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Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by barracuda » Sun Mar 05, 2017 2:55 am
by stefano » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:01 am
by Elvis » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:13 am
by barracuda » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:17 am
by seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 05, 2017 8:12 am
We have the tweets Donald Trump’s Russia conspirator Roger Stone deleted after melting down
By Bill Palmer | March 4, 2017 | 0
Donald Trump and Roger Stone have been friends for nearly forty years, so it’s not surprising they have a few things in common. For instance they both (allegedly) colluded with the Russian government to rig the the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. They’re both being investigated by the FBI. They’re both gleefully sexist pigs. And they both staged total meltdowns on Twitter today as they felt the heat of the Trump-Russia scandal closing in on them.
Trump’s meltdown was straightforward: he falsely and insanely accused President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. But Roger Stone’s meltdown was more difficult to pin down. He began by attacking Obama. But then it quickly dissolved into a series of vulgar sexist attacks on various female political pundits seemingly chosen at random. Stone then deleted some of the worst tweets after someone mentioned legal action. But we took screen captures of them before he deleted them.
There was this beauty in which Roger Stone called respected political pundit Caroline Orr a series of horribly inappropriate things:
Then Stone took aim at CNN commentator Ana Navarro, incompetently trying and failing to include her Twitter username, calling her awful names, making unsubstantiated accusations about her, and then inexplicably including a link to a Time Magazine article that doesn’t exist:
Roger Stone automatically yells “Fake News!” at any legitimate news outlet that reports anything negative about him, and he’s hurled that false claim at us a few times. He’s also blocked us on Twitter, but he doesn’t appear to realize we can see his tweets anyway (Hi, Roger). We’re not sure whether Stone or Donald Trump had the most embarrassing meltdown today. But it’s clear that the imploding Trump-Russia scandal is causing them both to go feral, suggesting they both know they no longer have much chance of surviving it.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/do ... down/1788/
Trump-Russia conspirator Roger Stone melts down, hurls vulgar sexist attacks at female pundits
By Bill Palmer | March 4, 2017 | 0
Donald Trump isn’t the only one in full meltdown mode today over the latest revelations in the Russia scandal. Former Trump campaign adviser and longtime Trump friend Roger Stone, who according to the New York Times is being investigated by the FBI for having allegedly colluded with with Russian officials during the election, went nuts tonight on Twitter and began calling various female political pundits “fat” and “ugly” and worse.
Roger Stone is one of four former Donald Trump advisers who are alleged to have been caught on a wiretap regularly colluding with Russian government representatives during the course of the campaign, along with Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Paul Manafort. Trump went nuts this morning and randomly (and falsely) accused President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. But then Roger Stone went equally nuts and began attacking pretty much every woman he could think of.
Roger Stone has blocked Palmer Report on Twitter (and he yells “Fake News” at us every time we publish real news about him), but that didn’t stop us from observing his meltdown tonight. Stone inappropriately called CNN commentator Ana Navarro “fat” and “stupid.” and made allegations about her sex life Stone then turned his ire on respected liberal political pundit Caroline Orr, whom he called a ” stupid ignorant ugly bitch.” Stone also insulted conservative political pundit Louise Mensch in sexist fashion. If Stone deletes these tweets, the above links will break, but we have screen captures of all of the tweets in question.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/roger- ... ssia/1787/
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:01 pm
norton ash » Sat Mar 04, 2017 4:57 pm wrote:^^^ He's 10 years old and barking mad.
by barracuda » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:19 pm
barracuda » Mon Feb 20, 2017 11:48 pm wrote:Dead since election day, all connected to the Christopher Steele dossier:
Sergei Krivov - blunt force trauma on election day in NY
Andrei Karlov - 12/19, assassinated in Turkey
Petr Polshikov - 12/20 - shot in head, found dead at home in Moscow
Yves Chandelon 12/23 - NATO Chief Auditor, gunshot to head, found dead in car in Belgium
Oleg Erovinkin - 12/26 - ex-KGB/FSB, found dead in car in Moscow
Andrei Melanin - 1/9 - found dead of "abnormal causes" on floor of apartment in Athens, Greece)
Vitaly Churkin - 2/20 - heart attack? in NY
by Luther Blissett » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:39 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Mar 05, 2017 2:08 pm
by Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 4:00 pm
seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 05, 2017 7:12 am wrote:Such a warrant would only have been granted if the FBI—not the Obama administration—was able to convince a judge that the Trump campaign had credible links to a foreign power.We have the tweets Donald Trump’s Russia conspirator Roger Stone deleted after melting down
By Bill Palmer | March 4, 2017 | 0
Donald Trump and Roger Stone have been friends for nearly forty years, so it’s not surprising they have a few things in common. For instance they both (allegedly) colluded with the Russian government to rig the the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. They’re both being investigated by the FBI. They’re both gleefully sexist pigs. And they both staged total meltdowns on Twitter today as they felt the heat of the Trump-Russia scandal closing in on them.
