Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey
The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.
The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” he said.
The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign — combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks — amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.
Well damn!
Now the gloves are off.
I am not sure what kind of a chance a lawsuit like this has, but they're not wrong.
I think there is ample evidence to prove that this is EXACTLY what happened, and at the very least this lawsuit might help to reveal even more evidence which makes that fact undeniable.
Personally I am just gratified to see the Democrats grow a pair and start taking the fight to the bad guys.
Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.
While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.
Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.
If you did not already suspect that this was the case you need to give yourself at least five demerits.
I think a lot of us were fairly certain about this way back before the election, but there was not any proof back then.
Now there is.
And now that we know this we also know that Roger Stone was promoting the stolen information that was being provided by the Kremlin to interfere in our election, and that Donald Trump was helping to disseminate that information.
"Nevins also received from Guccifer internal details re congressional districts in KY, PA, TX, VA, & WV. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC closely tied to Paul Ryan, used the stolen info in attack ads against Dems."#Maddowhttps://t.co/7c1zfXN7Td
Mueller could actually make the case that the entire GOP was simply working as a propaganda arm of the Russian government in an attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton's campaign and help elect Putin's Manchurian candidate.
That's at least one way to look at it.
Actually, in my mind that is the ONLY way to look at it.
Rich was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in July 2016. Police said he was shot several times in the back and later died at a local hospital. Rich was 27 years old and worked as a voter-expansion data director for the DNC at the time.
The May 16, 2017, Fox News article, which allegedly contained "false and fabricated facts," according to the lawsuit, fueled conspiracy theories that Rich was murdered in connection with a massive WikiLeaks data dump of 20,000 DNC emails days after his death.
In the suit, which was obtained by ABC News, Rich's parents, Joel and Mary Rich, claim that Fox News investigative reporter Malia Zimmerman and Fox News commenter Ed Butowsky reached out to the family under false pretenses to support stories that Seth Rich leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
The lawsuit claims that Fox News, Zimmerman and Butowsky are liable for the harm caused by the report because they "aided and abetted the intentional infliction of emotional distress" caused by the story about Seth Rich and alleges that Fox News provided with a national platform to develop what the lawsuit dubs a "sham story."
So to be clear Donald Trump's favorite news outlet is being sued for spreading "fake news."
Nice to see that irony has made a full recovery and is back in the saddle.
But Fox News is not the only Right Wing outlet being sued for spreading conspiracy theories.
A counterprotester at the deadly white supremacist rally last year in Charlottesville, Va., is suing the media outlet Infowars, its owner Alex Jones and seven others for defamation.
Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia on behalf of Brennan Gilmore, who alleges that Alex Jones and other far-right supporters, including former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), published stories about him that damaged his reputation and mobilized an army of followers to pursue a campaign of harassment and threats against him.
Gilmore argues he became the target of elaborate online conspiracies that placed him at the center of a “deep-state” plot to stage the Charlottesville attack and destabilize the Trump administration after he posted a video he captured on Twitter of the car attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 36 others.
“From Sandy Hook to ‘Pizzagate’ to Charlottesville, Las Vegas and now Parkland, the defendants thrive by inciting devastating real-world consequences with the propaganda and lies they publish as ‘news,’” Gilmore said in a statement.
“Today, I’m asking a court to hold them responsible for the personal and professional damage their lies have caused me, and, more importantly, to deter them from repeating this dangerous pattern of defamation and intimidation.”
Damn! First YouTube removes advertising from his videos, and now Alex Jones is getting his ass sued off.
I would say that today was a banner day for truth and justice, would you not agree?
In a sharp rebuke to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democratic Party has declined to endorse the state’s own senior senator in her bid for reelection.
Riven by conflict between progressive and more moderate forces at the state party’s annual convention here, delegates favored Feinstein’s progressive rival, state Senate leader Kevin de León, over Feinstein by a vote of 54 percent to 37 percent, according to results announced Sunday.
Neither candidate reached the 60 percent threshold required to receive the party endorsement for 2018. But the snubbing of Feinstein led de León to claim a victory for his struggling campaign.
“The outcome of today’s endorsement vote is an astounding rejection of politics as usual, and it boosts our campaign’s momentum as we all stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a complacent status quo,” de León said in a prepared statement. “California Democrats are hungry for new leadership that will fight for California values from the front lines, not equivocate on the sidelines.”
I'm a little concerned about this.
Dianne Feinstein has been in the Senate since 1992.
