Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:53 pm

I asked first...you are welcome to check out the Clinton thread


.@seanhannity Not a great look for you, being cited as a dupe of Russian propaganda in the Mueller Report

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In summer of 2016, Trump told Rick Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming soon from WikiLeaks. #MuellerReport
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1. Russia interfered
2. They did it to help Trump
3. Trump wanted their help
4. Trump's campaign met with the Russians to seek out that help
5. Trump and his campaign repeatedly lied about those contacts
6. Trump fired the FBI Director to stop an investigation into the matter



Mueller: After telling McGahn to get the special counsel fired, Trump told McGahn to deny reports that he had done so.

McGahn also told Mueller that Trump scolded him for taking notes, saying, "Lawyers don't take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes."
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:02 pm

With this I bid thee goodnight... a little perspective from a fellow American, even though I know the Mueller jollies are the best jollies. All that esoteric shit and Russian surnames, amirite...
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-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:04 pm

you should put that in my Yemen thread that why we have different threads for different topics ...it makes it easier to categorized and information is not lost

that would be great

here's the link

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40552


Wait until Michael Tracey finds out ...

emptywheel
In an normal time, this entire footnote would be redacted. But FBI left this imaged servers -- plural -- unredacted for all the Single Server Truthers.

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This person really should be named.

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This detail wasn't in the GRU indictment.

Note: the report doesn't have all the comms between WikiLeaks and G20, at least not in unredacted form.
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So the email hack and leak *wasn't* a DNC insider rouse after all?

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FBI was investigating Flynn BEFORE calls with Kislyak

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Michael Weiss

News to me: Joseph Mifsud, the nutty Maltese professor, was chums with a onetime employee of the Internet Research Agency:

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And that person was in touch with the Russian Defense Ministry (and through it to the GRU), which is presumably how Mifsud learned that the Russians had hacked the Dems.
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https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/statu ... 8115354625


emptywheel
This is referenced in Carter Page's FISA application: he SOUGHT OUT RUSSIA to tell them he hadn't cooperated with the FBI.

Then tells FBI sharing info w/RU spies is good for the US.

I just can't understand why this guy was surveilled.
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Mifsud's bona fides.
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212/ Holy crap! Read this (from a Russian woman who has, it seems, disappeared from contact with the SCO, and for all we know, disappeared generally):

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Last edited by seemslikeadream on Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:12 pm

The Trump campaign didn’t have to coordinate directly with the Russian government — because it had a middleman to do its dirty work.
Caroline Orr18 April 2019


Among the many intriguing revelations in the newly released, redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation are several key pieces of information confirming that Trump and his associates coordinated their campaign strategy around the release of materials stolen by the Russian government and published by WikiLeaks.

Far from exonerating Trump and his campaign members, the report is an indictment of their behaviour.

The report reveals that the Trump campaign was extremely interested in and “expected it would benefit” from Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign, as well as the subsequent release of hacked documents by WikiLeaks.

The unredacted material in the report does not include any evidence that Trump or his associates criminally conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. It does, however, state that Trump campaign officials were happy to reap the benefits of Russia’s efforts to hack into and release Democratic emails.


Apr 18, 2019; Washington, DC, USA; Television networks print out and read the released Mueller Report on the sidewalk outside of the Department of Justice following Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein holding a news conference on Thursday, April 18, 2019 to discuss Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY/Sipa USA
“The campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the report says.

Furthermore, according to the report, “The Trump Campaign showed interest in WikiLeaks’ release of hacked materials throughout the summer and fall of 2016.”

Multiple members of the campaign, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Donald Trump, and his son Don Jr., had contact with WikiLeaks and/or participated in the weaponization of hacked materials released by WikiLeaks, the report says.

Trump knew that more damaging material would soon be released

In one of the most intriguing sections of the document, the report states that Trump told another senior campaign official (Rick Gates) in the summer of 2016 that WikiLeaks would soon be releasing more damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

Following a redacted portion of a sentence, the report says that after finishing a call with an unidentified person, “candidate Trump told [Rick] Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”

This is the first public acknowledgement from investigators that Trump may have had advanced knowledge of upcoming leaks of hacked material. It appears to confirm testimony from Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who told Congress that Trump “knew about the release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of time.”

The report further confirms that Trump’s campaign was quietly working behind the scenes to obtain more details about WikiLeaks’ future activities, as well as to find Clinton’s emails.


Redactions from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election are seen on a computer screen in Portland, Ore., on April 18, 2019, after the document was released by Attorney General William Barr today. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)
“Trump also expressed skepticism that Russia had hacked the emails at the same time as he and other Campaign advisors privately sought information [redacted] about any further planned WikiLeaks releases,” the report says.

Citing Gates, the report also concluded that Trump was “generally frustrated that the Clinton emails had not been found” despite “repeatedly” telling Michael Flynn to find them and publicly calling for Russia to hack into the cache of emails.

Trump campaign planned its strategy ‘based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks’

Trump spoke to then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort about WikiLeaks, as well. According to the report, after WikiLeaks released the initial hacked DNC emails in July 2016, “Manafort also spoke with candidate Trump” — but the remainder of the sentence is redacted.

During that discussion, “Manafort recalled that Trump responded that Manafort should [redacted] keep Trump updated,” the report states, after noting: “Manafort also [redacted] wanted to be kept apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks and separately told Gates to keep in touch [redacted] about future WikiLeaks releases.”


Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, after the WikiLeaks founder was arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police and taken into custody following the Ecuadorian government’s withdrawal of asylum.
In one of the most crucial passages in this part of the document, the report cites Gates and says that the Trump campaign “was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”

In other words, Trump and his associates coordinated their campaign strategy around the release of materials that were hacked by the Russian government and later published by WikiLeaks.

Based on the report, it also appears that Donald Trump Jr. used information that WikiLeaks sent to him during a private direct-message conversation.

This is the first public acknowledgement from investigators that Trump may have had advanced knowledge of upcoming leaks of hacked material.

In one instance, Don Jr. shared a link that WikiLeaks recommended, and on another occasion, he took WikiLeaks’ advice to look into a possible anti-Trump campaign website (putintrump.org).

Taken together, these revelations show that the Trump campaign didn’t have to coordinate directly with the Russian government — because it had a middleman to do its dirty work.

Far from exonerating Trump and his campaign members, the report is an indictment of their behaviour. The campaign knew that Russia was interfering in the election, but rather than reporting the illegal interference, Trump and his associates strategized on how to capitalize off it.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/04/18/muel ... wikileaks/





WikiLeaks asked Russian military intelligence operatives to give them stolen DNC documents ahead of the Democratic Convention specifically to inflame tensions between Hillary and Bernie supporters.
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Often overlooked: the Kremlin not only supported the Trump campaign but the Bernie campaign as well. #MuellerReport

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Big deal. Mueller seems to say here that @realDonaldTrump directed Roger Stone to get information from WikiLeaks about the Russian-stolen material it was posting.
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southpaw


Manafort had Gates regularly send campaign data to Kilimnik (who the FBI says has links to Russian intelligence); he also met with Kilimnik twice in the US in 2016 and gave him campaign info. Mueller's office never figured out why the info was sent or what Kilimnik did with it.
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https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw



Steve Reilly

The Special Counsel's Office made 14 referrals of evidence of potential criminal activity to outside offices. Only two are publicly known at this point.
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https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw


I have not found evidence of a fashion crime yet
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Wendy Siegelman

The Barr-redacted Mueller report
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

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The report includes a list of names at the end with 3 names redacted completely noting 'Harm to Ongoing Matter'

One name between Graff and Hawker
One name between Katsyv and Kaveladze
One name between Mnuchin and Muller-Maguhn

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

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One name missing from list of Referenced Persons & the report - Dana Rohrabacher

It's amazing with Russia's efforts to lift sanctions & weaken Magnitsky Act & role of Wikileaks that 'Russia's favorite congressman' Rohrabacher wasn't part of this report

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

End contradicts Barr on WH "fully cooperated"

"we informed counsel of the insufficiency of (Trump's) responses"

Trump said 30X he didn't recall or something similar

Since Trump wouldn't "be interviewed voluntarily, we considered whether to issue a subpoena for his testimony"

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Here's an early hot-take on the Barr-redacted Mueller report - the report has a lot of new information that hasn't been previously reported and much of the new info will reveal additional lies and potentially new instances of perjury in sworn testimony

Dec'16 to Jan'17 RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev & Kusher associate Rick Gerson worked on proposal for reconciliation between US & Russia which Dmitriev implied he cleared through Putin. Gerson provided proposal to Kushner before inauguration - Kushner gave copies to Bannon & Tillerson

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Daily Beast article on memo likely related to above report today adds new info including that Dmitriev worked w/Gerson on report, that Dmitriev implied Putin cleared it and Gerson's role in sharing it with Kushner & that memo went to Bannon & Tillerson

There's a ton to unpack on Erik Prince - George Nader sent Prince email w/info on Dmitriev before Seychelles mtg and Prince "opened the attachments at Trump Tower"

Dmitriev was "not excited" about meeting Prince, but Nader assured him Prince was designated by Bannon

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George Nader described TWO mtgs between Dmitriev & Erik Prince - not one bar mtg Prince reported

Prince & Bannon's info conflicted but couldn't be verified because Prince's phone had no text mssgs before Mar'17 but provider records indicated he & Bannon exchanged dozens of mssgs

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NEW info: after election Dmitriev messaged (redacted) traveling to NY 2016 World Chess Championship, Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov also went

(redacted) wrote Dmitriev "Putin has won"

Dmitriev & Peskov attended tournament - an attendee said Trump was there (Trump denied)

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This chart is reminder - some folks missing from report like Butina & Erickson are cases outside SCO (Erickson's case not related to Russia, but could surface related info)

Other missing names are baffling (Rohrabacher, Cambridge Analytica related etc)

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More on Prince/Dmitriev

After brief 2nd mtg Dmitriev told Nader he was disappointed in mtgs w/Prince who didn't have enough authority & he hoped for conversation with greater substance

"Dmitriev told Nader that (redacted) Prince's comments (redacted) were insulting (redacted)"

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Besides other cases (Butina, Erickson) other names missing:

Torshin
Rohrabacher
Elliott Broidy
Dmitry Rybolovlev
Joel Zamel
Viktor Medvedchuk
Tevfik Arif
Alexander Machkevich
Khrapunovs
Robert, Rebekah Mercer
Cambridge Analytica: Nix, Kaiser, Oakes
Few UK names (Farage once)

Wendy Siegelman Retweeted Wendy Siegelman
Not that all these names are related to Russian election interference per se, but they are names that have come up often related to Trump-Russia story and/or related to Mideast (Broidy, Zamel) or other influence operations (CA etc)

Besides other cases (Butina, Erickson) other names missing:

Torshin
Rohrabacher…


The SCO interviewed Petr Aven a co-founder of Alfa Bank, who described a late 2016 mtg w/Putin about reaching out to incoming Trump admin to minimize future sanctions on Alfa Bank

A bit incredulously Aven said Putin didn't know who to contact around Trump
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https://twitter.com/WendySiegelman/stat ... 2800690177
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:04 pm

RocketMan » Thu Apr 18, 2019 10:49 am wrote:Clinton aggressively sought to have the election with Trump for amoral tactical reasons. Bad mistake.



If HRC wanted to insure election success in 2016, HRC would have begged Bernie Sanders to be her VP.

Going forward the Democratic party needs to better serve Red States and rural USA. FDR dominated in rural USA and that support has eroded ever since.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:03 pm

There's 10 unknown ongoin' criminal investigations referred by Mueller

WikiLeaks asked Donald Trump Jr. to tweet link to Podesta emails, which he did four days later - Mueller report


the Steele memos, Mueller's report confirms what we already knew: the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation began on July 31, 2016, in response to Downer's report about his conversation with Papadopoulos. Not started b/c of Steele.

Australia Says It's "Ready To Confirm" A Key Meeting That Led To The Investigation Into Trump's Russia Links
Heavily-redacted documents released to BuzzFeed News show Australia's former high commissioner wrote a three-page cable to the United States about his London meeting with a Trump campaign adviser.

Posted on April 18, 2019, at 5:07 a.m.
Mark Di Stefano

BuzzFeed News Reporter

A senior Australian diplomat has said the government is "now ready to confirm" a series of events in 2016 between the country's high commissioner to the UK and a Trump campaign adviser, which led to US authorities investigating Donald Trump's links with Russia.

The release of the Australian diplomatic documents comes as a redacted copy of the final Mueller report is expected to be released on Thursday.

