First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Russia

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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:13 pm

The Consul » Sun Dec 17, 2017 3:41 pm wrote:If the world were in perfect balance, Vladimir Putin would publicly declare his hope that Mueller release those 50,000 Trump Transition memos he obtained from the GSA.



Mueller did not go through proper procedure....Putin.....Wikileaks.....Mueller



“When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process

http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... ion-emails



try firing me while I am holding all these emails..... :P
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:37 pm

@weareoversight already collated and FLAGGED http://ptt.gov emails where Gen Flynn requested secure & encrypted cell phones.
Once again Trump proving he is beyond inept.
Pardon me while I go write them a fat check
check it out & don’t retweet this


the Hackers were told @realDonaldTrump et all were OFF LIMITS
Why didn’t the MSM Report this?
it’s right here in the emails
These folks in Trumpland had their info hacked “and are susceptible to blackmail” 2012-2016
Boy oh boy MSM
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More
Oh HIYA 3,700+ http://ppt.gov emails obtained, albeit LAWFULLY via FOIA
Can we give a YUGE shout out to @weareoversight for submitting FOIA request earlier this year re @realDonaldTrump @TrumpDC GSA contract
*cough* $5M liens on his hotel
https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... ndence.pdf
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PUBLISH DATE: DECEMBER 17, 2017
TRUMP TRANSITION GSA EMAILS AND MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING
American Oversight sued the General Services Administration to force the release of several thousand pages of email correspondence between the Trump transition team and the GSA, as well as the memorandum of understanding signed between the GSA and the transition, as part of our investigation into President Trump’s profits from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC.

Memorandum of Understanding

Memorandum outlining the agreement between the GSA and the Trump transition team. GSA provides office space and technical services to the incoming president and their staff to facilitate the transition to the new administration. The MOU includes several redactions which American Oversight plans to challenge in court. [View on DocumentCloud: Trump Transition MOU]


Transition Team Emails with GSA


GSA provided roughly 3,700 pages of emails in response to American Oversight’s Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit seeking records of communications with the Trump transition team. Select emails are highlighted below. [View on DocumentCloud: Trump Transition GSA Emails]

REQUEST FOR SECURE PHONES (p. 2268)

Email thread regarding a request by the transition team for secure mobile phones -- including a specific request by Michael Flynn for a phone that would allow him to discuss classified information. These emails were sent only a few days before Jared Kushner and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak discussed the possibility of using Russian embassy systems to have a "secure" conversation regarding Syria.
View entire document on DocumentCloud
FLYNN PUSHING FOR UNCLASSIFIED BRIEFING (p. 2226)

Emails between officials with the GSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicate that Michael Flynn was pushing for transition staff to receive an unclassified cybersecurity briefing.
View entire document on DocumentCloud
MEDIA INQUIRY: ACCOUNT INFORMATION HACKING (p. 2842)

Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom contacted the transition team seeking comment on a story reporting that email addresses and passwords for a number of senior Trump officials had been posted online by hackers.
View entire document on DocumentCloud
TALKING POINTS: CYBERSECURITY & DEVICES (p. 2793)

Email to Trump transition team staff including talking points on the importance of switching to government-owned devices (rather than personal cell phones) to counter an increased cybersecurity threat.
View entire document on DocumentCloud
American Oversight has filed over 20 lawsuits and more than 500 Freedom of Information Act requests to force the Trump administration to release documents including Attorney General Sessions’ SF-86 clearance form, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s detailed calendars, and thousands of pages of secret health care negotiations between the administration and Congress.
https://www.americanoversight.org/trump ... ails#flynn
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:53 pm

Why Republicans Launched the GSA Email Attack Now

empty wheel

December 18, 2017

I think most people are missing the significance of why the Republicans launched their attack on the GSA over the weekend (this post is a summary of what we know, with updates).

That’s true, in part, because people are misunderstanding what the Trump for America team recently learned. It’s not — as many have claimed — that they only recently learned Mueller had emails beyond what TFA had turned over to Congress and through that to Mueller. As Axios reported, “Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.” That is, Mueller has been asking questions based off these emails for months.

The timing of this complaint — not the complaint itself — is key

What TFA only discovered last week, according to their letter, at least, is how Mueller obtained them — by asking, just like prosecutors reviewing government communications in the course of investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act always do, especially if the subjects of the investigation have access to classified documents.

We discovered the unauthorized disclosures by the GSA on December 12 and 13, 2017. When we learned that the Special Counsel’s Office had received certain laptops and cell phones containing privileged materials, we initially raised our concerns with Brandon Van Grack in the Special Counsel’s Office on December 12, 2017. Mr. Van Grack confirmed that the Special Counsel’s Office had obtained certain laptops, cell phones, and at least one iPad from the GSA – but he assured us that the Special Counsel’s investigation did not recover any emails or other relevant data from that hardware. During this exchange, Mr. Van Grack failed to disclose the critical fact that undercut the importance of his representations, namely, that the Special Counsel’s Office had simultaneously received from the GSA tens of thousands of emails, including a very significant volume of privileged material, and that the Special Counsel’s Office was actively using those materials without any notice to TFA.1 Mr. Van Grack also declined to inform us of the identities of the 13 individuals whose materials were at issue.

The government has great leeway to access government communications, as Peter Strzok, the former counterintelligence FBI Agent who just had his own communications leaked and then released to the world, would probably be all too happy to tell you. All the more so given allegations that files went missing from the Transition SCIF, just as Jared Kushner was talking about back channel communications with the Russians.

So what’s new is not that Mueller had the emails (about which no one has complained before). But that he obtained the email inboxes of 13 people, including Jared, from GSA without letting the Transition do their own review of what to turn over.

Trump’s team may face obstruction charges

As I made clear here, it appears that one reason the Trump people are so angry is that Mueller has probably caught them failing to turn over emails that are absolutely material to the investigation, such as KT McFarland’s “Thrown election” email. Whoever did these document reviews may now be exposed to obstruction charges for withholding such material, which in turn would give Mueller leverage over them for their own further cooperation.

[Update: I should have said, withholding emails will only be a problem if the Transition was otherwise obligated (say, by subpoena) to turn them over. Mueller did subpoena the campaign for a similar set of emails; but since he didn’t need to from GSA, he may not have here.]

Mueller has far more damning information on Jared than Trump’s folks expected

Just as importantly, Axios explicitly said the emails include Jared Kushner’s emails (indeed, given his public claims about how many people he spoke to during the transition, I wouldn’t be surprised if his was the email box that had 7,000 emails).

As I have shown, Jared has been approaching disclosure issues (at least with Congress) very narrowly, ignoring clear requests to turn over his discussions about the topic of the investigation, and not just with the targets of it. If Mueller obtained all his emails, he’d have those “about” emails that Jared purposely and contemptuously has withheld from others.

We know that Jared is a key interim Mueller target here (and Abbe Lowell’s search for a crisis communications firm to help sure suggests Jared’s defense team knows that too). We know he felt the need to explain how he went from responding to a personalized Vladimir Putin congratulatory email on November 9 to asking his Dmitri Simes for Sergei Kislyak’s name.

Take, for example, the public statement prepared for testimony to congressional committees by the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner. There, he revealed that on the day after the election, in response to a congratulatory email from Russian President Vladimir Putin, he asked the publisher of The National Interest, Dimitri Simes, for the name of Russia’s ambassador to the United States. “On November 9, the day after the election, I could not even remember the name of the Russian ambassador,” Kushner claimed. “When the campaign received an email purporting to be an official note of congratulations from President Putin, I was asked how we could verify it was real. To do so, I thought the best way would be to ask the only contact I recalled meeting from the Russian government, which was the ambassador I had met months earlier, so I sent an email asking Mr. Simes, ‘What is the name of the Russian ambassador?’”

We also know that Mueller’s team has expressed some skepticism about Kushner’s previous public claims — and I would bet money this includes that email.

CNN recently reported, however, that in an interview conducted in the weeks before Flynn’s plea deal, “Mueller’s team asked Kushner to clear up some questions he was asked by lawmakers and details that emerged through media reports.” So Mueller’s team may now have doubts about the explanation Kushner offered for his interest in speaking with Kislyak as one of the first things he did after his father-in-law got elected.

If Mueller has all Jared’s emails and those emails disclose far more about the negotiations with all foreign powers conducted during the transition (including with Bibi Netanyahu on settlements, but obviously also with Russia), and Trump’s people recognize those emails expose Jared to serious charges, then of course they’re going to complain now, as the expectation that Mueller might soon indict Kushner grows.

Mueller has an outline of places where Trump was personally involved

Most importantly, consider what those morons laid out: they want to claim that these emails from the transition period — emails they insist were not government emails — are protected by Executive Privilege.

The legal claim is ridiculous; as I and far smarter people have noted, you don’t get Executive Privilege until you become the actual Executive on inauguration day.

But that they made the claim is telling (and really fucking stupid).

Because that tells us which emails Trump officials believe involve communications directly with Trump. The KT McFarland email, which we know was written from Mar-a-Lago, is a case in point. Did they withhold that because they believe it reflects a conversation with Trump? If so, then we know that Trump was personally involved in the orders to Mike Flynn to ask the Russians to hold off on retaliating for Obama’s sanctions. It might even mean that the language attributed to McFarland — about Russia being the key that unlocks doors, efforts to “discredit[] Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference, “thrown elections,” and Obama boxing Trump in — is actually Trump’s own language. Indeed, it does sound like stuff he says all the time.

And given that the emails include “speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes,” it might even reflect Trump’s own explanations of why — for example — he couldn’t nominate Flynn to be CIA Director because of his ties to Russia and Turkey.

