSTODY NOT DEAD.
And these tweets (from the right side of the graph):
Tweet: Nothing Says #BlackLivesMatter like mass looting convenience stores & shooting ppl over the death of an armed thug.
Tweet: What is this world coming to when you can’t aim a gun at some cops without them shooting you? #BlackLivesMatter.
In these tweets, you can see the kinds of “framing contests” that were taking place. On the left, content coalesced around frames that highlighted cases of where African Americans were victims of police violence, characterizing this as a form of systemic racism and ongoing injustice. On the right, content supported frames that highlighted violence within the African American community, implicitly arguing that police were acting reasonably in using violence. You can also see how the content on the right attempts to explicitly counter and undermine the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its frames — and, in turn, how content from the left reacts to and attempts to contest the counter-frames from the right.
Our research surfaced several interesting nuggets of findings about the structure of the two distinct clusters and the nature of “grassroots” activism shaping both sides of the conversation. Again, you’ll have to read the paper to learn more! But at a high level, two of our main take-aways were 1) how divided those two communities were; and 2) how toxic much of the content was.
That first paper was accepted for publication in Autumn 2017 — we finished the final version in early October. And then things got interesting.
A few weeks later, in November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a list of accounts, given to them by Twitter, that were found to be associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) and their influence campaign targeting the 2016 U.S. election. The activities of these accounts — the information operations that they were part of — had been occurring at the same time as the politicized conversations that we had been studying so closely.
Looking over the list, we noticed that we recognized several account names. So, we decided to cross-check the list of accounts with the accounts in our #BlackLivesMatter dataset. Indeed, dozens of the accounts in the list appeared in our data. Some — like @Crystal1Johnson and @TEN_GOP — were among the most retweeted accounts in our analysis. And some of the tweet examples we had featured in our earlier paper, including some of the most problematic tweets, were not posted by “real” #BlackLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter activists, but by IRA accounts.
To get a better view of how IRA accounts participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter conversation, we created another network graph (below) using retweet patterns from the accounts. Similar to the graph above, we saw two different clusters of accounts that tended to retweet other accounts in their cluster, but not accounts in the other cluster. Again, there was a cluster of accounts (on the left, in magenta) that was pro-BlackLivesMatter and liberal/democrat, and a cluster (on the right, in green) that was anti-BlackLivesMatter and conservative/republican.
Figure 2. Retweet Network Graph of Accounts in Twitter Conversations about #BlackLivesMatter and Shooting Events in 2016
Next, we identified and highlighted the accounts that had been identified as part of the IRA’s information operations. That graph — in all of its creepy glory — is below, with the IRA accounts in Orange and other accounts in Blue.
Figure 3. Retweet Network Graph plus IRA Troll Accounts (in orange)
As you can see, The IRA accounts had impersonated activists on both sides of the conversation. On the left were IRA accounts like @Crystal1Johnson, @gloed_up, and @BleepThePolice who enacted the personas of African American activists who supported the #BlackLivesMatter movement. On the right were IRA accounts like @TEN_GOP, @USA_Gunslinger, and @SouthLoneStar that pretended to be conservative U.S. citizens or political groups who were critical of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
PhD student Ahmer Arif conducted a deep qualitative analysis of the IRA accounts active in this conversation — studying their profiles and tweets to understand how they carefully crafted and maintained their personas. I highly recommend you read that paper (especially the Findings and Discussion). Among other observations, Ahmer has described how (as a left-leaning person who supported #BlackLivesMatter) it was very easy to problematize much of the content from the accounts on the “right” side of the graph —some of that content, which included racist and explicitly anti-immigrant statements and images, was profoundly disturbing. But in some ways he was more troubled by his reaction to the IRA content from the left side of the graph — content that often aligned with his own frames. At times, this content left him feeling doubtful about whether it was really propaganda after all.
This underscores the power and nuance of these strategies. These IRA agents were enacting caricatures of politically active U.S. citizens. In some cases, these were gross caricatures of the worst kinds of online actors —using the most toxic rhetoric. But in other cases, these accounts just looked like everyday people like us, people who care about the things we care about, people who want the things we want, people who share our values and frames. These suggest two different aspects of these information operations.
First, these information operations are targeting us within our online communities — the places we go to have our voices heard, to make social connections, to organize political action. They are infiltrating these communities by acting like other members of the community, developing trust, gathering audiences. Second, these operations begin to take advantage of that trust for different goals, to shape those communities towards the strategic goals of the operators (in this case, the Russian government).
One of these goals is to “sow division” — to put pressure on the fault lines in our society. A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. Look at how the orange accounts in the graph (Figure 3) are at the outside of the clusters — perhaps you can imagine them literally pulling the two communities further apart. Russian agents did not create political division in the U.S., but they were working to encourage it.