The London meeting between former high commissioner Alexander Downer and Trump adviser George Papadopoulos was first reported by the New York Times in December 2017, reportedly revealing how Downer had been told by Papadopoulos that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Until now, the Australian government and Downer have refused to confirm or give any details about the meeting central to the beginning of the Trump-Russia investigation, repeatedly citing the need to preserve national security.

But in a letter sent to Australia's Information Commissioner after a 15 month-long FOI battle with BuzzFeed News, a senior foreign official said his department was ready to confirm the meeting and release redacted documents, because Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was now finished.

"I have again reviewed these matters and, while standing by the validity of the original decisions at the time they were made, the Department has reassessed its position in relation to Mr Di Stefano's three requests in light of the recent conclusion of the U.S. Special Counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election," the official wrote to Australia's Information Commissioner Gillian Cameron.

"Notably, in light of the conclusion of that investigation, the Department is now ready to confirm that a meeting occurred between Mr Downer and Mr Papdopolous (sic), on 10 May 2016, whilst Mr Downer was High Commissioner to the United Kingdom."

Included in the documents released to BuzzFeed News is a calendar invite, and a diplomatic cable Downer wrote about the meeting. The senior foreign official said Downer's cable had been heavily-redacted because the full contents could "reasonably be expected" to damage Australia's relationship with the United States.

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Supplied
The Outlook invite (shown above) organised for Downer on Tuesday, May 10, reads, "6:00pm – Meeting with George Papadopolous (sic), Adivsor (sic), Donald J Trump for President", and includes a link to Papadopoulos' LinkedIn profile.

The government also released a heavily-redacted copy of the diplomatic cable (below) Downer wrote to Canberra the day after the Papadopoulos meeting.

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Supplied
The cable titled "UK: US: Donald Trump - Views from Trump's Adviser [redacted]" runs to three pages and briefly outlines how the high commissioner met with Papadopoulos the previous evening to "discuss Trump's foreign policy priorities".

The foreign official said the rest of the cable has been redacted under Section 33(a)iii of Australia's FOI Act because it "could reasonably be expected to cause damage to international relations".

"Release of the full contents of this document could reasonably be expected to damage the bilateral relationship with the United States, and relationships with other partners with which we engage closely," the senior official wrote. "This would significantly impact the Department's ability to prosecute Australia's foreign policy interests."


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Supplied
Papadopoulos was one of three dozen people charged in Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and served a 12-day prison sentence.

Along with posting numerous tweets and appearing on US cable TV to complain about the Downer meeting, Papadopoulos has released a book called "Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump".
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/ ... ler-russia


Mark Di Stefano


Exclusive: The Australian government says its “ready to confirm” the key meeting which led to the investigation into Trump-Russia links


After a 15-month FOI battle with DFAT, a senior foreign official wrote to the Australian Information Commissioner saying the government was now willing to confirm the meeting because the Mueller investigation had finished. https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/ ... ler-russia

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Here are the documents which confirm the meeting –

The Outlook invite lining up it up for May 10, 2016 in London – clearly showing DFAT considered Papadopoulos an “adivsor”(sic) to the Trump campaign.

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The very next day Downer wrote a three-page diplomatic cable to Canberra about what he was told.

Senior Australian foreign official said they’ve redacted it because the contents could “reasonably be expected to damage the bilateral relationship with the United States"

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The full letter Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade wrote to the information commissioner about BuzzFeed News’ series of FOIs.

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Remember - one of the first calls Trump made post swearing in was to Turnbull excoriating him about the number of “refugees” that had to be taken in by each country .


Trump was refused a casino license in Australia over 30 years ago because of his mob ties. The man is renowned to hold grudges...Trump's bid for Sydney casino 30 years ago rejected due to 'mafia connections’
https://twitter.com/MarkDiStef/status/1 ... 9255816193


Chris Sampson

Page 33-34
Note: “no similar connections between the IRA and Clinton Campaign)
IRA content retweeted and cited by TrumpJr and ETrump, KConway, BParscale, and MFlynn #usefulidiots at the least and cooperative all the same in IRA active measures.

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The IRA went so far as soliciting campaign materials including “signs and other materials to use at rallies
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https://twitter.com/TAPSTRIMEDIA/status ... 0622184448


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https://vimeo.com/238127800


Lincoln's Bible

1/ Put yourself in this scene:
The moment you hear the name of a person appointed to investigate you, your immediate response - without even a moment to think about it is, “Oh my God. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

You probably have a history with that person, no?

2/ And your next thing about that prosecutor is to jump to “he’s conflicted!”
That indicates you definitely have a history with that prosecutor, no?
Stop and think about it.
Take out the emotion of just reading/ repeating those lines, and just think about what they imply.

3/ Who prosecuted Gotti again? And who delivered Gravano, who then flipped on Gotti?

4/ Sammy is bad, bad, bad. But not as damning as the Russian mob.

1. Oh look! Ivankov. As predicted.
What I couldn't find mention of is that @FBI was searching for Ivankov in Trump properties - Trump Tower & Taj, where he was known to reside and gamble…

5/ And that brings us to Donald’s biggest fear of all. The mobster that no one wants their name attached to. The mobster that Donald laundered for, & Ivankov worked for.
The mobster that Robert Mueller tied to terror regimes after 9/11, and named as one of our greatest threats...

6/ I’ll give Donald this. It’s a helluva conflict. Just not in the way he wanted that conflict applied.
His first response was the right one.
He’s f*cked.

.......................

Dear 4th Estate,
Donald Trump is a money-launderer for global criminals. Laundering is the TrumpOrg biz model, & the crimes Mueller states a thorough FBI investigation would find. Consider Trump helped FBI in past by RATTING on mobsters 2 escape own prosecution.
https://twitter.com/LincolnsBible/statu ... 4907223040






Here’s Everything The Mueller Report Says About How Russian Trolls Used Social Media

The Mueller report clearly describes how Russian trolls reached millions of people on Facebook, were quoted in major newspapers as real Americans, and even organized rallies.

Ryan Broderick
Posted on April 18, 2019, at 3:50 p.m. ET

Attorney General William Barr (center) speaks about the release of the redacted version of the Mueller report at the Department of Justice on April 18.
Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign provides one of the most detailed looks at how Russia’s Internet Research Agency — the infamous Kremlin-linked troll farm — tried to hijack the 2016 election and swing the vote in favor of Donald Trump.

The report, which concludes that Trump didn’t commit a crime but “also does not exonerate him [of obstruction],” gives us a clear and exhaustive look at the scope, focus, and results of the IRA’s efforts. The agency learned how to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the span of four years. By the end, it used analytical tools and the built-in network effect of massive social media platforms to create large artificial grassroots political organizations that were aggressively targeting both Republicans and Democrats.

The IRA was able to reach up to 126 million Americans on Facebook via a mixture of fraudulent accounts, groups, and advertisements, the report says. Twitter accounts it created were portrayed as real American voices by major news outlets. It was even able to hold real-life rallies, mobilizing hundreds of people at a time in major cities like Philadelphia and Miami. Fake online personas were able to communicate with members of the Trump campaign — who were unaware they were ever communicating with foreign nationals.

Here’s everything we know about Russian interference from the report.

It started in 2014.

According to Mueller’s report, the IRA began creating fake Facebook accounts and small groups as early as 2014.

“IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences,” the report reads. “These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists."

The lines up with what we already knew about the IRA’s activity. One of its first large-scale misinformation projects was the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax in September 2014, when IRA members created a completely fake explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. “The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers,” the New York Times wrote about the hoax.

The IRA consolidated all of its US operations into one department called the “Translator” department, which appears to have operated like a typical digital media startup with different agents focusing on specific platforms, monitoring analytics, and even graphic designers. About a dozen people, known as “specialists,” would run an account at a time.

The IRA’s activity wasn’t confined to social media, either. IRA employees traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions in 2014.

“Four IRA employees applied to the U.S. Department of State to enter the United States, while lying about the purpose of their trip and claiming to be four friends who had met at a party,” the report reads. “Ultimately, two IRA employees-Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova-received visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.”

The IRA was on pretty much every platform.

At first, the IRA focused its activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Later, Tumblr and Instagram accounts were created. In the beginning, Russian trolls were manning only fake individual accounts. By 2015, however, they began creating larger groups and pages. Finally, they attempted to flex their network effect to hold real-life rallies.

According to Mueller’s report, the Facebook groups were particularly popular. By the time Facebook deactivated them in 2017, the Russia-controlled group "United Muslims of America" had over 300,000 followers, the "Don't Shoot Us" group had over 250,000 followers, the "Being Patriotic" Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the "Secured Borders" Facebook group had over 130,000 followers.

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A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called "Secured Borders".
Facebook
A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called "Secured Borders".
IRA Facebook accounts posted about already divisive social issues like Black Lives Matter and the tea party and even privately messaged other, real users.

“In total the IRA-controlled [Facebook] accounts made over 80,000 posts before their deactivation in August 2017, and these posts reached at least 29 million U.S persons and ‘may have reached an estimated 126 million people,’” the report reads.

On Twitter, it focused on two strategies: growing fake accounts and then using a botnet of automated accounts to amplify them. IRA “specialists” tweeted publicly, but also were direct messaging people behind the scenes.

Last spring, Tumblr announced that it had uncovered and terminated 84 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency. According to findings from researcher Jonathan Albright and BuzzFeed News, trolls were using Tumblr in similar ways as other platforms. They posed as black activists and generated hundreds of thousands of interactions for content that ranged from calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” to supporting Bernie Sanders and decrying racial injustice and police violence in the US.

Russian trolls had some of the best luck on Instagram, based on the report. IRA Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of US followers. Russia was controlling 170 Instagram accounts that posted 120,000 pieces of content during a two-year period.

“Collectively, the IRA's social media accounts reached tens of millions of U.S. persons,” the report reads.

The IRA's tweets got a lot attention.

Last year, Twitter publicly identified 3,814 Russia-controlled Twitter accounts. According to Twitter, in the 10 weeks leading up to the 2016 U.S. election, these accounts posted approximately 175,993 tweets. About 84% of the content they posted was political.

According to Mueller’s report, IRA tweets were quoted extensively in US news outlets. Seventy US outlets were found to have quoted a Russian-controlled Twitter account and attributed it to a real person.

It wasn’t only media attention the trolls were getting. Mueller’s report names several politicians, media personalities, and celebrities who were interacting unknowingly with the IRA, such as former Ambassador Michael McFaul, Roger Stone, Sean Hannity, Kellyanne Conway, Michael Flynn Jr., Donald Trump Jr., and President Trump.

One account is mentioned extensively by Mueller’s report, @TEN_GOP, an account that posed as a member of the Tennessee Republican Party. @TEN_GOP, and its backup account @l0_gop, was particularly prolific. Its @l0_gop backup even got a response from President Trump.

"We love you, Mr. President!,” @l0_gop tweeted.

“THANK YOU for your support Miami! My team just shared photos from your TRUMP SIGN WAVING DAY, yesterday,” Trump responded. “I love you — and there is no question — TOGETHER, WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

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Twitter
The IRA's main target: Hillary Clinton.

Across all platforms, the IRA maintained a pretty unified strategy: Find cultural pressure points, target them with memes and posts, find like-minded users, and use every opportunity to criticize Hillary Clinton.

At one point, the IRA employee moderating a Facebook page called “Secured Borders” was scolded for having a "lower number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton" and was reminded "it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton."

The IRA built Facebook communities across the political spectrum, but targeted Clinton in all of them. Mueller’s report lists conservative groups like "Being Patriotic," "Stop All Immigrants," "Secured Borders," and "Tea Party News”; black social justice groups like "Black Matters," "Blacktivist," and "Don't Shoot Us”; LGBTQ groups like "LGBT United”; and religious groups “United Muslims of America.”

“Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them),” IRA operators told specialists.

The IRA bought ads.

The first known ad from the IRA that explicitly endorsed the Trump campaign was purchased on April 19, 2016. It was an Instagram ad for an account called “Tea Party News” and asked users to help “make a patriotic team of young Trump supporters” by uploading photos with the hashtag #KIDS4TRU.

In the following months, the IRA would purchase ads via the Facebook Groups "Being Patriotic," "Stop All Invaders," and "Secured Borders."
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A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called Black Matters.
Facebook
A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called Black Matters.
The IRA also purchased ads posing as real US citizens or entities.

“Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies,” the report reads.

According to Facebook, Russian agents were able to purchase over 3,500 advertisements and spent about $100,000.

