A photograph of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson standing with the elusive Russian "Professor" shows up on social media. Uh oh.

Update: I did some extra digging. The Olga account in question liked a pic of a certain man in London. That certain man was at an event attended by Mifsud and Boris Johnson two weeks ago where this pic was taken. Isn't that Mifsud on the left with the British foreign secretary? pic.twitter.com/fTNJSnwPLp

— Gavin Sheridan (@gavinsblog) November 11, 2017

Yep, that's who that is alright.

Courtesy of Politico: 

A photograph has emerged of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson with the “London professor” whose alleged high-level Kremlin contacts have led to him featuring in the FBI’s investigation into links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. 

It will add to questions about the possibility of attempted Russian influence at the heart of the British government. 

The picture, which was posted on Facebook shows Johnson, wine glass in hand, standing with Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic and a businessman, Prasenjit Kumar Singh. It is alleged that Mifsud was a key link between Russia and the Trump campaign.

You may remember that this is the same "Professor" who supposedly compromised George Papadopoulos while he was working with the Trump campaign, by tempting him with access to those fabled Hillary emails.

You may also remember that this "Professor" is now missing.

New evidence has recently come to light that the Russians used Twitter to influence the pro-Brexit vote that Boris Johnson promoted as well, and there is substantial evidence that they also interfered in a variety of other ways.

So could compromising Boris Johnson be one of those "other ways?"

Could be. 

Of course it could also just be a coincidence that Boris Johnson is photographed hanging out with the same Russian operative who interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign.

You know just like all of those "coincidences" where folks on the Trump campaign all seemed to have worked independently to get their hands on those non-existent Hillary emails.

Former DNC Chairman, Howard Dean, pretty confident that Jared Kushner will soon also be indicted.

Howard Dean: ‘Jared Kushner will be indicted for money laundering’ and ‘the next step will be Trump family’#TrumpRussia pic.twitter.com/qGIc7SO61r

— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) November 5, 2017

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Howard Dean said he thinks there's a good chance President Trump's son-in-law, White House adviser Jared Kushner, will be indicted. 

“I expect there’s a good likelihood Jared Kushner will be indicted for money laundering,” Dean said Sunday on MSNBC. 

“And then we’re going to have to see how far the Russian involvement goes. This is serious business. These people are undermining our democracy.” 

Dean said it appears special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether President Trump "engaged with a foreign power in order to get where he got." 

"That's a very serious matter for this country," Dean said. 

Dean also said he thinks Mueller is working his way up from the bottom. The former DNC chairman expects that eventually "either the Flynns are going to plead guilty or they're going to ... cooperate for some leniency." 

"And the next step is going to be the Trump family itself," he said.

Now you might consider simply dismissing Dean's statement as wishful thinking, after all he is not an investigative journalist or prosecutor, but then there is this recent revelation courtesy of The Daily Beast:  

The so-called Paradise Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the same publication that obtained the “Panama Papers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the new documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which led a global effort of 96 media organizations from 67 countries to pore through the records. The findings were published on Sunday. The documents show that many of the wealthy individuals Trump brought into his administration have worked to legally store their money in offshore havens where they would be free from taxation in the United States. Trump has promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp,” in condemning the idea that well-connected individuals in Washington, D.C., preserve their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country.

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is also implicated. The documents reveal that Russian tech leader Yuri Milner invested $850,000 in a startup called Cadre that Kushner co-founded in 2014. 

Milner has long had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a big-league investor; his firm at one point owned major chunks of both Facebook and Twitter. But Milner was never considered particularly Kremlin-connected. These new documents call that reputation into question. The investing arm of Gazprom, the state-backed energy company, financed a share of Facebook worth up to $1 billion; a Kremlin-owned bank invested $191 million into a Milner firm, and some of that money was then injected into Twitter. 

Despite Milner’s investment in his startup, Kushner said in July that he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting that he never “relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”

Well gee, apparently that's not true.

Also keep in mind that Kushner was in attendance at that Trump Tower meeting where Junior offered to change policies in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

So would it be any surprise if Robert Mueller indicted Jared Kushner sometime soon?

