Russian lawyer involved in Trump Tower meeting admits that she was an informant for the Kremlin.

Courtesy of the NYT: 

The Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower in June 2016 on the premise that she would deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton has long insisted she is a private attorney, not a Kremlin operative trying to meddle in the presidential election. 

But newly released emails show that in at least one instance two years earlier, the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, worked hand in glove with Russia’s chief legal office to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud case against a well-connected Russian firm. 

Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government ties. During an interview to be broadcast Friday by NBC News, she acknowledged that she was not merely a private lawyer but a source of information for a top Kremlin official, Yuri Y. Chaika, the prosecutor general. 

“I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she said. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.”

Not exactly surprising news I know, but still nice to hear her finally admit it.

Veselnitskava also brought a certain memo with her to that meeting.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

The Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump's son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman last June at Trump Tower brought a memo with her to that meeting that contained many of the same talking points as one written by the Russian prosecutor's office two months earlier. 

The memo Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to the Trump campaign last year focused on banker-turned-human rights activist Bill Browder, whose reputation has become inextricably linked to the global human-rights campaign he launched in 2009 after tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison.

..........

The document's language closely mirrored the contents of a memo provided to Republican US Rep. Dana Rohrabacher by the office of Russia's chief federal prosecutor Yuri Chaika while Rohrabacher was in Moscow last April. 

The document is marked "confidential" but made the rounds on Capitol Hill upon the lawmaker's return to the US and was obtained by Business Insider.

Go ahead, act surprised that Rohrabacher is the one who received this memo.

So now it's confirmed that Junior, Kushner, and Manafort all met with a Russian spy during the campaign. (Well at least one that we know of.)

If you are looking for proof of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign you really do not have to go much further than this Trump Tower meeting.

But of course it is by no means the only evidence of collusion.

Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower reveals that Stephen Bannon was testing phrases like "drain the swamp" and pushing a pro-Putin narrative years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Chris Wylie

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday. 

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year. 

Among the messages tested were “drain the swamp” and “deep state,” he said.

According to Wylie, Bannon was the big boss and everything had to go through him.

And get this: 

The data and analyses that Cambridge Analytica generated in this time provided discoveries that would later form the emotionally charged core of Trump’s presidential platform, said Wylie, whose disclosures in news reports over the past several days have rocked both his onetime employer and Facebook. 

“Trump wasn’t in our consciousness at that moment; this was well before he became a thing,” Wylie said. “He wasn’t a client or anything.” 

The year before Trump announced his presidential bid, the data firm already had found a high level of alienation among young, white Americans with a conservative bent. 

In focus groups arranged to test messages for the 2014 midterms, these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intended to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s entrenched political community and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called “race realism,” he recounted.

Besides the Trump catchphrases that Bannon was testing out in 2014, there was also this startling revelation: 

“The only foreign thing we tested was Putin,” he said. “It turns out, there’s a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin’s invasion of Crimea.”

Now look I am really fighting the urge to put on my conspiracy theory tinfoil hat here, but there is no way to categorize this as a string of coincidences. 

It really sounds like there was an anti-immigrant, racist, pro-Putin platform all ready to go and all they needed was a figurehead to be the face of the campaign.

Cue Donald J. Trump.

Or, and this is only a little less conspiratorial, since Bannon met Trump way back in 2010, perhaps all of this was tested with him in mind, and he has literally been planning his campaign since at least 2014 or 2013.

Whatever the truth behind this is, what cannot be refuted is that people essentially voted for a Steven Bannon in Trump clothing.

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.

Robert Mueller suspects that Paul Manafort may have been the Trump campaign's back channel to Russians intent on meddling in the election.

Courtesy of Bloomberg:  

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s interest in former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort stemmed in part from his suspected role as a “back channel” between the campaign and Russians intent on meddling in the election, a Justice Department lawyer told a judge. 

The disclosure by U.S. prosecutors came Thursday during a hearing on whether Mueller exceeded his authority in indicting Manafort on charges of laundering millions of dollars while acting as an unregistered agent of the Ukrainian government. Manafort’s lawyers say those alleged crimes have nothing to do with Mueller’s central mission -- to determine whether anyone in the Trump campaign had links to the Russian government. 

Defense attorney Kevin Downing argued anew to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington that even Mueller’s appointment order permitting him to probe “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” wouldn’t cover the political consulting work that Manafort did in Ukraine for a decade. 