Yes she is part of the "establishment" but she is also a known quantity with a lot of support in her state.That means if she were to run for reelection, especially while riding the "blue wave," there is an almost certain victory.
If this Kevin de Leon guy, who may be an excellent candidate, wins the primary there is an increased possibility that something heretofore unknown in his background may be discovered and then he could be vulnerable in the general.
The saying "As California goes, so goes America" could bite us in the ass if we start seeing other safe seats suddenly challenged by more ideologically "pure" liberals who cannot win the general election.
Remember that is what has been happening with the conservatives, and they are losing seats right and left.
Look I want strong progressives in as many seats as possible, but I am also a pragmatist, and I know that if we start applying these purity tests to our sitting members of Congress and the Senate, we might purify ourselves right back to an overwhelming Republican majority in both houses.
In the Summer of 2015, Dutch intelligence services were the first to alert their American counterparts about the cyberintrusion of the Democratic National Committee by Cozy Bear, a hacking group believed to be tied to the Russian government. Intelligence hackers from Dutch AIVD (General Intelligence and Security Service) had penetrated the Cozy Bear computer servers as well as a security camera at the entrance of their working space, located in a university building adjacent to the Red Square in Moscow.
Over the course of a few months, they saw how the Russians penetrated several U.S. institutions, including the State Department, the White House, and the DNC. On all these occasions, the Dutch alerted the U.S. intelligence services, Dutch tv programme Nieuwsuur and de Volkskrant, a prominent newspaper in The Netherlands, jointly report on Thursday. This account is based on interviews with a dozen political, diplomatic and intelligence sources in The Netherlands and the U.S. with direct knowledge of the matter. None of them wanted to speak on the record, given the classified details of the matter.
Not only had Dutch intelligence penetrated the computer network of the hackers, they also managed to hack a security camera in the corridor. This allowed them to see exactly who entered the hacking room. Information about these individuals was shared with the US intelligence services. Dutch intelligence services consider Cozy Bear an extension of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, which is firmly controlled by President Putin.
The information the Dutch gathered ended up in the hands of Robert Mueller, so that is even more information that he has to work with.
Earlier reports only identified help from a "Western ally" but now the Dutch have come out to identify themselves as that ally.
But they also tell us this:
Last Sunday on Dutch television programme College Tour, Rob Bertholee, head of AIVD, said that he had no doubt that the Kremlin was directly responsible for the Russian cyber campaign against U.S. government agencies. Bertholee as well as Pieter Bindt, who was heading MIVD at the time, personally discussed the DNC matter with James Clapper, at the time overall head of the US intelligence services, and Michael Rogers, who is soon to retire as the head of the NSA.
As of now, the AIVD hackers do not seem to have access to Cozy Bear any longer. Sources suggest that the openness of US intelligence sources, who in 2017 praised the help of a Western ally in news stories, may have ruined their operation. The openness caused great anger in The Hague and Zoetermeer. In the television programme College Tour, this month, AIVD director Bertholee stated that he is extra careful when it comes to sharing intelligence with the U.S., now that Donald Trump is President.
This clearly suggests that the American intelligence agencies under Donald Trump were careless in revealing that the Dutch were involved, which led to their operation losing access to those Russian hackers, and has convinced our "western allies" that they can no longer trust the leader of our country with sensitive information.
It essentially implies that Trump is an agent for the Kremlin.
A jailed Russian who says he hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers on the Kremlin’s orders to steal emails released during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign now claims he left behind a data signature to prove his assertion.
In an interview with Russia’s RAIN television channel made public Wednesday, Konstantin Kozlovsky provided further details about what he said was a hacking operation led by the Russian intelligence agency known by its initials FSB. Among them, Kozlovsky said he worked with the FSB to develop computer viruses that were first tested on large, unsuspecting Russian companies, such as the oil giant Rosneft, later turning them loose on multinational corporations.
In written answers from jail made public Wednesday by RAIN TV, a Moscow-based independent TV station that has repeatedly run afoul of the Kremlin, Kozlovsky said he feared his minders might turn on him and planted a “poison pill” during the DNC hack. He placed a string of numbers that are his Russian passport number and the number of his visa to visit the Caribbean island of St. Martin in a hidden .dat file, which is a generic data file.
That allegation is difficult to prove, partly because of the limited universe of people who have seen the details of the hack. The DNC initially did not share information with the FBI, instead hiring a tech firm called CrowdStrike, run by a former FBI cyber leader. That company has said it discovered the Russian hand in the hacking, but had no immediate comment on the claim by Kozlovsky that he planted an identifier.
