TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[Luther Blissett]

I still can't believe Dillard gave fucking David Duke a platform, AND that the cops brutalized the students who were (understandably) angry about this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rsity.html

[Morty]

I hope Kurt's latest offering turns out better than his last Trump's-in-bed-with-the-Russkies effort. CIA to the rescue.

[seemslikeadream]

Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald: I got slimed by Russian propagandist site Sputnik


October 20, 2016
Kurt Eichenwald

Last week, I wrote an opinion piece about an altered document that had appeared in Sputnik, a news site publicly identified by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence as a vehicle Russian disinformation campaigns. Other U.S. intelligence officials have publicly described how false information from Russian operatives gets fed to the internet through blogs, Twitter and other social media. Frequently, it is then picked up by Russian media outlets such as Sputnik or other overseas media organizations, or is just allowed to spread on the internet. The purpose of these campaigns is to affect elections in other nations. So far, American intelligence has identified several countries targeted in this way: Estonia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Germany, and now the United States.

The altered document involved purported statements by Sidney Blumenthal, a confidant of Hillary Clinton, in which words I wrote a year ago were put into his email as though he’d written them. This supposedly damaging email was written up on Sputnik, and a few hours later, Donald Trump cited the manipulated document at a rally as fact. A short time later, when I attempted to ask Sputnik about the piece, it was taken down.

There was some important information about that document I could not explicitly state in my article, because I needed to protect a government source. That source has now given me permission to say more. What I have not revealed until now is that American intelligence determined that the false document—10,000 words that had been snipped down to two sentences and then sent out as an image on Twitter—was originally altered by a Russian operative and fed onto the internet through Reddit. From there, it was picked up and tweeted as part of a coordinated Russian campaign. Eventually, it was picked up some people who believed the tweeted image was real, leading it to be spread further. It then appeared in Sputnik, the site identified by the U.S. government as a participant in Russian disinformation campaigns. The original, undoctored Blumenthal email was released last week by Wikileaks, which played no role in it being altered. Wikileaks is as much of a victim in this deception as anyone else.

Some reporters disputed my contention that Sputnik was part of this propaganda campaign. They argued that the Sputnik article could have simply been the consequence of error, a reporter blindly taking as fact something others had tweeted. I updated my original Newsweek story, adding as much as I could to show that wasn’t the case.

Newsweek then got an email from someone who identified himself as William Moran. Moran—who had not been identified in either my piece or the Sputnik article—stated that he had written the Sputnik article and threatened to pursue legal action because, he claimed, he had lost his job as a result of what I wrote. Moran said he had pulled the anonymous, tweeted snippet that had been doctored, and published it as fact, going so far as to claim the document was an “October surprise” that could scuttle Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House. He wrote in his email to me and my editors that he had been fired not for making such an egregious error, but because Newsweek had pointed out that he had published falsehoods.

Last Thursday night, I was under a twitter attack by trolls over this piece, and began blocking them rapidly. I even tweeted an apology to anyone who may have been blocked accidentally, because I was blocking people quickly (the day before, some tweeters had threatened my family and started bogus twitter accounts with photographs of my children.) I saw a tweet from Moran claiming that I had blocked him and I figured this must be a new account. I decided to email him to explain that I had not blocked him specifically, but had done so as part of a mass blocking. We had a terse email exchange, and I then offered to call him the following day.

When we spoke, Moran told me a sob story—one he had told in his first email to me and to Newsweek. He said he had lost his job—for which he was paid $50,000 a year, a respectable sum for someone who says he has been in journalism for only nine months. He said getting fired meant he couldn’t close on a house he was about to buy and was putting stress on his marriage.

At that point, I believed Moran had been duped by Sputnik, that he did not understand the truth about his employer. I explained Sputnik’s connection to the Kremlin, and told him that being associated with the site could destroy his journalism career if he wanted to continue to work in Washington, D.C. I bought into his story about how his termination was destroying his life.

I told Moran I would think about how he could salvage his desperate situation, and would even consider forwarding his information to a publication if I could come up with an idea. I felt bad that this man’s life was being harmed because he had chosen the wrong employer. Over the weekend, I saw on a public jobs website that The New Republic had an opening for a political reporter. I know no one at The New Republic, but sent an email to an editor saying I knew someone who was out of a job and asked if I could send that person his way. I did not identify Moran, nor did I ask for a favor. I received no response.

Then, Moran sent me an emailed legal threat and said he was going to expose everything, whatever that meant. With that, I decided I had no idea what Moran’s agenda was, and didn’t know if he was who he claimed to be. I replied by email that I was giving up on him and no longer trusted him. I told him I had reached out to The New Republic, based on his sob story, but that I was no longer willing to help him. It made no sense that he would publicly portray himself as incompetent in order to protect Sputnik, which supposedly had fired him. He seemed far more interested in portraying Sputnik as free of interference from the Kremlin than he did in saving his career. I did not know what Moran was—A useful idiot? Crazy? A knowing propagandist?—but I wanted nothing to do with him. In that email, I showed him the paragraph I was willing to add to the story to present his case (if allowed to do so by the editors and the lawyers, since we were still operating under a threat of a lawsuit from Moran.) Still, part of me thought this was a foolish person who did not understand the consequences; I knew, because of what I had heard from the government official, that Moran had printed Russian propaganda, whether by accident or not. I asked him if he was sure he wanted me to print the paragraph, since I had no doubt that describing his incompetence publicly would destroy his career... I never heard back.

Instead, a couple of hours later, Moran reappeared in Sputnik with an article headlined, “I Am Vladimir Putin: The First Victim of McCarthyism 2.0.” In it, he stated that he had been offered his job back at Sputnik, but rejected the offer so that he could take a long vacation. He began telling other publications that I had tried to bribe him with that discussion of the job open at The New Republic. Bribe him for what purpose, I wondered. To avoid revealing what he claimed was his innocent—and incompetent—role in this Russian propaganda campaign?

