Donald Trump has invited Vladimir Putin to the White House. Again.

Let's be best friends. You can even come for a sleep over.

Courtesy of Reuters:  

U.S. President Donald Trump invited his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to the United States during a phone call, and said he would be glad to see Putin in the White House, RIA Novosti reported on Friday, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying Trump returned to the subject of an invitation a couple of times during a call last month and that Russia was now expecting Trump to formalize the invitation. 

“We proceed from the fact that the U.S. president in a telephone conversation...made such an invitation, said he would be glad to see (Putin) in the White House, would then be glad to meet on a reciprocal visit,” said Lavrov, according to a transcript of an interview with RIA on the foreign ministry website. 

“He returned to this topic a couple of times, so we let our American colleagues know that we do not want to impose, but we also do not want to be impolite, and that considering that President Trump made this proposal, we proceed from the position that he will make it concrete.”

Well so much for Trump suddenly getting tough on Putin.

You may remember that trump made this same offer almost exactly a month ago, and for all we know he has made it several times in between.

Of course since then there have been more cyber attacks from Russia, and of course this whole Syria airstrike Kabuki performance.

Let's simply point out once again that Trump is Putin's bitch, and he proves it almost every single day.

Today is the deadline for Donald Trump to sign off on the Russia sanctions. Think he'll do it? Update!

Courtesy of Politico:

President Donald Trump’s willingness to crack down on Russia will be seriously tested come Monday. 

Trump faces a major deadline to use the Russia sanctions power that Congress overwhelmingly voted to give him — and it’s anybody’s guess as to whether he’ll comply on time after missing the last deadline. 

Scrutiny is high, amid lingering suspicion of Trump’s eagerness to mend fences with Russia and with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation still digging into election meddling by Moscow. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain keen to get tough on Vladimir Putin’s government. 

And they have reason to worry about whether the popular sanctions package Trump reluctantly signed in August will be implemented just as hesitantly. The Russia provisions of the bill were designed as a response to Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election, which the president himself has downplayed. 

Furthermore, the last time Trump’s administration confronted a deadline to set in motion penalties against Putin’s government, it took more than three weeks — and a nudge from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) — for Trump’s team to comply.

I have heard some pundits suggesting that there is no way that Trump will let this deadline pass without his signature, but I am not so sure.

So far there does not seem to have been a really serious consequence for his past hesitation, and clearly Trump is more focused on pleasing his Russian pullet master than he is the American people, so I could definitely see him refusing to put his John Hancock on this bill.

Besides the fact that he waited this long is a clear sign that he is far more concerned with angering Vladimir Putin than he is with protecting American democracy.

Update: Nope, he didn't do it.

The Trump admin has notified Congress that last year’s bipartisan Russia sanctions bill is serving as a “deterrent” and as such, specific sanctions aren’t needed at this time. From a State Dept spox: pic.twitter.com/rwkd6Vzh66

— Elana Schor (@eschor) January 29, 2018

Okay does anybody still believe this guy is not working for the Kremlin?

During Asia summit Putin tells Trump once again he did not interfere in election, Trump seems to take his side over American intelligence agencies. Update!

The above video is from Russia TV.

Notice how Trump and Putin seemed to be joined at the hip?


Courtesy of CNBC:

"He says he didn't meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the trip to Hanoi, Vietnam. "Every time he sees me, he said: 'I didn't do that.' And I believe, I really believe that when he tells me that he means it." 

Trump and Putin did not have a formal meeting while they were in Vietnam for an economic summit, but the two spoke informally several times and reached agreement on a number of principles for the future of war-torn Syria. But Trump made clear that the issue of Russian meddling in the election hovers over the leaders' relationship — Putin is "insulted" by the accusation, Trump said. In a blistering partisan attack, Trump accused Democrats of using the election issue to create a barrier between the U.S. and Russia as the nations work on crises in Syria and Ukraine. 

"Having a good relationship with Russia's a great, great thing. And this artificial Democratic hit job gets in the way," Trump told reporters, once again casting doubt on the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia did try to interfere in the election. "People will die because of it."

You know to me this simply reinforces the idea that Trump knew all along that the Russians were interfering in our election, and was very likely helping them to do it.

Why else take the word of a former KGB agent over the word of our own intelligence agencies?

Here’s the *key* quote from Trump on Putin re: Russian election meddling:
“Every time he sees me he says, 'I didn't do that,' and I believe, I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.” pic.twitter.com/kLrx2pNLIf

— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) November 11, 2017

And to call the work by our intelligence agencies, an the Mueller investigation, a "Democratic hit job" is essentially the talk of a traitor.

Update: Well this is kind of an interesting twist. 

Trump and Putin spox Dmitry Peskov are telling 2 different stories -- Trump says they discussed Russian meddling, Peskov says the subject didn't even come up https://t.co/YnuSlenPa8

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) November 11, 2017

So who do we believe?

The Russians who lie to the American media all of the time, or Donald Trump who lies to the American media all of the time?

In response to Russian hacking Virginia to do away with touchscreen voting machines.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

The Virginia State Board of Elections moved Friday to do away with touchscreen voting machines in the state by November’s election, a move aimed at boosting security. 

The board decided to phase out the machines this year after the Virginia Department of Elections recommended that the touchscreen voting machines be decertified. The recommendation came after security experts breached numerous types of voting machines with ease at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

The move comes amid heightened concerns over foreign interference in future elections, in light of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used cyberattacks and disinformation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. 

