US Punishes Russia for Election Hacking Ejecting Operatives

[Wombaticus Rex]

On edit: There really could be a "Pussy Riot as RI Subject" thread.

There is at least a previous thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33975&start=30

[brekin]

Many people would say it's the US, rather, that's taken a tragic turn since GWB. A contentious topic indeed.

I would say the US has also taken a tragic turn since GWB. But that is just the Anna Karenina Principle at work with superpowers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

If the US can't be progressive (which may be an impossibility at this point in history) I just would want the US to be tragic in its own way, not in Russia's way.

[tapitsbo]

The US will be tragic in its own way, as it's certainly not about to be taken over by Russia or even Russian-style politics or ideas, imo...

I can understand people in Estonia being worried about being overrun by Russian "tragedy", the US not so much.

The US establishment is just threatened by Russia because they've made so many awful decisions that it starts to make Russia look good in comparison, which is quite a feat.

[seemslikeadream]

Mike Pence walks a fine line on Donald Trump's tweets regarding hacking

Mike Pence is defending his President-elect Donald Trump’s tweets casting doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

But in a subtle but notable move, Pence has backed up his running mate without ever saying that he agrees with Mr. Trump’s skeptical view of the nation’s intelligence services.

At a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, Pence called Mr. Trump’s skepticism “very sincere” and “healthy.”

“Given some of the intelligence failures of recent years, the President-elect made it clear to the American people that he’s skeptical about conclusions from the bureaucracy,” Pence said with House Republican leaders at his side as he justified Mr. Trump’s tweets.

“I think the American people hear him loud and clear,” Pence added.

Those comments come ahead of a Friday briefing where the duo will be briefed by the heads of major intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and CIA, about the hacks.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he was unsure if Russia was responsible for the hacks and has argued that “we ought to get on with our lives.” On Wednesday, Trump on Twitter referenced comments by Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks and the the publisher of many of the Democratic emails, to push back on the assertion that Russia was behind the hacks.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-pence- ... g-hacking/

of course cause he knows he will be president some day

[Sounder]

They were not 'hacks', they were leaks.

But whateves, this is a post-truth world.

[Luther Blissett]

The Real Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia

Posted on Jan 8, 2017

By Chris Hedges

Some thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election,” the newly released declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.

The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.

2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others.

Seven pages of the report were dedicated to RT America, on which I have a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated the cable network’s reach and influence. It also included a few glaring errors, including the statement that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on 4 September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of the US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was taken off the air two years ago. It could hardly be tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the election.

The barely contained rage of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats was visible when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, et cetera.” His anger was a glimpse into how the establishment seethes with hatred for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He perjured himself in March 2013 when, three months before the revelations of wholesale state surveillance leaked by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National Security Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on the American public. After the corporate state shuts down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful of progressive sites, including this one, that give these dissidents space. The goal is censorship.

3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms market for the war industry. It made those businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries such as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket.

4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered. Clinton initially blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss before switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge of Russian interference essentially boils down to the absurd premise that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of Podesta. Either that or they tuned in to RT America and decided to vote for the Green Party.

The Democratic Party leadership cannot face, and certainly cannot publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working and middle class triggered a nationwide revolt that resulted in the election of Trump. It has been pounded since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68 seats in the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships. It lost more than 1,000 elected positions between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010, Republicans have replaced 900 Democratic state legislators. If this was a real party, the entire leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party. It is the shell of a party propped up by corporate money and hyperventilating media.

The Democratic Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism just as the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of conservatism. These two parties, however, belong to one party—the corporate party. They will work in concert, as seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as McCain and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence all dissent, enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call democracy.

Welcome to our annus horribilis.

[seemslikeadream]

Trump has declared war on the American people ..period





EVERYTHING ELSE IS A DISTRACTION






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[liminalOyster]

Assange blasts 'embarrassing' ODNI report, says 'no evidence' given

The report also cites Russian politicians celebrating Trump’s win as further evidence. It does not, however, draw the same conclusions about the Israeli government’s delight at Trump’s victory.

[seemslikeadream]

The Russian government just tweeted an image of a white supremacist frog
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 9, 2017, 11:40am EST
=
The Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom loves to troll the West on Twitter. On Monday morning, it outdid itself — tweeting an image of a cartoon frog linked to Donald Trump’s white nationalist fans:

Russian Embassy, UKVerified account
‏@RussianEmbassy
In today’s papers: pundits call on @Theresa_May to disrupt possible Russia-US thaw. No trust in Britain's best friend and ally?

Even absent the image, the tweet would be pretty trolly. It’s a response to British pundits who are calling on UK Prime Minister Theresa May to disrupt President-elect Donald Trump’s attempts to cozy up to Putin’s Russia. The Russian Embassy is making fun of these UK pundits for seeming not to trust America, Britain’s closest ally — which is rather amusing, given how often the Russian government blasts the United States.