Trump’s meltdown was straightforward: he falsely and insanely accused President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. But Roger Stone’s meltdown was more difficult to pin down. He began by attacking Obama. But then it quickly dissolved into a series of vulgar sexist attacks on various female political pundits seemingly chosen at random. Stone then deleted some of the worst tweets after someone mentioned legal action. But we took screen captures of them before he deleted them.
There was this beauty in which Roger Stone called respected political pundit Caroline Orr a series of horribly inappropriate things:
Then Stone took aim at CNN commentator Ana Navarro, incompetently trying and failing to include her Twitter username, calling her awful names, making unsubstantiated accusations about her, and then inexplicably including a link to a Time Magazine article that doesn’t exist:
Roger Stone automatically yells “Fake News!” at any legitimate news outlet that reports anything negative about him, and he’s hurled that false claim at us a few times. He’s also blocked us on Twitter, but he doesn’t appear to realize we can see his tweets anyway (Hi, Roger). We’re not sure whether Stone or Donald Trump had the most embarrassing meltdown today. But it’s clear that the imploding Trump-Russia scandal is causing them both to go feral, suggesting they both know they no longer have much chance of surviving it.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/do ... down/1788/Trump-Russia conspirator Roger Stone melts down, hurls vulgar sexist attacks at female pundits
By Bill Palmer | March 4, 2017 | 0
Donald Trump isn’t the only one in full meltdown mode today over the latest revelations in the Russia scandal. Former Trump campaign adviser and longtime Trump friend Roger Stone, who according to the New York Times is being investigated by the FBI for having allegedly colluded with with Russian officials during the election, went nuts tonight on Twitter and began calling various female political pundits “fat” and “ugly” and worse.
Roger Stone is one of four former Donald Trump advisers who are alleged to have been caught on a wiretap regularly colluding with Russian government representatives during the course of the campaign, along with Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Paul Manafort. Trump went nuts this morning and randomly (and falsely) accused President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. But then Roger Stone went equally nuts and began attacking pretty much every woman he could think of.
Roger Stone has blocked Palmer Report on Twitter (and he yells “Fake News” at us every time we publish real news about him), but that didn’t stop us from observing his meltdown tonight. Stone inappropriately called CNN commentator Ana Navarro “fat” and “stupid.” and made allegations about her sex life Stone then turned his ire on respected liberal political pundit Caroline Orr, whom he called a ” stupid ignorant ugly bitch.” Stone also insulted conservative political pundit Louise Mensch in sexist fashion. If Stone deletes these tweets, the above links will break, but we have screen captures of all of the tweets in question.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/roger- ... ssia/1787/
by Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 4:02 pm
The Politics Behind ‘Russia-gate’
March 4, 2017
Exclusive: The hysteria over “Russia-gate” continues to grow – as President Trump’s enemies circle – but at its core there may be no there there while it risks pushing the world toward nuclear annihilation, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
There may be a turn-about-is-fair-play element to Democrats parsing the words of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump administration officials to hang them on possible “perjury” charges. After all, the Republicans made “lock her up” a popular chant citing Hillary Clinton’s arguably illegal use of a private email server as Secretary of State and her allegedly false claim under oath that her lawyers had hand-checked each of her 30,000 or so emails that were deleted as personal.
President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
But there is a grave danger in playing partisan “gotcha” over U.S. relations with the world’s other major nuclear superpower. If, for instance, President Trump finds himself having to demonstrate how tough he can be on Russia — to save his political skin — he could easily make a miscalculation that could push the two countries into a war that could truly be the war to end all wars – along with ending human civilization. But Democrats, liberals and the mainstream news media seem to hate Trump so much they will take that risk.
Official Washington’s Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has even compared the alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, two incidents that led the United States into violent warfare. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, Friedman demanded that the hacking allegations be taken with the utmost seriousness: “That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event. … This goes to the very core of our democracy.”
