DNC files lawsuit against Russia, the Trump Campaign, and Wikileaks.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

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.

Hey remember Guccifer 2.0, the guy who distributed those stolen DNC emails to Wikileaks? Turns out that dude was an agent for Russian intelligence.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

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.

We also know this:

Russian hacker Guccifer sent DNC data ➔ FL GOP operative, whose analysis he sent to Roger Stone#Trumprussia #maddow https://t.co/mBaUh2nNIQ pic.twitter.com/4iquR7uOtu

— Polly Sigh (@dcpoll) May 25, 2017

"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."#Maddow https://t.co/7c1zfXN7Td

— Polly Sigh (@dcpoll) December 28, 2017

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. 

Family of slain DNC staffer sues Fox News.

Courtesy of ABC News:

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.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

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?

Robert Mueller now asking witnesses if Trump knew about Russian hacking before it was publicly known.

Courtesy of NBC News:

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is asking witnesses pointed questions about whether Donald Trump was aware that Democratic emails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their strategic release, according to multiple people familiar with the probe. 

Mueller's investigators have asked witnesses whether Trump was aware of plans for WikiLeaks to publish the emails. They have also asked about the relationship between GOP operative Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and why Trump took policy positions favorable to Russia. 

The line of questioning suggests the special counsel, who is tasked with examining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, is looking into possible coordination between WikiLeaks and Trump associates in disseminating the emails, which U.S. intelligence officials say were stolen by Russia.

Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion and has described the special counsel's investigation as "illegal" and a "witch hunt."

"Witch hunt" my ass.

In one line of questioning, investigators have focused on Trump's public comments in July 2016 asking Russia to find emails that were deleted by his then-opponent Hillary Clinton from a private server she maintained while secretary of state. The comments came at a news conference on July 27, 2016, just days after WikiLeaks began publishing the Democratic National Committee emails. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. 

Witnesses have been asked whether Trump himself knew then that Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were released several months later, had already been targeted. They were also asked if Trump was advised to make the statement about Clinton's emails from someone outside his campaign, and if the witnesses had reason to believe Trump tried to coordinate the release of the DNC emails to do the most damage to Clinton, the people familiar with the matter said.

If it can be determined that Trump knew that the Russians had hacked the DNC and John Podesta's email account before he made these remarks, then there is your evidence of collusion right there.

Keep in mind that Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary back in May 2016. 

 About a month after Trump made the remarks above  Guccifer 2.0 started posting those DCCC documents and by the beginning of October Wikileaks was disseminating the Podesta emails.

And Trump was pimping Wikileaks the entire time.

There is also this from CNN:

Investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller have recently been asking witnesses about Donald Trump's business activities in Russia prior to the 2016 presidential campaign as he considered a run for president, according to three people familiar with the matter. 

Questions to some witnesses during wide-ranging interviews included the timing of Trump's decision to seek the presidency, potentially compromising information the Russians may have had about him, and why efforts to brand a Trump Tower in Moscow fell through, two sources said. 

The lines of inquiry indicate Mueller's team is reaching beyond the campaign to explore how the Russians might have sought to influence Trump at a time when he was discussing deals in Moscow and contemplating a presidential run. 

I was not sure he could pull it off, but it appears that Mueller might actually be able to prove collusion after all. 

Julian Assange's health is suffering as a result of hiding from authorities in an Ecuadorian embassy. Don't everybody shed a tear at once.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

Julian Assange’s long stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is having a “dangerous” impact on his physical and mental health, according to clinicians who carried out the most recent assessments of him. 

The pair renewed calls for the WikiLeaks publisher to be granted safe passage to a London hospital. 

Sondra Crosby, a doctor and associate professor at the Boston University’s school of medicine and public health, and Brock Chisholm, a London-based consultant clinical psychologist, examined Assange for 20 hours over three days in October. 

In an article for the Guardian, they wrote: “While the results of the evaluation are protected by doctor-patient confidentiality, it is our professional opinion that his continued confinement is dangerous physically and mentally to him and a clear infringement of his human right to healthcare.” 