But it’s the appended image of the frog that elevates the Russian tweet from “a bit trolly” to “holy shit, this is actually happening.”

The frog is named Pepe, and it was originally a character in a web comic called Boy’s Club. But more recently, the frog has been appropriated by the “alt-right” — a racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic online subculture full of Trump devotees. It became so closely associated with the alt-right movement that the Anti-Defamation League, America’s premier anti-Semitism watchdog, declared Pepe a hate symbol akin to the swastika.

It’s possible that Russia’s UK embassy didn’t know this, and just reached for a popular meme to append to its tweet. But the odds are against it: Pepe is quite famous, with his white supremacist links exhaustively reported after Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme featuring Pepe this summer. It’s more likely that the exceptionally web-savvy embassy added Pepe to the tweet intentionally to ramp up the troll quotient.

Russian state media agencies such as RT and Sputnik have tailored their content to appeal to the alt-right, which the Kremlin sees as willing to parrot its line on foreign policy issues.

“They grew their audience hugely [recently] — and it’s mostly on the back of the alternative right,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the author of a recent report on Russian online propaganda, says.

More broadly, the Kremlin has aligned itself with far-right movements in Western countries. These organizations, deeply hostile to both Islam and European integration, see Russia as a friend — and the Russians, for their part, are more than happy to reciprocate by manipulating public opinion inside Western democracies.

Russia does this in a variety of ways, ranging from funding far-right parties to hacking their political enemies to, yes, rallying their supporters with tweets and online propaganda. The Pepe tweet is a kind of silly example of this campaign, but it’s not isolated. It underscores just how well Russia understands online media — and how it’s attempting to weaponize this understanding to weaken Western democracies from within.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/9/14212 ... bassy-pepe

[seemslikeadream]

Germany accuses Russia of cyber attack on Ukraine peace monitors, as Kremlin dismisses US intelligence claims as a 'witch hunt'

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
The Kremlin has dismissed claims it tried to help Donald Trump win the US presidency CREDIT: DON EMMERT AND NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Justin Huggler, berlin
9 JANUARY 2017 • 3:11PM
Russian hackers have targeted international peace monitors in Ukraine, according to German intelligence, as the Kremlin dismisses claims that it tried to influence the US election as a "witch hunt".

Investigators have uncovered evidence that a notorious Russian hacking group believed to be linked to the Kremlin was behind an attack on computers of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) last month, Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service said.

He named the group responsible as APT28, another name for Fancy Bear, a group of hackers that has been implicated in the theft of emails from Democratic Party servers in the US.

German intelligence also believes the group was behind a series of cyber attacks on the German parliament in 2015.

The OSCE is responsible for monitoring the ceasefire between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.

We are observing a serious fatigue with these accusations. It truly is reminiscent of a witch hunt
Dmitry Peskov
A spokesman previously acknowledged that its computer servers had come under “serious” attack at the end of last year, but said the OSCE had no idea who was responsible.

"Our analysis showed that the infrastructure of the attack was the same one we know from previous cyber attacks in APT28’s campaign – the same campaign that affected the Bundestag the year before last,” Mr Maassen told Germany’s DPA news agency. “In APT28 there are clues that point to Russian sources.”

APT28, or Advanced Persistent Threat 28, is a name assigned to Fancy Bear by the internet security firm which first uncovered its activities.

Along with the similarly named Cozy Bear, the hacker group was one of two identified in investigations by the US Democratic National Congress (DNC) into the attack on its servers.

Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said no new evidence had been produced to show that Russian officials were involved CREDIT: ALEKSEY NIKOLSKYI/PLANET PIX/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
US intelligence agencies have published an unclassified report which found that attack was part of a multi-pronged campaign ordered by Vladimir Putin to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

On Monday morning the Kremlin said the allegations amounted to a witch hunt.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said no new evidence had been produced to show that Russian officials was involved.

"We are observing a serious fatigue with these accusations," Peskov told reporters on a conference call. "It truly is reminiscent of a witch hunt."

His words echoed a phrase used by Trump himself, who was quoted as saying in an interview with the New York Times on Friday that the storm over Russian hacking was a "political witch hunt."

Watch | Barack Obama expels 35 Russian spies over election hacking row
00:36
Peskov, commenting on the US intelligence report, said: "You know, that version of the report that was made public added no substance whatsoever that we can comment on.

"Groundless accusations which are not supported by anything are being rehearsed in an amateurish, unprofessional way. We don't know what information they are actually relying on."

Asked if Putin himself had read a translation of the report, Peskov said there was nothing in the document "that's worth reading in detail."

But Peskov said the Kremlin's position, as in the past, is that it categorically rules out that any Russian official could have been involved in hacking related to the 2016 US presidential election.