In the wake of his plea agreement, Flynn’s surrogate made it clear that Trump ordered him to carry out certain actions, especially with Russia. That’s likely a big reason why, in the wake of the Flynn plea, Trump’s people are now squawking that Mueller obtained these emails, emails that may lay out those orders.

Heck. These emails might even reflect Trump ordering Flynn to lie about his outreach to Russia.

Maybe that’s why Trump’s aides have promised to demand Mueller return the emails in question.

All of which is to say, there are things about these emails that explain why this attack is coming now, beyond just a generalized effort to discredit Mueller. The attack is designed to discredit specific avenues of investigation Mueller clearly has in hand. And those avenues reveal far more about the seriousness of the investigation than anything Ty Cobb is willing to claim to appease the President.

That said, the attack is probably too little, too late.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/12/18/w ... ttack-now/



This book gets to the heart of the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Russia is reshaping the world order to its advantage; this is something that should trouble us all.



THE TRUTH IS COMING: 10 TO PUBLISH LUKE HARDING’S EXPOSÉ ON THE RUSSIA–TRUMP SCANDAL AROUND THE GLOBE
November 6, 2017
Image
We're finally able to share that ten publishers are set to publish Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House by award-winning journalist Luke Harding simultaneously, on 16 November, including Guardian Faber and Vintage in the US.

In December 2016 Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect’s connections with Russia. Harding decides to follow the money and the sex. In Washington, January 2017, Steele’s explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been ‘cultivating, supporting and assisting’ Trump for years and that they have compromising information about him. Trump responds on Twitter, ‘FAKE NEWS’.

Collusion is a gripping, alarming exposé about the biggest political scandal of the modern era, in which Harding reveals the true nature of Trump’s decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of Steele’s dossier.

Drawing on exclusive new material and key sources from the intelligence community, Harding tells an astonishing story of offshore money, sketchy real-estate deals, a Miss Universe Pageant, mobsters, money laundering, hacking and Kremlin espionage. He shines a light on powerful Russian players like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have come from Vladimir Putin himself. Collusion is up-to-date to the minute, including last week’s indictment of campaign manager, Paul Manafort, which threatens to engulf Trump’s administration.

This book gets to the heart of the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Russia is reshaping the world order to its advantage; this is something that should trouble us all.

Laura Hassan, said: ‘Harding’s book is the first to unravel the truth of the Steele dossier and it is a zippy, riveting, up-to-the-minute overview of the momentous events of the past year. This this an invaluable read for anyone seeking to understand the Trump-Russia scandal.’

Collusion will be published simultaneously by Vintage (USA), Into Kustannus (Finland), Flammarion (France), Penguin Random House Germany, Nieuw Amsterdam (Holland), Mondadori (Italy), Penguin Random House Spain, Bonniers (Sweden) and Forlaget Press (Norway). Foreign rights are handled by Susanna Lea Associates.

Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize). Two of Harding’s books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.
http://www.davidgodwinassociates.com/bl ... mp-scandal
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:56 pm

EVIDENCE ....YOU WERE WARNED!

Here’s where this additional fact becomes interesting. Let’s say it was just that: all these things were happening but Trump and his inner circle didn’t realize it was a problem. Okay, so far so good. Having received this warning, though, you would imagine someone might have said: “Wow, I sure hope these counter-intelligence guys don’t think our Russian friends who totally aren’t spies are spies. Maybe I should ring up that CI guy from the Bureau who told us to keep an eye out.” Or perhaps, “Man, we’ve sure got a lot of Russian friends we’ve met during the campaign. And that’s because we’re awesome. But I guess these FBI guys are really suspicious. So maybe I’ll just mention it so there’s no misunderstanding.”



FBI warned Trump in 2016 Russians would try to infiltrate his campaign

by Ken Dilanian, Julia Ainsley and Carol E. LeeDec 18 2017, 1:47 pm ET

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after he became the Republican nominee on July 19, 2016, Donald Trump was warned that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his campaign, according to multiple government officials familiar with the matter.

The warning came in the form of a high-level counterintelligence briefing by senior FBI officials, the officials said. A similar briefing was given to Hillary Clinton, they added. They said the briefings, which are commonly provided to presidential nominees, were designed to educate the candidates and their top aides about potential threats from foreign spies.

The candidates were urged to alert the FBI about any suspicious overtures to their campaigns, the officials said.

The Clinton campaign didn't respond to a request for comment.

The briefings were led by counterintelligence specialists from the FBI, the sources said. They were timed to occur around the period when the candidates began receiving classified intelligence, the officials said, which put them at greater risk for being targeted by foreign spies. Trump's first intelligence briefing as Republican nominee was Aug. 17, 2016, sources told NBC News at the time.

Trump was "briefed and warned" at the session about potential espionage threats from Russia, two former law enforcement officials familiar with the sessions told NBC News. A source close to the White House said their position is that Trump was unaware of the contacts between his campaign and Russians.

"That the Republican and Democrat nominee for president received a standardized briefing on counterintelligence is hardly a news story," said Raj Shah, a White House spokesman. "That NBC News hears about the contents of this classified conversation due to an inappropriate leak is a news story."

Image: Donald Trump
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Thursday, July 21, 2016. Carolyn Kaster / AP file
It's unclear whether the warning about Russia was passed on to other campaign officials.

Still, the revelation that the Trump campaign was warned about spying threats from Russia and other adversaries, which has not been previously reported, casts a new light on the Trump campaign's dealings with Russians in the months before the November election.

As a former senator and secretary of state, Clinton would have been familiar with counterintelligence briefings, having already held a top-level security clearance. Trump, who was in his first political campaign, may have been hearing some of the information for the first time.

Trump would have been told, "If you see these kinds of contacts please let us know about them so we can keep you updated on the threat picture," said Frank Montoya, a former FBI counterintelligence agent and supervisor who retired in 2016.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the FBI had already become aware of contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russia, and was beginning to investigate further. Former CIA Director John Brennan has said he told the FBI about a pattern of contacts the CIA observed between members of the Trump team and Russians, and former FBI Director James Comey said the bureau then began investigating in July 2016.

Montoya and other former FBI officials told NBC News the FBI would not have wanted to compromise that investigation by saying too much in the counterintelligence briefing of Trump.

By the time of the warning in late July or August, at least seven Trump campaign officials had been in contact with Russians or people linked to Russia, according to public reports. There is no public evidence that the campaign reported any of that to the FBI.

Image: Donald Trump
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Thursday, July 21, 2016. Evan Vucci / AP file
After the FBI warning, the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., exchanged Twitter messages in September with Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community publicly accused in October of acting as an agent in Russia's covert operation to interfere in the election.

For example, on Sept. 20, WikiLeaks wrote to Trump Jr. that "a PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch," according to messages first published by the Atlantic magazine. "The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is 'putintrump.' See 'About' for who is behind it. Any comments?"

The next morning, the Atlantic reported, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. "Off the record I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around. Thanks."

Trump Jr.'s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, did not dispute the Atlantic's reporting.

That same month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator running the Trump campaign's foreign policy operation, met with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in his Senate office -- a meeting he failed to disclose during his confirmation hearing. (Sessions said he routinely met with foreign officials as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)

"If I give you a defensive briefing and the illicit behavior continues, I'm not going to just scratch my head over that, especially if I see continued interference," Montoya said. "If we're telling these guys stuff and they are not acting on it, then we're going to keep that as evidence."

Frank Figliuzzi, a former head of FBI counterintelligence and an NBC News analyst, said counterintelligence briefings "provide an opportunity for investigative subjects to be transparent with the bureau and to come back if such contacts are occurring because of admonishments by the bureau."

If they fail to do that, he said, "a couple of factors could be at play: They didn't spread the message to the rest of the team or there is some form of guilty conscience that prohibits them."

The Trump team had contacts with Russians throughout the campaign.

In May 2016, Trump Jr. met at a National Rifle Association dinner with a Russian central banker with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin who had previously contacted the campaign saying he wanted to pass on a message from the Russian president to Trump.

Also in May, Trump was told by campaign aide George Papadopoulos that he had connections with people who could facilitate a meeting between the candidate and Putin, according to a court filing. Papadopoulos had met with a London-based professor two weeks earlier who claimed to have connections to Russian officials, according to court documents.

In June 2016, Trump Jr. hosted a meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin, and a Russian-American lobbyist. Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner also sat in. An email to Trump Jr. setting up the meeting promised incriminating information about Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign.

In July 2016, Manafort sent an email offering a private briefing on the Trump campaign to his former business partner, a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.

Manafort left the campaign Aug. 19, two days after Trump's first intelligence briefing.

It's unclear whether the FBI gave any other counterintelligence warnings to the Trump team before the election.

In September 2017, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked the FBI whether it ever briefed or warned Trump campaign officials about alleged attempts by the Russian government to infiltrate the campaign.

"The FBI has reportedly given `defensive briefings' during previous presidential campaigns to warn candidates and campaign staff of potential foreign influence and counterintelligence concerns," Grassley's office said in a statement. "Such warnings allow unwitting organizations and individuals to take defensive actions to protect themselves."

After Trump took office, The New York Times reported that the FBI warned Hope Hicks, Trump's communications director, about what they deemed suspicious emails from Russians.

Senior F.B.I. counterintelligence agents met with Hicks in the White House Situation Room at least twice, gave her the names of the Russians who had contacted her, and said that they were not who they claimed to be, The Times reported.