The newest allegations are potentially significant. If the FSB did in fact direct Kozlovsky, then it debunks Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that his government had nothing to do with hacking that all major U.S. intelligence agencies put at his feet. It also calls into question the view of a hack that was conducted as a closely held, organized FSB campaign directed from central offices. Kozlovsky says he worked largely from home, with limited knowledge of others and that the political hack was just part of larger relationship with the FSB’s top cyber officials on viruses directed at other countries and the private sector.
“Based on my experience and understanding of professional intelligence operations, the blending of criminal activity with sanctioned intelligence operations is an old page out of the Russian intelligence-services playbook,” said Leo Taddeo, chief information security officer for Cyxtera Technologies and a former head of cyber operations in the FBI’s New York office. “What the defendant (in Russia) is describing would not be inconsistent with past Russian intelligence operations.”
I would guess that certain intelligence agencies here in America could confirm this "data signature," and once that was accomplished this individual might prove to be a valuable asset for investigators.
It has already been well established that the FSB ordered this attack. But finding out how they did it, and who specially oversaw the operation could help to prevent the next one.
Assuming of course that the now Trump led American law enforcement and intelligence services are interested in preventing the next one.
A Russian hacker believed to be a member of a hacking collective called Lurk said in court over the summer that he was ordered by Russia's security services, known as the FSB, to hack the Democratic National Committee.
The hacker, Konstantin Kozlovsky, told a Moscow court in August of this year that his nine-member hacking group — which has been accused of stealing over $17 million from Russia's largest financial institutions since 2013 — has been cooperating with the FSB for several years, according to the independent Russian news outlet The Bell. Part of that cooperation included hacking the DNC, he said.
Kozlovsky said during a hearing on August 15 that he "performed various tasks under the supervision of FSB officers," including a DNC hack and cyberattacks on "very serious military enterprises of the United States and other organizations."
Minutes from the hearing, as well as an audio recording, were posted on Kozlovsky's Facebook page.
The Bell said it confirmed their authenticity with two sources, including a person who was present at the hearing. Kozlovsky also posted a letter that he wrote on November 1, 2016. The letter outlined what he said was his work for the FSB, which he said had spanned nearly a decade and, most recently, involved attacking the DNC servers.
Well so much for this story about Russians hacking our election being "fake news."
On that last point Politifact has now determined the denial that Russia interfered in our election to be the "Lie of the Year."
Well isn't that adorable, now Donald Trump and Sarah Palin have yet another thing in common.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo met late last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who has become an advocate for a disputed theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence.
Pompeo met on October 24 with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community’s official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year’s theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was “leaked,” not hacked, “by a person with physical access” to the DNC’s computer system.
In an interview with The Intercept, Binney said Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump had urged the CIA director to meet with Binney to discuss his assessment that the DNC data theft was an inside job. During their hour-long meeting at CIA headquarters, Pompeo said Trump told him that if Pompeo “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me,” Binney said.
So if you are wondering if this is about that old debunked story about the murder of Seth Rich by Hillary Clinton (Which is referenced below.), yes it most certainly is.
This Binney guy is a frequent guest on Info Wars with Alex Jones and just about any fringe conspiracy focused radio show or blog that will have him.
He has some impressive credentials so people often take him seriously, but the majority of the charges he makes remain unsubstantiated.
This particular conspiracy theory has been debunked by essentially every intelligence agency in the country, including the CIA by the way, so the very fact that Pompeo talked to this guy speaks to Trump's desperation to get Robert Mueller and the other investigators off his back.
This of course is another reason why I was so frustrated with Donna Brazile, because her mentions of Seth Rich in her book only pour more gasoline on the dying embers of the "DNC hack was an inside job" conspiracy theory.
One of the charges in Brazile's book is that an agreement which the DNC signed with the Clinton campaign gave the campaign control over who the DNC hired.
However Sam Stein with the Daily Beast sees a problem with that contention.
From early June 2015 until mid-September of that year, the Democratic National Committee operated without a communications director.
In normal years, this would have been a problematic, perhaps embarrassing, staffing failure—and nothing more. But the timing of this particular vacancy made it operationally catastrophic. Just as the presidential campaign was heating up, the party’s main political arm was understaffed in a key department.
When the committee finally filled the void, it settled on Luis Miranda.
Miranda had served in the Obama administration’s communications shop and was well liked among his peers. One thing he was not, however, was the first, second, or even third choice of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In fact, he hadn’t really been on the campaign’s radar at all. Clinton’s team had sent the DNC several other options for the post, top among them Jess McIntosh, who had been serving at the time as the communications director of Emily's List. But according to half a dozen sources, their requests were ultimately set aside by then Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was won over by Miranda’s pitch to emphasize her as the election year ramped up.
