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 House Intelligence Committee’s report from its Russia investigation published on Friday revealed another meeting former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had with the Russian ambassador before he joined the Trump campaign.
Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn, Jr., met with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at his Washington, D.C. residence on December 2, 2015, according to emails reviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. Flynn’s son described the meeting as “very productive” in an email to the Russian embassy, according to the committee’s report. According to the report, “emails indicate that the meeting was arranged at the request of General Flynn or his son.” Neither Flynn sat with the committee for an interview, leaving congressional investigators with few details about the rendezvous.
The meeting with Kislyak took place about a week before Flynn traveled to Moscow to speak at the Kremlin RT news organization’s annual gala. Flynn sat next to Vladimir Putin at the dinner and was paid by RT to attend the event.
Flynn’s December 2015 meeting with Kislyak also came after he met with President Donald Trump for the first time, but Flynn did not formally join the campaign until 2016.
So between the time that Flynn met with Donald Trump for the first time, and this event took place...
...Flynn also met with this guy?
And that doesn't seem like collusion to the House Republicans?
Manhattan federal prosecutors seized as many as 16 cell phones when the FBI raided the home, office and hotel room of President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
Prosecutor Thomas McKay made the astonishing revelation while telling a judge Thursday that the feds are on track to hand over seized materials to Cohen’s lawyers by May 11.
In explaining the process, McKay said the feds have already turned over the contents of four phones and one iPad.
McKay said the feds will turn over the “remainder of the phones seized” on Friday — before adding that they have “about a dozen” left.
Among the devices seized are two BlackBerrys, suggesting Cohen has been holding on to his electronics for many, many years.
The startling revelation promptly attracted the attention of porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, who called Cohen’s phone hoarding “BIGLY bad.”
"Bigly bad" indeed. Because you KNOW that stored on those phones is information which will incriminate Donald Trump. Bigly!
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's embattled personal lawyer, once bragged that he was part of the Russian mob, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to The Journal, Cohen once told someone at a former friend's wedding that he belonged to the Russian mob.
Now the Business Insider article also contains a quote from a friend of Cohen's who doubts the veracity of this story, which brings me to this Rolling Stone's article:
Cohen joined the Trump Organization in 2006, and eventually became Trump's personal lawyer, a role once occupied by Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy's heavy-lidded hatchet man during the Red Scare who advised Trump in the 1980s. Michael Cohen's bare-knuckled tactics earned him the nickname of "Tom," a reference to Tom Hagen, the consigliore to Mafia Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He grew up on Long Island, the son of a physician who survived the Holocaust in Poland, and like Tom Hagen spent a childhood around organized crime, specifically the Russian Mafiya. Cohen's uncle, Morton Levine, was a wealthy Brooklyn doctor who owned the El Caribe Country Club, a Brooklyn catering hall and event space that was a well-known hangout for Russian gangsters. Cohen and his siblings all had ownership stakes in the club, which rented for years to the first Mafiya boss of Brighton Beach, Evsei Agron, along with his successors, Marat Balagula and Boris Nayfeld. (Cohen's uncle said his nephew gave up his stake in the club after Trump's election.)
So to be clear, the Feds found more than a dozen phones in Cohen's possession, who clearly has ties to the Russian mob, and whose only real client is Donald Trump. a man who is under investigation for Russian collusion during the election.
Does anybody else see pieces falling onto place here?
OWEN SHROYER (HOST): What an un-American scumbag. This story -- I can't say what I'd like to say to Robert Mueller right now on air because it's a family show. I'm sorry for already losing it and being inappropriate here. But, man, F that guy.
Story breaks on CNN, "Mueller's team questioning Russian oligarchs." Ladies and gentlemen, Robert Mueller is now sitting at the airport in New York and questioning Russian oligarchs right there at the airport. Stopping them and searching their electronic devices and reading their private messages.
Here's a question: Where's the [American Civil Liberties Union] ACLU? Oh, let me tell you, if Robert Mueller -- if Robert Mueller would've stood at the southern border and he would've questioned people crossing over the southern border illegally and reading their text messages, the ACLU would be up his butt immediately saying he's a racist and he has to be jailed. But he goes to the airport and questions Russian oligarchs and reads their electronic devices at the airport like a total insane madman, the ACLU's silent.