Although the two did not go into details, Assange’s health appears to be deteriorating significantly after more than five years holed up in the embassy.

Well that's a real shame isn't it? 

Poor little Julian has to hide out after working with the Russians to interfere in our last presidential election and to avoid those allegations of sexual assault.

That must be a terrible burden.

But do you know where you can get top notch medical treatment?

In a Federal prison.

Yep they would certainly fix him right up, and I am positive that there are open invitations to prisons from all over the world. 

Or he could just stay where he is and take his chances.

Simply could not care less.

Is Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner really cooperating with the Russian investigations? Because it does not appear that Jared Kushner is really cooperating with the Russian investigations.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Thursday disclosed that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner received an email about WikiLeaks in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. 

The two senators sent a letter to Kushner's lawyer Thursday demanding additional documents from Trump's son-in-law as part of the committee's ongoing investigation of Russia's election interference. 

In the letter, Grassley and Feinstein say Kushner received an email about WikiLeaks in September 2016 that he passed on to an official within President Trump’s campaign, in addition to communication about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite." 

“For example, other parties have produced September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks, which Мr. Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official,” the letter reads. 

“Likewise, other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ which Mr. Kushner also forwarded," the letter says. "And still others have produced communications with Sergei Millian, copied to Mr. Kushner. Again, these do not appear in Mr. Kushner’s production despite being responsive to the second request. You also have not produced any phone records that we presume exist and would relate to Mr. Kushner’s communications regarding several requests.”

Wait, an email about Wikileaks, a "back door" contact with Russia?

Yeah, those seem like things the investigators are going to want to see.

But wait, there's more.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

Among the revelations from Congress’ news blast claiming the president’s aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner failed to provide documents about an alleged “Russian backdoor overture” is a smaller — but still controversial — contact he had with a Belarusian-American businessman. 

Discussing the findings from a letter sent to Kushner’s lawyers by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Business Insider’s Natasha Bertrand told MSNBC host Chris Hayes that the lawmakers called the young real estate magnate out for failing to disclose that he’d been copied on emails from a businessman Sergei Millian. 

Millian, who founded the Russia-America Chamber of Commerce trade group, has claimed to have a business relationship with Donald Trump. He is also the alleged source of the rumor that Trump once hired prostitutes in Moscow to urinate on a bed that gave the infamous Fusion GPS document the nickname “golden showers dossier.” 

Millian’s name has appeared multiple times in 2017, most recently in relation to former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. The reports from the Senate Judiciary Committee also claim that Millian was in regular contact with Papadopoulos after the latter tried to set up a meeting with him, Bertrand said.

If this plot thickens anymore we may have to place it on a diet.

Damn!

Donald Trump Jr. communicated with Wikileaks via Twitter and appears to have done their bidding on a few occasions.

Courtesy of the Atlantic:  

Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.) 

The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. 

The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.

......

Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.

First off Wikileaks "guessed" the password to a progressive anti-Trump website?

Yeah, right.

And secondly, Wikileaks was echoing the message from the Kremlin trolls for Trump to refuse to concede even if he lost the election?

Interesting.

Thirdly, gotcha Junior!

For his part Don Junior has already confirmed that these emails exist, though I am not sure he understands how devastating they will turn out to be for his father's claim there was no collusion with Russia.

Here is the entire chain of messages with @wikileaks (with my whopping 3 responses) which one of the congressional committees has chosen to selectively leak. How ironic! 1/3 pic.twitter.com/SiwTqWtykA

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 14, 2017

(There! Happy now? I gave you the emails.)

For instance Junior somehow got his father to tweet about the hacked Podesta emails 15 minutes after Wikileaks asked him to.

We've now updated the story with @ByronTau's great catch: @realDonaldTrump tweeted about the release of Podesta's emails *15 minutes* after @Wikileaks wrote to @DonaldJTrumpJr about it. https://t.co/pVGEBqmB9O pic.twitter.com/pOszShJ7JY

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) November 13, 2017

🤔 https://t.co/ZYk79Niw5a pic.twitter.com/3OpXf8ii1v

— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) November 13, 2017

As we now know the American intelligence community recognizes Wikileaks as an agent for the Kremlin.