Watch | Donald Trump: Russia hacking US election is 'ridiculous'
00:39
The BfV has blamed Fancy Bear for a series of cyber attacks on the computer systems of the Bundestag in 2015.

Security officials reportedly believe some 2,240 classified files published by Wikileaks in November were stolen from the Bundestag’s servers in one of the attacks.

The files were being held in connection with a Bundestag inquiry into spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on German soil.

There is considerable concern in Germany that Russian hackers may seek to influence general elections in the country in September.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01 ... s-kremlin/

[seemslikeadream]

at the hearing today ..it seems there is an active investigation

Comey wouldn't answer the question saying "we don't comment on on going investigations"

unless it is about Clinton


Is there an FBI investigation Trump campaign coordination with Russia ...stay tuned ....more to come

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Angus King to Comey: "The irony of your making that statement I can't avoid."

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Comey says, re FBI investign Trump/Russia contacts, "I wd never comment on investigations whether open or not in a public forum" EYES EMOJI

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Warner wants intel cmte to include in review "contact between the Russian government & its agents, & associates of any campaign & candidate"

Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/ ... index.html

James Comey refuses to tell Senate if FBI is investigating Trump-Russia links
FBI director: ‘I would never comment on investigations in an open forum’
Response stuns senators after his public remarks on Clinton’s email case
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ion-senate

I predict that someone in Trumpworld will be indicted


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[seemslikeadream]

Senate Intelligence Committee Member Suggests FBI Is Sitting on Information on Trump-Russia Ties
At a hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden pushed FBI Director James Comey to release it by inauguration day.

DAVID CORN
JAN. 10, 2017 2:54 PM

It was only a couple of questions in the middle of a hearing, but the queries posed to FBI Director James Comey by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) during a Senate intelligence committee gathering on Tuesday afternoon had potentially explosive implications, for they suggested that Wyden believes the FBI has been sitting on information regarding ties between Donald Trump's inner circle and Russia.

The hearing was focused on the intelligence community's recently released report concluding that Vladimir Putin's regime had mounted an extensive secret operation to influence the US election in order to help Trump. At the start of the hearing, outgoing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper emphasized that the report did not assess whether the Russian meddling had affected the outcome of the election. This was an indirect rebuke to Trump and his partisans, who have repeatedly said the report concluded the Russian intervention did not affect the results. Comey also noted that Russian hackers had targeted Republican targets but that the FBI had no found evidence that Moscow had penetrated the Trump campaign or current accounts of the Republican National Committee.

The most dramatic exchange came with Wyden's questions. He noted that several media outlets have reported that Trump campaign associates, including Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, had maintained connections with Russians tied to Putin. He asked Comey, "Has the FBI investigated these reported relationships?" Comey answered, "I would never comment on investigations...in an open forum."

Wyden pushed Comey further. He asked if the FBI chief would declassify information related to this matter and "release it to the American people" by January 20. No, Comey said, adding, "I can't talk about it."

Wyden then declared, "The American people have a right to know this." He continued: "If it doesn't happen by January 20, I'm not sure it's going to happen."

Wyden's line of questioning indicated that he believes (or knows) the FBI has collected information on Trump ties to Moscow. And Wyden is in a position to know. As a member of the committee, he can see classified material gathered by the FBI and other national security agencies. With these questions to Comey, Wyden was seemingly referring to specific information. In fact, on November 30, he led all the Democratic members in sending a short letter to President Barack Obama that stated, "We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels." The letter gave no hint of the nature of this information.

But it is not hard to read between the lines: Intelligence committee members have received classified briefings that included information regarding contacts between the Trump camp and Russians.

In September, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence agencies were probing the contacts between Russian officials and Carter Page, who was identified by the Trump campaign as one of its foreign policy advisers. The New York Times reported in November that the FBI was looking at Manafort's business ties to Ukrainians who were Putin allies. The newspaper noted, "In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump."

Wyden also apparently fears that once Trump takes over the executive branch, this information—and perhaps any ongoing investigations—would be suppressed.

Shortly after Wyden questioned Comey, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked the FBI director if he would say whether any investigations on Trump and Russia were underway. "We never confirm or deny a pending investigation," Comey replied. King shot back: "The irony of you making that statement I cannot avoid." This was a clear reference to Comey's public declarations during the presidential campaign about the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's handling of email at the State Department. Comey responded, "We sometimes think differently about closed investigations."

So what specifically prompted Wyden to press Comey at the hearing? The American public may never know.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... ssia-wyden

Carter Page

[Wombaticus Rex]

So what specifically prompted Wyden to press Comey at the hearing? The American public may never know.

Yeah, definitely a cipher wrapped in an enigma, right there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_I ... nce_Agency

Comey wouldn't answer the question saying "we don't comment on on going investigations"

unless it is about Clinton

That's gotta be the best laugh of 2017 so far. What a f'ing nut, I love it.