The second goal is to shape these communities towards their other strategic aims. Not surprisingly, considering what we now know about their 2016 strategy, the IRA accounts on the right in this graph converged in support of Donald Trump. Their activity on the left is more interesting. As we had discussed in our previous paper (written before we knew about the IRA activities), the accounts in the pro-#BlackLivesMatter cluster on the left were harshly divided in sentiment about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election. When we look specifically at the IRA accounts on the left, we find that they were consistently critical of Hillary Clinton, highlighting previous statements of hers that they perceived to be racist and encouraging otherwise left-leaning people not to vote for her. Therefore, we can see the IRA accounts using two different strategies on the different sides of the graph, but with the same goal (of electing Donald Trump).
The #BlackLivesMatter conversation isn’t the only political conversation that the IRA targeted. With the new data provided by Twitter earlier this week, we can see that there were several conversational communities that they participated in—from gun rights to immigration issues to vaccine debates. Stepping back and keeping these views of the data in mind, we need to be careful, both in the case of #BlackLivesMatter and these other issue publics, to resist the temptation to say that, because these movements or communities were targeted by Russian information operations, that they are therefore illegitimate. That IRA accounts sent messages supporting #BlackLivesMatter does not mean that A) that ending racial injustice in the U.S. aligns with Russia’s strategic goals; or B) that #BlackLivesMatter is an arm of the Russian government. (IRA agents also sent messages saying the exact opposite, so we can assume they are ambivalent at most). If you accept this, then you should also be able to think similarly about the IRA activities supporting gun rights and ending illegal immigration in the United States. Russia likely does not care about most domestic issues in the U.S. Their participation in these conversations has a different set of goals — to undermine the U.S. by dividing us, to erode our trust in democracy (and other institutions), and to support specific political outcomes that weaken our strategic positions and strengthen theirs. Those are the goals of their information operations.
One of the most amazing things about the Internet age is how it allows us to come together — with people next door, across the country, and around the world — and to work together towards shared causes. We’ve seen the positive aspects of this with digital volunteerism during disaster events and online political activism during events like the Arab Spring. But some of the same mechanisms that make online organizing so powerful also make us particularly vulnerable, in these spaces, to tactics like the ones the IRA are using. Passing along recommendations from Ahmer Arif, if we could leave readers with one goal, that is to become more reflective about how we engage with information online (and elsewhere), to tune in to how this information affects us (emotionally), and to consider how the people who seek to manipulate us (for example, by shaping our frames) are not merely yelling at us from the “other side” of these political divides, but are increasingly trying to cultivate and shape us from within our own communities.
These two papers will be presented at the CSCW conference in November 2018. Kudos to PhD students Leo Stewart and Ahmer Arif for this thoughtful, difficult, and timely work.
Leo G. Stewart, Ahmer Arif, A. Conrad Nied, Emma S. Spiro, and Kate Starbird. (2017). Drawing the Lines of Contention: Networked Frame Contests Within #BlackLivesMatter Discourse. PACMHCI. 1, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2017), Article 122 (November), 23 pages.
Ahmer Arif, Leo G. Stewart, and Kate Starbird. (Forthcoming). Acting the Part: Examining Information Operations within #BlackLivesMatter Discourse. Accepted to PACMHCI. 2, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2018).
https://medium.com/@katestarbird/the-tr ... 1fb969b9e4
by JackRiddler » Sun Oct 21, 2018 12:46 pm
0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:12 pm wrote:Slad i think we can agree this whole thing started with allegations of Russian meddling in the US elections and i find it amusing that after more than a year of research it now appears that this meddling constituted of some 13 russian clickbait schemers posting links to news stories from major american news sources that were generally factually accurate. Talk about disrupting democracy! It becomes less funny and even somewhat alarming when you consider a choir of bigshots call this "an act of war on the scale of pearl harbor" or even a "cyber 911" if you will.
by JackRiddler » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:41 pm
JackRiddler » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:28 pm wrote:.
Returning to October 2016, a Bloomberg article went into detail on how the Trump campaign was practicing on a mass scale EXACTLY THE SAME FORMS OF TROLLING and seeking to exploit the same "divisiveness" in American society that is attributed to the "Russian troll farm." These operations were hundreds or thousands of times bigger than anything attributed to Russians, infinitely more "granular" and targeted, and absolutely standard for the GOP. They were run by Americans with lifetimes of experience with stupid things Americans can be made to think. Compared to this, as I have often said, the alleged operations run out of Petrograd are less than an echo. They are a baby-fart in the middle of a shit-storm. The Russiagaters' obsession with these trivialities has done double damage: it blinds people to the real enemy at home, while constructing an enemy for the next world war. The GOP gets a relative free pass to attempt the exact same crimes against democracy again in 12 days, as the corporate media focuses on nightmare scenarios about Russia, or China, "hacking another election." If the GOP pulls it off successfully, the same corporate media will sweep it all straight under the rug and once again make discussion of the voter suppression and election frauds anathema for all right-thinking people who fear the whiff of "conspiracy theory." They will continue to distract with false alarms about Russia, or China, or other foreign enemies.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 22, 2018 6:04 pm
by JackRiddler » Mon Oct 22, 2018 6:25 pm
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