In other words, smoke meet gun. 

Cambridge Analytica reached out to Wikileaks for those Clinton emails only after they started working for the Trump campaign.

Alexander Nix

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:  

The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica contacted the founder of WikiLeaks to ask him to share Hillary Clinton -related emails at the same time that people familiar with the matter say the British data-analytics firm had begun working for President Donald Trump’s campaign. 

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix said Thursday he asked the office that handles his speaking engagements to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in “early June 2016,” after reading a newspaper report that WikiLeaks planned to publish a trove of Clinton-related emails. He said Mr. Assange was asked “if he might share that information with us.” 

“We received a message back from them that he didn’t want to and wasn’t able to, and that was the end of the story,” Mr. Nix said at the digital conference Web Summit in Lisbon. He called the exchange “very benign.” 

When Mr. Nix’s approach to WikiLeaks was reported by The Wall Street Journal last month, it wasn’t clear whether Cambridge was working for the Trump campaign at the time. Federal Election Commission records show the first payment by the campaign to Cambridge Analytica is dated July 29, 2016.

Okay so how many people working for the Trump campaign actively tried to get those nonexistent Clinton emails now?

Five?

Six?

All of them?

To be clear the Russians only gave Wikileaks emails from John Podesta, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign.

These proved to be largely innocuous.

They NEVER got a hold of any of the emails on Hillary's private server, which once again proves the intelligence on her part of using that in the first place. 

NBC News lists the reasons why the Russia investigation is a real thing even WITHOUT the Christopher Steele dossier.

Courtesy of NBC News: 

With the revelation that the Clinton campaign and DNC paid the money to finance the Steele dossier, Trump and his supporters now argue that he’s off the hook when it comes to the Russia investigation. “‘Clinton campaign & DNC paid for research that led to the anti-Trump Fake News Dossier. The victim here is the President.’ @FoxNews,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. But here’s a timeline to remind everyone that the Trump-Russia investigation is real — even outside of what we know about the Steele dossier: 

Jan. 6: Intel community details that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — to hurt Hillary Clinton and benefit Trump. 

Feb. 13: National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigns just after the Washington Post first reported that the Justice Department had informed the White House that Flynn could be subject to blackmail after misleading statements about his interaction with Russia's ambassador. 

Feb. 14: The New York Times reports that Trump's 2016 campaign "had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials." 

Feb. 14: Then FBI Director James Comey met at White House with Trump, where Trump tells him: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go," the president says, per a memo Comey wrote about the meeting. "He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go." 

March 1: The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with Russia's envoy twice in 2016 -- which Sessions didn't disclose in his confirmation hearing. 

March 2: Sessions recuses himself from any federal inquiries involving Trump's 2016 campaign. 

March 20: Comey confirms his agency is investigation allegations that Trump's 2016 campaign might have contacts with Russian entities. 

May 9: Trump fires Comey. The original explanation is that it was due to how Comey handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation — and was based on the recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. 

May 10: In Oval Office meeting, Trump tells Russian officials, "I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job," he said, according to the New York Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off." 

May 11: In interview with NBC's Lester Holt, Trump said he firing Comey regardless of what Rosenstein recommended. And he suggested the Russia investigation was a reason behind the dismissal. "When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story." 

May 17: Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel in Russia probe. 

July 9: NYT reports that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer on June 9, 2016 after being promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton — "the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help." 

July 11: NYT publishes emails between Rob Goldstone ("This is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump") and Donald Trump Jr. ("If it's what you say, I love it." The entire email exchange is entitled: "Russia — Clinton — private and confidential." 

July 31: WaPo reports that Trump dictated his son’s misleading statement about that meeting with the Russian lawyer. 

Aug 3: WSJ reports that special counsel Mueller impaneled a grand jury in his Russia investigation. 