But Justice Department attorney Michael Dreeben said prosecutors were justified in investigating Manafort because he had served as Trump’s campaign chairman. “He had long-standing ties to Russia-backed politicians,” Dreeben told Jackson. “Did they provide back channels to Russia? Investigators will naturally look at those things.” 

Prosecutors hadn’t previously used such explicit language to describe their suspicions about Manafort. In a previous court filing, Mueller also cited business ties between Manafort and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Well if this pans out Manafort might be what they refer to in the legal profession as F.U.C.K'd.

David Corn of Mother Jones gets it:

How many times does this have to be explained? DJT Jr., Manafort & Kushner met with Russian emissary & signaled to Moscow they would gladly collude with secret Russian plan to help Trump by accepting HRC dirt. They showed Moscow they approved of efforts to intervene. https://t.co/JaLX9lxKiD

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) April 19, 2018

And this only adds to the avalanche of legal problems that is crushing the life out of Manafort which include a five-count indictment in Washington on charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine, and an 18-count indictment in Virginia on charges of bank fraud, tax evasion and failing to report foreign bank accounts.

Did I mention that he was F.U.C.K'd? 

Manafort would also like to have access to his bank accounts returned.

Not because he wants to flee the country, but because he desperately wants to flee the country.

You know all of this reminds me of that word we kept hearing all year. You know the one that rhymes with "confusion."

Contusion, intrusion, foregone conclusion, nah that's not it.

Don't worry, I am sure it will come to me eventually.

Two former Trump aides are locked in a vicious custody battle over their love child. Because everything is a reality show these days.

Ex-Trump Aide Says Jason Miller Forcing Long Custody Battle For ‘Revenge’ https://t.co/NF57RV1oIp via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 7, 2018

Courtesy of TPM:  

Now, a year and a half later, Delgado is locked in a bitter custody battle with Miller over their son that began nearly nine months ago: A “no end in sight” series of expensive court proceedings that Delgado thinks is largely fueled by Miller’s desire for retaliation. 

“I think the motivation is revenge,” she told TPM by phone on Saturday. “He refuses to speak to me, we haven’t spoken since this came out. … He blames me for not terminating the pregnancy or not keeping it confidential, like how dare I not hide it? His wife obviously has a tremendous deal of resentment toward me and her family has attacked me on social media. This is their way of getting back at me, but it doesn’t make sense to spend this much time and money to do that.”

When word of the affair and pregnancy surfaced in December 2016, Delgado left the Trump orbit and moved to Florida, where she did some non-profit legal work and focused on her pregnancy. Miller, who was on the cusp of moving into the coveted gig of White House communications director when the scandal broke, reportedly stepped away from the role, claiming he needed to focus on his family. (Delgado said she heard Miller did not initially accept the White House’s decision and had to be forced out.)

So we have gone from one of the classiest and dignified presidential administrations in recent history to one that appears to be a cross between Mad Max and the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Years ago when I was teased about using tabloid like reporting to cover the antics of Sarah Palin, my explanation was that I was simply going where the facts led me.

The same is true today, only now we are reporting on an actual president and the
damaged and unethical people that he brought into the campaign and White House with him.

Donald Trump, and his minions, cannot be covered as one might have covered administrations of the past.

They really need to covered as one would cover Hollywood gossip or still active crime scenes.

And if people complain that the press is not treating the president with respect, they need to reply that they are simply going where the facts lead them.

Search warrants reveal that Robert Mueller's interest in Paul Manafort is related to his time as the Trump campaign chairman, despite attempts by White House to say otherwise.

Courtesy of CNN:

The documents, used to obtain a search warrant in building the case against Manafort, were revealed in a court filing late Monday night. Manafort has pleaded not guilty in two federal cases, and the charges he faces do not include allegations about his time on the campaign. 

The search warrant makes clear that Mueller is also focused on Manafort's actions connected to the campaign. The White House and others have repeatedly said that the investigation into Manafort concerns his activities before he joined Trump's team in 2016.

Investigators in a search warrant application last July told a judge in Virginia that they sought evidence related to Manafort's interactions with a Russian real estate magnate and were suspicious of possible campaign finance violations. 

Specifically, the investigators sought from Manafort's apartment records "involving any of the attendees of the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower" and anything involving Aras and Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire and his son tied to the meeting, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and to a possible earlier unsuccessful attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

So much for the argument that this investigation of Paul Manafort is only focused on activities that took place BEFORE he became the head of Trump's campaign.