In April 2016, they purchased ads for its account, Black Matters" calling for a flash mob to "take a photo with #HillaryClintonForPrison2016 or #nohillary2016." There’s no evidence this flash mob ever materialized and the YouTube account promoting it has since been taken down. But it was in ads like this that the IRA focused most of its anti-Clinton messaging. All of the ads purchased about Trump were positive.

Another IRA-purchased ad, from March 2016, was a photo of Clinton with a caption that read, "If one day God lets this liar enter the White House as a president — that day would be a real national tragedy."
Image
A except from Mueller's report.
Department of Justice
A except from Mueller's report.
The IRA organized rallies via catfishing.

By 2016, according to Mueller’s findings, the IRA was becoming increasingly interested in mobilizing its followers physically. It was buying ads to organize anti-Clinton flash mobs and building pro-Trump photo challenges.

One of the most unsettling things in Thursday’s report are the details about how successful Russia-controlled social media accounts became at actually organizing political rallies. First, they would use spoofed accounts on Facebook or Twitter to announce an event. Then they’d privately message the event to real users, asking them if they could attend. Then if they got a bite, they’d assign one of these real people to be the event coordinator. Usually, the Russian troll would make up some excuse as to why they couldn’t personally attend, according to the report.

The users messaged privately about the events were usually recruited for their social media popularity. “The IRA recruited U.S. persons from across the political spectrum,” the report reads. “Initially, recruitment focused on US persons who could amplify the content posted by the IRA.”

Once a real social media user was set up as the coordinator, the IRA would promote the event to members of the media. After the event was over, they’d share photos and videos of it across their network of groups and fake accounts.

Mueller said this happened dozens of times, with the earliest rally being a "confederate rally" in November 2015. Also, these artificial rallies didn’t stop after the election, continuing after 2016. Attendance apparently varied, between just a few protestors, but occasionally reaching the hundreds.

At first, the rallies ran the gamut in terms of focus, but after June 2016, all of them became focused on the election. Meuller’s report includes a flyer for a “Miners for Trump" rally held in Philadelphia in October 2016. The IRA was able to successfully organize three rallies in New York and a series of pro-Trump rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania.

At one point, the IRA used Craigslist and an email called “beingpatriotic@gmail.com" to recruit someone to walk around New York City in a Santa suit and Trump mask.

The Trump campaign didn’t know it was talking to Russians — but it was.

One of the largest questions going into the report was what, if anything, Trump and his campaign team knew about Russian attempts to hijack the American political conversation in the lead up to the 2016 election. According to Mueller’s report, they were duped like the rest of us.

“In total, Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA,” the report reads. “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA's interference operation.”

When the IRA decided to create an artificial rally, they would recruit a real-life recruiter to act as the on-the-ground coordinator, but would also, typically, connect with Trump’s campaign.

“Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies,” the report reads.

Russian trolls would direct message or email Trump Campaign officials and ask for things like campaign buttons, flyers, and posters to make their artificial rallies look more organic.

By May 2016, the IRA were trying to organize enough rallies that they decided to create a Twitter account called @march_ r_trump, which they then used to promote IRA-organized rallies in support of the Trump campaign.

Mueller's report found no evidence of a similar relationship, publicly or privately, with the Clinton campaign.
Image
An excerpt from Mueller's report.
Department of Justice
An excerpt from Mueller's report.
The IRA’s accounts were distribution channels for its hacking.

The last piece of the IRA’s online strategy was its use of hacking. In March 2016, members with the Russian Federation's Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of employees and volunteers with the Clinton campaign and campaign chair John Podesta. Then a month later, the IRA hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

It released the hacked materials, at first, via two online personas, "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." DCLeaks disseminated the leaked emails via a website, dcleaks.com, but more importantly, the leak was shared across the IRA’s vast network of social media plages. Then a Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog was created. Once again, a similar strategy was deployed — push the Guccifer 2.0 hack across social media and send it directly to members of the media.

Then, finally, the IRA gave the leaked emails to WikiLeaks. GRU officers used both the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas to direct message WikiLeaks on Twitter. Once WikiLeaks released the hacked emails, IRA pages picked it up as they would any other news cycle or divisive social issue.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... ailed-2016



More
Now that we know for certain, AGAIN, that the Russian state attacked us in 2016 (and continue to do so), does handing them top secret intelligence qualify yet as a high crime?
Asking for the free world.

bb.jpg






Roger Stone = collusion
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:32 am

Nadler will send subpoena for full Mueller report in the next couple hours

The Mueller report explicitly states that the investigation did not clear President Trump https://nyti.ms/2XnKxMi
Image

Kellyanne Conway's husband calls for Congress to remove 'cancer' of Trump
Washington (CNN) — George Conway, husband of top White House aide Kellyanne Conway, called for Congress to remove President Donald Trump from office following the release of the redacted special counsel report.

"White House counsel John Dean famously told (President Richard) Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing," Conway wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published Thursday night. "What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J. Trump. Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay."
As the husband of one of Trump's top surrogates, and someone who once wanted to work in the administration, Conway has emerged as extremely unlikely critic of the President. He wrote in an op-ed last month that Trump was "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" of being unfit for office.
Conway argued in his op-ed that counter to Trump's claims, special counsel Robert Mueller had not "exonerated" him and that it was time for Congress to step in.

The redacted version of Mueller's report released Thursday showed Mueller could not clear Trump on obstruction of justice and detailed several cases where Trump was unsuccessful in obstructing justice because his aides refused his orders.
Conway also noted that a president could be removed from office even without committing a crime, and said "the facts in Mueller's report condemn Trump even more than the report's refusal to clear him of a crime."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/18/politics ... index.html



emptywheel


If Trump weren't so reliant on Manafort to only fake-flip, this kind of revelation (and the sharing of polling data) might piss him off.

Image
At the August 2 meeting Manafort & Kilimnik reviewed swing states, went over internal polling data, discussed a Ukrainian peace plan, and talked abt getting paid. 8 days later he told his accountant to book the revenue from the Ukr oligarchs.

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Why would Manafort need his debt to Deripaska to be resolved by inauguration day?
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Keith Boykin

Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. McGahn planned to resign rather than carry out what he felt to be an inappropriate order. McGahn decided not to quit and not to follow Trump's order.
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‘The Biggest Piece Mueller Left Out’
“The money trail is the most important part of the unanswered questions," says former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Michael HirshApril 18, 2019, 7:32 PM
Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 13, 2013. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 13, 2013. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Michael McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and was a key architect of former President Barack Obama’s Russia strategy. McFaul later had strained relations with the Kremlin and was banned from traveling to Russia; he also played a cameo role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s notoriously compliant Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year, when Putin floated the idea of allowing his investigators question McFaul in exchange for U.S. access to Russian military intelligence officials from the GRU indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for interference in the 2016 U.S. election. On Thursday, the day the long-awaited, redacted Mueller report was released, McFaul, a scholar at Stanford University, shared his reactions with Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy: What’s your overall response to what you’ve read and heard about the Mueller report?

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Michael McFaul: I have a couple of reactions. I’ve been skimming, so I haven’t read every word closely yet. One, on the part I’m most interested in, Volume I [which deals with Russia and collusion], I’m impressed by the level of detail and comprehensiveness that Mueller and his team have provided us on what the Russians did.

On the principal two operations—the IRA [Russia’s Internet Research Agency] and the GRU operation against the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and [Hillary Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta—I think that should be celebrated by everyone both for what he [Mueller] did but also what our intelligence community is capable of doing.

My second reaction is this is only a partial investigation of what happened in 2016. The full investigation of everything that the Russians did, and more importantly what we as a government did or did not do, was not part of Mueller’s mandates. So I have questions about many other things that he didn’t cover. And the biggest piece Mueller left out, of course, is now what do we do as a country to prevent this in the future? Two or three years ago, some of us were arguing that we needed a bipartisan commission, not unlike what we had after 9/11, to look at everything that happened—including the Obama administration, by the way, and the social media companies, and the media itself—and this not that.

FP: Can you be more specific about what you think the special counsel didn’t cover?

MM: One is when they look at IRA, they’re looking at a very specific operation by one entity in Russia, but they’re not looking at general behavior by Russian actors on social media platforms that also have an impact. How do you somehow discern that one entity was important in meddling and the other one was not. … The other piece was Russia media itself. RT, Sputnik … what impact did they have? We don’t have any assessment of that. I’d like to know more about that. Third, they do this in an indirect way in talking about the meetings but I was hoping we would learn more about the Russian strategy for engagement with all these people, and was it an attempt to influence the outcome of the elections? … To me that’s one more piece of Putin’s playbook, and it’s not just about conspiracy with the Russians.

And then the money part feels incomplete. There were all kinds of hypotheses about Russian money [laundering] floated about last couple of years, and I don’t feel that somebody’s tied a bow under that. … I expected there would be more discussion of that. The money trail is the most important part of the unanswered questions. Were these just innocent transactions, or were these done by Russian proxies to gain influence?

FP: Referring to Russian investment in Trump Organization businesses and buildings?

MM: Yeah. But not only. And then one other thing—and this is not Mueller’s fault—it’s just the policy part. What were the Russians doing in those 21 states—and why did they choose not to be disruptive on election day, even though they had capacity to do so?

FP: What does this report do to change U.S.-Russia relations, or not?

Read More

Special counsel Robert Mueller leaves after a closed meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Capitol in Washington on June 21, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
How to Read Between the Lines of the Mueller Report

Here’s what to expect from the long-awaited—and now heavily redacted—probe into Trump’s Russia ties.
MM: Putin will look to this to be end of a moment and an opportunity to try to reengage directly with President Trump to try to achieve some of the Russian foreign-policy objectives they were optimistic about, with this now over. I think they’re wrong: I don’t think it’s over. There’s a lot more drama to come. But their frustration has always been that, one, the deep state, and two, the Mueller investigation, has constrained President Trump from doing the right things in their view. The harder part for me to answer, because in some ways I know Putin better than I know Trump, is what will happen on the American side.

And I think you have this paradox that will not change as a result of the Mueller investigation, in that the Trump administration has a pretty confrontational policy toward Russia, with a lot of continuity with the Obama administration, and even in some places they’ve gone further, but the president himself has not agreed with that policy. The question I have is, will he try now to be more bold in cutting against the grain of his team? We’ve seen in the past that the president as he gains confidence in his own foreign-policy decision-making and diplomacy has gone against the grain. … Does this now liberate him to do that here?

FP: How would that be reflected in policy changes? Is Trump going to let you be brought in for questioning?

MM: Well, I hope they don’t revisit that policy [laughs]. … It’s something I have to worry about when I travel, Russian abuse of Interpol.

FP: More seriously, on broader policy issues, what does it mean?

MM: Without question, the top of the Russian government agenda will be sanctions relief and … new strategies for U.S.-Russia relations. I would add another independent event, the election in Ukraine. If you get a new president there, if Mr. [Volodymyr] Zelensky wins on the weekend and he starts some kind of new interaction with the Russians on Donbass, I could see a combination of a “resolution” on Donbass that would then lead to sanctions relief. That’s at the top of my list of areas to watch in terms of new Russian activity.

FP: Getting back to the report, was there anything that surprised you about new details of Russian activities?

MM: No, I don’t think so. Remember, those two indictments had a lot of details. Some little things, a few names. For instance, I found personally interesting what’s in there about Petr Aven from Alfa [the head of Russia’s Alfa Bank and a confidant of Putin’s], and that he took some kind of sign or signal from President Putin to reach out. … The other piece, I don’t quite know how to say this, there’s something about the report that disturbs me, like the first line, which says, to paraphrase, that this was a comprehensive and well-done attack by the Russians…

FP: I think the Mueller team used the words “sweeping and systematic.”

MM: Right. Here’s the paradox for me, both about the report itself but also about how we’re reacting to it. Again, because they didn’t have the mandate to talk about policy, it reads more like a legal document and not one that addresses that first sentence. … It reads very matter of fact. I get the same feeling of the reaction of the American people and our society. Maybe it’s because we’ve learned about this in bits and pieces for two years, but this was an incredible operation that the Russians ran against us. Impactful. Effective. Lots of money was dedicated to it. And they still have all those capacities moving forward, and yet our reaction is, “Meh, what’s the big deal, let’s get on with things.” We should never compare this to 1941 or 2001, but this is not just incremental change in the way that Soviets used to try to influence our elections.

This is something qualitatively different. I don’t think people are reacting to it. And I worry about that, because I don’t feel people will do the necessary prescriptive things right, because it’ll get tangled into partisan stuff. And then we’ll be vulnerable not only to what Putin wants to do but other actors, foreign and domestic, who might take a lesson from his playbook and try to run these operations in 2020.

FP: And we don’t know how many other IRA-type operations are out there?