Do you remember -- It was just -- I've been saying this every day now. Robert Mueller is off the chain. He has no boundaries, he is limitless, he is above the law, he is lawless, he is super Mueller. This guy needs to be brought down. Trump needs to stop this. This is out of control, man. How is it that Robert Mueller is above the entire world? He can just stop a Russian and say, "I'm reading your text messages." I wish that Russian would have beat his ass right there -- excuse me. That's what I would've done.
[...]
If we can't stop this, if we can't prosecute Obama, if we can't indict Hillary, then we can't do anything. We have no backbone, we have no spine, we have no testicles, we have nothing, no legs, no arms, no brain.
First off I would pay big money to see this little shit piss all over himself if he actually were to be stopped and questioned by one or more of the Mueller investigators.
The idea that this little cockroach would strike a federal officer, is laugh out loud funny.
Secondly, WTF?
Why would a supposedly American Right Wing new outlet get that worked up over American investigators questioning Russians with possible ties to the Kremlin?
I mean they do realize that we are under attack, right?
Here is the story that this douchenozzle was referring to.
Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has taken the unusual step of questioning Russian oligarchs who traveled into the US, stopping at least one and searching his electronic devices when his private jet landed at a New York area airport, according to multiple sources familiar with the inquiry.
A second Russian oligarch was stopped during a recent trip to the US, although it is not clear if he was searched, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Mueller's team has also made an informal voluntary document and interview request to a third Russian oligarch who has not traveled to the US recently.
The situations have one thing in common: Investigators are asking whether wealthy Russians illegally funneled cash donations directly or indirectly into Donald Trump's presidential campaign and inauguration.
Investigators' interest in Russian oligarchs has not been previously reported. It reveals that Mueller's team has intensified its focus into the potential flow of money from Russia into the US election as part of its wide-ranging investigation into whether the Trump team colluded with Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Okay then I guess in order to defend Donald Trump from the Mueller investigators, certain Right Wing outlets feel it necessary to defend the rights of Russians coming to this country who may have incriminating information that can be used by the Special Counsel.
Hey, do you remember when the conservatives absolutely HATED the Russians?
Investigators probing whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia have been questioning witnesses about events at the 2016 Republican National Convention, according to two sources familiar with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries.
Mueller’s team has been asking about a convention-related event attended by both Russia’s U.S. ambassador and Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to support Trump and now his attorney general, said one source, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.
Another issue Mueller’s team has been asking about is how and why Republican Party platform language hostile to Russia was deleted from a section of the document related to Ukraine, said another source who also requested anonymity.
Mueller’s interest in what happened at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July 2016, is an indication that Trump campaign contacts and actions related to Russia remain central to the special counsel’s investigation.
Personally I think that at this point the whole Republican party should be under investigation for obstructionism, and possible collusion with the Russians.
They are either complicit with what Trump did during the campaign, or they were purposefully ignorant, adopting a kind of Sergeant Schultz attitude.
Sadly for the GOP that is not an excuse that will go over well with Robert Mueller and his investigators.
Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.
While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.
“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.
Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency.
Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.
“Let’s be honest, Don Jr. is not ratting out his dad. Gates is different,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr.
Yeah, while we are all distracted by the Stormy Daniels' three ring circus, the truly damaging evidence to the Trump presidency might be filling the notebooks of Mueller's investigators as we speak.
As for Paul Manafort well he is still trying to get the case against him dismissed.
Paul Manafort's legal team has filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, filed in Virginia, brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which includes three charges for tax fraud from 2010 to 2014, failing to file reports from his foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud related to various property loans in the U.S.
This follows a nearly identical motion to dismiss his team filed on March 14, which dealt with the charges brought against him in D.C.
Manafort's legal team argues that the charges do not “arise directly from” the Special Counsel’s investigation. His team argues that they cover things Manafort disclosed to the DOJ himself in 2014. They also write that Mueller's team acted outside of its authority, “without the discipline of limits on the public resources they consume," according to the document.
This will likely be just as unsuccessful as the last one, but it shows that Paul Manafort has a lot to hide and that he is desperate to keep it hidden from Mueller's team.
There is a lot of speculation as to what Manafort is guarding to aggressively, but there might have been a hint revealed just recently.
This new Mueller filing says Trump’s campaign chair *and* deputy campaign manager *knew* their associate was a former Russian intelligence officer. As they say in court, Um. https://t.co/oPyGU1Fnl7
President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian officials from the United States and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in the Seattle, the White House announced Monday.