Aug 9: WaPo reports that the FBI searched Paul Manafort's home on July 26. 

Oct. 4: Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says his committee continues to look at whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. “There are concerns that we continue to pursue: collusion. The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion.” 

Oct. 25: The Daily Beast reports that the head of Trump’s data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails.

That's actually a lot, and significantly more than the Republicans typically have when they launch one of their endless investigations against Hillary Clinton or the Democrats.

The point of this article is that even without the dossier there is plenty of evidence that Trump and his people are hiding things, and also plenty of evidence that they are desperate to keep the investigators from discovering what that might be.

Remember the lesson of Watergate.

"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."

Head of the Trump Campaign's data-analytics firm admits he reached out to Wikileaks for Hillary's deleted emails.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Alexander Nix, who heads a controversial data-analytics firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails. 

On Wednesday, Assange confirmed that such an exchange took place. 

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (CNN later reported Cambridge backer Rebekah Mercer was one of the email's recipients.) Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own. 

The interchange between Nix—whose company made millions from the Trump campaign—and Assange represents the closest known connection between Trump’s campaign and Wikileaks.

Aha!

As we know Cambridge Analytica was funded by the Mercer family, and had deep ties with both Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn.

This was the Trump campaign's go to shop for analyzing voter data and formulating a strategy based on what they learned.

However that is an inconvenient reality and therefore the Trump folks must reject it.

Trump campaign issues statement downplaying Cambridge Analytica‘s role working for campaign, doesn’t address Assange/emails pic.twitter.com/N6L7MVtsse

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 25, 2017

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

When Trump adviser Jared Kushner bragged to Forbes about his role in steering the Trump campaign to victory, he emphasized the merits of its unique data operation. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica,” he said, referring to the Robert Mercer-backed analytics company. “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months.” The relationship was lucrative for the firm, too: Between July 29 and December 12 of last year, the Trump campaign reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. But on Wednesday, after the Daily Beast reported that its C.E.O., Alexander Nix, had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with an offer to help release Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails, Team Trump moved to distance itself from the company. 

In a statement, Michael S. Glassner, the Trump campaign executive director, highlighted the operation's reliance on Republican National Committee data. “Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics,” he said. “Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics.”

Nothing to see here, just move along. Move along dammit!

Apparently the Trump team still thinks there might be too many bread crumbs leading to the campaign's doorstep, so they also made this extraordinary move:

WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee was legal and specifically protected by federal law, the Trump campaign argued in a court filing Wednesday. 

Lawyers for the Trump presidential campaign came to the controversial transparency website's defense in a bid to defeat a lawsuit three Democratic activists filed in July accusing Trump's presidential campaign of conspiring to publish sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers and information suggesting that a Democratic National Committee employee was gay. 

The Trump campaign's motion to dismiss the case argues that WikiLeaks qualifies as the kind of online service that Congress rendered immune from legal liability through legislation passed more than two decades ago.

Do you know how they say that animals can smell fear?

Yeah, well I think I am getting a whiff of that myself. 

In the run up to the election Hillary Clinton's emails dominated the perceptions of the American voters.

Courtesy of HuffPo:

 During last year’s election, the polling firm Gallup regularly asked Americans if they’d read, heard, or seen anything about the presidential candidates in the last few days. Those who had ― usually two-thirds or more of the public in any given week ― were asked to elaborate. 

The researchers then pulled out the words used by the public to describe what they were hearing about both candidates, as part of an effort to figure out what information was reaching voters and staying with them. 

In a chart of the most common words used in relation to Clinton between last summer and Election Day, the word “email” quite literally crowds out the rest, with several of the other most prevalent words also alluding to perceptions that she was scandal-plagued. 

With emails so prominently on the minds of the voters, which was constantly being reinforced by the Wikileaks drip drip of leaks from hacked Democratic email accounts, is it really any surprise that Comey's letter had the effect that it had?

It was almost a perfect storm of coordination between the Republicans, the Russians, and the far left who were just looking for a reason not to vote for Hillary in the general.