[seemslikeadream]

come on shit hit the fan already

Bombshell CNN report: Russia might have dirt on Trump
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 10, 2017, 6:32pm EST

Late on Tuesday afternoon, CNN dropped an absolute bombshell of a story — the heads of America’s top intelligence agencies showed President-elect Donald Trump evidence that the Russian government may have “compromising personal and financial” information on him and that his campaign spoke directly with Kremlin intermediaries.

“The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible,” write CNN’s Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein (yes, that Carl Bernstein). After CNN’s report, BuzzFeed published the British officer’s full dossier, which you can read here.

This dossier, per CNN, has been around for some time. FBI Director James Comey was apparently aware of it when he announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey would have then announced an investigation into Clinton, which turned out to be nothingburger but profoundly affected the election, while sitting on far more significant allegations about her opponent.

But the allegations were only recently deemed credible — not proven, merely worth investigating — so are only recently getting top levels of scrutiny.

“Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer,” the CNN reporters explain. “What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect.”

The idea that Russian intelligence might be able to blackmail the next US president is almost too staggering to think through fully. But one angle that immediately raised eyebrows is a very simple one — what could the Russians possibly have on Trump that hasn’t already been made public? My colleague Matt Yglesias put this skepticism well in a tweet:


Matt’s point is a good one. But Trump’s history does suggest that there are some truly damaging things the Russians could have on him — things that, if they did come out, would embarrass him even further. These are four hypothetical examples, but they’re all based on public reporting:

Trump is not as rich as he says: Trump has repeatedly demonstrated extreme sensitivity over his net worth. In 2005, he sued journalist Tim O’Brien for claiming that he was “merely” worth between $150 million and $250 million. (During a deposition for the case, which he ultimately lost, Trump famously said he estimates his net worth based on his “feelings” at a given moment.) Before Trump’s 2011 Comedy Central Roast, his team reportedly laid out a list of acceptable and unacceptable topics to the comedians. Wanting to have sex with his daughter was in bounds, but jokes about his net worth being lower than he said weren’t. And then, of course, there’s the matter of him not releasing his tax returns like every other presidential candidate in history. If Russians have those tax returns, or a similar financial document, the potential release would be devastating for him.
Trump’s campaign directly coordinated with the Russian government: This, as I mentioned earlier, is a logical reading of an actual allegation in the memo. “The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,” the CNN reporters write. That doesn’t clarify whether Trump’s team did it wittingly — or whether the Russians were Putin aides, hackers, oligarchs not officially in the government, or some combination — but either way, that kind of revelation would be damning for Trump’s legitimacy.
Sex tape: There is a persistent rumor in Washington intelligence circles that Russian intelligence “filmed Trump in an orgy while in Russia,” as one writer put it. These rumors get very lurid — we’re talking illegal sex stuff lurid. But they’ve been impossible to track down or verify and thus report in any meaningful sense. Expect to see a lot more speculation along these lines now that the CNN report is out.
Trump’s business holdings in Russia are way more extensive than we think: No one actually knows how much money Trump’s family makes from Russia. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." If it’s the case that Russian oligarchs or Russian government officials are major income sources for Trump, or that they secretly own large shares of his various companies, then that would be a concrete lever the Kremlin could hold over his head.
It’s also something Russia experts, including some who recently served in the government, have been openly worrying about for months. As my colleague Yochi Dreazen has written, Evelyn Farkas, formerly a top Pentagon official on Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, used an essay for Politico to explicitly suggest that the next inhabitant of the Oval Office may do Putin’s bidding because he owes the Russian leader and his allies money:

We know, per Donald Trump Jr., that Russia makes up a significant amount of the family business. What we don’t know is how much Russian money is involved, and what Russian money. How did Trump get out of debt? To whom does he owe money? Who provides the collateral for his loans? Is he beholden to Russian oligarchs and banks who are under the thumb of the Kremlin and Russian security services?
To be crystal clear: I have no reason to believe any of these theories are correct. We don’t even know if the British intelligence officer’s report, the one the intel community is currently tracking down, is accurate.

But the fact that we even have to talk about these things shows just how much Donald Trump has deformed American politics — and the notion of the presidency itself — before he even moves into the White House.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/10/1423 ... -trump-cnn

These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia
A dossier, compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleges Russia has compromising information on Trump. The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.

posted on Jan. 10, 2017, at 5:20 p.m.
Ken Bensinger

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.
The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump.
Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.
The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.
The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column. Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the outgoing Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain a gave “full copy” of the memos to Comey on Dec. 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/t ... .xkpexOdDz

[barracuda]

Screen Shot 2017-01-10 at 4.11.12 PM.png

https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... ations.pdf