The move follows the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury on March 4.
The officials and their families have been given seven days to leave the U.S. Of the 60 officers being expelled, 48 are members of the Russian embassy and 12 are officers from Russia's mission to the United Nations in New York.
The consulate in Seattle is being shuttered due to its proximity to a U.S. submarine base and Boeing's operations there, a senior administration official said. Russia has been given the deadline of April 2 for its closure.
"The United States takes this action in conjunction with our NATO allies, and partners around the world in response with Russia's use of a military grade chemical weapon on the soil of the United Kingdom — the latest in its ongoing pattern of destabilizing activities around the world," the official said.
And now the day after the world learns that being spanked with a magazine makes the president respect you more, we are kicking out Russians willy nilly.
I have seen some clumsy attempts to divert media attention before, but this may be the most pathetic.
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.
Russian hackers are conducting a broad assault on the U.S. electric grid, water processing plants, air transportation facilities and other targets in rolling attacks on some of the country’s most sensitive infrastructure, U.S. government officials said Thursday.
The announcement was the first official confirmation that Russian hackers have taken aim at facilities on which hundreds of millions of Americans depend for basic services. Bloomberg News reported in July that Russian hackers had breached more than a dozen power plants in seven states, an aggressive campaign that has since expanded to dozens of states, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
"Since at least March 2016, Russian government cyber actors" have targeted "government entities and multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors," including those of energy, nuclear, water and aviation, according to an alert issued Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Critical manufacturing sectors and commercial facilities also have been targeted by the ongoing "multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors."
Cyber-attacks are "literally happening hundreds of thousands of times a day," Energy Secretary Rick Perry told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday. "The warfare that goes on in the cyberspace is real, it’s serious, and we must lead the world."
In other reporting it was made clear that the Russians had gained
control over some of these facilities, and could turn off power to
millions of Americans or interfere in air travel at will.
This means that the Russians can render us helpless with a literal flip of the switch.
No phone, no internet, no lights, no nothing.
And while all this was going on the Trump Administration did NOTHING to protect us.
But hey they finally moved on those old sanctions to punish the Russians for interfering in the 2916 elections.
Courtesy of CNN: The Trump administration announced Thursday it is enacting new sanctions on Russia, including individuals indicted last month by special counsel Robert Mueller, in a sweeping new effort to punish Moscow for its attempts to interfere in the 2016 US election.
In enacting the sanctions, the administration is finally meeting a congressional mandate to impose measures punishing Moscow for its cyber intrusion. The delay had led to questions over President Donald Trump's willingness to punish Moscow. The new measures, however delayed, amount to the most stringent punishment yet by Trump for Russia's election interference.
This is the very definition of "A day late, and a dollar short."
By doing nothing for over a year the administration empowered the Russians to keep right on hacking into our systems and now they have gained control over our communications, air travel, and security.
I have felt we were fucked before, but this is a whole new level of fucked.
A Russian spy who defected to Britain today reveals he was also poisoned – and claims he is on a hit-list of EIGHT targets he says Vladimir Putin wants dead.
Boris Karpichkov says he survived an assassination attempt – but lost nearly five stone and all of his body hair.
The ex-KGB major has since learned of seven others – including double agent Sergei Skripal – he believes the Russian President wants to execute.
In a terrifying development, Karpichkov says he has been warned to watch for weapons disguised as e-cigarettes but which conceal deadly nerve gas.
Others that Karpichkov identified as being on Putin's hit list include the following:
OLEG GORDIEVSKY, 79 . MI6 spirited Britain’s top Cold War double agent out of Russia in 1985 in the boot of a Ford saloon. He has provided British Intelligence with information ever since.
BILL BROWDER, 53 . A US-born British financier banned from Russia in 2005. Interpol rejected Russian extradition requests after Browder was sentenced in his absence to nine years for tax fraud.
CHRISTOPHER STEELE, 53 . Former MI6 officer running private intelligence firm. Made unsubstantiated claims of Russian spies holding compromising video of US President Donald Trump cavorting with prostitutes.
IGOR SUTYAGIN, 53 . Russian nuclear weapons specialist accused of spying for Britain, for which he served 11 years for treason. Swapped in 2010 along with Skirpal for Russian sleeper agents in a US spy network including femme fatale Anna Chapman.