US intelligence knew that the Russians were planning to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House as early as May 2016.

I am going to destroy you.

So do you remember this article from Time Magazine that I posted yesterday morning?

TIME’s new cover: How Trump’s loyalty test is straining Washington https://t.co/4ZQG16wS8f pic.twitter.com/tnng9Wy6km

— TIME (@TIME) May 18, 2017

Well as it turns out it had this little nugget contained within it, that I missed entirely:  

In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election. 

What the officer didn’t know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer’s boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn’t know what to make of it. “We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer’s boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn’t imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.

Everything that happened during the 2016 primaries and general election was manipulated and rigged by the Russians, with the help of the US media of course.

In fact they are STILL trying to destroy Hillary.

#WikiLeaks informer Seth Rich murdered in US but 🇬🇧 MSM was so busy accusing Russian hackers to take notice. pic.twitter.com/0XVezTyfHM

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) May 19, 2017

Of course this has already been debunked, but the Russians are well aware that we have millions if uninformed morons living in the US.

Well it certainly appears that those who saw through the bullshit and voted for Hillary in the primaries and general were the ones putting "America First" and fighting to retain our independence from a foreign government trying to undermine our democracy.

I'm just saying.

Sarah Palin joins Info Wars and Russian media in spreading debunked conspiracy theory in order to distract attention away from Trump scandals. Update!

Palin's ghostwritten blog is just one of the many Right Wing outlets for fake news that are working together to spread this story.

Info Wars, the Washington Examiner, Breitbart, and Fox News are also doing their part.

This was the front page of Fox News for most of the day.

 And so is Russia Today.

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.

Here's full statement from Seth Rich's family: pic.twitter.com/qX52cHHQL6

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 16, 2017

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.

Did French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron outwit the Russian hackers? He must have, he just won. Update!

Nice try Vlad.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

In the last hours before midnight on Friday, just before a campaigning blackout imposed by French electoral law in anticipation of the crucial vote on Sunday, somebody dumped nine gigabytes of emails and documents supposedly purloined from the campaign of leading presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. 

It looked like, and almost certainly was, a last-minute bid to tip the scales in favor of the centrist Macron’s opponent, the nativist, populist Marine Le Pen, who has received more-than-tacit endorsements from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who received her at the Kremlin, and U.S. President Donald Trump, who has declared his appreciation of her as the “strongest” candidate. 

Macron, by contrast, is favored by those who want a strong European Union, a strong NATO, and a France looking to the future rather than clinging to the fearful and fictional nostalgia promulgated by Le Pen. As the news broke, suspicion focused on the same “Fancy Bear” Russian hackers who fiddled with the American presidential campaign last year. 

As The Daily Beast reported 10 days earlier, they have been working hard for the election of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-European Union, anti-euro, anti-NATO, anti-American, Pro-Trump Le Pen. 

Literally at the 11th hour, before the blackout would silence it, the Macron campaign issued a statement saying it had been hacked and many of the documents that were dumped on the American 4Chan site and re-posted by Wikileaks were fakes. 

The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone disseminating the materials in this dump in France could be liable to prosecution, and calling on the media to shoulder their “responsibility” by steering clear of them.

As it turned out part of the Macron campaign's strategy was to create false identities and allow themselves to be "phished" and then to leak false information which would find itself among the data that the hackers compiled and then weaponized to use against Macron.

In the end nobody could really tell what was real, and what was false.

Which means that the impact of the hack was negligible.

And it worked, because just a little while ago Macron won the election and is now the President of France.

Courtesy of The Atlantic: 

French voters handed Emmanuel Macron, the independent candidate, a decisive victory in the presidential runoff Sunday over Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, buoying Europe’s political establishment that had watched with despair as populist movements threatened to derail the European experiment.

This is very good news for France, for the European Union, and for Democracy.

And it is very bad news for the Russians and those who are trying to destabilize the western democracies.

Update: It appears that Trump has decided to take the high road for a change.

Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win today as the next President of France. I look very much forward to working with him!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2017

You just know this is eating him up inside.