Yes, yes, yes!

This is EXACTLY what needs to happen all over this country in order to regain our voting integrity.

We have known since 2000, that these voting machines can be hacked and it is WAY past time that we shit can them and go back to paper ballots.

The Russians will be back, and dammit we need to be ready.

While most states agree that they need to prepare for more cyber attacks in the coming election cycles, few are ready to spend the money necessary for increased security.

Courtesy of Politico:  

The U.S. needs hundreds of millions of dollars to protect future elections from hackers — but neither the states nor Congress is rushing to fill the gap. 

Instead, a nation still squabbling over the role Russian cyberattacks played in the 2016 presidential campaign is fractured about how to pay for the steps needed to prevent repeats in 2018 and 2020, according to interviews with dozens of state election officials, federal lawmakers, current and former Department of Homeland Security staffers and leading election security experts.

These people agree that digital meddlers threaten the public’s confidence in America’s democratic process. And nearly everyone believes that the danger calls for collective action — from replacing the voting equipment at tens of thousands of polling places to strengthening state voter databases, training election workers and systematically conducting post-election audits. 

But those steps would require major spending, and only a handful of states’ legislatures are boosting their election security budgets, according to a POLITICO survey of state election agencies. And leaders in Congress are showing no eagerness to help them out. 

Not only are they showing "no eagerness to help them out," they are actively cutting funding from the agencies that currently DO help out.

In fact, some in the Capitol are trying to defund the 15-year-old federal agency that helps states and counties administer elections. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has three full-time staffers examining elections, would also see budget cuts in the pending congressional spending bills.

“We just don’t fund elections,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, who co-wrote a recent report on digitally securing America's elections. “Nobody’s really sure who’s responsible for this.”

“Nobody’s really sure who’s responsible for this?" Well that is certainly comforting.

I'm just going to say it, because it needs to be said.

The Republicans don't WANT to secure our voting systems because they habitually take advantage of the lack of security and if the Russians hacking helps to put THEIR guy in office they see no reason to do anything about it.

And that leaves the rest of us, you know the people who believe in free and fair elections, simply pondering a future where we will never be able to completely trust the outcome of any election in America for the foreseeable future.

Russian interference in our 2016 election may be more widespread than previously reported.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November. 

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours. 

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. 

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

Durham was certainly not the only areas to experience these complications, but without a forensic analysis we may never know exactly how widespread they were or who orchestrated the difficulties.

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there. 

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots. 

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process. 

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter. 

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

Of course with Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate there appears to be no burning desire to get to the bottom of what caused this interference.

And why would there be?

After all if it helped to put a Republican in the White House and to help the Republicans maintain a majority in both houses, why would they want to find a problem? 

However if these issues are not addressed how can the American people trust the election results ever again?

Investigators now have their first still living witness to the Russian hacking.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the election hacking and the heated debate it has stirred. The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man’s name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested. 

There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did. 

That a hacking operation that Washington is convinced was orchestrated by Moscow would obtain malware from a source in Ukraine — perhaps the Kremlin’s most bitter enemy — sheds considerable light on the Russian security services’ modus operandi in what Western intelligence agencies say is their clandestine cyberwar against the United States and Europe. 

It does not suggest a compact team of government employees who write all their own code and carry out attacks during office hours in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but rather a far looser enterprise that draws on talent and hacking tools wherever they can be found. 

Also emerging from Ukraine is a sharper picture of what the United States believes is a Russian government hacking group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 or Fancy Bear. It is this group, which American intelligence agencies believe is operated by Russian military intelligence, that has been blamed, along with a second Russian outfit known as Cozy Bear, for the D.N.C. intrusion. 

Rather than training, arming and deploying hackers to carry out a specific mission like just another military unit, Fancy Bear and its twin Cozy Bear have operated more as centers for organization and financing; much of the hard work like coding is outsourced to private and often crime-tainted vendors.

This more or less explains why security experts originally thought Ukraine was involved in the hacking of the DNC.

This Profexer has turned himself into the police in Ukraine and is cooperating fully.

His information is important because he is perhaps the only person who has had direct contact with the Russian hackers who is not either imprisoned or dead.

Republicans vote to abolish commission that works to protect integrity of voting machines.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

This past weekend, hackers gathered in Las Vegas with a simple mission: break into America’s electronic voting machines and take control. Within minutes, some had already succeeded – but that’s a good thing. These hackers were part of a workshop held to identify vulnerabilities so they can be fixed well before any Americans cast actual votes next election. This exercise underscores the very real danger posed by outdated and insecure voting-machine software – as well as the important mission our government must continue undertaking to close these vulnerabilities and safeguard our elections. 

However, in their FY2018 funding proposal, Republicans are going after the small but highly successful agency that protects the integrity of our voting systems: the Election Assistance Commission. In June, House Republicans included a provision in their Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill that would abolish the Election Assistance Commission. 

Many Americans may not have heard of the Election Assistance Commission, a four-member bipartisan agency that Congress established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, but nonetheless they benefit greatly from its work. Created to address the flaws in our nation’s voting infrastructure, which contributed to the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election, the Election Assistance Commission protects Americans’ votes by helping to ensure that state and local authorities adopt best practices and uphold the highest standards of security for voting technology.

Literally the ONLY reason that the Republicans would vote to abolish this commission is because they do not want the the voting machine vulnerabilities to be identified and fixed.

And the only reason I can think of for that is because they need them to remain vulnerable.

Anybody have an alternate theory?