YURI SHVETS, 65 . Former KGB major who defected to America in 1994. A key witness in the police investigation into the 2006 poisoning of former spy Alexander Litvinenko.
VLADIMIR REZUN (alias VIKTOR SUVOROV), 70 Captain in GRU Soviet military intelligence until his defection to Britain in 1978. Now writes controversial books on Soviet military history.
Two Republican senators have called for the investigation of Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled a dossier on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
In a letter to the US justice department, Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham claimed there was reason to believe that Steele had misled US authorities over his contacts with journalists and called for him to be investigated.
The letter, the first criminal referral from Congress since it started investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, comes at a time when Republicans are seeking to divert those investigations from scrutinising Donald Trump’s links to Russia to focus instead on whistleblowers, the FBI, and the special counsel investigating the issue, Robert Mueller.
Christopher Steele is not an American citizen and yet he felt obligated to reveal to the US authorities that the Republican candidate for president might be compromised, and for his trouble he is marked for death by the Russian leader and is the target of an investigation by the Republicans attempting to protect that Kremlin agent who now resides in the White House.
You know we need more Americans like British citizen Christopher Steele. Individuals who actually put their lives at risk protecting the interests of the United States of America.
As I allude to in my headline one of the prominent names missing from this list is Donald J Trump. And I imagine there are no other Republicans that should fear being added either.
Nor anybody in the Trump White House for that matter as they even refused to identify Russia as the culprit behind these recent attacks.
Sarah Sanders condemns poisoning of ex-spy in U.K. but declines to accuse Russia despite statements from PM Theresa May. pic.twitter.com/NDGtSiLxab
But you can bet your ass that if Hillary had been elected she would be at the very top of this list, with an added financial incentive included for the agent who managed to take her out.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has told NBC News that he "couldn't care less" if Russian citizens tried to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election because, he claims, they were not connected to the Kremlin.
In an exclusive and at-times combative interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly, Putin again denied the charge by U.S. intelligence services that he ordered meddling in the November 2016 vote that put Donald Trump in the White House.
"Why have you decided the Russian authorities, myself included, gave anybody permission to do this?" asked Putin, who will probably be returned as president in the March 18 elections.
"So what if they're Russians?" Putin said of the people named in last month's indictment. "There are 146 million Russians. So what? ... I don't care. I couldn't care less. ... They do not represent the interests of the Russian state."
Putin even suggested that Jews or other ethnic groups had been involved in the meddling.
"Maybe they're not even Russians," he said. "Maybe they're Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked. Maybe they have dual citizenship. Or maybe a green card. Maybe it was the Americans who paid them for this work. How do you know? I don't know.
Putin also claimed that he had seen no evidence that the Russians actually did any of the hacking, which is odd because you would think he would be eager to read the updates they sent him on their progress.
I do not know why NBC allows Megyn Kelly, a former operative from Fox News, to even interview this guy when they know he is simply going to lie his ass off?
The only person that I want to hear interviewing Vladimir Putin is Robert Mueller.
Under oath if at all possible.
There is at least one positive outcome from all of this. At least now Kelly realizes that Trump is likely compromised by Putin.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a second letter to the NRA asking for details about the pro-gun lobbying group’s finances. The letter zeroes in on the group’s ties to Russian banker and accused mob boss Aleksandr Torshin, a longtime confidant of several consecutive NRA presidents and a “life member” of the group.
The FBI is reportedly probing whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the NRA to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Wyden letter asks about the now-notorious trip to Moscow taken in 2015 by a number of NRA executives and supporters, including then-Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, as well about the NRA’s “Golden Ring of Freedom” program, reserved for million-dollar-plus donors.
In one of the pictures tweeted by Torshin’s Russian gun-rights group, Right to Bear Arms, the head of the Golden Ring of Freedom program, Joe Gregory, can be seen in attendance.
“Please identify the purpose of Mr. Gregory’s December 2015 trip to Moscow and confirm whether he attended in his capacity as the individual who runs your organization’s million dollar donor program,” Wyden wrote.
You know what, I'd like to know the answer to these questions as well.
But for right now I will simply assume that the NRA is a terrorist organization who receives financing from Russian mobsters.
And unlike what the NRA promotes, I bet this is not simply a conspiracy theory.
A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.
The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya.
Ms. Vashukevich, who described herself as close to the Russian aluminum tycoon Oleg V. Deripaska, said that audio recordings she made in August 2016 included discussions he had about the United States presidential election with people she declined to identify.
Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire with close ties to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, also has business ties to Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman. Mr. Manafort is under investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel looking into the campaign’s connections to Russia.
“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Ms. Vashukevich said on Monday. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”
Now you may want to discount such an outlandish claim out of hand, but then you have to keep this in mind:
Her assertion could be easy to disregard were it not for a 25-minute video investigation posted last month on YouTube by the Russian opposition figure Aleksei A. Navalny, which relies heavily on videos and photographs from Ms. Vashukevich.
That was the YouTube video that you may have heard about which the Russian government kept trying to get taken down, and has now received more than 6 million views.
Now that does not automatically mean that Vashukevich should be taken at her word about all of this, but it also means she cannot be discounted entirely.
Of course the problem is that Vashukevich is seeking asylum in America. And since Donald Trump is currently in charge of our government there is no way that he wants this kind of proof made available to the press.
I would think it might be smarter for Vashikevish to reach out to some of our allies, like Canada, Britain, or Germany and ask them for asylum.
Once she arrives in one of those places, she can tell her story without fear she will wind up suffering the same fate as former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.
As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.
The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions.
As if you needed ANY more evidence that Donald Trump is a Russian agent.
This also reinforces the New Yorker article about the Kremlin's influence in Trump's decision to choose Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State.
Just not sure that Mitt Romney would have been so willing to play along with this.
The Kremlin-backed troll farm at the center of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has quietly suffered a catastrophic security breach, The Daily Beast has confirmed, in a leak that spilled new details of its operations onto obscure corners of the internet.
The Russian “information exchange” Joker.Buzz, which auctions off often stolen or confidential information, advertised a leak for a large cache of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) internal documents. It includes names of Americans, activists in particular, whom the organization specifically targeted; American-based proxies used to access Reddit and the viral meme site 9Gag; and login information for troll farm accounts.
Even the advertisement for the document dump provides a trove of previously unknown information about the breadth of Russia’s disinformation effort in the United States, including rallies pushed by IRA social media accounts that turned violent.
What the Daily Beast was able to confirm:
While the date of the auction could not be independently confirmed, the authenticity of the leak can. The leaked documents list screen names connected to a number of American citizens who were used as unwitting proxies by the Russians. The Daily Beast was able to track down four of those citizens, whose names have not been previously revealed. The leak contains precise dates in 2016 in which the IRA-created account Blacktivist reached out to those U.S. citizens, plus a short description of the conversations. The Daily Beast spoke to those citizens, and confirmed they interacted with the Blacktivist account in the ways described by the IRA in the document. In one case, the American even provided screenshots of his interactions with the Russian troll trying to dupe him.
In short, the leaked document contains details of the Russian disinformation campaign that have not been previously made public—details which The Daily Beast was able to confirm.
The leak shows that even as the Russian trolls were able to influence and manipulate American political discourse online, they were less equipped to keep their own secrets. While The Daily Beast does not possess anything close to a comprehensive trove of the IRA’s internal operations, it is now likely that substantial amounts of the troll farm’s files are waiting to be discovered online.
This data treasure trove also reveals how the troll farm utilized social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and even Tumblr to spread their divisive propaganda and promote the Donald Trump campaign.
It is also more proof that the investigations in Russian interference is not a "witch hunt" but rather a very important, and necessary step in protecting ourselves from future manipulation and interference.
A prominent Kremlin-linked Russian politician has methodically cultivated ties with leaders of the National Rifle Association, and documented efforts in real time over six years to leverage those connections and gain access deeper into American politics, NPR has learned.
Russian politician Alexander Torshin claimed his ties to the National Rifle Association provided him access to Donald Trump — and the opportunity to serve as a foreign election observer in the United States during the 2012 election.
Torshin is a prolific Twitter user, logging nearly 150,000 tweets, mostly in Russian, since his account was created in 2011. Previously obscured by language and by sheer volume of tweets, Torshin has written numerous times about his connections with the NRA, of which he's a known paid lifetime member. NPR has translated a selection of those posts that document Torshin's relationship to the group.
These revelations come amid news that the FBI is investigating whether Torshin, the deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to assist the Trump campaign in 2016, McClatchy reported in January.
In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate intelligence committee, the NRA denied any wrongdoing and suggested the FBI is investigating Torshin, not the NRA. Neither the NRA nor Torshin responded to inquiries from NPR.