But what really goes to “the very core of our democracy” is the failure to deal with this issue – or pretty much any recent issue – with the sobriety and the seriousness that should accompany a question of war or peace. Just as Friedman and other “star” journalists failed to ask the necessary questions about Iraq’s WMD or to show professional skepticism in the face of U.S. propaganda campaigns around the conflicts in Libya, Syria or Ukraine, they have not demanded any actual evidence from the Obama administration for its lurid claims about Russian “hacking.”
Before this madness goes any further, doesn’t anyone think that the U.S. intelligence community should lay its cards on the table regarding exactly what the evidence is that Russian intelligence purloined Democratic emails and then slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication? President Obama’s intelligence officials apparently went to great lengths to spread these allegations around – even passing the secrets around overseas – but they never told the American people what the evidence is. The two official reports dealing with the issue were laughably short on anything approaching evidence. They amounted to “trust us.”
Further, WikiLeaks representatives have indicated that the two batches of emails – one from the Democratic National Committee and the other from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – did not come from the Russians but rather from two different American insiders. That could be wrong – it is possible that Russian intelligence laundered the material through some American cutouts or used some other method to conceal Moscow’s hand – but Obama’s intelligence officials apparently don’t know how WikiLeaks obtained the emails. So, the entire “scandal” may rest upon a foundation of sand.
No ‘Fake News’
It’s also important to note that nothing that WikiLeaks published was false. There was no “fake news.” Indeed, a key reason why the emails were newsworthy at all was that they exposed misconduct and deception on the part of the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. The main point that the DNC emails revealed was that the leadership had violated its duty to approach the primary campaign even-handedly when instead they tilted the playing field against Sen. Bernie Sanders. Later, the Podesta emails revealed the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street bankers, which she was trying to hide from the voters, and the emails exposed some of the pay-to-play tactics of the Clinton Foundation.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
In other words, even if the Russians did reveal this information to the American people, how does knowing relevant facts regarding a presidential campaign translate into an attack on “the core of our democracy”? Usually, journalists believe that getting the truth out, even if it embarrasses some politician or some political party, is healthy for a democracy. As an American journalist, I prefer getting information from people who have America’s best interests at heart, but I’m not naïve enough to think that people who “leak” don’t often do so for self-interested reasons. What’s most important is that the information is genuine and newsworthy.
Frankly, I found the WikiLeaks material far more appropriate for an American political debate than the scurrilous rumors that the Clinton campaign was circulating about Trump supposedly getting urinated on by Russian prostitutes in a five-star Moscow hotel, claims for which no evidence has been presented.
Also, remember that no one thought that the DNC/Podesta emails were significant in deciding the 2016 election. Clinton herself blamed FBI Director James Comey for briefly reopening the FBI investigation into her private email server near the end of the campaign as the reason her poll numbers cratered. It’s relevant, too, that Clinton ran a horrific campaign, which included breathtaking gaffes like referring to many Trump supporters as “deplorables,” relying way too heavily on negative ads, failing to articulate a compelling vision for the future, and ignoring signs that her leads in Rust Belt states were disappearing. In other words, the current effort to portray the disclosure of Democratic emails as somehow decisive in the campaign is revisionist history.
Yet, here we are with The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and almost the entire mainstream media (along with leading liberals and Democrats) panting every time they discover that someone from Trump’s circle met with a Russian. We are supposed to forget that the Russian government for many years was collaborating closely with the U.S. government – and particularly with U.S. national security agencies – on vital issues. Russia assisted in supplying the U.S. military in Afghanistan; President Putin played a crucial role in getting Iran to curtail its nuclear program; and he also arranged for the Syrian government to surrender its stockpiles of chemical weapons. The last two accomplishments were among President Obama’s most important foreign policy successes.
But those last two areas of cooperation – Iran and Syria – contributed to making Putin a target for Washington’s powerful neoconservatives who were lusting for direct U.S. military strikes against those two countries. The neocons, along with the Israeli and Saudi governments, wanted “regime change” in Tehran and Damascus, not diplomatic agreements that left the governments in place.
Neocons inside the U.S. government – including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Sen. John McCain and National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman – then took aim at “regime change” in Ukraine, realizing its sensitivity to Russia. Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. government, called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and a key step toward ousting Putin inside Russia; McCain cheered on Ukraine’s ultranationalists who were firebombing police in Kiev’s Maidan square; and Nuland was conspiring with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on how to “glue” or “midwife” a change in government.