Other reporters began hearing from Moran as he spun more misrepresentations, handing out emails and spinning them into what they did not say and without the context of our phone calls. According to reporters who spoke to him, Moran denied ever telling me he was in dire straits or that he had played on my sympathies. He appeared to have forgotten he had told that same story in one of his emails to Newsweek , in which he wrote, “I've lost my job at a time when my wife and I are in the lead up to closing on a new home.”

Then, on Tuesday, came new information: Moran had done this before in Sputnik. On August 14, he wrote a piece headlined, “Secret File Confirms Trump Claim: Obama, Hillary 'Founded ISIS' to Oust Assad.” The “secret file’’ was not secret—it was a 2012 Defense Intelligence Report that had been declassified; it said nothing to even suggest the “Hillary founded ISIS” canard. That article resulted in a rebuttal in The Washington Post by the former American Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. In response, Moran took to Sputnik, once again arguing he had nothing to do with any Russian government disinformation campaigns in an article headlined, “No, Ambassador McFaul: Putin Didn’t Order Me to Fall in Love with Donald Trump.” He advanced the same argument he had pushed on me.

McFaul tweeted at Moran. “You are not a journalist if you publish complete falsehoods. That's called propaganda.” Moran complained that McFaul was throwing legal allegations as a public official. McFaul responded, “Im a professor, not a public official. & in my profession #factsmatter. You published lies. Clean it up, or face consequences.” Moran responded, “Is that a threat?”

Then, this morning, Moran again tweeted the lie that I had attempted to bribe him, a falsehood he had gotten others to print. I decided I had to make sure no other reporter swallowed his poison, so I sent a Twitter-storm at him, informing him I knew of his deceptions. Apparently unable to keep up with his lies, he replied at one point that he had lost his job over this—I reminded him that he had said, in print, that Sputnik had offered his job back and he had turned it down.

Reached by email, Moran declined to respond to 14 questions I asked him about his deceptions or his motives. He called Newsweek’s decision to publish this article, “unprecedented” and “wildly illegal.”

So, to recount: According to U.S. government officials, a Moscow propagandist fed the altered document onto the internet through Reddit, which was then picked up and retweeted by other suspect accounts until it went viral, then appeared in Sputnik, which later took the story down. Seven days laters, a person who identified himself as the writer of that Sputnik article sacrificed his career to proclaim Sputnik independent, lied that I had offered him a bribe (for what, I still don’t know), lied to other reporters that he had never raised any issues of being in financial trouble, then spread more lies about me to further defend Sputnik, a known tool of Moscow’s propaganda machine.

Now, Bill Moran is coming at the media with new stories about the Twitter storm I launched to put reporters on notice about what he was doing.

Move on, Bill. I don’t know what your role is at Sputnik, but you’ve proven yourself willing to push propaganda to multiple news organizations in defense of a site controlled by the Russian government, even if it means destroying your professional reputation.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/newswee ... e-sputnik/

[dada]

There will be no Trumpist insurgency, all of its ringleaders will be shot... go out and celebrate

They could stage one of those fake Turkish coup things, blame it on a conspiracy of Donald-supporting plotters. Then round 'em all up.

Vlad can make a statement that he had nothing to do with it, we all must stand together for the sovereignty of all nations against the treasonous destabilizers of civilization.

It's a feel good show for the holiday season. Everybody goes out shopping full of giddy emotions, buying more stuff. The stock market is happy.

See, I should be the fucking president.

[Morty]

Get a grip, Slad. You're stooping pretty low to be rushing to Eichenwald's defense. He was already slime before he came into contact with Sputnik.


Kurt Eichenwald’s Deception, and Newsweek’s Failure to Restrain: A Follow-Up
By Walker Bragman & Shane Ryan | October 21, 2016 | 9:28am

[seemslikeadream]

[Rory]

Solace would be delighted you're unironically quoting arch zionist, neoconservative propagandist in chief, Frum

And Eichenwald is as much a piece of shit PR hitman as they come. Every word coming out of his mouth needs a mountain of salt

[seemslikeadream]

yes and you really have no standing Mr. Fox News

feeling bad that you got duped by Mr. Mercer?


any way.....may be ol' David is really upset with Trump's Network News...Breitbart (you know that racist network of Trumps') cause he posted this

Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 03: The Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol (L) leads a discussion on PayPal co-founder and former CEO Peter Thiel's National Review article, 'The End of the Future,' at the National Press Club October 3, 2011 in Washington, DC. Kristol is on the advisory board of e21, the discussion's co-sponsor. Thiel argues that the United States and its leaders are on the wrong track regarding scientific innovation and that 'when tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains.' (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
by DAVID HOROWITZ15 May 20165,547


While millions of Republican primary voters have chosen Donald Trump as the party’s nominee, Bill Kristol and a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders are preparing a third party effort to block Trump’s path to the White House.
Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all. This is to give elitism a bad name.

Trump's Anti-Semitic Speech Came From Breitbart, The Alt-Right, And Alex Jones
Blog ››› October 14, 2016 12:30 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s October 13 speech pushed the conspiracy theory that the media, corporations, and “global financial powers” such as banks are, in concert, harming America and working with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to defeat him. This claim -- which several journalists noted was an anti-Semitic dog whistle -- comes from the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, which includes the website of Trump’s campaign CEO, Breitbart News, and radio host conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/14 ... nes/213842

Did I mention FBI agents are leaking directly to the Trump campaign?

U.S. court deals Trump a setback in poll-monitor fight
The Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group, plans an undercover effort to monitor voting locations, while Trump ally Roger Stone is mobilizing supporters to conduct an exit poll to double-check election results. One right-wing group told the news website Politico that it has already installed hidden cameras in Philadelphia polling stations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-e ... SKBN12Y2BR

New reports reveal how the F.B.I. relied on an infamous Breitbart/Trump/Mercer source as the basis for its investigation into the Clinton Foundation—and that agents see Clinton as “the antichrist personified.