New CIA director calls Wikileaks a "hostile" intelligence gathering service.

Courtesy of ABC News:  

CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Thursday calling it a "hostile" intelligence-gathering service that is often "abetted by state actors like Russia." 

"WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service," Pompeo said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, saying, "it's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is." 

He called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a "fraud" and "coward" and criticized NSA leaker Edward Snowden for championing "nothing but his own celebrity." 

"I am quite confident that had Assange been around in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, he would have found himself on the wrong side of history," Pompeo said.

Well, somebody needed to say it.

Though I have to admit that I never thought I would find myself in agreement with Mike Pompeo.

However it is beyond clear now that Wikileaks is no longer (If they ever were.) the non-partisan data gathering entity that they advertised themselves to be during the Bush Administration.

Now it is clear that they are working alongside Russia and other hostile nations to undermine and  ultimately damage our very foundation as a country.

Interestingly enough Pmpeo himself was not always quite this hostile toward Wikileaks himself.

Courtesy of HuffPo:

Pompeo encouraged people to read WikiLeaks’ first dump of hacked Democratic National Committee emails. 

“Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks,” he tweeted in July from his congressional account. The account, @RepMikePompeo, no longer exists. 

Boy that confirmation bias is a powerful thing, don't you think? 

Well at least he did not go as far as his boss who praised Wikileaks during the campaign and often cited documents they had leaked in his attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Edward Snowden is being paid as much as $30,000 to speak by satellite, from the comfort of his Moscow apartment, to American college students. And that is WRONG!

Snowden's Russian ID.

Courtesy of Yahoo News:  

The university paid $30,000 through an American speakers’ bureau to digitally host Snowden, one of his largest known contracts to date, according to documents obtained by Yahoo Finance. The Ohio State event was one of a series of speeches that have netted Snowden — who is still a fugitive in the eyes of the U.S. government — well over $200,000 in the past two years, as Yahoo News first reported last year. He has continued to give paid speeches, including at U.S. colleges, in 2017. 

The ongoing speaking contracts come at a time when Snowden’s fate and influence are more uncertain than ever. A campaign by Snowden’s supporters to win him a pardon was rebuffed by the outgoing Obama White House, and new President Donald Trump previously labeled him a “terrible traitor.” 

Moreover, Snowden’s efforts to present himself as an Internet privacy pioneer are now complicated by an American political environment colored by increasing wariness and hostility toward Snowden’s host since June 2013: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Gee, no shit!

In my opinion Snowden should receive NO funds from American colleges or universities in the wake of the hack of our 2016 election by the Russians.

I think it is now beyond obvious that this the new Russian expertise in hacking American companies, political organizations, and US citizens is due to their access to the materials that Snowden pilfered from the NSA.

In my opinion Snowden is the worst kind of traitor and I believe his actions have undermined our very democracy,

Keep in mind that it was Julian Assange who sent one of his compatriots to assist Edward Snowden and helped him to gain entry into Russia, after dissuading him from going to Latin America.

As we now know it was through Wikileaks that Russia released the information they hacked during the 2016 campaign, leaving no doubt that they are Russian stooges.

And I am 100% certain that when Snowden arrived in Russia, with the NSA tools that he smuggled out of America, that they immediately found their way into the hands of the FSB, Russian Intelligence, and that THAT was the impetus for all of the hacking and manipulations that we have seen since.

Remember, Wikileaks JUST released those CIA hacking tools.

How could they have possibly gotten their hands on that without the information that Snowden carried with him into Russia?

They couldn't have.

It is time for all of these Snowden fan boys to finally recognize that their idol is at best a "useful tool" of the Russian government, and at worst a spy for Vladimir Putin.

Rachel Maddow explains the ability of Russia to sway American public opinion using bots. Everybody needs to watch this!

Look I know you are busy people but at some point today I implore you to take the time to watch his episode.

It is extremely important for all us to be as informed as possible about what happened in 2016 in order to inoculate ourselves from ever letting it happen again.