In other words Wasserman Schultz hired whoever the hell she wanted, and seemingly did not give two shits what the Clinton campaign recommended.
This does not sound as if the Clinton campaign had final say over anything.
Axios reported on Sunday that the book's dedication reads, “In loving memory of my father, Lionel Brazile Sr.; my beloved sister, Sheila Brazioutlanle; my fearless uncles Nat, Floyd, and Douglas; Harlem’s finest, my aunt Lucille; my friend and mentor, David Kaufmann; my DNC colleague and patriot, Seth Rich; and my beloved Pomeranian, Chip Joshua Marvin Brazile (Booty Wipes). I miss y’all.”
Now if the name "Seth Rich" leaps out at you it is likely because his death was part of the conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls, Alex Jones, and even Fox News, which claimed that Rich was the true source of those emails that Wikileaks was releasing and not Russian hackers, and that the Clintons had him killed in order to cover that up.
There was also this later in the book:
Rich also appears elsewhere in Brazile’s book, as the Post reported earlier in the weekend. She wrote that Rich’s murder haunted her and that she installed surveillance cameras at her home and would keep the blinds in her office window closed so she could not be seen by snipers, according to the Post.
Now if Brazile accepted the official police report that Seth Rich's death was the result of an attempted robbery gone bad then why would she be so paranoid?
Look I know that people have great respect for Donna Brazile, and I have certainly come to her defense in the past, but there is something really off about all of this.
By now most of you have probably heard something about Donna Brazile's new book which makes the explosive allegation that the Hillary Clinton campaign made a deal with the DNC to bail them out financially in exchange for essentially commandeering the primary process.
I have not written anything about this before, because to be honest I was not sure exactly what was going on.
I read the initial article in Politico and felt that the evidence provided did not really support the allegations that Brazile was making.
And I think my initial hesitancy to accept the validity of these charges was warranted.
The Democratic National Committee struck a deal with Hillary Clinton in 2015 that gave her campaign input on some party hiring and spending decisions, but required they be related only to preparations for the general election, according to a memo obtained by NBC News. It also left the door open for other candidates to make similar arrangements.
The document provides more context to the explosive claims made by former DNC Interim Chair Donna Brazile in a forthcoming book, an excerpt of which was published this week.
The August 26, 2015, memorandum of understanding from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook to DNC CEO Amy Dacey details the relationship between Clinton's campaign and the DNC long before she won her party's nomination.
Essentially the Clinton campaign offered up an initial 1.2 million up front and then offered to provide a monthly allowance as well as some additional funding moving forward.
However since the DNC had clearly mismanaged its funds the Clinton campaign wanted a say in how the money was spent. Which if you think about it makes pretty good sense.
But here is what was laid out in the memo that seems to have upset Donna Brazile so thoroughly:
However, the memo also made clear that the arrangement pertained to only the general election, not the primary season, and it left open the possibility that it would sign similar agreements with other candidates.
"Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC's obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary," the memo states.
"Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates," it continues.
In fact the DNC did enter into a similar agreement with the Sanders campaign, but they decided not to use it as they felt they could do better on their own encouraging smaller donations from their pool of supporters.
The contention is that this agreement allowed the Clinton campaign to have a say on who the DNC hired, and how some of the money was spent, which Brazile charges gave them undo influence.
The evidence that such influence took place appears to be mostly in Brazile's head, but her allegation received some support when Elizabeth Warren chimed in with this.
Seriously?
Well that certainly complicated things, because Warren makes it much harder to simply dismiss this as a DNC operative gone rogue.
Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them.”
Well gee how gracious of Brazile to allow the Democrats to keep the candidate that they had selected on the ticket.
We were shocked to learn the news that Donna Brazile actively considered overturning the will of the Democratic voters by attempting to replace Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine as the Democratic Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees. It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate’s health.
Donna came in to take over the DNC at a very difficult time. We were grateful to her for doing so. She is a longtime friend and colleague of many of us and has been an important leader in our party. But we do not recognize the campaign she portrays in the book.
That is from a letter signed by nearly 100 campaign staffers who certainly do not agree with Brazile's interpretation of their efforts.
A number of pundits have offered opinions on what motivated Brazile to set fire to so many bridges, she was frustrated by not getting the recognition she felt she deserved, she is positioning herself to have a place on the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, who knows?
All I know is that anything that allows Trump to tweet stuff like this...