[Jerky]

Bill Clinton cheats on his wife. Impeach him. Trump proudly brags about sexual assault (and has cheated on his wives). Elect him. Hillary oversaw the department of state while 4 people died in an embassy attack. Put her in jail. 2 Republicans were in office while over 200 people died in embassy attacks. No problem. Immigrants don’t pay taxes. Round them up and kick them out. Trump doesn’t pay taxes. He’s a business genius. Hillary’s foundation only spent 87% of their donations helping people. She’s a crook. Trump’s foundation paid off his debts, bought sculptures of him, and made political donations to avoid investigations while using less than 5% of funds for charity (and he got shut down by NY State). So savvy… Put him in the White House. Trump made 4 billion dollars in 40 years, when an index fund started at the same time with the same “small loans” he received would be worth $12 billion today… without a trail of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits and burned small business owners. He’s a real business whiz. Hillary took a loss of $700K. She’s a criminal. Trump is the first candidate in the modern era not to release his tax returns, and took a billion dollar loss in 2 year. Genius. Hillary takes responsibility for private email servers and apologizes. Not credible. Trump denies saying things (on the record) he actually said (on the record), he’s just telling it like it is.

Your arguments are thin. Your ignorace of reality is shocking. Your double-standards are offensive, and your willingness to blindly support him and recycle the rhetoric is absurd. Your opinion is not fact. Your memes are not news articles. And your hypocrisy is not a platform.

- Seen on Instagram, posted on Nov 1. It lasted a day before Trump partisans attacked the person who posted it and somehow had her Instagram account de-activated. I do not know the original author’s identity.

[JackRiddler]

There will be no Trumpist insurgency, all of its ringleaders will be shot... go out and celebrate

They could stage one of those fake Turkish coup things, blame it on a conspiracy of Donald-supporting plotters. Then round 'em all up.

Getting real now. As if you don't know that the Trumpist "insurgency" will be a fucking joke, the folks will make an aggressive show and then go home to bed. Though some casualties are possible. And for how it will be treated in the real world by the real US law enforcement, you don't have to go far for examples. These won't be Indians, or black people, they will be white people. See: Bundys.

[8bitagent]

Bill Clinton cheats on his wife. Impeach him. Trump proudly brags about sexual assault (and has cheated on his wives). Elect him. Hillary oversaw the department of state while 4 people died in an embassy attack. Put her in jail. 2 Republicans were in office while over 200 people died in embassy attacks. No problem. Immigrants don’t pay taxes. Round them up and kick them out. Trump doesn’t pay taxes. He’s a business genius. Hillary’s foundation only spent 87% of their donations helping people. She’s a crook. Trump’s foundation paid off his debts, bought sculptures of him, and made political donations to avoid investigations while using less than 5% of funds for charity (and he got shut down by NY State). So savvy… Put him in the White House. Trump made 4 billion dollars in 40 years, when an index fund started at the same time with the same “small loans” he received would be worth $12 billion today… without a trail of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits and burned small business owners. He’s a real business whiz. Hillary took a loss of $700K. She’s a criminal. Trump is the first candidate in the modern era not to release his tax returns, and took a billion dollar loss in 2 year. Genius. Hillary takes responsibility for private email servers and apologizes. Not credible. Trump denies saying things (on the record) he actually said (on the record), he’s just telling it like it is.

Your arguments are thin. Your ignorace of reality is shocking. Your double-standards are offensive, and your willingness to blindly support him and recycle the rhetoric is absurd. Your opinion is not fact. Your memes are not news articles. And your hypocrisy is not a platform.

- Seen on Instagram, posted on Nov 1. It lasted a day before Trump partisans attacked the person who posted it and somehow had her Instagram account de-activated. I do not know the original author’s identity.

This is why I hate the dead horse meme right wingers push with "Benghazi". It wasn't four dead Americans. It was TENS OF THOUSANDS of innocent Libyans.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016 ... a-country/

As much as I could write a book on the sheer hypocrisy of the slimey right wing, the "anti Bush left" mostly ignoring the war crimes of Obama and HRC(as Sec of State) confuses me

How the hell is "grab em by the pussy" more offensive than commanding the deaths of countless innocent Muslims? As Bush, and Obama/Clinton did?

If Trump is a slimeball, what does that make Bill Clinton?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

[tapitsbo]

There will be no Trumpist insurgency, all of its ringleaders will be shot... go out and celebrate

They could stage one of those fake Turkish coup things, blame it on a conspiracy of Donald-supporting plotters. Then round 'em all up.

Vlad can make a statement that he had nothing to do with it, we all must stand together for the sovereignty of all nations against the treasonous destabilizers of civilization.

It's a feel good show for the holiday season. Everybody goes out shopping full of giddy emotions, buying more stuff. The stock market is happy.

See, I should be the fucking president.

Mm. Erdogan had 62 percent approval. Much higher than Trump. And the Turkish Islamists built their institutions up slowly over decades, with lots of foreign support.

If I were you I wouldn't be worried, your side of this will crush the enemy to annihilation.

[seemslikeadream]

WHY VLADIMIR PUTIN'S RUSSIA IS BACKING DONALD TRUMP
BY KURT EICHENWALD ON 11/4/16 AT 5:50 AM


In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacks designed to interfere with the U.S. election. They fear the Republican nominee for president has emboldened the Kremlin in its unprecedented cyber-campaign to disrupt elections in multiple countries in hopes of weakening Western alliances, according to intelligence, law enforcement and other government officials in the United States and Europe.

While American intelligence officers have privately briefed Trump about Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election, he has publicly dismissed that information as unreliable, instead saying this hacking of incredible sophistication and technical complexity could have been done by some 400-pound “guy sitting on their bed” or even a child.

Officials from two European countries told Newsweek that Trump’s comments about Russia’s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official said members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia’s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump’s comments “quite disturbing” because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.

Trump’s behavior, however, has at times concerned the Russians, leading them to revise their hacking and disinformation strategy. For example, when Trump launched into an inexplicable attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat, the Kremlin assumed the Republican nominee was showing himself psychologically unfit to be president and would be forced by his party to withdraw from the race. As a result, Moscow put its hacking campaign temporarily on hold, ending the distribution of documents until Trump stabilized, both personally and in the polls, according to reports provided to Western intelligence.