The Times said there is no evidence that Hicks did anything improper, but that intelligence officials became alarmed by introductory emails that she received from Russian government addresses in the weeks after Trump's election.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fb ... gn-n830596



Trump Was Warned and What To Think About That
By JOSH MARSHALL Published DECEMBER 18, 2017 4:47 PM

Let me share a few thoughts about this news that during the campaign candidate Trump was warned to be on the lookout for foreign governments, including Russia, trying to infiltrate his campaign. If he saw anything suspicious, he was warned he should bring it to the FBI.

We can note a few caveats to this news. Hillary Clinton was apparently given the same briefing. And this is apparently a standard friendly heads up the FBI’s counter-intelligence officers give new candidates as they begin to receive classified intelligence briefings after the national conventions. So we cannot, on the basis of this report, say that the FBI was already so worried about Russian infiltration of Trump’s campaign that it thought it was necessary to give him a warning.

But there are a couple things I think we can say.

The first is the most obvious. According to this report and all other reporting on the Russia probe, no one from the Trump campaign ever reported any suspicious contacts to the FBI. The campaign itself. Not the candidate. Not any staffer for the campaign acting in some quasi-whistleblower capacity. No one. The point of these warnings isn’t to tell nominees they shouldn’t ally themselves with a foreign power. Presumably they aren’t planning on doing that. But in the nature of the American presidential system, a nominee will often be someone with little or even no real experience dealing with classified information or knowing what attempted intelligence operations might look like. So it is a general heads up to be cautious.

As we have learned more and more over these last months about the Trump team’s numerous contacts with Russian nationals and government or intelligence officials, the key defense has always been that president-ing wasn’t their background. So if it looks fishy it was really just that they were naive or inexperienced.

Here’s where this additional fact becomes interesting. Let’s say it was just that: all these things were happening but Trump and his inner circle didn’t realize it was a problem. Okay, so far so good. Having received this warning, though, you would imagine someone might have said: “Wow, I sure hope these counter-intelligence guys don’t think our Russian friends who totally aren’t spies are spies. Maybe I should ring up that CI guy from the Bureau who told us to keep an eye out.” Or perhaps, “Man, we’ve sure got a lot of Russian friends we’ve met during the campaign. And that’s because we’re awesome. But I guess these FBI guys are really suspicious. So maybe I’ll just mention it so there’s no misunderstanding.”

It certainly seems like that thought did not occur to anyone. Not Trump. Not whoever else on his campaign was briefed. Not anyone he shared the warning with, if he did share it. (It’s not clear from the article whether it was Trump alone who was warned or Trump and some top advisors.) I think that tells us what we should already know: that Trump and his top advisors knew they were doing something wrong, even if it might not have gone so far as ‘collusion’. This just makes it all the more clear.

The second is one of the things that fascinates me the most about this whole story. As I’ve written earlier, FBI and FBI counter-intelligence knew that Trump had at least troubling ties to Russian organized crime, money-laundering and possibly intelligence operators long before the campaign. Long before. Some day I think we will read fascinating accounts of what CIA and FBI counter-intelligence officers thought as they watched Trump move closer and closer to the presidency. A lot of these weird ties really didn’t matter that much as long as Trump was a has-been real estate developer and a TV star. They would matter a whole lot if he became President.

But this warning didn’t come in a vacuum, even in the tighter chronology of the campaign itself. The report about this warning says it came in late July or early August. It was July 27th when Trump made his notorious public request for Russia to hack and release more of Hillary Clinton’s emails. So that bizarre statement might have come just after or just before that heads up. Wow.

So on the one hand, the FBI counter-intelligence officers were giving these standard, good-faith warnings. On the other, they already knew that Trump had made one of his five foreign policy advisors a man who the FBI had already put under FISA surveillance because they believed it was likely he’d been recruited as a Russian asset. In other words, it probably looked like there was a good chance Trump’s campaign had already been infiltrated just on the basis of Carter Page’s role. At least some of what we know now – some of the contacts, some of the signals or human intelligence about Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign – they already knew then. So either just after or just before this warning he’s out in public inviting foreign intelligence assistance to his campaign. Of course it didn’t stop there. Both publicly and much more clandestinely Trump continued seeking out Russian assistance, friendship, understandings.

At some level I have to imagine that the people at the FBI charged with monitoring this stuff genuinely did not know what to make of it. They’re probably trained to assist people who are naive but acting in good faith. They’re probably trained to catch people who are acting clandestinely. But what about someone who is doing the latter, getting warned and also simultaneously flaunting what he and his aides are doing? All in real time? What were they to make of that? Going forward into the late campaign and the transition the contacts became much more sustained and in-depth.

This backdrop, this knowledge that something was happening, while also needing to began briefing candidate Trump and watching him say things on the campaign trail that were a lot like what a Russian asset would say … well, I really want to understand that story from their perspective.

For our present purposes, I think this news is not terribly surprising. It makes sense that such a heads-up would happen. It simply gives us more reason to believe what we largely already know: that Trump and his top advisors knew that they were doing something wrong. And since they knew it was wrong they worked hard to keep it secret and hidden. Just not that hidden and not that secret. Because after all, for most of them, it was their first time colluding.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 19, 2017 10:58 am

More signs of guilt: Trump’s campaign was warned about Russia, and said nothing

In the summer of 2016, the FBI was already investigating “pervasive connections” between Trump and the Russians

On Monday, NBC News reported that sometime after Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president on July 19, 2016, FBI officials delivered him a top-level counterintelligence briefing in which they warned him that Russians were trying to infiltrate the campaign. They asked that the campaign report any contacts or suspicious activity to the bureau. The exact date of this meeting is unclear, but it is assumed to have happened around the time both general election campaigns were receiving their first classified briefings around the middle of August.

It is apparently standard to brief presidential campaigns about the possibility of such threats, but in this case there was a highly specific one. And it was likely explained in some pretty stark terms, since Trump was new to classified briefings and the FBI knew at this point that the Russians had hacked into the Democratic National Committee's computer system and were behind the WikiLeaks releases that Trump touted on the campaign trail every day.

In fact, a month or so later when Trump met Clinton for the presidential debates and repeatedly claimed that "nobody knew" who had hacked the DNC, saying it might have even been "some guy in his bed who weighs 400 pounds," the intelligence community was appalled:

A senior U.S. intelligence official assured NBC News that cybersecurity and the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election have been briefed to, and discussed extensively with, both parties’ candidates, surrogates and leadership, since mid-August. "To profess not to know at this point is willful misrepresentation,” said the official. “The intelligence community has walked a very thin line in not taking sides, but both candidates have all the information they need to be crystal clear."
https://www.salon.com/2017/12/19/more-s ... d-nothing/


Trump team’s meeting with Mueller’s office poised to ratchet up tensions

President Trump has expressed optimism that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will soon end his focus on the White House, according to associates. (Evan Vucci/AP)
By Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig December 18 at 8:15 PM
White House lawyers are expected to meet with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office late this week seeking good news: that his sprawling investigation’s focus on President Trump will soon end and their client will be cleared.

But people familiar with the probe say that such assurances are unlikely and that the meeting could trigger a new, more contentious phase between the special counsel and a frustrated president, according to administration officials and advisers close to Trump.

People with knowledge of the investigation said it could last at least another year — pointing to ongoing cooperation from witnesses such...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... df4bf9848d
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby SonicG » Wed Dec 20, 2017 1:16 am

This is something...
THE FBI ROUTINELY ABUSES ITS POWERS BUT THE TRUMP INVESTIGATION HAS BEEN BY THE BOOK
“THE FBI HAS become America’s secret police.”

Gregg Jarrett was just getting started. It was December 6, and the Fox News legal analyst was a guest on Sean Hannity’s show. They were kicking off what would become the newest right-wing talking points about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment, and threats,” Jarrett continued. “It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night, banging through your door.”

“By the way, this not a game,” Hannity interjected. “This is not hyperbole you’re using here.”

“No. Ask Paul Manafort,” Jarrett replied, referring to the FBI’s search of the former Trump campaign manager’s home. “They came for him and broke through his front door.”

“And if it can happen to him, Gregg,” Hannity offered.

“It can happen to all of us,” Jarrett continued. “Absolutely.”

This message — that the FBI is overly aggressive and politically motivated — is cropping up again and again on Fox News, bellowed by right-wing pundits and elected officials like Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. A Fox commentator, Todd Starnes, even asked point-blank, “Was the FBI weaponized to take down the Trump presidency?” A chyron on the network was yet more succinct: “A coup in America?”

All of this carries forward the rhetoric of a president who has tweeted insults at the FBI since his election. On December 3, for example, Trump tweeted that the FBI’s “reputation is in Tatters — worst in History!” In his latest burst in the past week, Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, “It’s a shame what’s happened to the FBI.” The context is quite obvious: The president and his supporters are worried that Mueller, a former FBI director, will find reasons for impeachment, and they’re on the attack to undermine the credibility of the FBI and the special counsel.

Right-wing media and politicians aren’t entirely wrong about the FBI. It is a secret police that bangs down people’s doors, follows Americans, intercepts digital communications, digs through trash, and harasses and threatens potential informants or targets of criminal investigations. In fact, civil rights activists and left-wing groups have been complaining about this for more than 50 years. And since the 9/11 attacks, Muslims in the United States have been subjected to an unprecedented level of intrusive surveillance. A common joke in mosques around the country: “Whenever I pray on Friday, I just assume the man next to me is an FBI informant.”

While it’s entirely true that the FBI has few checks on its power, right-wing media did not rouse itself until allegations emerged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence agents. What’s amusing about the right’s sudden anti-FBI hysteria is that little evidence suggests Mueller’s investigation has been anything but by the book.