This neocon strategy worked by overthrowing Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych and causing Putin to intervene on behalf of threatened ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. That, in turn, was transformed by the Western media into a “Russian invasion.”
Partisan Interests
Instead of standing up to this neocon troublemaking, Obama fell in line. Later, the Democrats saw political advantage in becoming the super-hawks standing up to Russia, essentially maneuvering to the right of the Republicans, especially when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the nomination, in part, by calling for better relations with Russia.
Russia’s Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak. (Photo from Russian Embassy)
As the 2016 presidential campaign sank into infamy as one of the ugliest in U.S. history, Clinton hammered Trump over Russia, calling him a Putin “puppet.” But the Russia-bashing didn’t seem to help Clinton very much. Although it was calculated to pull in some “moderate” Republicans, it also alienated many peace-oriented Democrats.
Still, despite the shaky foundation and the haphazard construction, Official Washington is now adding more and more floors to this Russia “scandal.” Obama holdovers slapped together a shoddy pretext for going after Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – citing the never-prosecuted Logan Act of 1799 and then trapping Flynn because he didn’t have total recall of a phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29 while Flynn was vacationing in the Dominican Republic.
Similarly, the mainstream media and Democrats are framing in a “perjury” case against Attorney General Sessions because of a sloppily worded response during his confirmation hearing about contacts with Russians. He had met twice with Kislyak (as many others in Washington have done). The heavy-breathing suspicion is that perhaps Sessions and Kislyak were plotting how the Kremlin could help the Trump campaign, but there is zero evidence to support that conspiracy theory.
What’s actually happening here should be obvious. The Obama administration, the Democrats and the mainstream media were horrified at Trump’s election. They understandably were offended by Trump’s personal behavior and his obvious unfitness for the presidency. Many Clinton supporters, especially women, were bitterly disappointed at the failure of the first female major-party presidential nominee who lost to a lout who boasted about how he could exploit his fame and power by grabbing the genitals of vulnerable women whom he assumed couldn’t do anything to stop him.
There was also alarm about Trump’s policies on the environment, immigration, education and the courts. Among the neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks, there was concern, too, that Trump would not continue their “regime change” strategies in the Middle East and their hostility toward Russia.
So, these anti-Trump forces grabbed at the most potent weapon available, the suspicions that Trump had somehow colluded with Russia. It didn’t matter that the evidence was weak to non-existent. It would be enough to spread the allegations around under the cloak of U.S. intelligence “assessments.”
Nobody important would demand to review the evidence and, surely, with the availability of National Security Agency intercepts, people’s memories could be tested against the transcripts of conversations and be found wanting. Verbal missteps could become perjury traps. There could be a witch hunt against anyone who talked to a Russian. Any pushing back from the Trump people could be construed as a “cover-up.”
Having worked in Washington for nearly four decades, I have seen political investigations before, both in steering away from real crimes of state (such as Nicaraguan Contra cocaine trafficking and Republican collaboration with foreign governments to undercut Democrats in 1968 and 1980) and in fabricating scandals that weren’t there (such as the fictional offenses of Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. under Bill Clinton who was finally cornered for the heinous crime of lying about sex). So far at least, “Russia-gate” fits much more with the latter group than the former.
What I also have learned over these years is that in Official Washington, power – much more than truth – determines which scandals are taken seriously and which ones are not. “Russia-gate” is revealing that the established power centers of Washington arrayed against Trump – the major news media, the neoconservatives and the Democratic Party – have more power than the disorganized Trump administration.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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by JackRiddler » Sun Mar 05, 2017 4:51 pm
by barracuda » Sun Mar 05, 2017 4:58 pm
Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:02 pm wrote:...understandably were offended by Trump’s personal behavior and his obvious unfitness for the presidency.
Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:02 pm wrote:The U.S. intelligence community should lay its cards on the table regarding exactly what the evidence is
by seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 05, 2017 5:55 pm
As Mailer saw it, the CIA had tried to cover up elements of the assassination not because they were implicated but because they couldn't be certain they weren't.
The Innocent Explanation, Part #2: The Mailer Standard
Douliery Olivier
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedMARCH 5, 2017, 3:44 PM EDT
4768Views
Friday afternoon, TPM Senior Editor Catherine Thompson keyed in on this statement from White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders: “The big point here is the president himself knows what his involvement was and that’s zero. And I think that he’s the primary person that should be held responsibility and he had no interaction and I think that’s what the story should be focused on.”