America’s European partners are also troubled by the actions of several people close to Trump’s campaign and company. Trump has been surrounded by advisors and associates with economic and familial links to Russia. The publicized connections and contacts between former campaign manager Paul Manafort with Ukraine have raised concerns. Former Trump advisor Carter Page is being probed by American and European intelligence on allegations that he engaged in back-channel discussions with Russian government officials over the summer. Page did travel to Moscow, but he denies any inappropriate contact with Russian officials. The allies are also uneasy about retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a Trump advisor who was reportedly considered a possible running mate for the GOP nominee. Last December, Flynn attended a dinner at the Metropol Hotel in honor of the 10th anniversary of RT, a Russian news agency that has been publicly identified by American intelligence as a primary outlet for Moscow’s disinformation campaigns. Flynn, who was two seats away from Russian President Vladimir Putin at the dinner, has frequently appeared on RT, despite public warnings by American intelligence that the news agency is used for Russian propaganda.


Western intelligence has also obtained reports that a Trump associate met with a pro-Putin member of Russian parliament at a building in eastern Europe maintained by Rossotrudnichestvo, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is charged with administering language, education and support programs for civilians. While the purpose of that meeting is unclear and there is no evidence that Trump was aware it took place, it has become another fact that has alarmed officials from at least one NATO ally. Finally, Trump’s repeated glowing statements about Putin throughout the campaign—and his shocking comment that the Russians were not in Crimea—has perplexed some foreign officials, who fear that under a Trump presidency, the United States would no longer stand with Western Europe in regards to Moscow.

Trump and his campaign have also spread propaganda created as part of the Kremlin's effort, relying on bogus information generated through traditional Russian disinformation techniques. In one instance, a manipulated document was put out onto the internet anonymously by propagandists working with Russia; within hours, Trump was reciting that false information at a campaign rally. The Trump campaign has also spread claims from Sputnik, another news outlet identified by American intelligence as part of the Russian disinformation campaign. For example, almost immediately after the posting of an article by Sputnik attacking this Newsweek reporter, the Trump campaign emailed a link to the piece to American reporters, urging them to pursue the same story.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, did not respond to emails from Newsweek on Monday and Thursday asking how it became aware of the Sputnik story so quickly, why it almost immediately promoted information from the Russian propaganda site to U.S. reporters, and what led the Republican nominee to disregard the intelligence he has been provided in briefings about Moscow’s propaganda and hacking campaign.

American intelligence officials know Russia used cyberattacks and misinformation to interfere with recent elections in Western Europe, including the German elections last month that resulted in victories for right-wing populists, and the United Kingdom’s vote in June on Brexit, a referendum that called for Britain to leave the European Union.

Western intelligence and law enforcement say tens of thousands of people have been working with Russia on its hacking and disinformation campaign for many years. They include propagandists and cyber-operatives stationed in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, located in the southwestern part of Siberia. Operations have also been conducted in the United States, primarily out of New York City, Washington D.C. and Miami. Those involved include a large number of Russian emigres, as well as Americans and other foreign nationals. Intelligence operations in Europe and the U.S. have determined that the money these emigres receive for their work is disguised as payments from a Russian pension system. One U.S. official says there is evidence many of these Americans and foreign nationals do not know they are part of Russia’s propaganda operation.

Here is how Moscow operates its campaigns: Hackers pilfer information from a variety of organizations both inside and outside Western governments; that is distributed to individuals who feed it into what a source told a European intelligence expert was a “pipeline.” This so-called pipeline can involve multiple steps before hacked information is disclosed through the media or online. For example, that source reported that documents in the United States intended to disrupt the American election are distributed through WikiLeaks. However, there are so many layers of individuals between the hackers and that organization there is a strong possibility that WikiLeaks does not know with certainty the ultimate source of these records; throughout 2016, the site has been posting emails from various Democratic Party organizations that were originally obtained through Russian hacking.

The Russian penetration in the United States is far more extensive than previously revealed publicly, although most of it has been targeted either at government departments or non-government organizations connected to the Democratic Party. Russian hackers penetrated the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department. The State Department cyberattack, which began in 2014 and lasted more than a year, was particularly severe, with Russian hackers gaining entry into its unclassified system, including emails. (Clinton left the State Department in 2013, which means that if she had used its unclassified email system rather than her private server—a decision that has dogged her throughout the campaign—any of her emails on the government system could have been obtained by Russian hackers).

The breadth of the cyberattacks of non-governmental organizations is astonishing. Russian hackers have obtained emails and other information out of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, but also have struck at organizations with looser ties to the party, including think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, where some of Clinton’s long-time friends and colleagues work.

Once the documents are obtained by hackers and then distributed, a large group of propagandists around the world begin promoting them on social media—in comments sections of websites, and other locations online—hoping to generate negative news stories that undermine Democratic officials, particularly Clinton.

The Kremlin’s campaign is motivated not so much to support Trump as it is to hurt the Democratic nominee. During Clinton’s time as secretary of state, Putin publicly accused her of interfering in Moscow’s affairs. For example, her statement that Russian parliamentary elections in December 2011—which involved blatant cheating—were “neither free nor fair” infuriated Putin. He was also encouraged by the relentlessly positive comments about him by Trump, even after the Republican nominee began receiving criticism within his own party for sounding too supportive of the Kremlin, according to information obtained from within Russia by a Western intelligence source.

Both Trump and Clinton were monitored by Russian intelligence during their visits to Moscow over the years, according to American and European intelligence sources, in hopes of gathering kompromat—compromising material about a politician or public figure. The dossier on Clinton mainly contains recordings of conversations and intercepted phone calls; the intelligence source said the dossier has been controlled by Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman. When she was secretary of state, however, Clinton knew her conversations in Moscow might be recorded, so the dossier appears to have been used mainly for intelligence rather than to embarrass her with allies, the source said. The Kremlin also has both video and audio recordings of Trump in a kompromat file. Newsweek could not confirm if there is anything compromising in those recordings.