MM: Correct. To suggest that they’re the only Russian actors on Twitter, I’m skeptical of that.

Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent at Foreign
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/18/th ... -left-out/



Screen Shot 2019-04-19 at 6.38.46 AM.png




Sarah Kendzior


"On Impeachment: A @GaslitNation Essay"
Read: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25377010
Listen: https://www.patreon.com/posts/impeach-nazi-in-26003357

* * *
"As we have previously stated in multiple episodes, Gaslit Nation stands in favor of impeaching the motherfucker."


"This was previously not a controversial view, as Trump has committed a multitude of impeachable offenses, including but not limited to: violating the emoluments clause; obstruction of justice; ordering unconstitutional imprisonment of migrant families..."


"...abusing the pardon power; high crimes and misdemeanors; conspiracy against the US; and conspiracy to illegally influence the 2016 election. Trump has committed these crimes in plain sight and confessed to some of them, like obstruction, on television."

"These are not merely constitutional violations but severe threats to national security and public safety that require immediate action – investigation and indictment as well as impeachment. "

"Impeachment is not a snap of the fingers producing an instant result. It is a process of hearings in which officials present evidence of crimes and deliberate in a public forum, removed from media bias."

"Americans these days tend to exist in information silos, but hearings, from Comey to Cohen, have brought our country together to bear witness. Hearings give the public information long withheld from them and shift expectations of accountability."

"We see parallels with Watergate, in which much of the republic was unconvinced of the severity of Nixon’s crimes until hearings began and they learned the full details. The public has the right to information and to make up its own mind."

"Our media is largely sponsored by dictators or dictated by sponsors. It is critical that officials present evidence to the public directly."

"This is not a partisan issue; it is a matter of public safety. Trump’s supporters have as much right to the truth as do Trump’s opponents. We are Americans, and we are in this together."

"Pelosi doesn't seem to see herself as in it together with us. She sees herself as above it. She sees Trump as a partisan matter, not an urgent public threat. She does not understand that we are already divided as a nation, and that truth and transparency are the salve."

"Pelosi is replicating the mistakes made by the Obama administration (and by the FBI and James Comey) when they withheld the truth about Trump and Russia from the American public due to their fear of seeming 'divisive' or angering Mitch McConnell."

"The GOP has been hijacked by a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. This is not a secret."

"We have seen the indictments and we have seen the panicked protectiveness of Trump by the GOP even when they are confronted with his most severe and obviously illegal infractions."

"Any possibility of bipartisan support for impeachment, for the GOP to put country before party is a myth. The Republicans created this situation: they long ago abdicated their duty through corruption and capitulation."

"If the GOP were to impeach Trump, they would effectively impeach themselves, since they are caught in Trump’s web of criminality. (Michael Cohen, for example, was the deputy finance chairman of the RNC.)"

"But when Pelosi makes a bipartisan resolution that she knows is impossible the standard for following rule of law, she continues the very abdication that the GOP initiated – and in doing so, aids in their complicity."

"Supporters of Pelosi believe there must be a secret message or a secret plan behind her statement, but there is very likely not. (We will be delighted if we are wrong and there is a secret plan, since we are thinking first and foremost about the welfare of the American people.)"

"Some have said the point of Pelosi proclaiming Trump 'not worth it' is to wound his ego – as if Trump remotely cares what Pelosi says. All Trump cares about is money, power and being immune from prosecution."

"Impeachment hearings actually threaten all three of these things Trump cares about. Attempted jibes do not."

"The message Pelosi conveys when she says Trump is 'not worth it' is that it is not worth holding him accountable for crimes that have resulted in the loss of human life and the ongoing destruction of our nation."

"Pelosi may not have intended for this to be her message, but that is how many received it. She hurled a grenade into progressives and wounded many with her words. She may think we can vote Trump out, but she has hurt that very cause."

"We have heard from younger voters and voters from marginalized groups who no longer want to vote for the Democratic candidate because her flippant dismissal of impeachment as an outcome has led them to believe that the two parties are the same. They are *not* the same."

"One party is an existential threat, and one party is deeply flawed. We encourage you to support the Democratic candidate in 2020. But we demand that the Democrats confront our grim reality head on – that there may not be a 2020, that there may not be free and fair elections."

"Every day is damage done. It may be a partisan game to you, Speaker Pelosi, but for the rest of us, and for this country, it is a matter of life or death."

"It is critical that the stakes are made clear. Refusal to impeach sends the message that the situation cannot possibly be that dire – it if were, the Democrats would move to impeach, right?"

"This is the same disastrous miscalculation that gave us an unpunished cadre of criminals from Watergate, Iran-Contra, the War on Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis – criminals who are working with the White House right now!"

"This is not a comparative study; this is literally the same people committing crimes over and over without repercussions. We would not even been dealing with this crisis if officials had acted with conscience and conviction earlier, and brought these criminal elites to justice."

"Let us be clear: we do not think that, if the House impeaches Trump, the GOP-dominated Senate will convict. We also do not think that if the Senate, by some miracle, impeaches Trump, that he will leave."

"Trump has made it clear he will not leave office even if the will of the people demands it in an election, and even if the will of Congress demands it in impeachment. Trump is an aspiring autocrat, and the GOP is seeking a one-party state."

"So what is the point of the House impeaching Trump? An informed public is a powerful public, and hearings are the best way of informing the people on what the White House has done."

"Autocrats and wannabe autocrats live by their brands. A symbolic vote of impeachment by the House, sending the world the message that the United States still stands for the rule of law, damages the Trump brand."

"It leaves a mark on the Trump brand that Ivanka must carry with her as she continues to represent us abroad. The House must begin impeachment proceedings to help restore America's standing in the world and because it is their constitutional duty."
https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior/statu ... 0688500736



Mueller Said He Would Have Exonerated Trump On Obstruction If The Evidence Supported It, But He Couldn’t
Mueller and his team declined to make a “prosecutorial judgment” about whether Trump committed obstruction. Attorney General Bill Barr later concluded that the evidence didn’t support that.


Zoe Tillman
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Map of Washington, DC
Reporting From
Washington, DC
Last updated on April 18, 2019, at 3:50 p.m. ET
Posted on April 18, 2019, at 11:10 a.m. ET

Tom Brenner / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his final report that his office would have exonerated President Donald Trump if the evidence had supported it, but based on the information they had, they could not do that.

Mueller ultimately declined to make a “prosecutorial judgment” about whether Trump had committed any obstruction offenses, choosing instead to submit his evidence and legal analysis on the issue to Attorney General Bill Barr. Mueller repeatedly found “substantial evidence” that Trump had committed potentially obstructive acts and that often his intent was to stymie the investigation into himself and his campaign. Barr, after consulting with senior Justice Department officials, concluded that the evidence did not support finding that Trump had committed a crime, however.

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Undercutting Trump’s claim that Mueller, in addition to Barr, had cleared him of wrongdoing on obstruction, Mueller wrote that if his office had confidence that Trump did not commit obstruction, “we would so state.” But based on the facts and the law, he wrote, “we were unable to reach that judgment.”

“The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred,” Mueller wrote. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

The obstruction section of the report, when read as a whole, depicts an administration in which Trump’s impulsive responses to the events unfolding around him routinely put him at odds with his senior aides and White House lawyers. It describes several instances where top officials simply ignored directives from the president or those close to him in order to avoid taking action that they believed was ill-advised or, more seriously, could undermine his own administration.

Former White House counsel Don McGahn refused to carry out Trump’s order to contact the Justice Department about Trump’s concerns that Mueller had a conflict of interest because McGahn and other advisers thought it was “silly.” When Trump decided to fire former FBI director James Comey, one White House aide wrote in her notes, “‘[i]s this the beginning of the end?” in reference to his presidency.

The report shows that White House officials were aware early on that however they responded to the Russia investigation could raise questions about attempts to obstruct justice. After then–attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in March 2017 because of his role in Trump’s campaign, the White House counsel’s office tried to limit communication between the White House and Sessions, with one note from the office reading, “Serious concerns about obstruction.”

Mueller wrote that historical guidance from the Justice Department against indicting a sitting president in part guided his decision not to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” about whether Trump committed obstruction. The Office of Legal Counsel had previously issued an opinion that the indictment of a sitting president would “impermissibly undermine” the functions of the executive branch, and Mueller said he recognized that independently as well.

Mueller wrote in the introduction to the section of his report on obstruction that Trump “took a variety of actions” related to the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference “that raised questions about whether he had obstructed justice.”

Mueller’s report explains how he went about the investigation, including the decision not to subpoena Trump. Mueller wrote that his office believed they had the authority to issue a grand jury subpoena for Trump’s testimony, but decided not to do so because it would create a “substantial delay” at a late stage of the probe. He also wrote that his office believed they had enough evidence from other sources.

Although Mueller stopped short of deciding whether Trump committed a crime, he offered what he described as “general conclusions” about Trump’s behavior. Mueller wrote that Trump repeatedly took actions “that were capable of exerting undue influence” over the Russia and obstruction investigations, including his efforts to remove Mueller, limit the scope of the probe, and influence the testimony of witnesses.

“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller wrote, “but that is because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Mueller concluded the obstruction section, known as Volume II of the report, by exploring arguments from Trump’s lawyers about why federal obstruction laws couldn’t apply to Trump for actions he took in his power as president — for instance, removing executive branch officials from office or shutting down a law enforcement operation. Mueller wrote that Trump’s proposed interpretation went against the Justice Department's own positions and wasn’t supported by the legal principles that guide lawyers in interpreting federal laws.

There is Justice Department guidance on the books advising that a sitting president can’t be criminally indicted, but a former president can be criminally charged after leaving office. Mueller ended the report with something of a warning to Trump — that the special counsel office found that the US Constitution “does not categorically and permanently immunize the President from potential liability for the conduct that we investigated.”

Mueller’s report details a series of situations that raised questions about whether the president had committed obstruction. They are:

How the Trump campaign responded to reports that the Russians were backing Trump.

Trump’s comments in 2017 to then–FBI director James Comey about then–national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey wrote in a memo released last April that during a meeting with Trump on Feb. 14, the president told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy.”

Trump’s own response to the pending Russia investigation.

Trump’s decision to fire Comey.

Trump’s reaction to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller and his direction to then-White House Counsel Don McGahn to remove Mueller. Mueller said McGahn was prepared to resign “rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre.”

Efforts by Trump to have his former attorney general Jeff Sessions limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation.

How Trump handled the public response to reports about the Trump Tower meeting between his campaign and Russians on June 9, 2016.

A conversation Trump had with Sessions asking him to reverse his recusal from the Russia probe.

Efforts by Trump to have McGahn deny that Trump ordered him to remove Mueller.

How Trump responded to the prosecutions of Flynn and his former campaign chair Paul Manafort.

Trump’s comments about his former personal attorney Michael Cohen’s decision to cooperate with investigators.

Here's what Mueller found:

The Trump Campaign’s Response to Russia Backing Trump

The report cited numerous news reports about links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, and recited how Trump responded to reports that Russia was involved in the WikiLeaks release of emails hacked from the DNC by denying he’d done business in Russia. But Mueller noted that wasn’t true, since the Trump Organization had been trying to do business there through June 2016. Cohen told investigators that when he asked Trump about the denial, Trump replied, “Why mention it if it is not a deal?”

Campaign aides “reacted with enthusiasm” to the WikiLeaks release, according to the report, citing information investigators learned from former deputy campaign chair Rick Gates and “Newman,” presumably referring to former campaign and White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman; there did not appear to be another reference to “Newman” in the report.

Michael Flynn

Mueller’s report went over much of what was already known about Flynn’s contacts with then–Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak from documents in Flynn’s criminal case. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about conversations with Kislyak during the presidential transition period about Russia’s response to sanctions that the Obama administration had announced.

The report confirms that Flynn was in touch with K.T. McFarland about his conversations with Kislyak; McFarland, who did not face criminal charges, served as deputy national security adviser in the early months of the Trump administration. McFarland told investigators that she thought someone may have told Trump that Flynn was talking to Kislyak, but there wasn’t evidence that Trump knew what exactly they discussed.

Trump was briefed on the Justice Department’s concerns about Flynn’s interactions with Kislyak and a denial by Vice President Mike Pence that Flynn and Kislyak had discussed sanctions. Then–chief of staff Reince Priebus told investigators that Trump was angry with Flynn and said, “not again, this guy, this stuff.”

Mueller noted that when Trump told Comey that he hoped Comey could “let Flynn go,” Comey understood that as a directive to close the FBI investigation into Flynn. Mueller wrote that the instruction reflected the president’s awareness that Flynn could face criminal prosecution, but it wasn’t clear how much of a personal stake Trump had in Flynn’s fate — the evidence was inconclusive about how much Trump actually knew about what Flynn had done.