Let’s review some of the evidence of this so-called FBI coup.
...
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/19/fbi ... n-mueller/
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:50 pm

on the Senate floor......people are watching trump very closely this weekend

ABC News Politics‏Verified account
@ABCPolitics
8m8 minutes ago
More
.@MarkWarner: "Any attempt by this president to remove special counsel Mueller from his position or to pardon key witnesses...would be a gross abuse of power and a flagrant violation of executive branch responsibilities and authorities. These truly are red lines."

"Many of the same people who are attacking him today praised Mr. Mueller's appointment just months ago."

Citing Comey, Wray, Rosenstein, Mueller and Sessions, @MarkWarner says, "All of the major players to date in this investigation...are Republicans."




what does he know?



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM_dr4942X8



Wall Street Journal Killed Editorial on Trump’s Mob Ties

Jonathan Chait@jonathanchaitDecember 20, 2017 12:22 pm

Wall Street Journal editorial page editor and vice-president Paul Gigot. Photo: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images
In a short period of time, five staffers have departed The Wall Street Journal editorial page. The general cause of their departures, willing and otherwise, is known: the Journal editorial line has increasingly conformed with the pro-Trump dictates of the rest of the Murdoch media empire. (Most recently, Journal editorials, which once presented Ken Starr as the last hope to preserve the rule of law, have fomented various right-wing conspiracy theories about Robert Mueller and called for his firing.)

Sam Tanenhaus, deep into his excellent story on the dwindling band of anti-Trump conservative intellectuals, reports more specifically on the circumstances surrounding their departure. As Trump’s chances of winning the nomination grew, the paper buried an editorial highlighting his underworld connections:

Those were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors, was the Journal’s skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win. Several sources pointed to the editorials by one writer, James Freeman. “All-in for Ted Cruz” during the primaries, Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.”

(Trump’s Mafia connections are the sort of scandal that would have killed an ordinary candidacy but barely even register on the outsize scale of Trump scandals.)

To be sure, the Journal has continued to voice occasional criticisms of the president. But the chidings have been gentle, and reserved for the sources of frustration shared by Trump’s own staff and legislative allies: He tweets too much, he expresses his racism a little too bluntly. On the subject of the president’s authoritarianism and contempt for governing norms, the Journal now runs interference with the same gusto as Fox News.

The Journal editorial page is famously close to Paul Ryan, and generally reflects the priorities and interests of the Republican Party’s ruling money wing. Its complete submission to Trump is perfectly emblematic of the choice the party has made.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... rebutton-b
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:16 pm

House Republicans quietly investigate perceived corruption at DOJ, FBI

The group was born out of frustration over the Justice Department's refusal to explain how it used a disputed dossier.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOHN BRESNAHAN12/20/2017 06:34 PM EST
A group of House Republicans has gathered secretly for weeks in the Capitol in an effort to build a case that senior leaders of the Justice Department and FBI improperly — and perhaps criminally — mishandled the contents of a dossier that describes alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, according to four people familiar with their plans.

A subset of the Republican members of the House intelligence committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes of California, has been quietly working parallel to the committee's high-profile inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. They haven't informed Democrats about their plans, but they have consulted with the House's general counsel.

The people familiar with Nunes' plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence.

That final product could ultimately be used by Republicans to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether any Trump aides colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign — or possibly even to justify his dismissal, as some rank-and-file Republicans and Trump allies have demanded. (The president has said he is not currently considering firing Mueller.)

Republicans in the Nunes-led group suspect the FBI and DOJ have worked either to hurt Trump or aid his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, a sense that has pervaded parts of the president’s inner circle. Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” and on Tuesday, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president.

The sources familiar with the separate inquiry said it was born out of steadily building frustration with the Justice Department's refusal to share details of the way the Trump dossier was used to launch the FBI's investigation of his campaign team last year — or whether it was the basis for any court-ordered surveillance of Trump associates.

The group is relying on the same documents and testimony provided by top Obama administration officials — such as former acting attorney general Sally Yates, former attorney general Loretta Lynch and former UN ambassador Samantha Power — who were grilled as part of the intelligence committee's broader Russia probe.

It's unclear how many members of the intelligence committee are participating in the side effort. Lawmakers on the full committee interviewed by POLITICO refused to discuss it.

"I don't talk about what we do behind closed doors," said Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who's leading the intelligence committee's bipartisan Russia probe. "I'm not going to talk about that," said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), another member of the panel.

A congressional aide with knowledge of the meetings said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was not among the participants. ”While he does believe the FBI and DOJ have recently made decisions worth looking into, he is and will always be a defender of the FBI, DOJ and the special counsel," the aide said.

Nunes' office declined to comment about the effort, but he has aired his suspicions about the law enforcement agencies before.

"I hate to use the word corrupt, but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen? Who’s investigating these people?" he said in a Fox News interview earlier this month. "There is no one."

DOJ and FBI officials also declined to comment. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended the FBI and Mueller's team at a recent hearing on Capitol Hill. "The special counsel investigation is not a witch hunt," he said.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said he wasn't aware of the Nunes effort but said it fit with what he sees as an increasingly destructive bent in Republicans’ rhetoric and actions.

"I think what we are seeing in our committee ... is an effort to attack the Department of Justice, an effort to attack the FBI, to attack Bob Mueller, is an effort to undermine the investigations and these institutions out of fear of what they’ll find and try to discredit them in advance," he said. "It’s a pernicious thing to do that will ultimately inflict long-term damage on these institutions."

The Nunes-led group is the latest evidence of an increasingly toxic and bruising confrontation between Republicans on Capitol Hill and the highest ranks of the justice system. Some Hill Republicans are irate about the Justice Department's refusal to provide more details about its investigation of Trump associates' ties to Russia. They're also frothing over the FBI's handling of the Trump-Russia dossier, which GOP lawmakers have openly mocked as "discredited" and "disproven.”

In recent weeks, GOP lawmakers have berated top Justice Department officials and threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress, and a couple of rank-and-file members described ongoing investigations of Trump associates in startling terms — including as a potential "coup" attempt. On Wednesday, Fox News reported that Nunes intends to subpoena senior FBI agents connected to the dossier.

Earlier this week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called for the FBI's deputy director, Andrew McCabe, to be replaced amid claims by Republicans of anti-Trump bias infecting the bureau. And Gowdy, the chairman of the House oversight committee, joined House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte on Tuesday to request interviews with senior FBI officials as early as Thursday — which some lawmakers say is the precursor to subpoenas.

To Democrats, the GOP offensive is an attempt to distract from the investigation of Trump associates by Mueller, who has already indicted Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and secured a guilty plea from his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. There are indications he's investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey, whose exit led to Mueller taking over the Russia probe.

The more dangerous Mueller's probe has seemed to become to the White House, the louder the attacks have gotten from Trump allies on Capitol Hill, Democrats say.

“Republicans are terrified that Special Counsel Mueller is getting closer to the truth, and they are desperate to grind his investigation to a halt — even if they undermine the foundations of our democracy," Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement after Republicans requested the FBI interviews.

GOP lawmakers have become increasingly fixated on the FBI's use of the dossier describing sometimes salacious allegations of Trump's ties to the Kremlin. The document was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, who was commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Under pressure from Nunes, Fusion revealed that funding for the dossier project was provided by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The House general counsel helped argue on behalf of Nunes in court to compel the release of Fusion's funding information.

In January, then-FBI Director Comey briefed Trump about the dossier prior to his inauguration, and the contents subsequently leaked in the media after circulating in Washington for months. Trump has rejected the allegations as fiction, and Republicans on Capitol Hill have largely dismissed it as a "discredited" or "false" document, though investigators have spent months attempting to verify its contents.

Still, Republicans on the intelligence and judiciary committees have increasingly wondered aloud whether the FBI — which had a longstanding relationship with Steele — used the allegations in his dossier to obtain surveillance warrants to spy on Trump campaign associates. They also want to know if the agency paid Steele for his work at the same time he was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

In recent weeks, Republicans have grown more vocal in their accusations that the FBI, DOJ and Mueller’s team are biased. They've railed against political donations that some of Mueller’s attorneys have made to Democrats. And more recently, they've pointed to a series of text messages — revealed by the DOJ inspector general — in which two senior FBI officials, who were previously assigned to the special counsel’s office, bashed Trump.

Schiff said committee rules require consultation between Republicans and Democrats, but House Speaker Paul Ryan must enforce bipartisan cooperation if he wants it to occur.

"And at this point, you have to conclude that he doesn’t," Schiff said. Ryan’s office declined to comment.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/ ... fbi-310121
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Jan 24, 2018 6:35 pm

Today’s Mueller Revelations Were The Biggest in Months
By Josh Marshall | January 23, 2018 8:59 pm

Image
Pool/Getty Images North America

Over the course of today there was a rush of nugget-sized revelations about the Trump/Russia investigation. Overnight there was news that FBI Director Christopher Wray had threatened to resign. Then we learned that Jeff Sessions had sat for an extended interview with Robert Mueller’s investigators. A bit later we learned that James Comey was interviewed last year. None of these revelations was that big in itself. But there were enough of them (including others not mentioned here) that we put together a round up of these little pops of information just to help keep track. By the end of the day though the different nuggets began to fit together, not as a scattershot of discrete revelations but several parts of a unified whole.

We thought that Robert Mueller had one channel of his probe investigating collusion and another focusing on obstruction of justice. The latter channel appeared to focus on two incidents involving James Comey in February (the request for Michael Flynn) and May (Comey’s firing). Now that channel seems much broader, both in scope and chronology. An afternoon article in The Washington Post suggested that one focus of the interview with Jeff Sessions turned on the President’s pressure on Sessions to resign, which took place after Comey’s dismissal. Mueller was examining this episode as part of a potential pattern of conduct tied to the two aforementioned incidents. This is unquestionably an expansive interpretation of Mueller’s brief. There is also little question that bullying Sessions is part of a broader pattern of the President either obstructing specific investigations or harnessing the machinery of law enforcement to protect himself personally.