Bernie Sanders supporters have every right to be apoplectic of the complete theft of the Dem primary by Crooked Hillary!
I realize that I will NEVER convince those Bernie supporters that the nomination was not stolen from them, especially after this.
However keep in mind that the Republicans are seriously concerned about their ability to win elections moving forward, and their only real hope lies with the Democrats sabotaging themselves with infighting and rampant mistrust within their ranks.
Donna Brazile just gave them an early Christmas present all wrapped up in a shiny bow.
So I hope her fucking book tanks, and she never finds a job working with any Democrats ever again.
I assume at some point we will see her on Fox News, where all progressive traitors seem to eventually find themselves.
And good riddance to her.
Update: Donna Brazile now says she found "no evidence" that the primaries were rigged in Hillary's favor.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.
Okay so first off this is not really news.
In fact I wrote a post before election day that linked to a Mother Jones story which said the following:
This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) "It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."
At the time David Corn, the author of the Mother Jones piece, did not identify Christopher Steel by name, nor did he seem to know who the "client allied with the Democrats" was for sure, but I think most of us probably assumed they would be connected to the Clinton campaign or some big DNC donor.
The important point of the article was that people were finally reporting on what was in the dossier after the original Republican operatives stopped paying the bills, and the information was almost lost for all time.
Yesterday some troll in the comments section attempted to make the case that this muddies the waters, and that it proves the Democrats were also engaged in the same sort of shady dealings to undermine the Republican candidate that the Trump campaign was using in their attempt to undermine the Clinton campaign.
But of course that is ridiculous as this is NOT a case of a campaign working hand in hand with an adversarial foreign government which hacked one party's computers, and paid millions of dollars to spread misinformation, to help that campaign's candidate get elected.
The Democrats were actually working to reveal information which has now proven critical in understanding just how compromised Donald Trump and his campaign staff were by the Russians during the 2016 campaign cycle.
Ultimately if Trump gets impeached this Russian dossier may prove to be the key to making that happen, and at the very least it allowed us to be vigilant when it came to how Trump defers to Vladimir Putin, and focused our attention on the fact that he seems extremely reluctant to support the Russian sanctions voted into place by the majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate.
Here is how Josh Marshall of TPM summed this up yesterday:
The country owes the Democrats a debt of gratitude for keeping Steele’s research going. The FBI had apparently missed a lot of what he found.
I’ve heard some suggest that the Clinton campaign had denied that it helped fund Steele’s work. Or maybe that Elias had. I don’t know if that’s the case or not. It’s possible that the Clinton camp or the DNC didn’t know they had. The Post piece suggests they didn’t know that Fusion GPS was involved.
If someone lied, then by all means identify that person as lying. Even call them a liar. But in the big picture, who cares? Even in the small picture who cares. It was a service to the country. Donald Trump and his campaign knowingly accepted assistance from a foreign adversary power. There’s good reason to believe, though as yet no hard proof, that they agreed to help Russia in exchange for assistance subverting the 2016 campaign. The President is still actively covering up for the Russian effort, as of this week.
Whether the execs at top of the Clinton campaign knew about it, Marc Elias may have helped save his country by making the decision to fund this critical research. Thank you, Marc Elias! I know that sounds a bit hyperbolic but it’s really not.
Yes, and I agree completely with that.
We are suffering a national crisis right now in this country.
Marc Elias and the DNC attempted to keep that from happening, and failing that they may have been instrumental in providing the tools needed to eventually stop it.
President Donald Trump collaborated with Fox News to concoct a story claiming a Democratic National Committee staffer was killed in retaliation for furnishing information damaging to Hillary Clinton to Wikileaks, according to a lawsuit by a private investigator for the slain man’s family.
Rod Wheeler -- the investigator, a former Washington police detective, and an occasional Fox News contributor -- claims in his lawsuit that the president read the Fox story before it was published and suggested the insertion of quotes falsely attributed to Wheeler supporting the story’s premise. Trump wanted the story published to divert attention from the widening investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, Wheeler claims.
The complaint’s first paragraph includes screen shot of a May 14 text message to Wheeler from another Fox News contributor that reads: “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. but don’t feel the pressure."
Seth Rich was killed on a Washington street in the middle of the night last year. The crime remains unsolved. The story was published on May 16 and later retracted by the network, according to the complaint.
Fox News didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
So just mull that over in your mind a little.
Donald Trump worked with is propaganda outlet, Fox News, to frame Hillary Clinton and the DNC for murder.