Trump’s Reaction to the Russia Probe

After Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Mueller reported that the White House was already worried about the possibility of being seen as obstructing the probe — he quoted internal notes from the White House counsel’s office on March 2, 2017, that read: “No contact w/Sessions” and “No comms / Serious concerns about obstruction.” The report summarized Trump’s immediate anger with Sessions for recusing, which was already well-documented in news reports.

Several days later, Annie Donaldson, who was McGahn’s chief of staff at the time, wrote in her notes, “POTUS in panic/chaos … Need binders to put in front of POTUS. (1) All things related to Russia.”

The report described increasing frustration among Trump and several top aides about Comey, as well as the president’s directives that the intelligence community publicly push back on the idea that the president was tied to the Russian election interference. Mueller wrote that Trump’s requests to intelligence officials were a potential obstructive act, but he found that witnesses had different memories about their interactions with Trump, and that none of the officials interpreted them as instructions to “improperly interfere” with the probe.

Comey’s Firing

The report describes how Trump decided to fire Comey before getting advice from the Justice Department, but initially said publicly that he was doing so only after getting guidance from Sessions and Rosenstein. Days before Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, Trump dictated ideas for a letter about firing Comey to senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Miller prepared a letter. When Trump told other advisers he planned to fire Comey and that Miller had researched his authority to do so, McGahn urged Trump to consult with the Justice Department.

When Rosenstein met with Trump to discuss Comey’s firing, Trump told Rosenstein to “put the Russia stuff in the memo,” according to notes that a DOJ official took based on Rosenstein’s description of the meeting. Rosenstein tried to push back, and later told colleagues that his reasons for firing Comey were “not [the president’s] reasons.”

Donaldson took notes saying that the White House counsel’s office believed Trump’s original letter, the one he drafted with Miller, should “[n]ot [see the] light of day.” In a footnote, Mueller wrote that Donaldson also wrote "[i]s this the beginning of the end?” since she worried that the circumstances of Comey’s firing would end Trump’s presidency.

Trump didn’t like the press coverage of Comey’s firing, and Mueller wrote that the White House told the Justice Department it wanted to release a statement saying Rosenstein made the call to fire Comey. Rosenstein told DOJ officials that he wouldn’t be part of a “false story.”

Mueller wrote that firing Comey would be obstruction if it interfered with the investigation and that Trump’s public comments after firing Comey calling the probe a “witch hunt” and asking “When does it end?” could affect how Comey’s successor handled the investigation. But he also pointed to evidence that Comey’s departure didn’t affect the course of the probe, including Trump’s decision to appoint Comey’s former deputy, Andrew McCabe, as interim director; Trump would later turn on McCabe and agitate for his firing as well. Sessions fired McCabe in March 2018.


Mueller wrote that the evidence showed Trump wanted Comey to publicly announce he wasn’t under investigation for several possible reasons, including that he believed it was interfering with his duties, but also to protect himself against investigation into his campaign. Mueller highlighted the fact that Trump and the White House at first pushed a “pretextual reason” for firing Comey.

“The initial reliance on a pretextual justification could support an inference that the President had concerns about providing the real reason for the firing, although the evidence does not resolve whether those concerns were personal, political, or both,” Mueller wrote.

Trump’s Efforts to Remove Mueller

When Trump learned that Rosenstein had appointed Mueller as special counsel on May 17, 2017, Trump “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked,'” according to notes taken by Jody Hunt, who was Sessions’ chief of staff and now runs the Civil Division at the Justice Department.

“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Trump said, according to Hunt’s notes.

Former White House official Hope Hicks told investigators the only other time she’d seen Trump so upset was after the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the campaign, which featured a recording of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy,” among other things.

Mueller wrote about pushback Trump got from his advisers and from the Justice Department when he tried to argue that Mueller had conflicts of interest that would prevent him from serving as special counsel. The report confirms that Trump called McGahn in June 2017 — after news reports revealed Mueller was investigating possible obstruction by Trump — and told him Mueller had to be removed, and to have Rosenstein say that Mueller was conflicted.

McGahn told investigators he did not intend to act on the president’s request and was prepared to resign if pushed to do so. He didn’t tell Trump he planned to resign, though, and the next time he saw the president, Trump didn’t ask if McGahn had actually called Rosenstein.

Mueller wrote that notwithstanding Trump’s denials that he told McGahn to have Mueller fired, there was “substantial evidence” that was what Trump did. McGahn was a “credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House,” Mueller wrote. If Trump just wanted McGahn to bring the conflict issue to DOJ’s attention — something Trump had already done — he wouldn’t have acted with such urgency in repeatedly calling McGahn, Mueller wrote.

Trump’s Efforts to “Curtail” Mueller’s Probe

Mueller described later efforts by the president to limit the scope of what Mueller was investigating. According to the report, Trump met in the White House with his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on June 19, 2017, to dictate a letter Trump wanted to send to Sessions instructing the then–attorney general to give a speech saying Mueller was only authorized to investigate “election meddling for future elections.”

But according to Mueller, that letter never made it to Sessions. Lewandowski asked a senior White House official at the time, Rick Dearborn, to give the letter to Sessions. Dearborn told investigators he was uncomfortable serving as a messenger to Sessions, and never delivered the letter, even though he told Lewandowski that he’d “handled the situation,” according to Mueller.

In July 2017, Mueller detailed how Trump told Priebus that he wanted Sessions to resign and Priebus’s ultimately successful efforts to talk down the president. Priebus believed Trump was motivated by his “hatred” at Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the investigation, Mueller wrote, and not Trump’s stated reasons of being unhappy with negative press around Sessions and the attorney general’s performance before Congress. Priebus and McGahn talked about having to resign if they were ordered to fire Sessions.

Mueller wrote that there was “substantial evidence” that Trump’s push to limit Mueller’s investigation through Sessions was meant to stop the investigation into the president and his campaign.

The Trump Tower Meeting

The report breaks down how Trump and his advisers handled releasing information about a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between members of Trump’s campaign and Russians. According to emails that Donald Trump Jr. released in anticipation of media coverage, he was told that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” wanted to give Trump’s campaign damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. replied, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” The Clinton information never materialized at the meeting, however.

Mueller wrote that senior administration officials learned about the Trump Tower meeting emails in mid-June 2017; news broke about the meeting a month later. Hicks told investigators that Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House aide Jared Kushner tried to show a folder of documents to Trump — the report doesn’t specify what was in the folder, but implies it included the emails — but Trump said he did not want to know about it.

Hicks said she urged the president to have Trump Jr. release the emails as part of a “softball” interview and warned him that they were “really bad.” But Trump said he didn’t want to discuss it and objected to going to the media.

When Trump and his advisers learned in early July 2017 that the New York Times was working on a story about the Trump Tower meeting, Trump initially told Hicks to decline to comment. Hicks told investigators that Trump was later involved in drafting a statement to the Times about the meeting and rejected a version that disclosed that Trump Jr. was offered information about the campaign. Trump Jr. was worried about being accused of lying if more details about the meeting leaked, according to a text message he sent to Hicks.

Mueller wrote that although the evidence showed Trump repeatedly told people not to publicly release the emails, it did not establish that he tried to stop the emails from being provided to Congress or to the special counsel’s office.

Trump’s Efforts to Have Sessions Step In

Between May and July 2017 — the report doesn’t give a specific date — Sessions told investigators that Trump called him at home to ask him to reverse his recusal. Sessions did not do so. He also had discussions with former White House aide Rob Porter and McGahn about options to replace Sessions, according to the report.

The report described other conversations that Trump had with Sessions about his recusal, and Trump’s public criticism of his then–attorney general. Mueller wrote that it was “reasonable” to infer that Trump thought a new attorney general — one who wasn’t recused — could protect the president and “shield” him from the Russia probe.


Trump’s Efforts to Have McGahn Deny That Trump Tried to Get Rid of Mueller

After media reports in January 2018 revealed the conversations that Trump had with McGahn in June 2017 about removing Mueller, Mueller wrote that Trump’s “personal counsel” — the report doesn’t identify which of the president’s lawyers that referred to — contacted McGahn’s lawyer and said Trump wanted McGahn to publicly deny the reports. McGahn, through his lawyer, refused.

Trump repeatedly tried to get McGahn to deny the story, both through intermediaries and directly. In one meeting on Feb. 6, 2018, Trump questioned McGahn about notes he’d taken about their interactions, although McGahn clarified to investigators that Trump was referring to notes that Donaldson took. McGahn said that Trump told him, “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” McGahn said he replied that he took notes because he was a “real lawyer.”

Mueller wrote that there was evidence that Trump genuinely thought that the media reports about his conversations with McGahn were wrong; Mueller noted that Trump was right that McGahn never told the president he planned to resign if he was required to do what Trump asked, and insisted to other aides that he never used the word “fire.”

But Mueller also pointed out that there was “substantial evidence” supporting McGahn’s version of events and that Trump’s denials were “carefully worded.” He wrote that Trump’s insistence on McGahn creating a written record denying the president had instructed him to remove Mueller, long after the initial round of media reports, “indicates the President was not focused solely on a press strategy, but instead likely contemplated the ongoing investigation and any proceedings arising from it.”

Mueller wrote that there was “substantial evidence” that Trump was trying to get McGahn to change his story to shift attention away from how Trump had acted toward the investigation.

Flynn and Manafort

Mueller described how Trump’s “personal counsel” — again, the report doesn’t say who that refers to — were upset when they learned that Flynn was withdrawing from a joint defense agreement with the president and tried to convince Flynn’s lawyers to continue to cooperate with them. According to Flynn’s lawyers, Trump’s lawyers told them that Trump’s team would see this as “hostility” from Flynn toward Trump, and that Flynn’s lawyers thought their client would be “disturbed” knowing that.

According to the report, after Mueller’s office brought criminal charges against Gates and Manafort, Gates told investigators that Manafort said it was stupid to take a plea deal, that Manafort had talked to Trump’s personal lawyers, and that Manafort said, “we’ll be taken care of.” However, Gates said Manafort told him no one had used the word “pardon.” The report also quoted Trump’s public praise of Manafort for fighting the charges; Manafort was found guilty of various financial crimes by a jury in Virginia and took a plea deal in the other case Mueller’s office brought in Washington, DC.

A significant part of the section on Manafort is redacted — the Justice Department indicated that they had kept that information secret because it could harm an “ongoing matter.”

Mueller wrote that it wasn’t clear what Trump knew about his lawyers’ communications with Flynn’s counsel. But he wrote that the evidence showed Trump, through his public praise of Manafort and open-ended responses to questions about whether he was considering a pardon for Manafort, was trying to encourage Manafort not to cooperate.

Michael Cohen

The report traced the history of Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and the role that Cohen played in pushing those efforts forward. It confirms previous reporting by BuzzFeed News that Cohen kept Trump informed about the status of the Trump Tower Moscow project well into 2016, while Trump was a presidential candidate.

Cohen told investigators that in responding to requests from reporters in January 2017 about the Moscow project, he developed talking points with Trump and others — the report doesn’t specify who else was involved. Cohen said the talking points included saying the Moscow project ended in January 2016 and that he didn’t need to tell Trump that was a lie because Trump knew it wasn’t true.

When Congress asked Cohen for information related to the Russia investigation in May 2017, according to Mueller’s report, Cohen said he met with Trump and that the president told him to cooperate. Cohen was regularly in touch with Trump’s personal lawyers, according to the report, and the lawyers told Cohen that “the President loves you” and that Trump would support him if he kept his messaging consistent with the president’s.

Cohen was part of a joint defense agreement with Trump and other unnamed individuals that Mueller wrote were also involved in the Russia probe. Mueller wrote that members of that agreement were involved in editing a false statement that Cohen submitted to Congress in August 2017; the report doesn’t specify who specifically was involved in editing the statement, but does note that Cohen spoke with Trump’s personal counsel almost every day in the two weeks leading up to submitting the statement to Congress.

Cohen said that the day before he submitted his statement to Congress, he had multiple calls with Trump’s personal counsel. That lawyer, still unidentified in the report, told Cohen that Trump appreciated him and that Cohen needed to stay on message and not contradict Trump. Cohen not only submitted the false statement to Congress, but also served as a source for a Washington Post story that repeated the false information that the Moscow project was over by the end of January 2016, Mueller wrote. He later pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of making false statements Congress, as well as to a slew of financial crimes and campaign finance violations.