And in other bad news for Paul Manafort it appears that yet another employee has sold him down the river.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort has trouble in his own house. According to court documents, one of Manafort’s former employees led an FBI agent to a storage locker filled with paperwork on Manafort’s businesses and finances. The person’s name is redacted from the filings. But he’s now at the center of a fight over evidence that could play a significant role in the government’s case against Manafort. 

“People do strange things when confronted with authoritative FBI agents,” said Sol Wisenberg, a criminal defense attorney with Nelson Mullins. 

This makes the second Manafort associate known to have aided the government in the sprawling investigation into foreign influence in U.S. politics. Rick Gates, Manafort’s long-time right hand, began cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in February.

Currently Manafort's attorneys are fighting tooth and nail to get this evidence thrown out of court, which means that it is definitely something that Mueller does not want thrown out. 

Cambridge Analytica boss caught on camera offering to hire sex workers and offer bribes to compromise politicians.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed: 

The boss of Cambridge Analytica, the analytics firm at the centre of an international storm over the misuse of Facebook user data, has been caught on camera bragging about how the company could blackmail political candidates with sex workers, and telling a prospective client that it has been secretly operating around the world to campaign in elections. 

In an undercover operation by Britain's Channel 4 News, CEO Alexander Nix and two other high-ranking Cambridge Analytica staff took meetings with a reporter posing as a fixer who wanted the data firm's help getting candidates elected in Sri Lanka. 

On Monday evening, Channel 4 broadcast undercover footage from four meetings across three months, with Nix telling the reporter that one of the services of Cambridge Analytica could be to “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”. 

Nix also told the undercover reporter: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.”

Representatives of the company also offered to spread fake news about political opponents in order to help sway the elections.

Well gee, no wonder the Trump campaign wanted to work with these guys, they were singing the same tune.

This is what the whistle blower who outed the company's Facebook data mining operation said about this video:   

Wiley couldn’t speak as to how this relates to the firm’s work for the Trump campaign, but he went on to say “there is a perverse company culture inside of Cambridge Analytica, and as the undercover shows, they’re willing to go to extreme lengths to service their clients, and they’ll do anything that helps, whether it’s legal or not.”

Do we really believe that the Trump campaign did not utilize that skills set?

We also learned yesterday that before they started using their possibly illegal tactics to help Donald Trump, that Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Before they ran shady data operations for Donald Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during his presidential bid. Now, the Texas Republican is under fire for hiring the group amid reports that they improperly used Facebook data. 

The Dallas Morning News reported Monday that the Cruz campaign kept Cambridge Analytica on retainer six months after initial reports of the firm using illicitly-sourced Facebook data surfaced in 2015 — a fact the Texas Democratic Party touted in a news release published on Monday. 

“Ted Cruz will stop at nothing to weasel his way into power, even if it means weaponizing stolen information to manipulate people to like him,” Manny Garcia, the deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a press release. “Cruz’s campaign exploited personal information to create psychological profiles on millions of Americans. All to keep lining the pockets of Cruz’s billionaire super PAC donors — like Robert Mercer, who funded this propaganda machine.”

Color me unsurprised that Cruz would resort to tactics like this, nice to see that it might end up biting him in the ass and costing him this election.

Oh, one more thing.

I appears that Cambridge Anaylytica currently has a contract with our State Department: 

Strategic Communications Laboratories, best known for its work with its offshoot and collaborator Cambridge Analytica, appears to have an open contract with the State Department. DefenseOne first noted the contract on a government contracts database, where it is listed as still open.

Well, I ma going to have to take a really hot shower after this post to get the sleaze off. 

Cambridge Analytica, who stands accused of stealing data from over 50 million Facebook users, is working overtime to stop media outlets from issuing reports revealing their tactics.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent an undercover report by London’s Channel 4 News that shows the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix speaking candidly about the firm’s practices from airing, according to the Financial Times. 

Reporters for Channel 4 posed as prospective clients and secretly filmed a number of meetings with the firm. 

The Financial Times's report did not make clear how the data firm was working to stop the report from airing. 

Cambridge Analytica also threatened to sue the Guardian to stop this story about the guy who blew the whistle on their Facebook data theft from being published: 

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process. 

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. 

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says. 

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

Clearly that didn't work.

In another piece by the Guardian that I am sure Cambridge Analytica would like to make go away, we learn that the guy who orchestrated the data mining on Facebook has ties to Russia: 

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin. 

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. 

The revelations come at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, with 13 Russians criminally charged last month with interfering to help Donald Trump.

Man no matter what the story, it always links back to Russia in some way or another. 