This massive Russian campaign has led to significant disputes within the Kremlin. Russian officials originally believed it could be conducted without any significant blowback from the United States. According to information obtained by the Western intelligence source, Sergei Ivanov, the chief of staff for the presidential executive office in the Kremlin, came to believe this summer that the hacking and disinformation campaign, which has been orchestrated in part by Peskov, had gone too far. Articles implying that Russian had been trying to split the supporters of Democratic primary runner-up Bernie Sanders and Clinton while building up Trump set off fears among Peskov and others that they would be held responsible for the backlash from the United States, according to the information obtained by the Western intelligence source.

Ivanov was also furious that Peskov led what he considered to be an ill-conceived and botched attempt to use the hacking and disinformation campaign to interfere in the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July. The web of relationships involving Turkey, Western Europe, the United States, Syria and Donald Trump is complex, and Ivanov expressed disbelief that an attempt to interfere with the coup was undertaken without examining the possible ramifications. The Incirlik air base in Turkey has been used as a primary staging area for American bombers engaged in attacks on the Islamic State group (ISIS) in both Syria and Iraq; Russia supports President Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president who is fighting off a variety of rebel outfits, including ISIS, which has led the Kremlin to authorize bombing campaigns there. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan despises Trump and his associates because of the Republican nominee’s anti-Muslim rhetoric (in March, one of Trump’s Turkish business partners was indicted in what some Erdoğan critics described as retribution). Erdoğan has told associates he will not cooperate militarily with a Trump administration, according to a Middle Eastern financier in direct contact with senior Turkish officials.

By interfering in the Turkish coup with propaganda efforts, one faction in the Kremlin believes Moscow might have squandered the advantages to be gained from Erdoğan’s contempt for Trump, according to both European and Middle Eastern intelligence sources. If Erdoğan is angry at the next American president, the ability of the United States to engage in military action in Syria would be severely limited. If Russian interference in the coup leads Erdoğan to turn his fury on Moscow, the Americans might maintain access to the air base.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, is also deeply concerned about the cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, according to information obtained by a Western intelligence source. He wants to maintain a close relationship with the United States so he can travel to America both officially and privately. As a result, he is refusing to support Peskov or to strongly combat U.S. charges about the hacking campaign.

Despite these qualms, Putin remained satisfied with the campaign, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. election, according to information obtained by the Western intelligence source. Should Clinton win, he has told associates, her administration would be bogged down trying to heal divisions within the United States brought about by releases and misrepresentations of hacked information, and would have little time or political capital to confront Russia’s efforts in Syria, Ukraine and other locales.

By August, however, fears began to emerge within the Kremlin that the effort was falling apart. Trump’s attacks on the parents of a slain Muslim American soldier following the father’s speech at the Democratic convention created dismay in the Kremlin. Top Russian officials came to believe Trump would be forced to withdraw from the race because of his psychological state and apparent unsuitability for the presidency, according to information obtained by the Western intelligence source. In particular, Kremlin officials feared they could not predict what impact it might have on Russia should Trump step aside. As a result, the Russians decided to stop forwarding material through channels to WikiLeaks, although some material was already in the pipeline.

Ivanov expressed his belief that, while the United States has failed to split the Russian elite with sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, the cyberattacks had created political division in the United States. Still, he had strong concerns about the impact of continuing the campaign in the aftermath of Trump’s attack on the parents who had lost a child in war. By that time, though, the internal controversy over the cyberattacks and disinformation campaign had taken its toll, and a decision was reached to “sweep it all under the rug,’’ according to a report obtained by Western counterintelligence officials. On August 12, Ivanov—a close ally of Putin for decades—was forced out of office by the Russian strongman, and replaced by Anton Vaino, who had been the deputy chief of staff.

Two days later, the New York Times reported that Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, may have illegally received $12.7 million from Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions; Manafort has denied any wrongdoing and his lawyer, Richard Hibey, said his client never received any such payments. Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign not long after the article ran. According to information obtained from inside Russia by Western intelligence, Putin later met with Yanukovych in secret near Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad. Yanukovych assured Putin there was no documentary trail showing payments to Manafort, although Putin told associates he did not believe the Ukrainian president, according to the information obtained by the Western intelligence source.

By October, “buyer’s remorse” had set in at the Kremlin, according to a report obtained by Western counterintelligence. Russia came to see Trump as too unpredictable and feared that, should he win, the Kremlin would not be able to rely on him or even anticipate his actions.

On October 7, the Obama administration finally broke its silence on America’s knowledge about the Russian campaign. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,’’ Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” The White House stated that Obama was considering a “proportional response”—a statement that suggested the United States would be launching cyberattacks against Russia. (Shortly afterward, Ukrainian hackers began posting emails and other documents obtained from inside the Kremlin, although it is not clear if this effort was done in coordination with the American government).

Less than two weeks later—despite his intelligence briefings about the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign, despite the public statements by top American intelligence officials confirming its existence and despite the White House proclamation that it was preparing to respond to the unprecedented interference by Moscow—Trump once again dismissed all of the evidence and came to Russia’s defense. Intelligence and other government officials in Britain were horrified, according to one person with direct knowledge of the reaction there.

The incident that so stunned the British officials was largely overlooked in the United States, where media analysts were more focused on Trump’s refusal to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election. Instead, it came in the course of a discussion during the third presidential debate, when the two candidates talked about the Russian hacking.


CLINTON: We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17—17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing. And I think it's time you take a stand...

TRUMP: She has no idea whether it's Russia, China, or anybody else.

CLINTON: I am not quoting myself.

TRUMP: She has no idea.

CLINTON: I am quoting 17...

TRUMP: Hillary, you have no idea.

CLINTON: ...17 intelligence—do you doubt 17 military and civilian...

TRUMP: And our country has no idea.

CLINTON: ... agencies.

TRUMP: Yeah, I doubt it. I doubt it.

CLINTON: Well, he'd rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us. I find that just absolutely...

TRUMP: She doesn't like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way.