According to the report, Cohen didn’t remember speaking directly with Trump about the details of his letter to Congress, but remembered speaking generally with Trump about staying on message in his testimony. After testifying before Congress in October 2017, Mueller wrote that phone records showed Cohen spoke with Trump’s personal counsel right away.

Cohen testified before Congress in February that Trump “in his way” had instructed Cohen to lie about the Moscow project timeline. Cohen said that during the campaign, Trump would tell Cohen that he didn’t have business in Russia and would relay a similar message to the American public, when Trump knew that wasn’t true. When BuzzFeed News first reported in January that Cohen told Mueller’s office that Trump directed him to lie, Mueller’s office issued a rare public response saying that the article was “not accurate,” but not specifying what exactly in the story was wrong.

In the conclusion of his section on Trump’s dealings with Cohen, Mueller wrote that the evidence “does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen’s false testimony.” Mueller referred to Cohen’s beliefs that Trump understood Cohen would need to lie to stay on message, but said there were no explicit conversations to that effect. When Cohen was drafting his false statement to Congress, the evidence showed Cohen communicated with Trump’s lawyers, and not Trump himself — and Mueller said it wasn’t clear if Trump knew what they were talking about.

Although Mueller’s office referred an investigation into Cohen’s role in orchestrating payments to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump to federal prosecutors in New York, the report noted the evolution of Trump’s feelings toward Cohen — from backing him in the beginning to denouncing him as a “rat” by the end.

Trump initially offered public and private support to Cohen after Cohen’s home, hotel, and office were raided in April 2018. Cohen said he understood from Trump’s comments that he’d have the White House’s support if he continued to stay on message, and that he believed Trump’s personal counsel had conveyed that Trump would take care of him, either by pardoning him or ending the probe. But their relationship soured when Cohen decided to cooperate with investigators, and Trump repeatedly lambasted him in tweets and public remarks.

Mueller wrote that the evidence could support a conclusion that Trump praised Cohen at first to convince him not to cooperate with the investigation, and then attacked him to try to stop him from giving investigators information or to undermine his credibility.

Mueller was originally tasked with investigating whether there was any collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government leading up to the 2016 election, but the probe broadened to include, among other things, whether Trump had tried to obstruct the investigation. Although Mueller kept much of his work under wraps, information occasionally trickled out.

The New York Times reported that Mueller’s team was interested in Trump’s response in 2017 to articles about a July 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign officials, including Trump Jr., Kushner, and Russians. There was a July 2018 report in the Times that Mueller was examining Trump’s tweets as part of the obstruction investigation. And there were numerous stories on Trump’s inclinations — some realized, some not — to fire key players in the investigation, including former FBI director James Comey, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Mueller himself.

BuzzFeed News did extensive reporting on Mueller's interest in the president’s plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, discussions that took place during his 2016 campaign and went on much longer than Trump or his team had admitted publicly. In January, BuzzFeed News reported that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, told Mueller’s office that Trump instructed him to lie about the timing of discussions within the Trump Organization about the Moscow project, which ultimately never happened. Cohen confirmed that narrative in his testimony before the House Oversight Committee in February.

Soon after announcing that Mueller had finished his investigation and submitted his final report to Barr, Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress on March 24 that he characterized as a summary of Mueller’s “principal conclusions.” But Barr wrote that Mueller had, in fact, not reached a conclusion on whether Trump committed any obstruction offenses.

Instead, Barr wrote that Mueller had laid out evidence on both sides and stopped short of offering an opinion on the “difficult issues” of whether Trump’s actions could qualify as obstruction.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zo ... ler-report
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Last edited by seemslikeadream on Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:52 am

Jonathan Turley was MSNBC's go to guy during the Bush years, but he's been clearly blackballed ever since he continued to criticize the Bush policies that were continued to be implemented under Obama. Here is his analysis concerning the Mueller report.

Mueller report proves key Trump advisers saved him from himself

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4 ... dent-trump

Trump came close to achieving the impossible feat of obstructing the investigation into a crime that did not, in fact, occur. In the end, Mueller punted the issue by saying that whether these comments constitute a crime must turn on intent, which could not be ascertained, particularly given the refusal by Trump to be interviewed by the special counsel staff. It is notable that the special counsel repeatedly described the motivation in noncriminal terms. Trump firing Comey was clearly in response to his frustration with Comey refusing to state publicly what he was saying privately, which is that Trump was not a target. Indeed, Mueller found that Trump agreed that the Russian interference with the investigation, including any cooperating individuals, had to be fully investigated.

On some level, the indeterminacy of the conclusion on obstruction was the penalty for Trump refusing to answer questions. However, the report establishes that there really was no serious basis for a criminal charge of obstruction. Indeed, there is something peevish in not reaching an obvious conclusion. The report has precious little on obstruction that was not already known. The greatest damage that Trump did to himself was done in full view. But once his rhetoric is stripped away, his conduct was not criminal, though it was at some point contemptible.

There seems little question that Trump wanted the investigation to end and wanted to fire key players in the investigation, according to the report. But he did not fire anyone involved in the investigation. He did not destroy any evidence. He did not end the investigation prematurely. He took no actual obstructive acts. To charge him would have amounted to a virtual thought crime. The investigation did find “substantial evidence” that Trump wanted to limit the investigation by some of his actions. However, it also found that he did not do so. Trump had obstructive desires and even wanted to obstruct, but he did not actually obstruct.

What emerges from more than 400 pages and 10 investigative “episodes” is a Trump who was protected from himself by key advisers. It began with the single greatest blunder in modern presidential history, which is the firing of FBI Director James Comey. There were ample reasons to fire Comey, who was denounced by career prosecutors and both Democratic and Republican leaders for his violation of core prosecutorial policies.

Trump could have fired Comey at the start of his administration or at the end of the Russia investigation. He just could not do it in the middle of the investigation. That is what the White House staffers uniformly told him, with one exception, which was Jared Kushner. That was enough. Trump fired Comey and set his administration on fire. An investigation that was winding down metastasized into a spiraling inquiry with global reach.

After the Comey debacle, staffers quickly recognized that Trump was counterpunching himself into serious criminal jeopardy. That led to the most significant moment described in the report. Trump decided to take a step that would have made the moronic firing of Comey look brilliant in comparison. He ordered the firing of Mueller. At that point, staffers including White House counsel Don McGahn turned themselves into a virtual human shield to protect Trump from himself. McGahn refused to carry out the order and threatened to resign. It was an extraordinary moment. In refusing repeated orders of a sitting president, McGahn actually said that he was coming to the White House to pack his things. Instead, the president kept McGahn on and Mueller was never fired.

Had Trump gotten his wish, he well could have tripped the wire for obstruction or impeachment. He came that close. However, he did not cross the line. That is why this movie is so confusing to so many. The “Death Star” did not explode. The “Titanic” did not sink. The president did not obstruct justice. Despite his best efforts, Trump stayed just north of the criminal code. Of course, avoiding the indictable or the impeachable does not mean that some conduct was not contemptible as president.

Trump is worthy of condemnation for his conduct in seeking to end the investigation. It is clear from the report that Trump was, to some degree, saved from himself by staffers. It is an extraordinary moment for staffers to refuse a direct order from the president. Trump also instantly reminded voters how much of this was inflicted upon himself by tweeting a “Game of Thrones” image with the words “game over.” The problem is that the special counsel report makes him look a lot like Mad King Targaryen.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:56 am

What the Mueller report tells us about Russian influence operations
Alina PolyakovaThursday, April 18, 2019
U.S. Attorney General William Barr, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, speaks at a news conference to discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, in Washington, U.S., April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst - RC1E360BBAB0
The redacted Special Counsel report released this morning confirms that the Russian government, through various proxies, carried out a multi-pronged campaign against the United States before, during, and after the 2016 election. That campaign involved three distinct elements:

A social media influence and infiltration operation led by the Internet Research Agency (IRA);
A cyber hacking operation carried out by the Russian military intelligence (GRU); and
An infiltration operation of the Trump campaign.
The report describes in stunning detail the inner workings of the full Russian operation. To date, the report is the most comprehensive account (in addition to the previously released indictment of IRA and GRU operatives) of how the Russian operation evolved over time, how successful it was in targeting and duping Americans, and the Kremlin’s motivation.

This post focuses specifically on what the Mueller report tells us about the information operations. A second post will focus on what we have learned about Russian cyber operations and capabilities.

The IRA’s tactics evolved over time

The IRA’s first step was to build a network of accounts. Its social media activities started in 2014, seeking to create individual impersonation accounts meant to look like Americans, particularly on Facebook.

Step two was audience growth. The IRA did so by creating pages and content that were not necessarily political or even divisive, but simply meant to attract more eyeballs to IRA-controlled pages and accounts. By early 2015, the IRA had turned to audience-building around divisive social issues by creating social media groups and pages posing as U.S. groups and activists, such as “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” (see pages 22-25 of the Special Counsel report).

Step three was to turn this network political. It was only once the IRA established its audience base that it turned explicitly to the U.S. elections around February 2016, with the explicit goal of undermining the Clinton campaign. Instructions to the IRA read, at the time: “Main idea: use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them)” (p. 25).

Step four was a move towards promoting the Trump campaign while further building the reach of the content. The focus remained primarily on criticizing Clinton until late spring 2016, when the IRA began to actively promote Donald Trump. At the same time, it aimed to further increase its audience by purchasing advertisements to promote its pages and reaching out via private messages to Facebook users prompting them to organize anti-Clinton rallies. (Recall that the IRA purchased over 3,500 ads and spent approximately $100,000, as detailed on page 25 of the report.) By the time Facebook deactivated the IRA accounts in mid-2017, the most popular group—“United Muslims of America”—had over 300,000 followers.

By the end of the 2016 election, the IRA “had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts” on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr, according to the report (see page 26). Facebook later estimated that IRA-controlled accounts reached as many as 126 million people, and an additional 1.4 million were reached through Twitter.

On Twitter, the IRA followed a similar impersonation and audience-building strategy by creating individual accounts that would post content, which bot networks would then amplify. As has been previously reported, U.S. media outlets quoted the IRA-controlled accounts as representing real American opinions. So did members of the Trump campaign, including Trump family members (see pages 27-35 of the report).

Influencing real life (not just digital life) was the original target

The IRA’s intent from the outset was to use its digital operations to affect real life: As early as 2015, the IRA attempted to organize rallies on divisive social issues. The “confederate rally” of November 2015 was just one of dozens of rallies that aimed to amplify socially divisive issues in the United States.

It was only after June 2016 that the rallies focused almost exclusively on the U.S. election and pro-Trump rallies. This tells us that the original goal of the social media operations, from 2014 to early 2016, was a straightforward, KGB-style infiltration operation aimed at polarizing and destabilizing U.S. society from within. Recall that during the Cold War, the KGB infiltrated environmental, civil rights, peace, and religious organizations.

What we don’t know, due to redactions

The structure of the IRA—perhaps the most interesting section—is almost fully redacted due to “harm to ongoing matter,” suggesting that the Department of Justice could still be pursuing further indictments against Russian individuals and entities involved in the IRA operation. We know from the February 2018 Department of Justice indictment of IRA operatives and entities, as well as independent reports, that the so-called “troll farm” in St. Petersburg focused on the United States was part of a larger interference project funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin called “Project Lakhta.” We also know that the IRA hired specialists for each social media platform, who were given specific instructions on which messages to push, how, and the performance quotas they had to meet. Yet, we still don’t know the full scope of the command structure, how far into the Kremlin the decisionmaking process reached, and how the project continues to be funded today. Funding and oversight of IRA and Prigozhin is also almost fully redacted.

The section on the IRA Twitter botnets is, interestingly, also redacted. This again suggests that further investigation may be ongoing into how the IRA established and used the automated accounts to amplify its content.

The bottom line is that the Mueller report clearly shows that the Russian information operations were highly adaptive to the political context in the United States, followed a seemingly well-thought out strategic plan akin to a marketing or public relations campaign, involved direction from Russian intelligence, and were incredibly effective in infiltrating American media while influencing public debate around the 2016 election.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-fr ... perations/
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:00 am

The IRA sounds much like the CIA-funded "pro-democracy NGOs" operating in Russia against its government.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:02 am

that's very funny RocketMan love the laugh in the morning :lol:

The Mueller Report: A Detailed Account of Trump’s Lies and Misconduct

This is no exoneration.


The long-awaited report by special counsel Robert Mueller confirms what we already knew: that Donald Trump and his campaign privately interacted with Russia while Putin’s regime was preparing—and then carrying out—an attack on the 2016 US presidential election; that Russia’s goal (as early as the start of 2016) was to help Trump become president; that Trump and his campaign had good reason to believe Putin’s regime was behind the ongoing assault (but kept insisting Moscow was doing nothing); and that Trump and folks in his orbit have lied about much of this.