By the way Robert Mueller has requested all emails between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, so this party is far from over.

Interesting that not only is the Trump White House all super double secret about what they are up to, but so is just about everybody who helped them to get there in the first place.

Natasha Bertrand ties it all together.

.@NATASHABERTRAND on the reported ties between Russia and #CambridgeAnalytica that she believes could "add an entirely new dimension to #Mueller's investigation" #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/clVKhyn2Eu

— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) March 18, 2018

This my friends, is evidence of collusion.

I think that Mueller probably has all that he needs to make Donald Trump eat these words. 

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Data analysis group associated with Trump campaign harvested information from millions of Facebook accounts in order to target them more effectively.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. 

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. 

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” 

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. 

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Couple of things to note here.

First off Jared Kushner took credit for bringing Cambridge Analytica into the Trump campaign:  

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Secondly if this breach happened way back in 2014, it might indicate that Trump was already getting his ducks in a row to run way back then, despite his claims that he did not decide until 2015. 

Thirdly using Facebook data was also how the Russians targeted users for their propaganda campaign, which could link their efforts directly to Kushner and the Trump campaign, something I am certain Robert Mueller is already looking into.

Have you noticed that the more we learn, the more it seems to indicate that the Russians and the Trump campaign worked hand in hand to win that 2016 election?

P.S. The Massachusetts Attorney General is now launching in investigation into Cambridge Analytica. 

So now an advisor to the United Arab Emirates is cooperating with the Special Counsel investigation? Sweet!

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

An adviser to the United Arab Emirates with ties to current and former aides to President Trump is cooperating with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and gave testimony last week to a grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Mr. Mueller appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities and has asked witnesses about the possibility that the adviser, George Nader, funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts. It is illegal for foreign entities to contribute to campaigns or for Americans to knowingly accept foreign money for political races. 

Mr. Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates, also attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have examined. The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting. 

Mr. Nader’s cooperation in the special counsel’s investigation could prompt new legal risks for the Trump administration, and Mr. Nader’s presence at the Seychelles meeting appears to connect him to the primary focus of Mr. Mueller’s investigation: examining Russian interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.

So to be clear Donald Trump is losing support staff in the White House on an almost hourly basis, while almost everybody who may have helped get him there in the first place seems to be cooperating with an investigation that may see him led away in handcuffs.

You know there is not enough popcorn on the planet to keep us fed through all of this.

I am thinking of switching to Chex Mix. 

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. 

How Facebook's advertising algorithm allowed the Trump campaign (And the Russians) reach far more people, for far less money.

Courtesy of Wired: 

Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount. 

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money. 

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.

The article goes on to explain that it was actually more costly for the Clinton campaign to target Facebook users in urban areas, where her demographics were better, than the Trump campaign's attempt to reach voters in rural areas.

To be fair many of these same tools were also available to the Clinton campaign, however you also need to keep in mind that Facebook sent folks to the Trump campaign to specifically teach them how to better use the platform.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Fleshed out, Parscale is the man behind the Trump campaign’s digital media efforts in 2016. He was hired to create a website for $1,500 (as he explained in that “60 Minutes” interview) and then his role expanded until he was managing tens of millions of dollars intended to promote the presidential candidate online. 

The point of the interview was, in part, to serve as a profile of Parscale but, more broadly, to explain the primary way in which those millions were spent. Per Parscale’s accounting, that was largely on Facebook advertising. Trump’s team advertised on other platforms, too, but “Facebook was the 500-pound gorilla, 80 percent of the budget kind of thing,” Parscale said. 

He also revealed that Facebook even sent staff — whose political persuasion had been cleared by the company — to aid in that effort, to help Parscale “know every, single secret button, click, technology [they] have,” as he said in the interview. The campaign poured money into Facebook, sending thousands of versions of tweaked ads to maximize response. Then it won the presidency by a margin narrow enough that Parscale (and Facebook) can justifiably take credit.

That's right Facebook worked hand in orange tinted hand to help the Trump campaign beat Hillary Clinton.

 And that is without even taking into consideration how they allowed the Russians to weaponize their site to attack Clinton voters and spread misinformation to Trump supporters.

So when they say that Facebook was a neutral participant, or that they are simply a social gathering place with no agenda, they are full of shit. 

In response to all the talk about gun control, Donald Trump goes off on a bizarre Twitter rant that ends up embracing the NRA.