Here's a question.
If the NRA helped to facilitate the Russian influence over Donald Trump, does that not make them a terrorist organization, or at the very least guilty of some form of treason?
And by the way despite what Trump said recently the NRA clearly has him in their pocket.
I had a great meeting tonight with @realDonaldTrump & @VP. We all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people. POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA#MAGA
Today, our thoughts and prayers are with the #MAGA brigade, as they howl in despair after half their Twitter followers vanished overnight.
The reason? Those ‘cruel leftist libs’ at Twitter just purged a load of Russian bots, it seems – leading (hilariously) to right-wing Tweeters losing their sh*t.
They think it’s some kind of left-wing conspiracy, whereas in fact, Twitter appears to have just deleted a bunch of non-existent fascists controlled from St Petersburg.
Not seeming to realise the irony, many are sharing their agony online with the hashtag #TwitterLockout.
It's not polite to point and laugh at the stupid, but come on this is almost too good to be true.
However as we LOL at their expense, let's also take a moment to realize just how big this Russian operation truly was.
I mean some of these are just regular idiots on Twitter, NOT celebrities or big name politicians.
If they lost hundreds and even thousands of Twitter followers, what does that tell us about just how many fake accounts the Russians actually created, not just on Twitter, but on ALL social media platforms?
Here was how one Trump supporter reacted to learning that she had been manipulated by the Russians.
A Florida woman who ran a Trump supporters page that unwittingly promoted a Russian-coordinated event on Facebook says she doesn’t believe that she was influenced by Kremlin-linked trolls https://t.co/fhcT0MyxUApic.twitter.com/dOG3xXFpTw
While everyone has been focused on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump, the Franken take-down originated in—and was propelled by—a strategic online campaign with digital tentacles reaching to, of all places, Japan. Analysts have now mapped out how the initial accusation against Franken by Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model Leeann Tweeden was turned into effective propaganda after first being hinted at by right wing black ops master Roger Stone.
A pair of Japan-based websites, created the day before Tweeden came forward, and a swarm of related Twitter bots made the Tweeden story go viral—and then weaponized a liberal writer's criticism of Franken. The bot army, in tandem with prominent real live human right-wingers with Twitter followers in the millions, such as Mike Cernovich, spewed thousands of posts, helping the #frankenfondles hashtag and the "Franken is a groper" meme effectively silence the testimonies of eight former female staffers who defended the Minnesota Democrat before he resigned last year.
The operation commenced on November 15, when Roger Stone— who is now banned from Twitter for racism and profanity—tweeted from one of his accounts “Roger Stone says it’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the barrel.’ Franken next in long list of Democrats accused of ‘grabby’ behavior.”
On the same day, a web domain called realusa.site was registered in Japan by a developer named Atsufumi Otsuka. A fake-news website was then established at that web address, and then a second one was created a few days later, according to research shared with the voting rights research outfit Unhack the Vote.
Tweeden’s account of being groped by Franken was first amplified by a network of right wing media, including KABC in Los Angeles, where Tweeden has a radio show, The Hill, Infowars and Breitbart, which mobilized within hours of Stone's tweet and the release of a picture of a Tweeden and Franken clowning around at a USO performance before he was a senator.
By November 17, the trending of “Al Franken” was officially also a Russia Intelligence operation, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an organization tracking Russian social media accounts, based on a sample taken that day of 600 of the fake accounts.
There is apparently a sophisticated botnet called "The Voty botnet" that was instrumental in pushing a story by a liberal writer called “Dear Al Franken, I’ll Miss You But You Can’t Matter Anymore” out to millions of people.
That article provided legitimacy for actual liberals to pile on Al Franken as well, and before you knew it Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand were calling for his resignation.
The rest, as they say, is history.
And this serves as yet another reminder that it is not only the Right Wing who can be manipulated by Russian tactics online, but also seemingly intelligent liberals.
We have to examine literally every bit of information we see to discover its roots, and to determine if it is indeed accurate, before we accept it as fact.
This puts a huge burden on each of us, but right now this is essentially our only defense against allowing ourselves to be used to spread and weaponize misinformation.
Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein stated at the News Conference: “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
That tweet is actually part of a longer campaign by the Trump White House to dismiss the impact of the Russian interference by claiming that even if it happened it did not have any effect.