There are a few points to note in this context. First, the news that Christopher Wray threatened to resign over pressure to purge the FBI of perceived Comey allies came after a report in the same publication – Axios – that suggested that Sessions had urged Wray to fire Comey-era FBI leadership. The first report suggested that Wray was pliant. The second sent a very different signal. Perhaps these are successive revelations from one source. But I doubt it. It sounds more like different sources of information jousting to establish a set of facts on their terms. I would be very cautious about assuming that we know the full story about Trump’s and Sessions’ pressure on Wray to ‘clean house at the FBI’ and how Wray responded.

This raises another point. The two instances of possible obstruction that we’ve known about for months are Trump’s request to Comey to let Flynn off the hook and Trump’s subsequent firing of Comey. We only know about these two events because they were done in public. Comey’s firing was obviously public and the Flynn revelation came out of the congressional testimony that Comey’s firing spurred. To be clear, we don’t know about these incidents because they’re the worst examples. We know about them because specific events forced their disclosure. We’ve had lots of hints of other shenanigans but it’s all been hazy and uncertain, likely because the parties have little reason to go public. There’s probably quite a lot on this front we do not know but which Mueller’s investigators do know. It is all but certain.

That gets to an even bigger point. Today DC is buzzing about a “secret memo” Devin Nunes staffers wrote about alleged FBI/CIA anti-Trump wrongdoing during the 2016 campaign. He has made this classified memo available to all members of the House. He has refused to share it with the FBI – the organization accused of wrongdoing. He and the White House have worked to create a rightwing faux groundswell of demands to “release the memo” to the public. Russian intelligence backed social media accounts have worked to amplify the “release the memo” push.

We can dig into the arcana of these claims and conspiracy theories. But all of this – every last bit of it – is the work of the White House and its defenders on Capitol Hill making war on the Mueller probe. All of this is an effort to disrupt and discredit the Mueller probe. And it’s start inside the Trump White House. It goes all the way back to Flynn’s attempt to snoop on the investigation into himself exactly one year ago.

In a political sense, all of this amounts to obstruction. It has gone as far as demands for purges of the FBI, the Department of Justice, even jailing various perceived Trump law enforcement enemies who have been part of this on-going probe. But what counts in a political sense does not necessarily count in a legal sense. Certainly, the efforts of corrupt members of Congress to defeat an investigation into a Presidential ally go far beyond anything the obstruction statutes are meant to encompass.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that Robert Mueller is going to start investigating Devin Nunes for obstruction. My point is that if Mueller is taking an expansive view of President Trump’s wrongdoing (as the scrutiny of the Sessions bullying suggests) and subversion of the rule of law it may be difficult to draw a bright line between Trump’s pressure on Sessions and the various ways Trump, his cronies and allies have worked with people like Nunes and others to protect himself by defeating Mueller’s investigation.

These are not statutory crimes. They political crimes, subversion of the political order and the rule of law that ordinary statutes are not designed to grapple with. Where this will lead is not at all clear.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 25, 2018 9:33 pm

US intelligence able to claim high confidence intel assessments that Russia interfered

AIVD didn't just hack the servers - they hacked cameras WHERE THE HACKERS WERE SITTING

They know exactly who did what to hack US political targets.

Image
JANUARY 26 2018 - 11:07AM

Dutch took pictures of Russian hackers of US Democrats: local media

Amsterdam: The Dutch intelligence agency AIVD had access to the Russian group believed to be behind the hack of the Democratic Party years ahead of US elections, local media reported.

The Dutch intelligence group also hacked a security camera near the office entrance gaining images of the Russians involved, according to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.

AIVD managed to track down the physical location of a hacking group known as APT29, or Cozy Bear, to a university building near the Red Square, de Volkskrant reported.

The Moscow-based group is widely suspected of hacking the Democratic Party and is believed to be linked to the Russian government.

Current affairs program Nieuwsuur and newspaper de Volkskrant based the story on several anonymous intelligence sources in the Netherlands and the United States.

American intelligence agencies' 'high confidence' in attributing a Russian hand in the hacking of the Democratic Party comes from the AIVD hackers having "had access to the office-like space in the center of Moscow for years", the Dutch report says.



The Dutch intelligence professionals also gained access to security cameras which revealed who entered and exited the facility.

"Not only can the intelligence service now see what the Russians are doing, they can also see who's doing it," Volkskrant reported.

AIVD took pictures of every visitor which were then compared with known Russian spies.

For months rumours have circulated online about the role non-US intelligence agencies have played in tracking Russian efforts to hack US political figures and subvert the 2016 election.

The Volkskrant provides the clearest picture yet of the help received by US agencies.

One US official, former State Department official overseeing cyber issues, is quoted in the report saying: 'We'd never expected that the Russians would do this, attacking our vital infrastructure and undermining our democracy.'

Agents with the AIVD maintained access to the group's headquarters and between 2014 and 2017 and passed along information to the US Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, the report said.

The Dutch intelligence may have contributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election race, the report said.
http://www.theage.com.au/world/dutch-sp ... 125-p4yywo


Not only did the Dutch hack into Cozy Bear’s network, they also hacked the security cameras outside the building the Russian hackers worked in— allowing them to be identified and compared to known Russian spies.

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Dutch intelligence first to alert U.S. about Russian hack of Democratic Party
GISTEREN, 21:35 AANGEPAST GISTEREN, 21:44BUITENLAND
NIEUWSUUR
GESCHREVEN DOOR
Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal
verslaggever
In the Summer of 2015, Dutch intelligence services were the first to alert their American counterparts about the cyberintrusion of the Democratic National Committee by Cozy Bear, a hacking group believed to be tied to the Russian government. Intelligence hackers from Dutch AIVD (General Intelligence and Security Service) had penetrated the Cozy Bear computer servers as well as a security camera at the entrance of their working space, located in a university building adjacent to the Red Square in Moscow.

Over the course of a few months, they saw how the Russians penetrated several U.S. institutions, including the State Department, the White House, and the DNC. On all these occasions, the Dutch alerted the U.S. intelligence services, Dutch tv programme Nieuwsuur and de Volkskrant, a prominent newspaper in The Netherlands, jointly report on Thursday. This account is based on interviews with a dozen political, diplomatic and intelligence sources in The Netherlands and the U.S. with direct knowledge of the matter. None of them wanted to speak on the record, given the classified details of the matter.

Not only had Dutch intelligence penetrated the computer network of the hackers, they also managed to hack a security camera in the corridor. This allowed them to see exactly who entered the hacking room. Information about these individuals was shared with the US intelligence services. Dutch intelligence services consider Cozy Bear an extension of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, which is firmly controlled by President Putin.

The information shared by The Netherlands about the hacks at the DNC ended up on the desk of Robert Mueller, the Special Prosecutor leading the FBI investigation into possible Russian interference in the American elections. As early as December, the New York Times reported that information from, among others, Australia, the United Kingdom and The Netherlands had propelled the FBI investigation.

Gaining access to the network

In the summer of 2014, the Joint Sigint Cyber Unit (JSCU) was launched, a joint unit of AIVD and MIVD, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service. Based in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer, it focuses on, among other things, obtaining intelligence through cyber operations. That same summer, the unit received a tip about a group of Russian hackers based at a university complex in Moscow. An AIVD hacking team, operating under the JSCU flag, subsequently succeeded in penetrating the internal Russian computer network. Not only did the AIVD gain access the computer network, it also hacked the security camera in the corridor.

After a few months, in November 2014, the Dutch watched as the Russian hackers penetrated the computer network of the State Department. After being alerted to this by the Dutch intelligence chiefs, it took the Americans over 24 hours to avert the Russian attack, after a digital clash which, years later, at a discussion forum in Aspen, the Deputy Director of the NSA would refer to as hand-to-hand combat . Basing itself on intelligence sources, the Washington Post wrote that a Western ally had been of assistance.

In the autumn of 2014, the Russians also gained access to the non-classified computer network of the White House. This allowed them to see confidential memos and non-public information about the itinerary of President Obama, and to at least part of President Obama's email correspondence. These hacks, too, were exposed by the Dutch intelligence services, which subsequently notified the Americans.

Cozy bear

The Russian hackers belong to a group that, over the years, the intelligence services and cyber security companies had referred to alternatively as The Dukes and APT29, but that for several years now has mostly been known as Cozy Bear. Most Western intelligence services assume that the group is controlled by foreign intelligence service SVR. For years, Western intelligence services and cyber security companies have been hunting the group, which has attacked government agencies and businesses around the globe, including in The Netherlands.

Together with another group of Russian hackers (Fancy Bear, also known as APT28), Cozy Bear is also held responsible for the cyberintrusion of the DNC. In April 2016, Fancy Bear accessed the Washington servers of the Democrats; Cozy Bear had done so as early as the summer of 2015. Once more, the group was caught red-handed by the Dutch, who again alerted their U.S. counterparts.

It is not clear why the hacks at the DNC could continue for so long despite the Dutch warnings. Last year, The New York Times reported that for months, the DNC had not taken the FBI warnings seriously. Eventually, cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, which was investigating the matter on behalf of the Democratic Party, also concluded that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were jointly responsible for the hacks. According to the US intelligence services, Russian officials eventually passed on the emails hacked by Fancy Bear to Wikileaks, which published them. The published emails caused a huge scandal in the American election campaign.