Let me just say this for the record, and yes I know it will probably offend some of you, if you were convinced not to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election the chances are extremely high that your opinion was shaped by the Russian government.

If you thought that the nomination was stolen from Bernie Sanders, that was an opinion shaped by the Russian hack of the DNC and the misrepresentation of that stolen data all over the internet.

If you thought Hillary Clinton was going to jail, THAT was a meme pushed by Putin's disinformation bots.

If you thought she was a warmonger, THAT was also an opinion shaped and pushed by the Russians.

Simply put if you failed to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, you were quite likely played by the Russians and you helped them to achieve their agenda of putting Donald Trump into the White House.

I know that is a bitter pill to swallow, and that many of you will be in denial, but if you are still in doubt I suggest you watch that Rachel Maddow video again.

Because there is another election in two years and we ALL need to be aware of how easily we can be manipulated.

Rachel Maddow digs up more evidence to suggest that the Russians are continuing to exert influence over policy in this country.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

“What’s getting to be, I think, particularly unsettling, is that simultaneously, we are … number one, nailing down more direct connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government at the time the Russian government was influencing our election,” Maddow began. “Number two, at the same time, we are also starting to see what may be signs of continuing influence in our country. Not just during the campaign but during the administration. Basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation.”

Maddow once again revisits the fact that the Trump campaign demanded that the language in the GOP platform concerning Russia invasion in Ukraine be softened.

She then pointed out that this was predicted in that infamous Russian dossier.

Rachel goes on to suggest that the Russians did not help Trump win this election for kicks, they wanted a return on their investment. And she further suggests that this recent Wikileaks dump of CIA data, which could severely impact the agency's ability to do its job, is also part of that return on their initial investment.

“The Russian government attacked our election,” Maddow said. “The Russian government was in contact with multiple campaign sources while they were doing it. Russian nemeses in the American government, U.S. State Department, the CIA, are not fairing well since Donald Trump came to power. Is the operation that Russia started during the campaign — is it over? Or are they still running it? Are we still in this now?

Remember Trump has still tweeted NOTHING about this latest Wikileaks dump.

Rachel Maddow is currently doing some of the best investigative journalism available on cable news concerning Trump's connection to the Kremlin and I think that it behooves all of us to pay attention to what she uncovers, because she is tying these threads together every night.

Another news outlet has essentially reached the same conclusion that I have about the Wikileaks dump of hacked CIA materials.

As most of you know I posted about this Wikileaks dump on Tuesday.

During that post I stated that it was unlikely that this leak was a coincidence, that the Russians likely did the hacking, and that Trump's supporters would use it to suggest that the CIA had hacked the DNC computers and then blamed it on the Russians.

I know, crazy right?

However this news outlet, which specializes in foreign policy, does not think it so crazy.

Courtesy of the FP Group: 

In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage. 

In the second place, WikiLeaks, which has often leaked American but never Russian secrets, has been identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a front for Russian intelligence. In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified estimate that found “with high confidence that Russian military intelligence … relayed material to WikiLeaks.” This was done with a definite purpose: “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

 .........

It is significant, therefore, that one of the major storylines to emerge from the latest WikiLeaks release is that the CIA supposedly has a program to reuse computer codes from foreign hackers, thus disguising CIA fingerprints on a hacking operation. Never mind that there is no evidence that the codes used to break into the DNC were part of this CIA database. Right-wing outlets are nevertheless trumpeting these revelations with headlines such as this one on Breitbart: “WikiLeaks: CIA Uses ‘Stolen’ Malware to ‘Attribute’ Cyberattacks to Nations Like Russia.” Russian-controlled Internet “bots” are also said to be playing up these claims online. 

The implication is clear. Trump was a victim of a “false flag” operation wherein CIA hackers broke into the DNC and blamed the Russians. This may be nutty, but it’s eminently believable to an audience conditioned to believe that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged — favorite tropes of the radio talk-show host Alex Jones, whose work Trump has praised. Other WikiLeaks revelations — for instance, that the CIA can use Samsung smart TVs as listening devices — lend further credence to Trump’s charge that he was secretly wiretapped. 