This does seem like a significantly new position and one to take note of.
There's a lot going on in these two brief sentences. They can be summarized as follows: 1) The President is clean. 2) If others are dirty, that's not the President's problem. 3) If others are dirty, it doesn't matter because the President is clean.
I am dubious that the President will be able to maintain this standard considering there's little evidence that any of his foreign policy and national defense ideas do not come from his advisors. But it's a clear statement of where the President and his top staffers want to set the bar, where they feel confident setting the bar, or at least where the feel the least unconfident setting the bar.
This reminded of something I read years ago. It was actually more than two decades ago so I may have some minor details off. But the gist is what's important.
Back in 1992 or 1993 I was living in Providence starting my history Phd. This was shortly after Norman Mailer wrote Harlot's Ghost (1991), a mammoth novel set in the Cold War CIA. About this time I happened upon an article, I think, in The New Yorker about Mailer and Harlot's Ghost. As best I can remember it focused on a talk Mailer had recently given about his research for the book. Perhaps it was an interview. I don't remember.
In this talk or interview, Mailer described his theory of why the CIA tried to cover up certain elements of the Kennedy Assassination. As Mailer saw it, the CIA had tried to cover up elements of the assassination not because they were implicated but because they couldn't be certain they weren't. The early 1960s CIA was tied up with so many crazies and bad actors - far-right anti-Castro emigre crazies, double agents, La Cosa Nostra, double agents who might really be triple agents, domestic right wing groups, domestic left wing groups - that it was impossible for them to know whether one of those trails from the Kennedy murder might not lead back to them.
Whether this was an accurate read of the CIA and the Kennedy assassination, I have no idea. But it always struck me as a piercing and perhaps profound insight into human nature and the inherent messiness of knowledge and complex, opaque organizations. If some version of my 'innocent explanation' is accurate, one can easily imagine the Mailer Standard comes into play.
Consider an example.
Trump put Paul Manafort in charge of his campaign in March of 2016. At first he was nominally in charge only of delegate wrangling. But he was running the campaign, to the degree anyone but Trump ever was, from that point onward. This was also the monthTrump announced his first batch of five foreign policy advisors - one of whom was Carter Page, chief advisor on Europe and Russia. It was also the month when Trump had that meeting with his new foreign policy advisors at the new Trump DC hotel and outlined the policy imperative which, J.D. Gordon says, was the basis of Gordon's intervening when the GOP platform committee was writing its Ukraine plank at the GOP convention in Cleveland.
A lot happened that month.
It was also the month when Mike Flynn's position solidified from being vaguely in the Trump mix to being a full-fledged surrogate. It seems likely that Manafort had a strong hand in choosing that initial batch of advisors as well as shaping what emerged that month as Trump's highly negative stance toward NATO and impatience with US involvement in Ukraine.
Now, Manafort set up shop in Trump Tower in 2006. In 2008 he and his business partners put together a $895 million deal with Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash to purchase the site of what was the Drake Hotel and redevelop it as the 'Bulgari Tower', a luxury spa and shopping mall. The deal appears to have come apart because it ended up coinciding with the 2008 financial crash.
Firtash is perhaps the most notorious, quintessential Ukrainian oligarch. He made his fortune in the energy trade between Russia and Ukraine. He is currently in a sort of limbo, a gilded cage as Bloomberg News puts it. He is in Vienna, unable to return to Ukraine and fighting extradition to the United States. He was very close to Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed President who Manafort worked for for years. He also has deep ties to Russia.
Firtash has long been looked at with suspicion by the US government because he is believed to be closely tied to Semion Mogilevich, the most notorious Russian organized crime boss who was on the FBI most wanted list until 2015. Mogilevich is now living in Russia. You'll remember from a few days ago that litigation tied to Trump associate Felix Sater identified Sater's father Mikhail Sater as a part of Mogilevich's crime organization. I'm told by someone who knows the Ukraine money world intimately that Manafort was always trying to set up deals of this sort with those around Yanukovych. How many others there were is unclear. We only know the Drake Hotel deal because it came up in a lawsuit. The proposed Drake Hotel deal looks quite similar to the roughly contemporaneous Trump Soho project, which also drew most or all of its investment capital from Russia and Kazakhstan. This is a recurrent pattern: money earned in the treacherous world of the post-Soviet successor states seeking out the political stability and ever rising values of real estate in major cities in the West.