And the really troubling part is.....I'm not surprised.
Nor am I surprised by this:
The White House previously denied knowledge of Fox News' false report on Seth Rich. pic.twitter.com/Qcmf3lpaFt
Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration's ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.
Fox's president of news, Jay Wallace, told NPR on Monday that there was no "concrete evidence" that Wheeler was misquoted by the reporter, Malia Zimmerman. The news executive did not address a question about the story's allegedly partisan origins. Fox News declined to allow Zimmerman to comment for this story.
There is "no concrete evidence." Well that's an interesting way to phrase it.
And the fact that they declined to comment on Trump's participation in pushing this narrative speaks volumes.
Update: Okay here is a more aggressive denial from Fox News:
Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.
Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.
There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.
But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
Political campaigns are far more focused on this kind of thing than the average American, and that is just setting aside the possibility that the Russians had not already communicated to Trump folks that they had information from those hacks that could help them win.
It was also noted on one of the cable news shows I watched that this meeting seemed to be the catalyst for the hacked information being dumped on the internet.
Only six days later Guccifer 2.0, who has now been identified as a Russian operative, takes credit for the hack and starts dumping internal DNC documents.
“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said at a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Things then escalated from there.
Of course Trump supporters and Right Wing news outlets are downplaying this as aggressively as possible, with Junior's attorney claiming that it's all much ado about nothing:
“The meeting lasted about 20-30 minutes, and nothing came of it. His father knew nothing about it. The bottom line is that Don, Jr. did nothing wrong.”
Says the man paid to proclaim his client's innocence despite any evidence to the contrary.
The outside attorneys for Trump Sr. are even trying to suggest that this whole meeting was a Democratic plot.
NEW: spox for POTUS outside legal team casts mtg as part of oppo effort. Source close to team calls it "poss. setup by Russian operatives" pic.twitter.com/1Y145Ooag8
The key points here are that Don Jr. KNEW that he was taking this meeting with hopes of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government, that was now working to help his father get elected, while there was information circulating out there that the Russians had hacked the DNC.
And he took his father's campaign manager and campaign advisor/son-in-law along for the ride.
And THAT is the clearest evidence of collusion that we have seen thus far.
By the way this is a picture of the guy who set up this meeting on the day after the election.
Rob Goldstone, the Donald Trump Jr. acquaintance who brokered the meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, the day after the 2016 US election: pic.twitter.com/20bMLUvDiH
Former President Obama is involved in discussions about the future of the Democratic Party, sources close to the former president tell The Hill.
Since leaving office, he has held meetings — on a by-request basis — with a handful of House and Senate lawmakers in his office in Washington’s West End and over the phone.
In recent months, for example, he sat down one-on-one with freshman Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), according to a Democrat familiar with the meeting.
He has also met with and has had phone conversations with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez throughout the spring, according to two sources.
“Hey man, it's only the future of the world in your hands,” Obama joked with Perez in one conversation, according to a DNC aide.
Obama’s former political adviser David Simas, who is now the CEO of the Obama Foundation, has also been making a string of calls to DNC officials in recent months.
Sources familiar with Obama’s meetings with members of Congress declined to offer the names of all of the lawmakers he has met with, saying the sessions were meant to be private.
This may sound a little silly, but just reading this helped ease my troubled brow.
The time that I felt the very best about my country, the time that I was most proud to be an American, was when this man was in office.
So something about knowing that he is not gone, but instead in the background giving advice to the people who are working to stall Donald Trump's policies, and who someday will return to poser, just gives me a little hope.
And let's be honest, we could all use a little hope right about now.
Okay first off this is inaccurate, and the result of Russian propaganda during the Democratic primaries that misrepresented stolen emails from the DNC.
Secondly, WTF?
If this WERE accurate it would still be Americans working with Americans to win an American election.
On the other hand if Trump colluded with the Russians it would be the case of an American working with a foreign power using cyber terrorism to change the outcome of an American election.
Not even remotely similar.
And while we are on the topic The Atlantic has an article explaining how Donald Trump appears to STILL be colluding with Vladimir Putin.
Take a look at this:
As the president faces accusations of colluding with the Russians during last year’s campaign, his policies in office have aligned almost perfectly with the Kremlin’s goals. If Moscow wanted its interference in America’s election to yield dividends, it could hardly have hoped for more.
Just as importantly, while Trump has expressed concern over the “cloud” the Russia investigation generated, he has seemed indifferent overall to Russia’s direct attempts to interfere with the American democratic process. According to Comey’s testimony, Trump never asked him about the meddling, or how to prevent similar interference in the future. Not once.