Lies, lies, and more lies. They lace this report.
The basics of the Trump-Russia scandal were well established long before Mueller concluded his investigation, because so much of it had taken place in public view—Trump repeatedly echoing Russia’s false claims of innocence, for example. Other elements had been exposed by media reports—including Trump’s pursuit of a secret Moscow project while he was running for president, as well as the June 2016 Trump tower meeting, during which top Trump aides gathered to participate in what they were told was a Moscow plot to help Trump get elected. Numerous lies had already been exposed, including Trump saying he had nothing to do with Russia, and he and Donald Trump Jr. claiming that the Trump tower meeting had only been about adoption policy.

Yet the Mueller report—while, as expected, not revealing any further criminality beyond the indictments already brought during the investigation—reinforces the case that much wrongdoing occurred on the part of Trump and his crew.

Listen to our DC bureau chief David Corn discuss Mueller’s findings on this special breaking news edition of the Mother Jones Podcast:

Here is just one overview Mueller provides in the report:

During the 2016 campaign, the media raised questions about a possible connection between the Trump Campaign and Russia. The questions intensified after WikiLeaks released politically damaging Democratic Party emails that were reported to have been hacked by Russia. Trump responded to questions about possible connections to Russia by denying any business involvement in Russia—even though the Trump Organization had pursued a business project in Russia as late as June 2016. Trump also expressed skepticism that Russia had hacked the emails at the same time as he and other Campaign advisors privately sought information [redacted] about any further WikiLeaks releases.

Lying and subterfuge—not crimes, but that’s what Mueller accuses Trump of engaging in. And given that this particular redaction probably refers to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose lying-to-Congress case is still pending, this portion suggests that Trump himself ordered Stone to be in contact with WikiLeaks, while Julian Assange’s outfit was being used by the Russians as part of their covert operation to help Trump. Pause for a moment: A presidential candidate apparently directed a henchman to make contact with—perhaps collaborate with—an ongoing attack on American democracy.

Another page of the report that is full of redactions shows that after WikiLeaks released emails swiped from the Democratic National Committee, Trump was keen on getting information about future WikiLeaks dumps—even as, as Mueller points out, Trump and the campaign were publicly dismissing the notion Moscow was intervening in the election. Trump, at the time, called “this whole thing with Russia” a “total deflection” and said that it was “farfetched” and “ridiculous.”

Trump also proclaimed at that point, “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Yet, according to the report, when his then-fixer Michael Cohen questioned this denial, Trump told him that the potential Moscow tower project had not yet been finalized: “Why mention it if it is not a deal?” Trump said, despite the fact that a letter of intent had already been signed. In other words, Trump was willing to lie about a substantial conflict of interest.

The report also details how Trump helped fashion a public statement—to be issued in the name of Donald Trump Jr.—that falsely described the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting as nothing more than a discussion of adoption policy. Another section of the report describes how Trump tried to force his own White House counsel, Don McGahn, to lie and say that Trump never ordered to him to fire Mueller. (Trump had.) McGahn refused to do so.

Lies, lies, and more lies. They lace this report. And as Mueller notes:

[A]lthough the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several US persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress. This office has therefore charged some of those individuals with making false statements and obstructing justice.

But read that carefully. George Papadopoulos, Stone, Cohen, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were each charged with lying. But Mueller is saying that he did not charge all the persons who lied, just “some” of them. (Trump and Trump Jr. refused to be interviewed by the Mueller team.)

The report is full of more information about the curious actions of Trump’s people. Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort—who publicly denied the campaign or he had any Russian connections—is shown colluding with a former business partner who was (according to the FBI) tied to Russian intelligence, discussing a supposed peace plan for Ukraine that would benefit Russia. Manafort was also passing internal campaign information to Oleg Deripaska, a Putin-friendly oligarch, while running Trump’s campaign.

Mueller has demonstrated that the president is a liar.
And it turns out that on May 16, 2016—months before the Russians pushed the button on their election attack—Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy adviser, told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that he had been informed by a Russian cut-out that Moscow could assist the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Clinton. His memory, though, was hazy on whether he shared this news with anyone inside the campaign. (He would tell an Aussie diplomat but none of his colleagues?)

In the summer of that year, Papadopoulos and other Trump campaign aides discussed setting up a meeting in September that would occur with representatives of the “office of Putin.” That is, they considered this outreach to Putin while Putin was attacking the United States. The meeting never occurred. Papadopoulos declined to assist Mueller’s investigators in deciphering his handwritten notes about this potential get-together. He said he could not read his own handwriting. Moreover, Mueller notes that he never was able to get a full explanation of what Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy adviser, was up to when he visited Moscow in July 2016.

Then there’s obstruction. The report is full of details about actions Mueller investigated when trying to ascertain if Trump obstructed justice—and legal experts and commentators will chew over all the details and legal interpretations. But in a concise, one-paragraph conclusion, Mueller notes that “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” There is no such stating.

Trump defenders and Russiagate skeptics on the left will certainly point to this report and wave the Trump-did-not-conspire-directly-with-the-Russian-government-hack-and-dump-and-social-media-attack flag. But Mueller has demonstrated that the president is a liar. He has shown that Trump and his campaign made it easier for Moscow to pull off its attack on American democracy by asserting there was no attack. He has raised troubling questions about Trump’s adherence (or lack thereof) to the rule of law. He has added details to the known narrative of puzzling interactions between the Trump camp and Russia. He has reminded the public that an election was attacked by a foreign adversary (to help Trump) and that the president has not fully acknowledged that.

Mueller has demonstrated that the Trump-Russia scandal is neither a hoax nor a conspiracy theory. He has not exonerated Trump. He has shown that even if Trump has not committed crimes, the president of the United States is guilty of many serious misdeeds and transgressions.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ssia-lies/
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:07 am

When Trump won, Putin deployed his oligarchs
After an election marred by Moscow's attempts to buoy Donald Trump's candidacy, the Russian president wanted to cash in.

NATASHA BERTRAND04/18/2019 08:09 PM EDT
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
President Donald Trump (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) arrive for a meeting in Helsinki, on July 16. The special counsel’s report details ways Kremlin intermediaries tried to woo those around Trump. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
In December 2016, a few weeks after Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, Russian president Vladimir Putin convened what a Russian oligarch described as an “all-hands” meeting with some of his country’s top businessmen. A main topic of discussion: U.S. sanctions against Russia.

One of the oligarchs present was Petr Aven, co-founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest commercial bank. Aven had recently met with with Putin one on one to discuss the sanctions and what to do about them. Putin said he had been struggling to get messages to Trump’s inner circle, and urged Aven to take steps to protect his bank from additional U.S. penalties, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which details the episode. Aven perceived that as an order, not a request, according to Mueller, and understood “that there would be consequences if he did not follow through.”

Aven quickly understood that his mission was to contact the Trump transition team, and began an effort to contact Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Mueller’s nearly 450-page report granularly describes this and related episodes, revealing how Putin explicitly encouraged his country’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen to make contact with Trump’s transition team after the election. The directives help explain the “flurry” of contact the oligarchs made with Trump’s associates in the weeks following the reality TV star’s unexpected victory, Mueller wrote.

Even though Mueller did not establish any conspiracy between Trump’s team and Russia, the special counsel’s report shows how important it was to Putin to establish a backchannel line of communication to Trump’s transition team — and how receptive Trump’s associates were to the overtures.

“As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration,” Mueller’s team wrote in their final report.

Screenshot of the Mueller report
p. 152
In other words, after Trump pulled off his surprise victory in an election marred by Russia’s attempts to sow discord and buoy Trump’s candidacy, Putin wanted to cash in.

The attempts entailed outreaches “sanctioned at high levels of the Russian government, through business rather than political contacts.” Putin’s chief concern, according to Mueller, was getting the incoming Trump administration to roll back the U.S. sanctions hampering the Russian economy.

Among the oligarchs working to make inroads with Trump was Aven, the co-founder of Russia’s biggest private financial institution, Alfa Bank; Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund; and Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian-government owned bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB.

Two of the wealthy moguls succeeded.

Dmitriev was able to get a Putin-approved U.S.-Russia “reconciliation plan” to Kushner, who passed it to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. And Gorkov scored a meeting with Kushner during the transition period to discuss U.S.-Russia relations, according to Mueller.

Andrew Weiss, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia, called the details of this outreach “striking.”

“It wasn’t just, 'we need to build bridges for the sake of future dialogue,'” Weiss told POLITICO. “It was designed to head off further sanctions and, in Dmitriev’s case, to create a blueprint for recasting U.S. relations with Russia.”

And although Aven was rebuffed in his overtures, it was not for a lack of effort. At one point, Aven enlisted an American business associate, Richard Burt, formerly a U.S. ambassador to Germany, to help get through to Kushner.

According to Mueller, Aven told Burt that “someone high in the Russian government” had expressed “interest in establishing a communication channel between the Kremlin and the Trump transition team.”

Burt apparently found Aven’s request odd, but nonetheless approached Dmitri Simes, head of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank founded by Richard Nixon, about setting up a meeting.

But Simes demurred, according to the report, citing the heightened media scrutiny surrounding Russia’s election interference.

Aven then dropped the matter. Putin didn’t.

The report says the Russian president “continued to inquire about Aven's efforts to connect to the Trump Administration in several subsequent quarterly meetings.”

Steve Hall, who served as the CIA’s chief of Russian operations during Barack Obama’s second term, told POLITICO that tasking oligarchs to conduct “hybrid wars and information operations” is par for the course for Putin.

But Hall, a public critic of Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community, said it is “inconceivable” that the oligarchs were Putin’s only method of infiltrating Trump’s inner circle.

“He’s going to rely on all the tools in his toolbox to go after these important targets,” he said.

Indeed, Mueller’s report includes a hefty section detailing the myriad ways Kremlin intermediaries — including fake online personas and others hiding their Moscow links — tried to woo those in and around the unlikely presidential candidate.

But the document did not address one of the most confounding mysteries that lingers from the election.

Alfa Bank, the institution Aven co-founded, had a computer server pinging a Trump Organization server during the 2016 race. The FBI reportedly investigated the pinging and said there could be an innocuous explanation, but never provided a conclusive reason for the server activity.

Still, where Aven failed, Dmitriev seemingly triumphed, using many of the same tactics.

Dmitriev scored meetings with both Erik Prince — an informal Trump campaign and transition team adviser — and a Kushner friend named Rick Gerson. Dmitriev, who Mueller says referred to Putin as his “boss,” worked with Gerson on the reconciliation proposal, implying that Putin had blessed the plan.

The offer apparently involved “jointly fighting terrorism” and “developing ‘win-win’ economic and investment initiatives.”

The Russian machinations portray “both how real that effort was and how much high-level buy-in it had within the Kremlin,” said Weiss. “And the fact that Kushner passed this along to Tillerson suggests that these policies were not a nonstarter — they had the attention of Trump’s senior-most staff.”

Dmitriev’s intermediary to Trump’s team was George Nader, a business associate who worked for the United Arab Emirates’ royal court.

Nader began cooperating with Mueller’s team in March 2018 and was given at least partial immunity for his testimony. Nader told Mueller that Dmitriev pressed him for an introduction to Kushner and Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Dmitriev, Nader said, wanted Nader to convey to the incoming Trump administration that Russia wanted “to start rebuilding the relationship in whatever is a comfortable pace for them.”

According to Mueller, Nader did just that over dinner with Erik Prince in January 2017. Prince then agreed to meet with Dmitriev in the Seychelles later that month.

In an interview with the House Intelligence Committee, however, Prince characterized that meeting as an impromptu encounter during an unrelated business trip. “I didn’t fly there to meet any Russian guy,” he told lawmakers.

He also told Congress that he met Dmitriev by chance at the bar and talked “over a beer.” According to Mueller, however, the two met in Nader’s villa for 30-45 minutes the same day Prince arrived. They met again at a restaurant to discuss Russia’s involvement in Libya.

And then there’s Sergey Gorkov, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned Vnesheconombank.

Gorkov secured a meeting with Kushner in December 2016 through Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, who insisted that Kushner meet “with someone who had a direct line to Putin,” according to Mueller. Kushner told the special counsel that he could not remember them discussing sanctions, and investigators were apparently unable to establish the true nature of their conversation.

The meeting, however, like the others, appears to have had Putin’s blessing.