College Tour

Last Sunday on Dutch television programme College Tour, Rob Bertholee, head of AIVD, said that he had no doubt that the Kremlin was directly responsible for the Russian cyber campaign against U.S. government agencies. Bertholee as well as Pieter Bindt, who was heading MIVD at the time, personally discussed the DNC matter with James Clapper, at the time overall head of the US intelligence services, and Michael Rogers, who is soon to retire as the head of the NSA.

As of now, the AIVD hackers do not seem to have access to Cozy Bear any longer. Sources suggest that the openness of US intelligence sources, who in 2017 praised the help of a Western ally in news stories, may have ruined their operation. The openness caused great anger in The Hague and Zoetermeer. In the television programme College Tour, this month, AIVD director Bertholee stated that he is extra careful when it comes to sharing intelligence with the U.S., now that Donald Trump is President.
https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/221376 ... party.html



from Bloomberg

Dutch Spied on Russian Group Linked to 2016 U.S. Election Hacks
By Wout Vergauwen
January 26, 2018, 3:38 AM CST Updated on January 26, 2018, 5:32 AM CST
Dutch agency hacked ‘Cozy Bear’ network in summer of 2014
Newspaper investigation cites six people with direct knowledge
The Dutch intelligence service passed on “crucial evidence” to the FBI about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported Friday, citing the results of an investigation.

Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service known as the AIVD gained access to the network of Russian hacking group “Cozy Bear” in the summer of 2014. While monitoring the group’s activities, the AIVD learned of attacks launched on the Democratic Party, according to six unidentified American and Dutch sources cited by the investigation.


The information provided by the Dutch gave grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of Russian interference on the election race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, according to the newspaper report based on a collaborative investigation with Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal, a journalist at Dutch news program Nieuwsuur. A spokeswoman for the AIVD declined to comment on the report when contacted by phone on Friday.

Russia didn’t hear any statement from Dutch special services in this case, Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin, told reporters on a conference call.

A Jan. 6, 2017 report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, based on an assessment by the CIA, FBI and NSA, said that the U.S. had “high confidence” that Putin had ordered “an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” The Kremlin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting” Clinton, the report said.

Moscow Access

Volkskrant cited sources as saying this certainty was derived from “AIVD hackers having had access to the office-like space in the center of Moscow for years.”


Follow the Trump Administration’s Every Move
Based on pictures taken of visitors to the Moscow-based hacking center, the AIVD managed to deduce that the hacker group was led by Russia’s external intelligence agency, the SVR.

The AIVD and its military counterpart, MIVD, informed the NSA liaison at the U.S. embassy in The Hague in November 2014 of Russian preparations to attack the State Department, enabling the NSA and FBI to counter Russian attempts. The information was found important enough for the NSA to open a direct line with the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, Netherlands.

Trump Won’t Admit Russian Meddling, Strengthening Putin’s Hand

The Americans were taken completely by surprise by the Russian aggression, the U.S.’s former top cyber diplomat, Chris Painter, told Volkskrant, adding that unpreparedness by the U.S. intelligence services was “one of the reasons the Dutch access was so appreciated.”

Volkskrant said it spoke with 15 people over the course of the seven-month investigation. Six of those had direct knowledge of the Dutch access while the other nine are familiar with the intelligence community, the working methods of Russian hacking groups or the U.S.-Dutch international relationship, it said.

“Throwing coal into the furnace of anti-Russian hysteria that’s going on in America is not the most noble task,” Russia’s Peskov commented on the Dutch newspaper reports.

— With assistance by Stepan Kravchenko
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... tion-hacks


from ZNET

Dutch spies tipped off NSA that Russia was hacking the Democrats, new reports claim

Netherlands intelligence penetrated Russia's US election hackers and alerted US counterparts, sources say.

By David Meyer for Benelux | January 26, 2018 -- 11:09 GMT (03:09 PST) | Topic: Security

The Netherlands AIVD's access to the Russian hackers' networks yielded "crucial evidence" of Russian involvement in the Democratic leaks.

Netherlands newspaper de Volkskrant and the public broadcaster NOS reported on Thursday evening that AIVD hackers had penetrated the Russian operation back in the summer of 2014.

The Russian operation was what security researchers at CrowdStrike would later dub Cozy Bear, which, along with a separate group called Fancy Bear, emerged as the prime suspects for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

The emails covered communications spanning 2015 and the early months of 2016 and -- when they appeared on a site called DCLeaks and on Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in mid-2016 -- they greatly embarrassed the Democrats at a crucial time in the campaign.

Apart from reams of sensitive personal information, the emails demonstrated that the DNC had clearly favored the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, and had undermined Bernie Sanders' bid to take on the Republicans from the left.

According to the new reports, the AIVD's access to the Russian hackers' networks yielded "crucial evidence" of Russian involvement in the DNC leaks, a matter that is now a key focus of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and the Kremlin.

What exactly did the Dutch spies learn about Cozy Bear, also known as APT29? The precise details remain a mystery for now, but Thursday's reports draw on six US and Netherlands sources to argue that the Russian operation was responsible for attacks around the world since 2010.

Targets included "governments, energy corporations and telecom companies", some of them in the Netherlands.

Cozy Bear apparently comprised around 10 active agents at most times. The AIVD managed to hack into the security camera watching those entering and leaving the hackers' room in a university building, which allowed the Dutch to figure out that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) was running the operation.

After the Dutch intelligence agency spotted the Russians hacking the US State Department and warned the NSA, a 24-hour-long battle between attackers and defenders reportedly ensued.

Before being booted out of the State Department's systems, the Russians managed to send a plausible-looking email to the White House, which in turn gave them access to servers holding some of then-president Barack Obama's emails.

In return for all this intelligence, the Americans reportedly sent some back to their Dutch counterparts, along with cake and flowers. However, the story has a sour ending.

With Trump denying any Russian support in his victory, US intelligence has been leaking like a sieve to prove the contrary. According to de Volkskrant, these leaks angered the Dutch, who didn't want their access -- now lost -- to be revealed, even if they were not specifically identified to the media as the source of all this crucial information.

As is the case with Israel and the UK, both of which have been burned by Trump himself after divulging intelligence to the US, the Dutch are now warier about sharing the secrets they find with the Americans.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dutch-spie ... rts-claim/


from Reuters

Dutch intelligence agency spied on Russian hacking group: media

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch intelligence agency AIVD spied on the Russian group believed to be behind the hack of the Democratic Party ahead of U.S. elections, local media reported on Thursday.

Current affairs program Nieuwsuur and newspaper de Volkskrant based the story on several anonymous intelligence sources in the Netherlands and the United States.

The Moscow-based group known as Cozy Bear is widely suspected of hacking the Democratic Party and is believed to be linked to the Russian government.

Agents with the AIVD gained access to the group’s headquarters and between 2014 and 2017 passed along information to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, the report said.

The Dutch intelligence may have contributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election race, the report said.

The FBI and the AIVD were not immediately available for comment.

Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Dustin Volz; Editing by James Dalgleish
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-neth ... SKBN1FE34W



Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MAGGIE HABERMANJAN. 25, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.

The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.


If it wasn’t clear before: McGahn has jumped ship


Seth Abramson‏
(THREAD) BREAKING NEWS (New York Times): We now know Trump already tried to fire Special Counsel Mueller—7 months ago. Many believed such an attempt would be a "red line" that would lead to impeachment. So what do we do now? I analyze that question and what this news means here.


1/ First, here's the NYT story. The upshot is that last June Donald Trump *ordered* White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Bob Mueller. McGahn refused and threatened to quit if Trump went forward with the firing. Ultimately, Trump relented.

2/ Some will wonder why McGahn had enough sway with Trump to stop this from happening. That's a very good question to ask. First, note that McGahn was the attorney from Trump's winning presidential campaign, so the two have known each other and worked together for some time now.

3/ Next, we have to remember that McGahn is a potential witness—and, importantly, a potential witness *against Trump*—in the Trump-Russia investigation. McGahn was present at nearly all the key moments in the Obstruction fact-pattern that Mueller is considering referring to DOJ.

4/ If Mueller refers an Obstruction indictment to DOJ, DOJ will likely refer it to the House Judiciary Committee for consideration for articles of impeachment—and whether or not such articles come out of that committee, America already knows Obstruction is an impeachable offense.

5/ It's an impeachable offense because it already was for Bill Clinton—per the Republican Party and its votes on impeachment in the House. So while Trump may only have had an inkling of this last June, he likely knew enough to see that McGahn was someone whose loyalty he needed.

6/ McGahn is protected from ever testifying against Donald Trump on some issues—but *not* if the conduct he is to be questioned about involves criminal conduct by the president. Remember that Don McGahn does *not* represent Donald Trump, he represents the Office of the President.

7/ Definitionally and legally, criminal conduct is not considered within the recognized duties of a president, which means McGahn's role as an attorney for the Office of the President diverges from Trump's own legal interests as and when the president has acted illegally—as here.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 5810255872


REMEMBER: Trump, his lawyer John Dowd and his top adviser Kellyanne Conway ALL DENIED last August that Trump ever considered firing Mueller. (NYT just reported that Trump ordered Mueller's firing in June.)
Image


"it just brings the impeachment quicker"
- Steve Bannon



:big smile
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Jan 26, 2018 3:59 pm

seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 25, 2018 8:33 pm wrote:The Dutch intelligence professionals also gained access to security cameras which revealed who entered and exited the facility.

"Not only can the intelligence service now see what the Russians are doing, they can also see who's doing it," Volkskrant reported.