The words that so shocked the British were “our country has no idea,” and “I doubt it.” All of the NATO allies are sure Russia is behind the hacking. All of America’s intelligence agencies are, too. The foreign intelligence services had been sharing what they knew about this with the Americans, and Trump had been told about it. But he blithely dismissed the conclusion of not only the United States but its allies as well, based on absolutely nothing. Trump had no apparent means of developing his own information to contradict the findings of intelligence agencies around the world. And that he would so aggressively fight to clear Putin, and cast aspersions on all Western intelligence agencies, left the British officials slack-jawed.

“They didn’t know what to think,’’ one former British official who has spoken to numerous members of the government about Trump’s comments in that debate. “A lot of people are now trying to connect the dots of all the data [in the intelligence files] to try and understand Trump…There certainly are a lot of conspiracy theories being bandied about, but no question there is a lot of concern about what’s going on in Trump’s head…and whether we would be able to work with him.”

Even as Trump was disputing the role played by the Kremlin in the hacking, his campaign was scouring sites publicly identified by American intelligence as sources for Russian propaganda. Ten days before the third debate, Newsweek published an article disclosing that a document altered by Russian propagandists and put out on the internet—ultimately published by Sputnik—had been cited by Trump at a rally as fact. (The information distributed on the internet placed words that had appeared in Newsweek into the mouth of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton confidante. Taken in that context, they suggested that her closest allies believed she bore responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American mission in Benghazi).

Subsequently, Sputnik, which took down that article, published another one essentially denying the news organization was controlled by the Kremlin and attacking Newsweek. Before the day was out, the Trump campaign was emailing links to the article from the Russian propaganda site to multiple reporters, urging them to pursue the story.


Officials in Western Europe say they are dismayed that they now feel compelled to gather intelligence on a man who could be the next president of the United States, but believe they have no choice. Moscow is seen as a direct threat to their interests—both in its aggressive efforts to reshape global alliances and for its power to damage Western Europe, which obtains almost 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Should the United States, the last remaining superpower, tilt its policies away from NATO to the benefit of Russia, the alliance between America and Western Europe could be transformed in unprecedented ways. And so, for perhaps the first time since World War II, countries in Western Europe fear that the American election, should Trump win, could trigger events that imperil their national security and do potentially irreparable harm to the alliances that have kept the continent safe for decades.

[Searcher08]

Officials in Western Europe say they are dismayed that they now feel compelled to gather intelligence on a man who could be the next president of the United States, but believe they have no choice. Moscow is seen as a direct threat to their interests—both in its aggressive efforts to reshape global alliances and for its power to damage Western Europe, which obtains almost 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Should the United States, the last remaining superpower, tilt its policies away from NATO to the benefit of Russia, the alliance between America and Western Europe could be transformed in unprecedented ways. And so, for perhaps the first time since World War II, countries in Western Europe fear that the American election, should Trump win, could trigger events that imperil their national security and do potentially irreparable harm to the alliances that have kept the continent safe for decades.

Ironically, a wonderfully cogent summary of American Exceptionalism writ large.
Fear Fear Fear. It goes through what Eichenwald writes like a stick of Brighton Rock.
The last highlighted quote looks like a direct threat to me.

[seemslikeadream]

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump supporters march in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

Hey climate change denial people Trump's your guy!

Trump Says Cutting Climate Funds Would Save $100 Billion. Climate Reality Says Otherwise.
Much of Trump's energy plan relies on non-academic research published by an industry group with ties to Charles and David Koch
byNadia Prupis, staff writer


Trump said he would cancel all "wasteful" climate change spending currently under way by the Obama administration and planned by the Clinton campaign. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has claimed that cutting climate funding would save the U.S. $100 billion over eight years, in another remark that observers say demonstrates the dangers of a potential Trump presidency.

"We're going to put America first. That includes canceling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations, a number [Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton] wants to increase, and instead use that money to provide for American infrastructure including clean water, clean air, and safety," Trump said at an Oct. 31 rally in Warren, Michigan. "We're giving away billions and billions and billions of dollars."

The Republican nominee has stood by these projections even as economists put the global costs of business-as-usual emissions in the trillions of dollars.

In another policy statement released by his team later that day, Trump said he would cancel all "wasteful" climate change spending currently under way by the Obama administration and planned by the Clinton campaign—a sum he said would amount to $100 billion over eight years.

Trump's campaign did not give a specific tally of that figure in an email to Bloomberg, but said it came from "an estimate of what the Obama administration had spent on climate-related programs, the amount of U.S. contributions to an international climate fund that Trump would cancel, and a calculation of what Trump believes would be savings to the economy if Obama's and Clinton's climate policies were reversed."

As Bloomberg noted on Tuesday, however, the estimate largely paraphrases the findings of a 2013 Congressional Research Service report which looked at federal climate change funding from fiscal year (FY) 2008 to budget requests for 2014. It did not look at the administration's spending over eight years. Reporters Dean Scott and Renee Schoof wrote:

The report said that the breakdown in the administration's FY 2014 request of $11.6 billion for these programs was about 68 percent for energy technology, 23 percent for science, 8 percent for international assistance and 1 percent for adaptation to climate change.

Trump has said he would also cancel commitments for an international fund to help poor nations reduce carbon pollution and adapt to climate impacts.

[....] Roughly one-third of that amount is projected to come from private sources. The U.S. is providing a fraction of the $100 billion total today, with the U.K., the European Union, and more than 30 other nations pledging significant sums.

Fall Fundraising Banner

Moreover, the Congressional Research Service and Trump appear to be diametrically opposed in their stances on climate change, with the nonpartisan organization having previously written that it is not up for debate, while the GOP nominee has alternately called it a hoax, a myth, and bullshit.

Trump has also regularly called for rolling back regulations on the energy industry, which he has said would reinvigorate the coal industry and generate revenue to spend on "infrastructure," although he tends not to specify what that means. But, as CNBC's Tim DiChristopher recently explained, the windfalls he has promised do not account for the real reasons coal is failing, and rely on non-academic research published by an industry group with ties to Charles and David Koch.