Now, are all these moving parts connected together in some dark puzzle? I have no idea. But look at it through the prism of the Mailer Standard. Trump did put Manafort in charge of his campaign and foreign policy operation as they started to congeal in the spring of 2016. Let's assume you're Donald Trump and your hands are clean, as far as it goes. Or let's assume you're someone with half a brain and you're charged with protecting Donald Trump. How confident are you that a thorough look at that skein of Putin-aligned oligarchs, deposed strongmen, billion dollar real estate deals, Russian organized crime and mysterious peace deals wouldn't turn up something at least awkward and possibly quite bad?
Right, me neither.
Indeed, to the extent Trump really is an improbable innocent bystander on all of this business, that means he's probably even more in the dark, intentionally or otherwise, about just what was going on.
What it all amounts to is that Donald Trump doesn't need to have any deep dark secret for it to make every sense in the world for him to resist at all costs the kind of investigation even many Republicans are now demanding.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... r-standard
barracuda » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:58 pm wrote:Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:02 pm wrote:...understandably were offended by Trump’s personal behavior and his obvious unfitness for the presidency.
Yeah, that. Now let's compile a list of Trump's close advisors who met with the Russians or the Russian ambassador before the election:
Paul Manafort
Michael Flynn
Michael Cohen
Carter Page
J.D. Gordon
Walid Phares
Jared Kushner
Jeff Sessions
Roger Stone
I'm sure I missed a few. Slad?Nordic » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:02 pm wrote:The U.S. intelligence community should lay its cards on the table regarding exactly what the evidence is
No doubt about that. The rest of Parry's article is basically his resume, and a series of pretend games that stuff never happened because Parry isn't talking about it. This problem isn't even about Wikileaks anymore, though Stone has publicly admitted to working through a cut-out with Wikileaks throughout the campaign. Honey badger don't care.
This bullshit line in which "you're gonna force Trump to nuke Russia if you don't be nice to him" is sooooooo fucking played out, it pains me to hear it coming from Parry. If you're so worried about Trump firing all the guns at once, advise him to get off the Propecia.
As of this moment, and in particular, the country should be made aware of the reason for the FISA warrants and probably any evidence found by these warrants. Otherwise, the FBI is once again in charge of potential blackmail against the standing president.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 05, 2017 6:08 pm
Trump Tower’s Russia email server was shut down three days before Carter Page quit campaign
By Bill Palmer | March 5, 2017 | 0
Now that former Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page is accusing Trump himself of having been behind the pro-Russia platform change at the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign is suddenly insisting that Page has overstated his own role in the campaign. But Trump will have a hard time explaining why Page appears to have been directly connected to the Russian email server which was discovered to have been running out of Trump Tower.
The original Slate story about an email server allegedly inside Trump Tower and communicating with a Russian bank, first published in October, is back in the headlines this week after Donald Trump made the surreal claim that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower just before election day. Obama could not have done any such thing, but as we’ve reported, there is evidence that a federal judge granted a FISA warrant in October in relation to that server. So what does Carter Page have to do with this?
The Trump Tower Russian email server in question saw spikes in traffic whenever Carter Page traveled to Russia, according to a scientist who has analyzed the data pattern. The server was then permanently shut down on September 23rd. Three days later, Carter Page announced he had left the Donald Trump campaign, claiming that the mounting questions about his Russian connections had become a distraction.
There’s a small chance this could be coincidence. But as the Trump-Russia scandal has unfolded, things that have looked too suspicious to be coincidences have generally turned out later to have been legitimately connected to each other. The most plausible explanation here is that the Trump campaign or Trump Organization was using the Trump Tower email server to communicate with Carter Page whenever he traveled to Russia, and no longer had a use for it once Page was forced out. As always, we’ll keep digging.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/tr ... aign/1795/
Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?
This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.
By Franklin Foer
U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, U.S. October 24, 2016.
Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, on Oct. 24.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.
The greatest miracle of the internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.
In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.
Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system—the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire. Before a mail server can deliver a message to another mail server, it has to look up its IP address using the DNS. Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors. These databases can give a useful, though far from comprehensive, snapshot of traffic across the internet. Some of the most trusted DNS specialists—an elite group of malware hunters, who work for private contractors—have access to nearly comprehensive logs of communication between servers. They work in close concert with internet service providers, the networks through which most of us connect to the internet, and the ones that are most vulnerable to massive attacks. To extend the traffic metaphor, these scientists have cameras posted on the internet’s stoplights and overpasses. They are entrusted with something close to a complete record of all the servers of the world connecting with one another.