AIVD took pictures of every visitor which were then compared with known Russian spies.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/dutch-sp ... 125-p4yywo


"You're so Fucked! Here, let me get a picture while I'm at it."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E2z-1Mi6Zo

Previously, I was agnostic leaning negative on the whole Russian hacking charge by the IC. They had dropped the ball unanimously before with the Saddam WMD charge. But if they've got video of Russian spies going in the same building the Cozy Bear hackers were operating, there's your smoking gun. Can't wait to see it!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 27, 2018 12:26 pm

Twitter also found that Russian-linked accounts were responsible for 48 percent to 73 percent of the retweets of WikiLeaks’ Twitter accounts during the same time period. During the campaign WikiLeaks published emails from hacked Democratic party servers.

In this further assessment, Twitter said it identified about 2.12 million automated, election-related tweets from Russian-linked accounts that collectively received about 455 million impressions within the first seven days of posting. This is significantly higher than the number of impressions Twitter had previously reported.




Twitter Says Russian Bots Retweeted Trump 470,000 Times

Gerrit De Vynck

January 26, 2018, 6:13 PM CST

Russian-linked Twitter bots shared Donald Trump’s tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election, Twitter Inc. said in a submission to Congress.

The automated accounts retweeted the Republican candidate’s @realDonaldTrump posts almost 470,000 times, accounting for just more than 4 percent of the re-tweets he received from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s account got less than 50,000 retweets by the Russian-linked automated accounts during the same period of time, the company said in documents posted Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The information further underscores how Russian-linked accounts sought to stir up discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Congress has been investigating exactly how social-media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube were manipulated during the election. The documents are Twitter’s response to follow-up questions from the Senate committee following an Oct. 31 hearing on the issue of Russian infiltration of the media platforms.

Twitter also found that Russian-linked accounts were responsible for 48 percent to 73 percent of the retweets of WikiLeaks’ Twitter accounts during the same time period. During the campaign WikiLeaks published emails from hacked Democratic party servers.

In this further assessment, Twitter said it identified about 2.12 million automated, election-related tweets from Russian-linked accounts that collectively received about 455 million impressions within the first seven days of posting. This is significantly higher than the number of impressions Twitter had previously reported.

Twitter also said accounts linked to the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency exhibited non-automated patterns of activity, such as trying to reach out to journalists and “prominent individuals” through mentions. Some of those accounts represented themselves as news outlets, members of activist organizations, or politically engaged Americans, the company said. Bloomberg News has previously reported that the IRA operated dozens of Twitter accounts masquerading as local American news sources that collectively garnered more than half-a-million followers. More than 100 news outlets also published stories containing those handles in the run-up to the election, and some of them were even tweeted by a top presidential aide.

“Some of the accounts appear to have attempted to organize rallies and demonstrations, and several engaged in abusive behavior and harassment,” Twitter said.

The new disclosures from Twitter demonstrate how Russian meddlers are complementing their networks of bots with human activity, which the company said makes it harder for Twitter’s algorithms to detect the difference. Twitter previously said it had suspended 3,814 IRA-linked accounts.

The company has made several changes to address the manipulation in the past several months. It has banned Russian state media accounts from buying ads and is creating a “transparency center” to show how much political campaigns spend on advertising, the identity of the organization funding the campaign, and what demographics the ads targeted.

Facebook told a Senate panel in a written response to questions released earlier this week that it has detected “only what appears to be insignificant overlap” between targeting of ads and content promoted by a pro-Kremlin Russia group and by Trump’s presidential campaign. The company said it “does not believe it is in a position to substantiate or disprove allegations of possible collusion” between Russia and the campaign.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ium=social


Mueller now investigating whether Trump’s FBI smear campaign constituted obstruction


Donald Trump urged his aides to orchestrate a plan to discredit specific FBI officials after learning that they were likely to testify against him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe, according to an explosive new report by Foreign Policy.

The report, published Friday evening, details a series of events that took place in June 2017, following the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey. Those events are now being investigated as potential obstruction of justice, according to Foreign Policy.

During his testimony, Comey mentioned that he had spoken with three other senior FBI officials about Trump’s efforts to undermine the Russia investigation. A short time later, Trump’s lawyer John Dowd warned the president that corroborating testimony from the other FBI officials would likely play a key role in Mueller’s investigation into potential obstruction of justice.

According to the new report, that warning prompted Trump to take matters into his own hands, telling aides they needed to “fight back harder” and ordering them to orchestrate a smear campaign targeting the specific FBI officials named by Comey, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Since Dowd gave him that information, Trump — as well as his aides, surrogates, and some Republican members of Congress — has engaged in an unprecedented campaign to discredit specific senior bureau officials and the FBI as an institution.

The FBI officials Trump has targeted are Andrew McCabe, the current deputy FBI director and who was briefly acting FBI director after Comey’s firing; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; and James Baker, formerly the FBI’s general counsel. Those same three officials were first identified as possible corroborating witnesses for Comey in a June 7 article in Vox. Comey confirmed in congressional testimony the following day that he confided in the three men.

The Foreign Policy report comes just one day after the New York Times published a bombshell report revealing that Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller last June — the same month that Trump called on his aides to devise the smear campaign.

The report also comes on the heels of the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions pressured FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire McCabe — one of the three officials targeted by Trump’s smear campaign.

While it’s no secret that Trump and his allies have engaged in coordinated attacks against the FBI and the officials who work there, Friday’s report reveals that the targets of that campaign were not random. Rather, they were the specific people who were most likely to testify against Trump and corroborate what Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

McCabe, who has been the target of frequent and vicious attacks by Trump and his Republican allies, confirmed last month that he could corroborate Comey’s testimony about Trump pressuring him to pledge his loyalty by shutting down the Russia probe. This allegedly resulted in the firing of Comey when he refused Trump’s request.

This series of events could prove crucial in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump — and those around him — engaged in a cover-up.

Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, is among the few other witnesses with inside knowledge about Trump’s reported attempts to pressure Comey to end the Russia investigation. In December, Baker was quietly and unexpectedly reassigned to another position within the FBI. He told colleagues he would be “taking on other duties at the FBI.”

Like McCabe, Baker has been targeted by attacks launched by Trump’s allies, including right-wing media outlets like Circa (operated by the pro-Trump Sinclair network) and Breitbart (until recently, run by Trump’s former campaign manager and chief strategist Steve Bannon).

Clearly, Trump wanted to discredit officials like Baker and McCabe because he views their testimony as a threat — which is telling, given that a person with nothing to hide would have no reason to fear the truth. But fearing that they could be key witnesses in an obstruction of justice case, Trump took matters into his own hands and tried to undermine them before they could give their testimony.

Now, though, Mueller is investigating those very efforts to undermine the three FBI witnesses as a potential act of obstruction by Trump.

As Foreign Policy noted, proving obstruction of justice hinges on whether a prosecutor can show the intent of the person under investigation. The fact that Trump was reportedly motivated to attack specific FBI officials because they were likely to testify against him “could demonstrate potential intent that would bolster an obstruction of justice case,” the report concluded.

It’s hard to imagine anything backfiring more spectacularly than Trump’s attempt to undermine the obstruction case against him by trying to impugn the integrity of these three FBI officials — only to find out that the smear campaign against the officials is now being investigated as an act of obstruction. But if anyone can top this failure, it’s Trump.
https://shareblue.com/mueller-now-inves ... R4.twitter
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 28, 2018 10:27 am

January 26, 2018. Dutch journalist Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal broke the news that Dutch intel spied on Russian “Cozy Bear” hackers and warned the U.S. government.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFMiw0MUJM

Greg Palast

It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the #Trump Admin Is Doing to America — journalist / author @DavidCayJ (@DCReportMedia) in conversation with Greg Palast.

A Facebook LIVE Event — Wed, Jan 31 @ 7PM
Image


Seth Abramson


September 8, 2016: Sessions has a secret meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which the two men discuss the dropping of U.S. sanctions on Russia.

September 9, 2016: Russian bots begin a 60-day campaign of retweeting Donald Trump 500,000 times.

2/ According to Twitter, nearly 5% of *all* retweets of Donald Trump in the two months before the 2016 presidential election were by Russian bots.

3/ As a further point of reference, Don Jr. began his communication with WikiLeaks—as far as we know—on September 21, under two weeks after Russia's campaign to support Trump on Twitter via bots began. It was at this same time that Trump began using WikiLeaks in his stump speech.

4/ Trump received his first security briefing as a candidate—which confirmed for him that Russia was waging cyber-war against the United States on a massive scale—on August 17, 2016.

That was the *latest* date at which he—and family and aides—learned Russia was a hostile actor.

5/ George Papdopoulos gave an interview to Russian media implying Trump wanted to drop sanctions on September 30—three weeks after Sessions met with Kislyak and Russia began its Twitter campaign supporting Trump, and about a week after Don Jr. began corresponding with WikiLeaks.

6/ Papadopoulos' girlfriend says that her understanding from Papadopoulos is that—presumably with the exception of an early-campaign gaffe involving UK media—every action Papadopoulos took abroad with respect to meetings and interviews was with the blessing of the Trump campaign.

7/ If Donald Trump beginning to use the word "WikiLeaks" in nearly every campaign speech truly had nothing to do with the fact that his son—one of his chief political advisors—had just begun a communication with them, it's one of the great coincidences in U.S. political history.

8/ And if Donald Trump Jr. was willing to tell his dad about communicating with WikiLeaks at the time it was happening but *not* willing to tell his dad about communicating with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at the time *that* happened, it's another historic coincidence.