Trump himself has seemingly courted the favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin since the 2016 presidential campaign. He’s repeatedly praised Putin’s leadership, refused to condemn Russian efforts to disrupt the U.S. system of free elections, and openly encouraged Russian hacking of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Friday’s explosive report from The Washington Post confirmed that Putin was deeply and directly involved in an operation to hurt Clinton’s candidacy and help elect Trump.
What’s more, in every way he can, Trump has deferred to Russia on matters of foreign policy. After Russian forces deployed their hacking tools during the recent French presidential election, Trump invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the White House and failed to repudiate the attack against a vital American ally. Instead, during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump divulged highly sensitive classified information provided by Israel, another crucial U.S. partner. (That May 10 meeting also came a day after Trump removed Comey, who was leading the inquiries into collusion; Trump told the Russians that the director’s dismissal had alleviated “great pressure” on him.) Even more recently, the Trump administration has reportedly taken steps to return two diplomatic compounds that former President Barack Obama stripped from Russia following its actions during last year’s election.
To make matters worse, Trump has done far more than just extend open arms toward the Russian government. He wavered on the United States’ commitment to defend its fellow members of NATO; his aides have reportedly tried to undermine the European Union; and he himself has alienated key partners by lashing out at individual leaders and pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
I actually think this tweet is Trump's clumsy way of attempting to minimize the impact once it is proven that he did indeed collude with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.
He will actually attempt to make the case that sure he worked with Putin to win an election, just like Hillary worked with her own party to win the primary.
On Friday, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked Conway about the Post report.
“What about this new reporting that there are three dozen high-level officials that say they can connect President Putin with giving instructions to hack the DNC computers and to plant fake stories — what is the current White House doing about this?” Camerota asked.
Conway responded by asserting that Russian hackers weren’t the only people “interfering in our democracy” last year.
“Well Alisyn, the president has said previously, and he stands by that — particularly as president-elect — that he would be concerned about anybody interfering in our democracy,” Conway said. “We saw a lot of people interfering with our democracy by saying he couldn’t win here at home.”
Yes, because suggesting that Donald Trump could not win the election, is exactly the same as hacking the election in order to ensure his victory.
Conway also attempted to lay the blame on the DNC in a rather transparent attempt to pivot away from answering the question.
However Camerota persisted:
“What is the White House, what is President Trump now doing to prevent Russia from doing this again?” she asked.
“This report is new and we’ll discuss it with him later, but he has been very clear on the record that he believes in any type of numbers and measures to make sure that democracy flourishes and that our voter integrity is intact, and in fact he has an entire commission on that,” she said, before Camerota interjected: “Against Russia — what is he doing specifically to try to stop this?”
Conway replied by smearing CNN and accusing Camerota of having a bad case of Russia hysteria.
“Alisyn, I realize that we just like to say the word ‘Russia Russia’ to mislead the voters and I know that CNN is aiding and abetting this nonsense as well, but you’ve asked me the same question three times now and I’ve answered it,” she said, still unable to point to anything Trump is doing to prevent future Russian interference.
"This nonsense" by the way is referring to reports from our intelligence agencies and media outlets that Vladimir Putin personally directed the assault on our democracy, and worked to shift the election away from the candidate that he feared to hand victory to the candidate that he knew he could outmaneuver.
As for this report being new, that is only the latest Washington Post report which exposes the fact that Putin personally directed this attack, but we have had many months of reporting on what the Russians did and how they did it, and yet Trump has developed no plan for punishing the Russians for their actions or for preventing them from happening again.
That more or less proves, despite Conway's assertions, that Trump has no plan in the works, and no intention to create a plan, to deal with this issue.
And why would he?
After all he was the prime beneficiary of their interference. To him it was a net positive.
This is a story that was promoted by the Right Wing during the election which states that this young, a DNC staffer working on getting out the vote, was killed by a Clinton hit team because he had incriminating information that could derail her campaign.
The story further states that the FBI has the young man's laptop with proof of thousands of e-mails he sent to Wikileaks.
Interestingly enough this story was first reported to have been circulating within the Kremlin, before finding it's way to the Right Wing blogs and news sites in America.
Nothing suspicious about that, right?
For the record Snopes debunked this story way back in July of last year.
And Seth Rich's family also came out today to deny the story's validity.
And just to top it off, this was what NBC News reported today:
Meanwhile, a current FBI official and a former one completely discount the Fox News claim that an FBI analysis of a computer belonging to Rich contained thousands of e-mails to and from WikiLeaks.