Nope, but it would be a surprise if he didn't.

The Russians hacked the Trump Organization computers four years ago and we are just learning about it now.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

Four years ago, the Trump Organization experienced a major cyber breach that could have allowed the perpetrator (or perpetrators) to mount malware attacks from the company’s web domains and may have enabled the intruders to gain access to the company’s computer network. Up until this week, this penetration had gone undetected by President Donald Trump’s company, according to several internet security researchers. 

In 2013, a hacker (or hackers) apparently obtained access to the Trump Organization’s domain registration account and created at least 250 website subdomains that cybersecurity experts refer to as “shadow” subdomains. Each one of these shadow Trump subdomains pointed to a Russian IP address, meaning that they were hosted at these Russian addresses. (Every website domain is associated with one or more IP addresses. These addresses allow the internet to find the server that hosts the website. Authentic Trump Organization domains point to IP addresses that are hosted in the United States or countries where the company operates.) The creation of these shadow subdomains within the Trump Organization network was visible in the publicly available records of the company’s domains.

The subdomains and their associated Russian IP addresses have repeatedly been linked to possible malware campaigns, having been flagged in well-known research databases as potentially associated with malware. The vast majority of the shadow subdomains remained active until this week, indicating that the Trump Organization had taken no steps to disable them. This suggests that the company for the past four years was unaware of the breach. Had the infiltration been caught by the Trump Organization, the firm should have immediately decommissioned the shadow subdomains, according to cybersecurity experts contacted by Mother Jones.

Now this is both interesting and troubling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that using hacked information to blackmail people is a tried and true Russian tactic, which could help to explain why Donald Trump is so clearly Putin's little bitch.

The other troubling part is that if these remained active until this week that means they were fully functional during these first months of the Trump presidency, and there is no telling how much data they could have mined during that time. And if the Trump Organization and White House have not performed a huge cyber security sweep they could STILL be gathering information.

Keep in mind that Trump once bragged that the reason the DNC had been hacked and the RNC had not, which is a lie by the way, is because the Republicans had better cyber security.

I would suggest that this new information drives a stake right through that argument.

From the article:

This week, a researcher named C. Shawn Eib wrote a blog post highlighting the existence of the shadow subdomains, which had been referenced in a Twitter thread several weeks ago. Eib noted that “more than 250 subdomains of domains registered to the Trump Organization redirect traffic to computers in St. Petersburg, Russia.” 

Another computer security expert, who also asked not to be named, notes that this network of shadow subdomains may have been established by a criminal enterprise looking to use the Trump Organization’s computer system as the launching pad for various cyberattacks on other individuals or entities. But, he adds, this breach also could be exploited by state or nonstate actors attempting to infiltrate the Trump Organization. “At the least,” he remarks, “it shows the Trump Organization has been badly run.” 

In his blog post, Eib notes, “With an organization of this size, and with the added security concerns and scrutiny that a presidential campaign and victory would entail, it would be inexcusable for this to not have been discovered by their IT department. Any basic security audit would show the existence of these subdomains, and what servers they’re leading to. This is sloppy at best, and potentially criminally negligent at worst, depending on the traffic that is being run through these servers.”

Mother Jones reached out to the Trump Organization for comment, and they essentially denied the accuracy of this reporting.

Of course they did.

By the way also keep in mind that just this summer Donald Trump floated the idea of creating a joint cyber security unit with the Kremlin.

Cyber security experts warned the FBI in 2015 that Russians were targeting thousands of powerful leaders, believes they may have been quite successful in compromising many of them.

Courtesy of Politico: 

The active measures are not targeting the military and political system in isolation, but as part of a broader effort to subvert Western institutions including the news media, financial markets and intelligence agencies. Because of its multidimensional nature and use of unconventional tactics the U.S. government has struggled to effectively combat the effort. “This is obviously a really difficult challenge and a lot of people are worried that our response to date hasn’t been effective,” said one expert on active measures who recently testified on the issue before Congress. 