9/ It'd be especially rich if Trump felt so warmly about Russia that on July 27, 2016 he could publicly invite them to commit crimes against American citizens, even as his own son was—for reasons passing human understanding—unwilling to tell his dad that he'd met with a Russian.

10/ The good news is the world makes sense, none of this was coincidental, Trump was coordinating with the Russians and the ice-cream headache we've all been getting trying to imagine *some way* that he *couldn't* have been coordinating with the Russians is totally needless. /end



Scott Stedman‏

Following news about the Dutch alerting US agencies to the Russian hack, I'm reminded of the fact that European intel had info on Trump associates meeting with Russians close to the Kremlin in the Netherlands. To my knowledge, details of these meetings are still entirely unclear.
Image
I asked the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs if anyone in their office met with any of the Trump advisers during the election season and the answer was no. Whoever it was that traveled to the Netherlands wanted to be acting in an unofficial capacity.

Following the election, GOP donor/Ukrainian foreign agent/informal Rohrabacher adviser Yuri Vanetik traveled to the Netherlands at least twice. In April 2017, he, Rohrabacher, Paul Behrends, and 2 unknown men dined in The Hague.
ImageImage
Behrends was ousted from his role as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in July after it was discovered that he had a close working relationship with Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin in their Anti-Magnitsky efforts.
The Hill Staffer at the Center of the Russia Intrigue
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... gue-215396
I think it be fruitful to dig into these Netherlands meetings. The two Trump foreign advisers that we know traveled to Europe multiple times are Carter Page (Russia, Hungary) and George Papadopoulos (Greece, UK, Cyprus, Israel).
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 29, 2018 10:28 am

CONSPIRACY
Trump Tower Russian Lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Exposed in Swiss Corruption Case

Natalia Veselnitskaya, who organized the notorious Trump Tower meeting, has been named in an explosive Swiss court case about bribery, corruption, and double-agents.

NICO HINES
01.29.18 8:00 AM ET
LONDON—The Moscow operation behind the now-infamous Russian-Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 included a direct attempt to enlist a foreign country’s law-enforcement official as a virtual double-agent, according to a court case in Switzerland.

One of Switzerland’s top investigators has been fired after allegations of bribery, violating secrecy laws, and “unauthorized clandestine behavior” in meeting with the very same Russian actors linked to the Trump Tower encounter.

Details of the explosive case have been published by investigative reporters for the Tribune de Genève and Tages-Anzeiger newspapers in Switzerland. The officer, identified only as Victor K., traveled to Moscow—against the expressed wishes of his superiors—where he spoke to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.

The meeting was reportedly set up by Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan—from the same rogue department that was apparently responsible for offering intel on Hillary Clinton to be shared at the Trump Tower meeting and the Kremlin’s further plots to influence U.S. politics.

The reports, which are based on Swiss court papers, describe how K. was lured to Moscow during a call from Karapetyan before Christmas 2016. He was told not to go by his boss, ostensibly because he was working too much overtime, but made the trip anyway, using his diplomatic passport to fly to the Russian capital. There he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend an unexpected meeting with Veselnitskaya.

In the case against K.—who had been entrusted with investigating the Swiss financial arrangements of the Russian mafia and oligarchs for decades—it emerged that he had previously met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich, as well as Russia "without the knowledge of his superiors."


According to the the Tages-Anzeiger, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled that this amounted to unacceptable "unauthorized clandestine behavior," which brought the integrity of the Federal Criminal Police into question. "In particular, it gives the impression that they do not have their employees under control and thus creates an unpredictable security risk in their delicate field."

The interest of Veselnitskaya and the Russian Prosecutor General’s office is likely to be linked back to a $230 million tax fraud which was uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was working for Bill Browder, whose Hermitage Capital had major investments in Russia. After discovering the massive financial crime which could be linked back to the Russian government, Magnitsky was arrested, beaten, and allowed to die in a Russian jail cell.

A series of laws in Magnitsky’s name have been enacted all over the world imposing sanctions on Russians accused of corruption or complicity in the death of Magnitsky and the subsequent cover up. President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Magnitsky Act in 2012.

A large proportion of those stolen funds are believed to have made their way into the Swiss banking sector, sparking investigations by the Swiss authorities, including the federal police and Swiss prosecutor’s offices, both of which worked closely with K.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, a Russian businessman living near London, had tipped off Magnitsky about the role played by Switzerland in the international scam. A few weeks before he was due to give evidence at a hearing in Lausanne he died suddenly while out running.

British detectives initially concluded that there was nothing suspicious about the sudden collapse of the 44-year-old whistleblower—despite his own fears that he would be assassinated. A later toxicology investigation found traces of the deadly Gelsemium elegans flower, which is a known weapon of Chinese and Russian contract killers.

The Swiss court investigating K. heard that Veselnitskaya had raised the question of the Magnitsky case with him during that Moscow meeting. Swiss accounts linked to the fraud are still frozen.

Don. Jr and others have confirmed that Veselnitskaya raised similar issues during the summit at Trump Tower earlier in 2016.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tow ... rticles%29
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:38 pm

Three things Trump hated about ousted FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe

Written by Heather Timmons

PUSHED OUT


After months of grousing publicly about deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, Donald Trump finally got what he wanted today: McCabe, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, stepped down.

According to numerous reports, McCabe was forced to resign from his position by a widespread Republican campaign to cast doubts on his objectivity in overseeing the FBI’s Russian election-meddling investigation. McCabe had been planning to retire in March, and will officially leave the agency then.

McCabe’s reputation in the bureau was a “lawyer, not a tough guy,” until he publicly testified in Congress last year about former FBI director James Comey’s firing by Trump. “McCabe today is a figure of wide admiration for standing up for the bureau when it was under political attack,” Lawfare wrote in August.

And there are a few more reasons why Trump could not wait for him to go.


The fact that McCabe did not vote for him. When they met in May, Trump reportedly asked McCabe how he voted in the 2016 presidential election—an unusual and highly sensitive question for a president to ask of a career civil servant. McCabe did not vote in the election. The conversation about it, however, could become part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

His wife’s political career. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, a pediatrician, ran for state senate in Virginia in 2015 as a Democrat, pledging to “devote herself to ensuring that your interests come first. ”

Andrew McCabe featured in her campaign materials, a situation that some Republicans have said could violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from endorsing political candidates.


Jill McCabe received a $675,000 campaign donation from the state’s Democratic party and a political action committee connected to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.

Trump has repeatedly lied about that donation in his public criticism on Twitter, saying Andrew had received the donation “from H for wife.” Those lies have been repeated by right-wing news outlets.

McCabe’s refusal to pledge his loyalty. McCabe has been targeted by right-wing media who characterize him as part of a “deep state” cabal of anti-Trump government employees in the US intelligence agencies. Pro-Trump talking heads wheeled out anti-McCabe talking points this past weekend. “The management layer, the seventh floor, is riddled through with Obama-era appointees who have politicized the agency,” Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump advisor, said on Fox News.

McCabe’s stepping down and the campaign against him raised alarm bells among former justice officials. McCabe is a “dedicated public servant who has served this country well,” former attorney general Eric Holder wrote on Twitter. “Bogus attacks on the FBI and DOJ to distract attention from a legitimate criminal inquiry does long term, unnecessary damage to these foundations of our government.”

During a press conference on Monday, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “The president wasn’t part of this decision-making process.”
https://qz.com/1191880/andrew-mccabe-st ... or-months/


@JulieZebrak‏

Here are my (perhaps unconventional) thoughts on the McCabe departure today. I’m not a TV pundit but I did work @ #DOJ for 18 yrs, 15 of which I was employment counsel for DOJ. McCabe is career SES/not political. They couldn’t remove/fire him unless they all reached agreement. /1
10:59 AM - 29 Jan 2018

I suspect new General Counsel Dana Boente worked on a settlement agreement over weekend to get McCabe to resign in return for McCabe getting to use paid administrative leave + benefits so that he won’t take financial hit. McCabe would have agreed to stop work & depart early. /2

It is not unusual to reach this type of agreement with an employee you need to get out of the office. Although usually the employee would be a poor performer and usually you couldn’t pay him for not working for more than 10 days per DOJ policy. Firing McCabe would be illegal. /3

Basically, when someone is gonna depart anyway, you expedite their departure by saying don’t come back but we will pay you. Again, usually for problem employees — not McCabe type. I don’t find McCabe leaving earlier than planned as so crazy today. Not panicking. /4

As many know, I have consistently said that Chris Wray wanting a new Deputy is not unusual. At all. It is in the usual course that leadership brings in their own team, and McCabe has helped Wray transition and get his sea legs long enough. /5

Pushing out McCabe is like throwing fresh meat to the wolves. It is an easy one to do, McCabe will be fine, and if it will calm the savage beast for a time, it is a no-brainer for Team Trump. Emphasis on McCabe will be fine. I saw similar dynamic w Fast & Furious under Holder. /6

With Fast & Furious, under Holder DOJ, the White House and DOJ and Holder got hit repeatedly by the Hill Republicans, and at some point, someone had to be the fall guy. It was my friend/former colleague Jason Weinstein. Jason was a long-time career prosecutor who “resigned.” /7

The bottom line is that every thing we know about Trump and his advisors shows us that they are trying to manage him, his rage and reign him in. IMHO, they can assuage his rage & paranoia by saying to McCabe, it’ll be easier on all if you just go early. Is any of this normal? /8

Of course not. But to me this makes the most sense as to why McCabe is fall guy, & why it happened early and caught FBI and others off guard. The good news: McCabe has much more time for Mueller now. I’m not panicked. I hope you won’t be either. /END
https://twitter.com/YesMomsCan/status/9 ... 6990353408
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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seemslikeadream
 
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