The research "does not actually attribute the gains to a lifting of restrictions, as Trump indicated, but to opening all federal lands to oil, gas, and coal leasing," DiChristopher said.

Trump has also promised to increase hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. He claims his energy policies would increase annual economic output by $700 trillion over the next 30 years and $6 trillion in tax revenues, among other high figures.

But as Harvard's environmental economics program director Robert N. Stavins told the New York Times recently, "Trump's promised support of greater natural gas fracking would actually have the effect of lowering demand for coal, causing more mines to close. He can't have it both ways—talk up expanding natural gas supply when in North Dakota, and talk about bringing back coal mining jobs when in Kentucky!"

"[E]nergy economists dismissed the idea that new drilling could bring enough money to substantially fund such proposals," the Times' Coral Davenport writes. "In 2015, coal, oil, and gas companies paid the federal government $9.6 billion in fees and royalties for drilling on public lands and waters, in a budget of $3.8 trillion. Even with a large expansion of such drilling on public land, experts say it is difficult to predict a new such revenue stream at the scale envisioned by Mr. Trump."

The challenge to Trump's energy claims, Davenport says, is simple: economic reality.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/1 ... ality-says

FRIDAY, NOV 4, 2016 04:00 AM CDT
Be afraid — be very afraid: Donald Trump’s transition team is lining up corporate hacks and readying a rollback of Obama’s eight years
Trump's transition team, led by Chris Christie, offers a window into the terrifying workings of a Trump presidency
GARY LEGUM


Be afraid — be very afraid: Donald Trump's transition team is lining up corporate hacks and readying a rollback of Obama's eight years

The Donald Trump carnival may be a traveling grotesquery of incipient fascism, but there is one area where it seems to be functioning like something resembling a normal presidential campaign.

The transition teams of both Trump and Hillary Clinton have been hard at work for several months, preparing for an orderly transition of power from Obama’s administration to that of the winner of Tuesday’s presidential election. Clinton’s team has remained small, owing to her campaign’s apparent desire to focus on finishing the race and not look as if it is taking her lead in the polls for granted and getting ahead of itself.

Trump’s transition team, on the other hand, has been plowing ahead. This action seems to be mostly a function of needing to ramp up the infrastructure of wonks and advisers that campaigns usually have working on policy a year ahead of time. Trump has neglected to build up such a team, which might turn out to be lucky for him. Since he is famously indifferent to policy details, the people doing this work now are able to accomplish it without interference.

This is making for some jarring moments, such as when a White House spokesperson said, after both transition teams had a meeting with Obama administration officials to work on details of the upcoming transfer of power, “We have appreciated the seriousness with which both campaigns’ transition teams have approached their planning.” Who would have ever thought the word “seriousness” would ever be associated with Trump’s campaign in any way?

What is emerging from the transition team’s work is a portrait of what a Trump administration might look like if, God help us all, he somehow manages to pull off a victory on Tuesday. And what is emerging is not pretty: A disengaged chief executive, surrounded by a cabinet and a team full of the worst sycophants and mountebanks of the last 40 years of Republican politics, overturning any and all of President Obama’s achievements as fast as Trump can sign his name with his tiny little hands.

Ironically, Republicans have spent eight years calling Obama a dictator and challenging his authority to use executive orders on every single detail of his agenda, to the point of taking the weird step of the House suing the president in order to stop him. Now, with the help of the transition team, they are lining up a raft of executive orders for Trump to sign the minute he steps into the Oval Office. These orders would “undo hundreds of Obama’s regulations on energy, taxes and health care.” This would include overturning the hated Obamacare, of course.

After all its complaints about feeling bullied by the current administration (i.e. “Obamacare was shoved down our throats!”), the GOP is ready to have its revenge, using this half-bright glob of orange Jell-O to do it.

And who is laying the groundwork for this rollback? The transition team is being led by Chris Christie, in what is either a bone tossed to the New Jersey governor to soothe his hurt feelings after being passed over for vice president, or a chance for him to prove his value to Trump beyond acting as the mogul’s personal Chicken McNugget wrangler. Other senior members include Andrew Bremberg, a policy adviser to Mitch McConnell who also worked in the George W. Bush administration; J.D. Gordon, a right-wing former Navy officer and foreign-policy adviser who has also advised Sarah Palin and Herman Cain, if you feel like really having your confidence inspired; and Reagan administration attorney general Ed Meese, who is apparently still alive.

The team is also said to be looking at mostly business executives to staff Trump’s Cabinet, which might result in the spectacle of an oil-industry CEO, 74-year-old Frank Lucas of Lucas Oil, becoming Secretary of the Interior. This is akin to holding open the henhouse door for the fox.

And for all the talk of how many conservatives want nothing to do with Trump, there are still plenty of members of the GOP who are displaying no qualms about working for the administration of a xenophobic ethno-nationalist:

As Trump inches up in the polls, the transition team is also getting an influx of interest from Republicans eager to join his administration, said one official close to the transition team.

As can be explained by the votes and continued support of high-profile Republicans like Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, this is pretty simple to understand. Sure Trump is a racist who would wreak untold havoc with our standing in the world, throw the healthcare market into chaos at the stroke of a pen, and deport millions of people without due process, just for starters. But think of the tax cuts the very wealthy would get!

No one in Republican politics, not even the #NeverTrump crew, comes out of 2016 with clean hands. Even assuming Hillary Clinton wins, in a just world the GOP will have to drag the ghost of Trump around like an anvil until the party becomes a functional governing entity again. No matter how many decades that takes.

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/04/be-afra ... ght-years/

Conway: False Indictment Story Trump Pushed Did Political Damage To Clinton

Rainier Ehrhardt
ByALLEGRA KIRKLAND

PublishedNOVEMBER 4, 2016, 6:42 AM EDT

Donald Trump’s campaign manager admitted Thursday that a story her candidate pushed on the trail about the FBI predicting an indictment for Hillary Clinton was baseless, but said that the political damage to the Democratic nominee was already done.