An investment bank executive who spoke with Gorkov before his trip to New York recalled Gorkov saying that the Russian president had approved of the meeting — and that he would be reporting back to Putin upon his return.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/ ... mp-1282648


Here's an early front runner on collusion in 2020

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Mueller Report: Assange Smeared Seth Rich to Cover for Russians
Julian Assange repeatedly blamed Seth Rich, the murdered DNC staffer, for Russia’s leaks. The Mueller report shows that Assange was lying from the start.

Kevin Poulsen

04.18.19 8:57 PM ET

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photo by Getty
Julian Assange not only knew that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer wasn’t his source for thousands of hacked party emails, he was in active contact with his real sources in Russia’s GRU months after Seth Rich’s death. At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller asserts in his final report on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” the report reads. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have ‘physical proof’ that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

Thursday’s long-anticipated release adds new details about Assange’s interactions with the officers in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate. Still, it leaves one question unanswered: Why was Assange so determined to exonerate the Russian intelligence agents who gave him the material?

As laid out by Mueller, Assange’s involvement in Russia’s election interference began with a June 14, 2016 direct message to WikiLeaks’ Twitter account from “DC Leaks,” one of the false fronts created by the Russians to launder their hacked material.

“You announced your organization was preparing to publish more Hillary's emails,” the message read, according to Mueller’s report. “We are ready to support you. We have some sensitive information too, in particular, her financial documents. Let's do it together. What do you think about publishing our info at the same moment? Thank you.”

A week later, WikiLeaks reached out to a second GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0, and pitched WikiLeaks as the best outlet for the hacked material. On July 14, 2016, GRU officers used a Guccifer 2.0 email address to send WikiLeaks an encrypted one-gigabyte file named “wk dnc link I .txt.gpg.” Assange confirmed receipt, and on July 22 he published 20,000 DNC emails stolen during the GRU’s breach.

By then, it was no secret where the documents came from. The computer security firm CrowdStrike had already published its technical report on the DNC breach, which laid out a trail leading directly to Moscow and the GRU. Analysts at ThreatConnect independently presented evidence that Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks were fictional creations of that agency.


But rather than refuse to comment on his sources, as he’s done in other cases, Assange used his platform to deny that he got the material from Russians, and make statements at an alternative theory. On August 9, 2016, WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed announced a $20,000 reward for “information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.”

For some, the cryptic tweet was their first introduction to a grim and fantastical conspiracy theory rooted in a real-life tragedy that occurred the early morning of July 10, 2016 on a Washington DC sidewalk.

Rich was a 27-year-old DNC staffer when he was gunned down in what police have described as a robbery gone wrong. The unsolved murder timed shortly before Assange’s DNC leaks spoke volumes to inhabitants of the far right wing fringe, where it’s long been an article of faith that Hillary Clinton has her enemies killed.

Assange fanned the flames even higher on August 25, 2016, when he was asked in a television interview, "Why are you so interested in Seth Rich's killer?"

"We're very interested in anything that might be a threat to alleged Wikileaks sources,” Assange answered. “If there's someone who's potentially connected to our publication, and that person has been murdered in suspicious circumstances, it doesn't necessarily mean that the two are connected. But it is a very serious matter .. that type of allegation is very serious, as it's taken very seriously by us."

With Assange behind it, the Seth Rich hoax moved into the almost-mainstream, spawning a quickly-retracted report on Fox News, and a series of “investigations” by Assange ally Sean Hannity. It also wreaked havoc in the lives of Rich’s surviving family, particularly his anguished parents who later begged perpetrators of the charade “to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son's murder.”

Even as he was ruthlessly framing Rich to protect himself, the GRU, or both, Assange was privately communicating with his real sources to arrange the transfer of the second election leak, material the GRU stole from John Podesta’s Gmail account.

The Mueller report quotes from cryptic emails and messages exchanged between WikiLeaks and the GRU accounts in September 2016, and based on metadata, Mueller suspects the transfer occurred on September 19. But the actual transmittal of the massive Podesta haul evidently took place in a channel that Mueller couldn’t crack. The report notes the possibility that, this time, the files were simply carried into the Ecuadorian Embassy by one of Assange’s visitors.

“Both the GRU and WikiLeaks sought to hide their communications, which has limited the Office's ability to collect all of the communications between them,” the report notes. “The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016.”

In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.

WikiLeaks reacted to the Mueller report Thursday with a Trump-like tweet claiming vindication. “WikiLeaks has always been confident that this investigation would vindicate our groundbreaking publishing of the 2016 materials which it has,” the group wrote. Adding a cavieth calling for “full transparency” from the Justice Department.

“We disapprove of the large redactions,” WikiLeaks wrote, “which permit conspiracy theories to abound.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-r ... ref=scroll


Erik Prince financed effort to find Clinton's emails, Mueller report says

Erik Prince, former Navy Seal and founder of private military contractor Blackwater USA, arrives to testify during a closed-door House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, November 30, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
(CNN) — Security contractor Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, helped finance an effort to obtain Hillary Clinton's deleted emails in 2016, according to the publicly released version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report.

The redacted report said the effort was led by Barbara Ledeen, a onetime GOP staffer on Capitol Hill and associate of President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Flynn reached out to Ledeen after Trump privately and repeatedly asked him and other campaign officials to obtain the deleted emails from Clinton's private server, according to the report. This was one of multiple Flynn-linked efforts to get Clinton's emails, another being with GOP operative Peter Smith.

At a July 2016 press conference, Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton's emails, but according to the report, he privately and repeatedly "asked individuals affiliated with his campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails." The report said Flynn told investigators that Trump repeatedly asked him about the emails, and that he in turn tried to get them.

In September 2016, Ledeen claimed to have actually received "a trove of emails" that belonged to Clinton, but wanted to authenticate the emails, the report said. Prince "provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity of the emails," the report said. The analysis determined the emails were not real.

A spokesperson for Prince, Marc Cohen, declined to comment when reached via email by CNN.

Prince and Flynn provided information about these efforts to investigators, according to the footnotes.

A former Navy SEAL, Prince was the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater who entered Trump's orbit during the 2016 campaign. He later became the subject of press reports and congressional inquiry over a meeting he had with a Russian banker in the Seychelles, an island chain in the Indian Ocean. Since Trump took office, Prince has floated the US reorganizing its war efforts in Afghanistan with a focus on using private sector forces and pitched a private network of intelligence contractors, according to previous CNN reporting.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/18/politics ... index.html



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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:23 am

I'm happy I could offer a laugh.

For the life of me, I can't understand what the steady smearing of political prisoner Assange by supposed anti-authoritarians does for the cause of humanity...
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:30 am

this is what I was laughing about I would appreciate it if you would stop that...why you always do that I can not figure out..why do you have to be so dishonest?

RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:00 am wrote:The IRA sounds much like the CIA-funded "pro-democracy NGOs" operating in Russia against its government.




Alexa O'Brien


WikiLeaks direct message chat log published about by @Intercept in Mueller report. p. 44
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Muller report cites direct messages in regard to 2015 WikiLeaks effort to catalog Hillary Clinton emails released by Freedom of Information Act requests and associated litigation

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Importante! (kidding) Use of the term staged is very important here. Suggests theory that the material was transferred in this manner for the benefit of U.S.I.C. and/or law enforcement and other methods of transfer occurred.

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And, here it is !! alongside a footnote cited to the excellent reporting of @nakashimae in regard to Andy Mueller Maguhn, the USIC thinks he may have been involved in the transfer of the stolen documents.

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So, I have a theory in April of 2016, WikiLeaks was desperate for staff, and the organization was running around trying to hire people, which in hindsight has left me curious as to why.

So, according to my timeline sometime in the weeks or month (not more than two months) before early April 2016, WikiLeaks associates express needs to hire staff, b/c 1.) unexpected staff departures, 2.) need to deal w/ copious and/or expected submissions. This is followed up

with concrete in the first week of April 2016. What is interesting to me is 1.) need for new staff appears have been unexpected 2.) It fits within the time frame of the March and April 2016 hacks. As yet, only indicators, but ones I am monitoring closely.

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*with concrete should read more concretely above*

However, it should also be noted here in the matrix that WikiLeaks submission system reportedly was functioning at this time. (At present, it's not). Will note as well in terms of timeline the submission system, it reportedly became available in May 2015 again, after a hiatus.

So, perhaps the organization was being inundated with submissions during this period and exacerbated by in early Spring 2016 by staff departures.

Beginning in mid-March 2016 Unit 26165 had primary responsibility for DCCC and DNC hacks, as well as HRC associates.

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p. 38

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p. 41, footnote 137 (cited to Netyksho indictment). *At least* as early as April 19, 2016, GRU began planning releases.

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p. 43 referring to GRU March 2016 theft of HRC campaign volunteer, footnotes cite emails from Guccifer 2 claiming DCLeaks was a "WikiLeaks sub plot"

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Still going thru, but noisy stuff by WikiLeaks should always give pause in re possibility of deception/distraction, IMO. E.g. I am thinking of reported, known, or admitted tactics in re Edward Snowden (like, purchasing multiple plane tickets) contacting folks on

in unencrypted communications regarding knowledge or lack thereof-- in attempts to divert attention/or distract from actual plans. Shorter: as an analyst, one has to also account for possibilities of deception/distraction.

This skepticism should also be applied to any material reportedly released by intel or security services allied to foreign governments, e.g. Rafael Correa (here I am thinking of the visitor logs the Guardian reported). I am not at all discrediting those, just admitting that

the players and subjects are foreign states and professionals (including professional spies).

So to circle back to questions: Why was WikiLeaks noisily (and in what appears to have been exasperated) attempts to hire staff in weeks (no more than two months) into early April 2016 (as far as I can tell)?

The other question I ask myself, that sort of rounds out what I am trying to say above is: Were any of WikiLeaks attributed comms or GRU attributed comms including technical transfers to WL in any way "staged" for the benefit of expected audience(s)?

I am noting here for myself that the Mueller report describes WikiLeaks intentions in re 2016 election by citing a November of 2015 comment attributed to WikiLeaks about its archive of FOIA material of HRC emails. 2015 is in play too.

Correcting last tweet. So the comment in November 2015 is about intentions in re HRC, and THEN he notes the publication of the FOIA material in March 2016 by the organization. 2015 in play.

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Also, want to note that the Andy Mueller Maguhn report in the Washington Post, could work as a public reporting easily citable (sort of a de facto substitution for others associated within WL) who Mueller has not ruled out could have transferred the material by other means.

§ III of the report deals with WikiLeaks related material. The redactions in this section are as follows: Under A. "GRU Hacking Directed at Clinton Campaign" Redacted harm to an ongoing matter relates to Trump Campaign ongoing interest and contact with WL.

Still in § III B. 2. "Guccifer 2.0" REDACTED harm to an ongoing manner relates to GRU contact with former Trump Campaign member. Under D. "Trump Campaign and the Dissemination of Hacked Material" entire description is redacted harm to ongoing matter.

Still under D. Subsection 1 has its title completely redacted as a harm to ongoing matter. Under 1. b. the redacted harm to ongoing matter concerns Gates, Manafort, and Cohen. Under 1. c. the redacted harm to ongoing matter concerns Corsi, Assange, Malloch

Still under D. Subsection d. "WikiLeaks's October 7, 2016 Release of Stolen Pedestal Emails" the redacted material is harm to ongoing matter that relates to Corsi. Conclusions and the structure of this section to compare with V "Prosecution and Declination Decisions"

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V. Prosecution and Declination Decisions
B. Russian Hacking and Dumping Operations


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Barr letter ruled out Trump and campaign, but did not rule out U.S. persons in regard to the election effort-- and as the redactions listed above list indicate those sections concern Trump campaign and the U.S. persons.

Based on Section III structure, starting on page 174 Section V prosecution and declinations deals with hacking and dissemination in regard to the Democratic Party. The SC discusses prosecution of Russian hackers 1030 conspiracy.

Redacted under subsection 1 pertains to ongoing matter likely concerning hacking. Then, there is a discussion under subsection b (largely redacted) in re ongoing matter likely concerning dissemination b/c footnote SC declined to use the National Stolen Property Act.

Cannot rule out other charging decisions were/were not made, tho. In section 2 on potential violations of 1030, redacted material related to private persons, prosecutions of *potential* 1030 violations were declined.
https://twitter.com/alexadobrien/status ... 7298238464
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:50 am

seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 19, 2019 3:30 pm wrote:this is what I was laughing about I would appreciate it if you would stop that...why you always do that I can not figure out..why do you have to be so dishonest?

RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:00 am wrote:The IRA sounds much like the CIA-funded "pro-democracy NGOs" operating in Russia against its government.


Huh, you lost me there. To my own knowledge, I am not dishonest here.
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