Quite apart from its specifics, the WikiLeaks release changes the subject after a bad few days for Trump highlighted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from any Kremlingate probe after he was revealed to have lied under oath when he denied meeting any Russian representatives. Last week it was Trump on the defensive. Now it’s his nemeses in the U.S. intelligence community who are answering embarrassing questions about how this leak could have occurred and the contents of the leaked information.

Yep, those are the same conclusions that I reached as well.

Trump's supporters and his fellow Republicans are looking for some reason to reject the fact that the Russians hacked various computers to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign and help Trump win the election, and this is all they need to make that to happen.  

Now Julian Assange is going to deny that the Russians provided him with the CIA data, just like he denied that they were behind the DNC hack and the John Podesta phishing expedition. But of course we now know that he was lying then, and so it is safe to assume that he will be lying this time.

And what is undeniably true is that he is now handing out the CIA's hacking tools to various technology companies, knowing full well they will find their way into the hands of America's enemies.

The idea presented by Assange is that this will help these technology companies patch their software therefore making it harder to hack, but it of course will also mean that the foreign agencies will now know how to block intelligence agencies from spying on them and that will likely make any further investigation into Trump's ties with Russia just that much harder to prove.

All of this will also undermine the credibility of the American intelligence agencies which will make what they DO reveal that much easier to dismiss by the public at large. 

What is that called? "Collateral damage?"

Or perhaps that was really the target all along.

P.S. It appears that Josh Marshall over at TPM has some more interesting crumbs that involve possible Trump representative Nigel Farage meeting with Assange before his big press conference today: 

During Sean Spicer's daily press briefing, an AP reporter asks Spicer about the Farage/Assange meeting and whether he carrying a message from President Trump. Spicer basically ducked the question. But when asked specifically whether Farage was "delivering a message" from Trump, Spicer replied: "I have no idea."

Hmm, curiouser and curiouser.

Donald Trump's silence on the CIA hack is deafening.

Shhh, nothing to see here.

Courtesy of 9 News: 

In the past few days, Donald Trump has tweeted about Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vladimir Putin, ExxonMobil and wire-tapping. 

But in the wake of the biggest national security leak since Edward Snowden, both Trump and his White House have been decidedly silent. 

Trump has not spoken or tweeted about the 8761 documents and files published by Wikileaks overnight that presents a scathing expose of the intelligence-gathering methods of the CIA. 

It's unusual for an administration to keep mum about such a revelation. The White House could have accused Wikileaks of fabricating the evidence, or have expressed their concern about the privacy breaches, or have offered their resolute support to the CIA. 

But by doing nothing, Trump is leaving the CIA out in the cold. 

So this is from an Australian news outlet but when I read it I thought that they asked a very good question;  "Why hasn't the Twitter tyrant tweeted about this?"

Which by the way goes right along with "Why doesn't Donald Trump EVER criticize Russia for anything that they do either?"

Staying away from any conspiracy theories one might assume that Trump is waiting for more details before he responds, but then of course you would then remember that he accused President Obama of tapping his phones based on a Breitbart article with absolutely NO real facts to back it up.

Okay so then if you got just a little more conspiratorial you might think that since he is having this ongoing battle with the intelligence agencies maybe he is secretly glad that the Russians hacked the CIA and released the data on Wikileaks, but realizes that gloating about it publicly is not exactly a good idea.

However if you go right ahead and take the plunge into the "conspiracy" pool you might assume that since we have been told that Trump is helping the Russians target American journalists, that he is also working with them to go after American intelligence agencies that he also considers his opponents.

Which of course would mean that none of this surprised him in the least, and in fact he was aware that it would come out to deflect from news that these same intelligence agencies are set to testify in front of Congress on March 20th.

Diving a little deeper we might then come to the realization that Trump is in fact an active Russian spy currently working with, if not for, Vladimir Putin and helping him scoop up all kinds of damaging intelligence while also undermining our democracy from within.

But of course those are just conspiracy theories, right?

Right?