And rather than abating after the presidential election, these campaigns have only continued to get more brazen, according to Strategic Cyber Ventures CEO Tom Kellermann, who has watched them closely. 

In May and June of 2015, Kellermann, who was then the chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, said the firm warned the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Kremlin hackers had drawn up a list of 2,300 people comprising the most powerful leaders in Washington and New York along with their spouses and lovers to target with a concerted hacking campaign. Kellerman said he does not know whether the government acted on the tip, which warned that the hackers had the ability to turn on microphones and cameras on the personal devices of their targets to obtain sensitive information about their personal lives. But he believes the campaign has successfully compromised American leaders, emboldening the Kremlin. “When you wonder why certain people act certain ways,” he said, “You have to remember these people have been warned that their dirty laundry could be aired.” (Spokespeople for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI declined to comment.)

Perhaps this explains why certain Republicans and media types are so hesitant to admit publicly that the election was hacked by the Russians, and why they keep coming to Trump's defense in spite of all the damaging information that has come to light recently.

That sentence at the beginning of this post is referring to a strategy directed at military members and their families on social media to feed them disinformation and even compromised pro-military websites and turned them into propaganda outlets for the Kremlin:

Putin has made the creation of a pro-Russian “alternative media ecosystem” to, in his words, smash “the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the information stream” a top priority of his foreign policy. A significant prong of those operations is aimed at the American military community, and the Russian activity has ramped up in recent years as tensions have increased over sanctions, the annexation of Crimea and the expansion of NATO. 

Veterans Today is a homegrown American site that was founded in 2003 in opposition to the invasion of Iraq and soon began publishing wild conspiracy theories. Before it partnered with Russia’s New Eastern Outlook in 2013, it had forged ties with Iran’s state-backed PressTV and counted among its editorial board of directors a former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services, publishing headlines like, “Israeli death squads involved in Sandy Hook bloodbath” and “Water Terrorism by India to Overawe Pakistan.” 

New Eastern Outlook “chose to work with VT after following us for a while and seeing us for the unique platform that we are,” Veterans Today managing editor Jim Dean explained in an article about the arrangement. He described it as a “marriage made in heaven.”

That "marriage made in heaven" allowed the Russian media to overwhelm the Veteran focused website and essentially turn it into a red, white, and blue version of Pravda.

In October 2013, at the same time that Veterans Today began publishing content from New Eastern Outlook, its sister site Veterans News Now began publishing content from the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow think tank run by Yuri Profokiev, a former head of Moscow’s Communist Party and member of the Soviet Politburo. 

In October 2015, Veterans Today also partnered with a slickly designed, anonymously authored military affairs website called South Front that had been registered in Moscow that April just as Russia was ramping up its influence operations in response to Western sanctions. 

Since then, the site has consistently published articles that push the Kremlin party line, both from its Russian partner and its own contributors.

Also keep in mind that the Russians did not only target the military, conservatives, and powerful Americans, but also targeted those on the Left, especially the so-called Bernie Bros and those on the far left fringe who were already suspicious and critical of Hillary Clinton.

This was a concerted effort that reached deep into America's social media and shaped opinions all over the political spectrum, while also compromising those who may have had the resources to expose them.

To be clear this means that so many of the things that we all saw on our Facebook feed attacking Hillary Clinton, talking about third party candidates, or the failures of Democratic policies to meet the needs of progressives, may very well have come to us directly from Russian disinformation sites determined to undermine our faith in the Democratic candidate and the political system as a whole.

So apparently Russia also finances Trump's golf courses.

Golf writer: "How are you getting $100M for a golf course?"

Eric Trump: "We get all the 💰we need from Russia."

https://t.co/HBuypFlFbg pic.twitter.com/NOL6QmhHa0

— justin kanew (@justin_kanew) May 7, 2017

This is from a conversation that author James Dodson had with Donald Trump, and his son Eric, three years ago: 

When the big day arrived, a dark, gray sky provided the first sign that all would not go as planned. Dodson was a little late arriving, and by the time he entered the Trump National Charlotte clubhouse, his host was already holding forth. 