I will always remember the time I spent today with courageous students, teachers and families. So much love in the midst of so much pain. We must not let them down. We must keep our children safe!!

Full Listening Session: https://t.co/x5VenyQX5p pic.twitter.com/CAPfX5odIp

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

So this was Trump's tweet from last night after he met with numerous survivors of school shootings.

It sounds like he wants to do something, right?

But then Trump must have watched the coverage of his "listening session" and that CNN town hall last night. And the old Trump once again reared it's ugly orange tinted head.

I never said “give teachers guns” like was stated on Fake News @CNN & @NBC. What I said was to look at the possibility of giving “concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience - only the best. 20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

Okay well this is interesting because Trump is essentially lying and then calling himself out on that lie IN THE SAME TWEET.

But wait, there's more.

....History shows that a school shooting lasts, on average, 3 minutes. It takes police & first responders approximately 5 to 8 minutes to get to site of crime. Highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive. GREAT DETERRENT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

....If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there...problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

This is an NRA fantasy with essentially no foothold in reality.

And teachers are almost universally against it.

Courtesy of Politico:   

But education groups are virtually unanimously opposed to the idea, which they say is asking teachers and principals to do too much. 

“This is bar none, the worst theory of action I’ve ever heard,” Shanna Peeples, a former National Teacher of the Year award winner, wrote on Twitter.

I can tell you from first hand experience that people do not always react in a predictable fashion to a crisis situation, and that sometimes even training does not prevent bad decision making.

We have all seen video of trained police officers panicking when confronted with a gunman, and firing erratically or firing unnecessarily.

Just imagine that every school in the country had poorly trained armed teachers milling around in the hallways dealing with sometimes out of control students, and stressful situations.

School shootings would become an almost daily occurrence.

However Trump DID offer to support a couple of potentially helpful policies.

I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue - I hope!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

That response is of course woefully lacking in its effectiveness to deal the crisis at hand, and before you allow yourselves to feel a little hopeful that Trump could be persuaded to do more, he followed that tweet up with this one.

What many people don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, is that Wayne, Chris and the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

And that is how the dream dies.

Keep in mind that during the 2016 election cycle the NRA spent 20 million dollars attacking Hillary Clinton, and donated 11 million to the Trump campaign. (Source.)

Trump is not going to bite the hand that feds him, especially since in a round about way that hand was quite likely Russian.

Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates will plead guilty to fraud related charges, and has agreed to testify against Paul Manafort.

Courtesy of CNN: 

Former Trump presidential campaign aide Rick Gates has agreed to testify against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and will plead guilty to fraud related charges, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

The Times reported Sunday a revised plea will be presented in federal court "within the next few days." 

CNN first reported last week that Gates was finalizing a plea deal and that he had been in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert Mueller's team for a month. 

Gates can expect "a substantial reduction in his sentence," to likely about 18 months in prison if he cooperates with the investigation, according to the LA Times report. He is also likely going to have to forfeit any cash or valuables obtained through his alleged illegal activity. 

Aside from the legal maneuvering, the father of four has faced personal and financial pressure to bring his legal proceedings to a speedy resolution, a person familiar with the situation told CNN.

Apparently Gates had hoped that wealthy GOP donors would have come to his rescue and donate to his defense fund, but since he is not a gun lobby or a candidate running for office, they simply could not be bothered.

I wrote about this on Friday, but now we know some of the details.

This of course ramps up pressure on Manafort who seems so far to be holding his ground, and maintains that he is not guilty of the charges against him.

Let's see how long that lasts now.

Trump campaign chair in Kentucky pleads guilty to sex trafficking. Remember what I said yesterday?

JUST IN: Trump campaign chair in KY pleads guilty to sex trafficking of minors: 21 counts against 19 victims, to get 20 yrs in prison, “felony trafficking of a minor, felony inducing a minor to engage in sex, and a third count of giving alcohol to a minor”https://t.co/jlM9QpCzMS pic.twitter.com/1scCWud33F

— The Baxter Bean (@TheBaxterBean) February 9, 2018

 Courtesy of Kentucky.gov:  

Today, Attorney General Andy Beshear announced that former Campbell County District Judge Timothy Nolan has pleaded guilty to numerous felony charges, including human trafficking of adults, promoting human trafficking of minors and unlawful transaction with minors. 

As part of his plea agreement with prosecutors from Beshear’s Special Prosecutions Division, Nolan pleaded guilty to 21 counts against 19 victims and prosecutors’ recommended sentences totaling 20 years in prison. Nolan will remain in custody at the Campbell County Detention Center pending his sentencing March 29, 2018, at 9 a.m. 