Local police in Washington, D.C., never even gave the FBI Rich's laptop to analyze after his murder, according to the current FBI official.
And a former law enforcement official with first-hand knowledge of Rich's laptop said the claim was incorrect. "It never contained any e-mails related to WikiLeaks, and the FBI never had it," the person said.
So this is who Sarah Palin is these days.
Just another Right Wing shit poster desperately trying to provide cover for a deeply flawed GOP president who is falling apart right before our eyes.
Believe it or not this is actually even several steps lower than I predicted she would fall oh those many years ago.
Update: Here is a report from CNN looking into the story and documenting how the whole thing fell apart under scrutiny.
Clinton didn’t offer a formal endorsement in the DNC race, though she and Perez have long been political allies and Perez was widely considered the candidate of the establishment wing of the party. Perez backed Clinton over Sanders for the Democratic nomination last year.
Trump has claimed for months that the Democratic race for president was “rigged” in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. He also frequently used the same term to describe his race against Clinton.
First of all if you are a Democrat who actually gives this any credibility you need to, right now, go find a brick wall and start beating your head against it until you come to your senses.
This is right out of the Kremlin's playbook and it is how they sowed doubt and disunity among the Democrats during the primaries, which led up to disenfranchised voters in the general.
It is time for Democrats to stop allowing assholes like Trump and Putin to yank their chains and cause them to shoot themselves in the foot.
When we are together, we are unstoppable.
And that is what terrifies Trump and the Republicans so much.
After a difficult 2016 campaign that saw them lose in the White House, both chambers of Congress and in state houses across the country, Democrats elected Tom Perez, the former labor secretary during the Obama administration, to lead the Democratic National Committee on Saturday.
Perez won in the second round of voting during the 2017 Winter DNC Meeting in Atlanta, earning 235 votes from the 447 DNC members — the voting bloc that decides the chairmanship. Perez was considered the heavy favorite of the Democratic establishment.
Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the preferred candidate of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, came in second, earning 200 votes in the second round of votes. Half ballots are given to Democrats voting abroad.
I have to admit that though I followed this with interest I really did not have a dog in this fight.
In my opinion all that matters with a new DNC head is that they recognize what is happening all across the country right now in response to the election of Donald Trump and that they find some way to harness that activism and organize it into overwhelming voter turnout for the next election cycles.
With that goal in mind I think that having somebody from the Obama administration is not exactly a bad thing since it means that our former President will likely become more involved, and with his sky rocketing approval numbers that can only help moving forward.
Russian news agencies are reporting that former members of the domestic security agency and a cybersecurity expert have been formally charged with treason.
Reports emerged last week that three officials of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and an executive for cybersecurity company Kaspersky Labs had been arrested for treason. Government officials haven’t commented on the case.
We reported on this last Friday and reached the conclusion that these charges of treason were directly linked to the investigation launched by our intelligence agencies into the Russian hacking of the DNC and other agencies and individuals.
A conclusion, by the way, essentially confirmed by Russian lawyer Ivan Pavlov:
Pavlov has told The Associated Press that he represents the fourth, unnamed arrestee.
“Everyone involved in the case is charged with treason, and in fact, this is the only article, no other charges,” Pavlov is quoted as saying to Tass. Like Interfax, Tass is controlled by the Russian government.
According to Pavlov, the criminal case is being investigated by the FSB’s own Department of Investigation.
Investigators accuse the defendants of transferring Russian state secrets to U.S. intelligence services, according to Tass. Unlike previous reports in Russian media, the accounts citing Pavlov that were published Wednesday do not specify which U.S. agencies the suspects are accused of colluding with.
“The name of CIA does not appear in the case, only the country (is mentioned),” Tass quotes Pavlov as saying. “Yes, we are in fact talking about America, but not about the CIA.”
Of course they aren't, but then who exactly would these security experts be talking to in America?
And as I mentioned in my previous post it certainly does not appear that these individuals are being punished for the hack itself, but rather for helping America investigate that hack.
While we are on the topic let's not forget that these folks were "arrested" but at least one individual who spoke out of turn is no longer with us.
An ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump may have been murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up. it has been claimed.
Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day in mysterious circumstances.
Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.
Remember both the Trump administration and the Kremlin have reason to undermine any investigation into the hacking, and to obfuscate any evidence that might emerge from the investigation.
We can see how the Kremlin is working to sabotage the investigation, by killing or kidnapping those that might be questioned, now watch for Trump to make an attempt to put a stop to it or, failing that, distract from its findings.