But that is NOT what the intelligence agencies determined.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Thursday rebuffed a claim by Vice President Mike Pence that intelligence officials concluded that Russian meddling didn't have "any impact on the outcome of the 2016 election," saying it "stretches credulity" to say Moscow's interference didn't affect any voters' decisions.
"The intelligence community has neither the authority nor the capability to make such a judgment as to whether there was or was not impact on the election," Clapper said. "And we did not say that."
Clapper added that it was "absolutely" possible that foreign influence campaigns had swayed voters, even though authorities had not made a definitive ruling on the matter.
“I will say now that I’m not in an official position that it stretches credulity, given the magnitude, scope and depth of the Russian efforts, that they didn’t have impact on individual voter decisions," Clapper said. "But again, the intelligence community did not and could not gauge the impact on individual voter decisions.”
And keep in mind that just because these most recent indictments make no allegations that the meddling changed the outcome of the election, does not mean that is the conclusion of the intelligence agencies, or that it will be Mueller's ultimate conclusion.
The groups and narratives identified in the indictment were integral parts of the frenzied election circus that built momentum, shaped perceptions, and activated a core base of support for now-President Trump—just as they helped disgust and dismay other groups, making them less likely to vote (or to vote for marginal candidates in protest).
In the indictment, Trump campaign officials are referred to as “unwitting” participants in Russian information warfare. This gives the White House an out—and a chance to finally act against what the Kremlin did. But the evidence presented in the indictment makes it increasingly hard to say Russian efforts to influence the American mind were a failure.
In my mind there has never really been a question of whether the Russians altered the outcome of the election.
Of course they did.
But they also had help from James Comey, the House Republicans with their constant investigations, and the American media.
I am not sure that the Russians could have pulled this off without that extra help, but I do know that with this victory they are only going to amplify their efforts in the elections to come.
Putting in place strong sanctions, and protections, might head that off.
But with Putin's puppet in the White House, we know that will likely not happen.
Thirteen Russian nationals have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of interfering in the 2016 presidential election — including supporting Donald Trump's campaign and "disparaging" Hillary Clinton, special counsel Robert Mueller announced Friday.
The indictments — part of Mueller's ongoing investigation — are the first tied directly to Russian meddling in the race for the White House.
"Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities," the indictment says.
Some of those charged also "posted derogatory information" about candidates in the Republican primaries, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and supporting Bernie Sanders and Trump. By the time of the general election, the Russians' efforts included "supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton," the indictment says.
At a press conference, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the defendants allegedly "conducted what they called 'Information Warfare' against the United States, with the stated goal of spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general."
Damn!
Rosenstein also stated that there is no allegation in this indictment that these activities changed the outcome of the election.
The key phrase here is "in THIS indictment."
However some on the Right are taking this to mean that Trump is free and clear, while I know nothing could be further from the truth.
Trump himself jumped on the fact that the Russians launched their campaign in 2014.
Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!
Of course the problem with that is that Trump started talking about his presidential run way back in 2013.
Mr. Trump, you told the Russians you'd be running for president in Moscow in November 2013—and indeed it was that declaration that led to the anti-U.S. campaign in early 2014. Cohen had made clear by mid-2013 you were running; you confirmed it to the Agalarovs and Yulya Alferova. https://t.co/UyjT9QMqbE
I think through this indictment is the first time that we are learning that the Russians actually had boots on the ground here in American during this time period, and were not simply conducting an online election interference campaign.
The time period in which they really ramped things up by the way, the summer of 2016, also coincides with Trump asking Russia to release Hillary's emails, and with his son meeting with Russian operatives in Trump Tower.
And while the Russian operation focused mainly on the easily manipulated deplorables in order to help Trump win, they also used other methods of damaging Hillary Clinton's chances.
Friday afternoon, the Justice Department released an indictment that’s part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The indictment outlines the lengths Russia went to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton — including by supporting Bernie Sanders (and, later, Jill Stein).
The Russian operations on social media were meant to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton and other candidates, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. And they were supposed to support Sanders and Trump.
“Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them),” they were directed, according to the indictment.
So once again I have to remind people that the ONLY way you know the Russians did not manipulate you in some way is if you voted for Hillary Clinton, because that was the ONE person they were desperate to see defeated.
And look, they were successful.
The Russians wanted to see America destroyed, just like ISIS and just like Al Qaeda, the only difference is that they came up with the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