Nolan, 71, of California, Ky., a former local school board member, was originally charged in a criminal complaint by the Campbell County Police Department for crimes that occurred between 2010 and 2017. That complaint alleged that Nolan committed human trafficking with a minor by subjecting a child under age 18 to engaging in commercial sexual activity. 

He was later indicted on 28 felony counts and two misdemeanor counts. 

“The punishment in this case does not undo the trauma inflicted on the victims, but it brings closure and some justice,” Beshear said. “I want to thank the Campbell County Police Department and our special prosecutions team for working this case.”

Remember yesterday when I said it appeared being a sexual predator was a prerequisite to work in the Trump White House?

Well apparently that goes for working on the campaign as well.

So here is the Trump 2020 campaign's advertisement attacking Democrats for not applauding Trump's crappy presidency.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

“President Donald Trump asked Democrats to join him in standing up for America,” text at the bottom of the video —which superimposed “patriotic” music over a clip from the president’s speech — reads. 

“Instead, they just sat there, and sat there,” the chyron reads, “disrespecting our people, disrespecting our country.” 

The video highlights the faces of multiple Democrats in the audience, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the former of which Trump referred to in his Ohio “treasonous” speech.

Okay that is some truly deceptive editing going on here. 

I think they just matched up the words of the speech with images of the Democrats sitting down kind of willy nilly.

I think it sort of took balls to include that remark about the lowest black unemployment ever, since after that speech it went right back up again.

So to be clear kids, it is NOT unpatriotic to yell "you lie!," during a speech by a Democratic President, but completely traitorous to refuse to give a standing ovation to a Republican president.

The only time I will give this POS a standing ovation is while watching him hauled out of the White House in handcuffs, or during his funeral, whichever comes first.

Devin Nunes claims that Donald Trump never met George Papadopoulos. Uh..really?

NUNES downplays PAPADOPOULOS' role in Trump campaign, claims he shouldn't have been investigated for drunkenly bragging about Russia having dirt on Clinton.

"As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who Trump wa-- never even met with the president." pic.twitter.com/NgMdzdXVPM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2018

Courtesy of The Week:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) appeared on Fox & Friends on Monday to talk about the FBI's investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Specifically, he made some questionable claims downplaying the importance of President Trump's former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopolous, who has proved surprisingly essential to a swirl of controversy in Washington. 

Papadopolous triggered the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign and Russia, thanks to a drunken conversation with an Australian diplomat in which he touted Russia's hacking efforts against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. He has also been indicted for lying to the FBI — but Nunes claimed that none of that really matters, because Papadopolous played such a minor role in the Trump campaign. In fact, "as far as we can tell, Papadopoulos … never even had met with the president," Nunes told host Brian Kilmeade.

That claim is untrue. Papadopoulos not only provoked the FBI probe, but he also edited foreign policy speeches for Trump and arranged meetings on the then-candidate's behalf with foreign leaders.

Oh, and there's also this picture. 

 That is Trump at the head of the table and Papadopoulos to his right, separated by only three people.

It should also be noted that Trump himself tweeted this picture out back in March of 2016.

You know it's kind of like Nunes is trapped in one of those sensory deprivation chambers where he remains completely cut off from reality.

Or else he is just a compulsive liar, like his boss.

To start your day here is Carter Page, while working on the Trump campaign, in Moscow undermining America's foreign policy while praising Putin's.

NEW: I just found this video of Carter Page in Moscow, Russia speaking in support of Vladimir Putin, while working on the Trump campaign. He calls the American international affairs strategy "hostile," then goes on to talk about the "failure of US analysts & leaders" #TrumpRussia pic.twitter.com/LE2T6mMrcC

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) February 5, 2018

Yeah I have no idea why the federal courts authorized all of those FISA warrants, do you?

Back in 2013 Carter Page was bragging that he was an adviser to the Kremlin.

Oh you found that letter did you? Damn!

Courtesy of Time: 

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page bragged that he was an adviser to the Kremlin in a letter obtained by TIME that raises new questions about the extent of Page’s contacts with the Russian government over the years. 

The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page. 

“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.

But wait, I thought the whole point of the Devin Nunes "secret memo" was that there was no legitimate reason to issue a FISA warrant against Page, and that the ONLY reason the FBI obtained one was due to that Christopher Steele dossier?

Do you hear that sound?

That is the sound of little right wing heads exploding in frustration.