MSNBC’s “11th Hour” host Brian Williams asked Kellyanne Conway about a report from Fox News in which two anonymous “sources with intimate knowledge” of an FBI inquiry into the Clinton Foundation said an indictment of Clinton was “likely.” Trump recounted a version of the report to a crowd in Jacksonville, Florida on Thursday, crowing that “FBI agents” said his opponent would be indicted.

“This has been walked back, the indictment portion, by Fox News who originally reported it and by NBC News which has done subsequent reporting on this,” Williams said. “Will Donald Trump amend his stump speech to walk back the same thing?”

“Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton,” Conway replied. “No matter how it's being termed the voters are hearing it for what it is—a culture of corruption.”

Conway said the words of congressional Republicans like Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) proved that Clinton will face “all types of investigations” if elected and that the U.S. will “be living this nightmare” from the moment she takes office.

“I'm wondering why more Democrats aren't asking Hillary Clinton to step aside, get off the ticket for the good of the party, for the good of the election, for the good of the country and why not a single Democrat as far as I can tell has unendorsed her or said I don't want to run on the ticket with someone who is not under one but two FBI investigations,” she went on.

Top Democrats have stood by Clinton after FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was looking into recently discovered emails that may be related to her use of a private email server. Fox and other publications have also reported on a separate FBI inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton’s State Department offered favors to Clinton Foundation donors.

Some two dozen Republicans actually unendorsed Trump or asked him to drop out after a tape leaked in which he bragged about groping women without consent, though most have since said they were still voting for him.

On MSNBC, Williams noted that falsely claiming that a political opponent will face indictment misleads voters.

“As a lawyer, you would concede indictment is not only a term of art, it's a term of law and that's a big difference to use the expression likely indictment when all the reporting is to the contrary,” he said.

“Fine,” Conway replied. “It just doesn't change what's in voters' minds right now and you see in the your own polling, you see in the other polling, Brian, which is—even though the polls were tightening before last Friday's explosive announcement by Mr. Comey you see that voters are putting it in this large cauldron of impressions and images and individuals and issues from which they eventually make a choice.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/k ... ry-clinton

Former CIA chief: Trump is Russia’s useful fool

By Michael V. Hayden November 3 at 2:24 PM

I know I’m not the first to notice this, but Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin.

There has always been a sympathetic authoritarian chord between the Republican presidential nominee and the Russian president. Both are on record as admiring The Strong Leader. They’ve even complimented one another on the trait. Putin could have been humming along when Trump was claiming “I alone can fix it” during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Maybe he was.

Each seems to have a pretty conspiratorial view of the world, too. Putin comes by his naturally. He’s a product of a KGB Marxist philosophy where “the other” — any other — is reflexively identified as hostile and created by immutable forces of history, something to be feared and ultimately crushed.

At a rally in Springfield, Ohio, Oct. 27, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he wished the U.S. “actually got along with Russia” so they could defeat the Islamic State together. (The Washington Post)
Trump seems to view business a bit that way. At least I don’t recall a lot of win-win vocabulary when he touts his dealmaking skills.

At the political level, Trump sees quite a few powerful “others” in the American electoral process: a corrupt media, international banks, unrestricted immigrants, a variety of globalists, free-traders and (at least some) Muslims. It’s a list Putin could second or, in some cases, jail or worse.

Sounding simultaneously populist and a little bit the conspiratorial Marxist, Trump has claimed that these unseen forces could rig the U.S. election. It’s a theme that Putin is happy to echo. Indeed, it’s a theme that his intelligence services are happy to actively propagate.

And in that case, the American presidential candidate routinely comes to the defense of his Russian soul mate. In the face of a high-confidence judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and then weaponized embarrassing emails to sow confusion here, the man who would be president has declared: “Our country has no idea,” “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. . . . It could also be lots of other people” and “They always blame Russia.”

Rejecting a fact-based intelligence assessment — not because of compelling contrarian data, but because it is inconsistent with a preexisting worldview — that’s the stuff of ideological authoritarianism, not pragmatic democracy. And it is frightening.

Trump also echoes Putin when it comes to Syria and the Islamic State, or ISIS. Here he follows the Moscow line that we and the Russians have common purpose and that Russia and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad (and Iran) are “killing ISIS.”

Actually, they are not. They are bucking up the Assad regime that, if anyone is keeping score, has killed more innocents than the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, have combined. And the attractiveness of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda to Sunni Muslims is a direct byproduct of the depredations of the Assad regime — the regime that Russia saved from collapse a year ago.

It’s a little complicated, I suppose, but not so hard that it explains or justifies the willful ignorance that Trump seems to display. His second debate formulation — “I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS” — is precisely the formulation that the Syrian president has been attempting to craft. “It’s me or the terrorists” has been his false dilemma. It’s hard to explain how the candidate of a major American political party could have gotten there, especially after receiving classified intelligence briefings.

Perhaps some of this is explained by the murky ties of some on team Trump to things Russian. There is certainly a history there, and perhaps a comfort level as well.

Former campaign manager Paul Manafort did consulting work for the now-discredited but decidedly pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanokovych in Ukraine, and recent revelations in Kiev have stoked questions about whether Manafort should have registered here as working on behalf of a foreign power.

Manafort denies any role in July’s successful effort to suppress a Republican platform pledge to provide lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainians in their continuing battle against separatists and the Russian army. Although it’s clear that the suppression was initiated by Trump staffers, Trump has denied any personal responsibility for it. The whole episode was too quickly forgotten; it begs explanation.

Then there’s Carter Page, an adviser with intermittent contacts with the campaign, but with deep ties to Russian money, oil and gas, who has blamed aggressive Western policies for the mess in the Ukraine and what he describes as the “so-called annexation of Crimea.” So-called?

And what about the money? Although Trump has said, “I have zero investments in Russia,” his son Donald Jr. conceded in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets . . . we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Absent more detailed data (such as tax returns), who knows?

We have really never seen anything like this. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.

That’s a pretty harsh term, and Trump supporters will no doubt be offended. But, frankly, it’s the most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html