In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.
More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.
Trump Tower.
Trump Tower.
Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
(I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data. They persuasively demonstrated some of their analytical methods to me—and showed me two white papers, which they had circulated so that colleagues could check their analysis. I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. “This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,” said Camp. “When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.”)
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.
“I’ve never seen a server set up like that.”
Christopher Davis of the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc.
That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health. (The company said in a statement: “Spectrum Health does not have a relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. We have concluded a rigorous investigation with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.”)
Spectrum accounted for a relatively trivial portion of the traffic. Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” Camp told me. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.
* * *
While the researchers went about their work, the conventional wisdom about Russian interference in the campaign began to shift. There were reports that the Trump campaign had ordered the Republican Party to rewrite its platform position on Ukraine, maneuvering the GOP toward a policy preferred by Russia, though the Trump campaign denied having a hand in the change. Then Trump announced in an interview with the New York Times his unwillingness to spring to the defense of NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion. Trump even invited Russian hackers to go hunting for Clinton’s emails, then passed the comment off as a joke. (I wrote about Trump’s relationship with Russia in early July.)
In the face of accusations that he is somehow backed by Putin or in business with Russian investors, Trump has issued categorical statements. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told one reporter, a flat denial that he repeated over and over. Of course, it’s possible that these statements are sincere and even correct. The sweeping nature of Trump’s claim, however, prodded the scientists to dig deeper. They were increasingly confident that they were observing data that contradicted Trump’s claims.
In the parlance that has become familiar since the Edward Snowden revelations, the DNS logs reside in the realm of metadata. We can see a trail of transmissions, but we can’t see the actual substance of the communications. And we can’t even say with complete certitude that the servers exchanged email. One scientist, who wasn’t involved in the effort to compile and analyze the logs, ticked off a list of other possibilities: an errant piece of spam caroming between servers, a misdirected email that kept trying to reach its destination, which created the impression of sustained communication. “I’m seeing a preponderance of the evidence, but not a smoking gun,” he said. Richard Clayton, a cybersecurity researcher at Cambridge University who was sent one of the white papers laying out the evidence, acknowledges those objections and the alternative theories but considers them improbable. “I think mail is more likely, because it’s going to a machine running a mail server and [the host] is called mail. Dr. Occam says you should rule out mail before pulling out the more exotic explanations.” After Tea Leaves posted his analysis on Reddit, a security blogger who goes by Krypt3ia expressed initial doubts—but his analysis was tarnished by several incorrect assumptions, and as he examined the matter, his skepticism of Tea Leaves softened somewhat.
I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. “I can't attest to the logs themselves,” he told me, “but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.”
Weaver’s statement raises another uncertainty: Are the logs authentic? Computer scientists are careful about vouching for evidence that emerges from unknown sources—especially since the logs were pasted in a text file, where they could conceivably have been edited. I asked nine computer scientists—some who agreed to speak on the record, some who asked for anonymity—if the DNS logs that Tea Leaves and his collaborators discovered could be forged or manipulated. They considered it nearly impossible. It would be easy enough to fake one or maybe even a dozen records of DNS lookups. But in the aggregate, the logs contained thousands of records, with nuances and patterns that not even the most skilled programmers would be able to recreate on this scale. “The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,” Vixie told me. “It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume. If you look at those time stamps, they are not simulated. This bears every indication that it was collected from a live link.” I asked him if there was a chance that he was wrong about their authenticity. “This passes the reasonable person test,” he told me. “No reasonable person would come to the conclusion other than the one I’ve come to.” Others were equally emphatic. “It would be really, really hard to fake these,” Davis said. According to Camp, “When the technical community examined the data, the conclusion was pretty obvious.”
It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.
* * *
The researchers were seeing patterns in the data—and the Trump Organization’s potential interlocutor was itself suggestive. Alfa Bank emerged in the messy post-Soviet scramble to create a private Russian economy. Its founder was a Ukrainian called Mikhail Fridman. He erected his empire in a frenetic rush—in a matter of years, he rose from operating a window washing company to the purchase of the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory to the co-founding of his bank with some friends from university. Fridman could be charmingly open when describing this era. In 2003, he told the Financial Times, “Of course we benefitted from events in the country over the past 10 years. Of course we understand that the distribution of state property was not very objective. … I don’t want to lie and play this game. To say one can be completely clean and transparent is not realistic.”