"Trump was strutting up and down, talking to his new members about how they were part of the greatest club in North Carolina," Dodson says. "And when I first met him, I asked him how he was — you know, this is the journalist in me — I said, 'What are you using to pay for these courses?' And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million." 

$100 million. 

"So when I got in the cart with Eric," Dodson says, "as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."

So not only have Russians invested heavily in Trump Tower, and bought a mansion for 55 million more than Trump paid for it, but now they are also the money behind his string of golf courses?

I swear every day we learn that Trump has more and more ties with the Russians.

How much more evidence do we really need that he was compromised?

In Senate hearing FBI's James Comey reiterates that the Republicans WERE hacked, but that their information was not released by the Russians. Update: Trump warned that Russians have compromising information about him

Courtesy of CNN: 

FBI director James Comey told a Senate panel that there was "penetration on the Republican side of the aisle and old Republican National Committee domains" no longer in use. 

He later added that "there was evidence of hacking directed at state-level organizations, state-level campaigns, and the RNC, but old domains of the RNC, meaning old emails they weren't using. None of that was released." 

Comey said there was no sign "that the Trump campaign or the current RNC was successfully hacked." 

Asked by Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, whether the hacker had the ability to selectively leak that old information, Comey indicated that they did. 

Comey also assesssed that "they got far deeper and wider into the (Democratic National Committee) than the RNC," adding that "similar techniques were used in both cases." 

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate committee, examining the cyber breaches, that the intelligence community concluded with "high confidence" that Russia hacked the election to "denigrate" Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and contrast her unfavorably to Republican Donald Trump.

So older Republican e-mail accounts WERE hacked, but not the current RNC or the Trump campaign. Hmm.

Does ANYBODY not think that those older GOP e-mail accounts would have yielded a treasure trove of useful data?

Depending on how old they are they could contain information about the John McCain campaign, the lead up to the Iraq War, evidence of corruption among lawmakers, possible inter office affairs, the possibilities are endless.

And why would the Russians even bother hacking into the current Republican e-mails or the Trump campaign when everything was already going according to plan?

Earlier in the hearing there was also this exchange:

Comey refused to comment on whether the FBI is investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

But Sen. Angus King of Maine, an Independent, alluded tartly to Comey's very public statements about investigations into Clinton during the election campaign -- "the irony of you making that statement I cannot avoid." 

Comey said that there was a difference between open and closed investigations. He pushed back on King, saying, "You asked me if you have any pending investigations and we're not going to talk about that."

That's funny because we were told repeatedly that the Clinton investigation was not entirely closed before Comey sent that letter which played such a large part in costing Hillary the presidency.

And to my mind by saying that he cannot comment on any investigations that might be ongoing concerning Trump, that means there are ongoing investigations concerning Trump.

I think THAT should be announced to the American people BEFORE he gets sworn into office.

I am not the only one who thinks that.

I suspect this big news will not get full coverage: intel committee member says Comey should tell public what FBI knows of Trump-Russia ties

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) January 10, 2017

And there also clearly needs to be an independent non-partisan commission to investigate Russia's influence on this election, and the ties between them and the Trump campaign.

We also need to stop saying that the hacks had no impact on the outcome of the election when Donald Trump cited information leaked by Wikileaks over 100 times.

He did that because he knew it would have an impact, the only question left unanswered is when did he know he was citing information obtained by Russian hackers?

Update: Well as it turns out Trump himself may very well have been hacked by the Russians.

Courtesy of CNN:  

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. 

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, according to two national security officials. 

Sources tell CNN that these same allegations about communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians, mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year, prompted then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to send a letter to FBI Director Comey in October, in which he wrote, "It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States." 

CNN has confirmed that the synopsis was included in the documents that were presented to Mr. Trump but cannot confirm if it was discussed in his meeting with the intelligence chiefs. 

The Trump transition team declined repeated requests for comment.

Okay help me out here, is this the right time to say "We told you so?"

Well I think we now know why the Russians worked so hard to get Trump elected.

"Not a puppet, not a puppet."

Yes, yes you are.

Update 2: Trump r

FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

Well since just about everything this guy says is a lie, you make the call.