To build out the bank, Fridman recruited a skilled economist and shrewd operator called Pyotr Aven. In the early ’90s, Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in the St. Petersburg government—and according to several accounts, helped Putin wiggle out of accusations of corruption that might have derailed his ascent. (Karen Dawisha recounts this history in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy.) Over time, Alfa built one of the world’s most lucrative enterprises. Fridman became the second richest man in Russia, valued by Forbes at $15.3 billion.
Alfa’s oligarchs occupied an unusual position in Putin’s firmament. They were insiders but not in the closest ring of power. “It’s like they were his judo pals,” one former U.S. government official who knows Fridman told me. “They were always worried about where they stood in the pecking order and always feared expropriation.” Fridman and Aven, however, are adept at staying close to power. As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, in the course of dismissing a libel suit the bankers filed, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”
Unlike other Russian firms, Alfa has operated smoothly and effortlessly in the West. It has never been slapped with sanctions. Fridman and Aven have cultivated a reputation as beneficent philanthropists. They endowed a prestigious fellowship. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American-government funded think tank, gave Aven its award for “Corporate Citizenship” in 2015. To protect its interests in Washington, Alfa hired as its lobbyist former Reagan administration official Ed Rogers. Richard Burt, who helped Trump write the speech in which he first laid out his foreign policy, previously served on Alfa’s senior advisory board.* The branding campaign has worked well. During the first Obama term, Fridman and Aven met with officials in the White House on two occasions, according to visitor logs.
Fridman and Aven have significant business interests to promote in the West. One of their holding companies, LetterOne, has vowed to invest as much as $3 billion in U.S. health care. This year, it sank $200 million into Uber. This is, of course, money that might otherwise be invested in Russia. According to a former U.S. official, Putin tolerates this condition because Alfa advances Russian interests. It promotes itself as an avatar of Russian prowess. “It’s our moral duty to become a global player, to prove a Russian can transform into an international businessman,” Fridman told the Financial Times.
* * *
Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.
pol_161031_screenshotlarge
Start: DNS lookup history start date.
RFC from Alfa-Bank: Alfa-Bank rep provided with 2 ips, hostname, count.
Errors: 4:11 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.
Errors: 1:12 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.
Taken down: 9:53 a.m. EST USA time: Trump-Email.com deleted from Trump authoritative name server zone.
In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. (Lichtblau told me that Times policy prevents him from commenting on his reporting.)
The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had “SERVFAILed.” (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
As one of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”
According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.
* * *
Last week, I wrote to Alfa Bank asking if it could explain why its servers attempted to connect with the Trump Organization on such a regular basis. Its Washington representative, Jeffrey Birnbaum of the public relations firm BGR, provided me the following response:
Alfa hired Mandiant, one of the world's foremost cyber security experts, to investigate and it has found nothing to the allegations. I hope the below answers respond clearly to your questions. Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organizations. Fridman and Aven have never met Mr. Trump nor have they or Alfa Bank had any business dealings with him. Neither Alfa nor its officers have sent Mr. Trump or his organizations any emails, information or money. Alfa Bank does not have and has never had any special or exclusive internet connection with Mr. Trump or his entities. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.
I asked Birnbaum if he would connect me with Mandiant to elaborate on its findings. He told me:
Mandiant is still doing its deep dive into the Alfa Bank systems. Its leading theory is that Alfa Bank's servers may have been responding with common DNS look ups to spam sent to it by a marketing server. But it doesn't want to speak on the record until it's finished its investigation.
It’s hard to evaluate the findings of an investigation that hasn’t ended. And of course, even the most reputable firm in the world isn’t likely to loudly broadcast an opinion that bites the hand of its client.
I posed the same basic questions to the Trump campaign. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks sent me this in response to my questions by email:
The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank's [sic] IP address is regular DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.
I asked Hicks to explain what caused the Trump Organization to rename its host after the New York Times called Alfa. I also asked how the Trump Organization arrived at its judgment that there was no email traffic. (Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “regular” DNS server traffic, at least not according to the computer scientists I consulted. The very reason DNS exists is to enable email and other means of communication.) She never provided me with a response.
What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.
We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.
Update, Oct. 31, 2016: The article has been updated to make clear that the New York Times reporters learned of the logs independently, not from the Reddit thread. (Return.)
Correction, Nov. 1, 2016: The article originally stated that Richard Burt serves on Alfa’s senior advisory board. He no longer sits on that board. (Return.)
Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ussia.html
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