have you ever watch him on the TV?
poor Tucker he's got to push Manafort onto Clintons
does he even know that Manafort was trump's campaign manager?
did you hear the kids on Reddit think the indictment is for Hillary
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:03 pm
by Morty » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:10 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:11 pm
by Morty » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:17 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:22 pm
Everything you need to know about Felix Sater
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40670&p=642965&hilit=felix+sater#p642965
by Morty » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:31 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:36 pm
.....this thread has nothing to do with the Clintons. Carter Page Met Russian Politician Behind Uranium One Deal During Trump Campaign
But Dvorkovich’s request for a meeting with President Clinton was denied, because of the conflicting interests raised with his wife, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
........
Forbes reports that the Uranium One deal is a “real empty barrel” because of the minimal amounts of uranium actually produced.
However, this real evidence demonstrates real ties between the President’s least favorite campaign aide, Page, and his most favored, shortest tenured White House official, Flynn, and the Russian state-run company which bought Uranium One.
“The only explanation for this meeting is something sinister,” says the Democratic Coalition’s senior advisor Dworkin, “Because Page was working for Trump at the time, and Dvorkovich has a direct line to Vladimir Putin.”https://thesternfacts.com/carter-page-met-russian-politician-behind-uranium-one-deal-during-trump-campaign-10cdfa078642
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Oct 30, 2017 4:32 pm
Robert Mueller’s Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis
By Susan Hennessey, Benjamin Wittes
Monday, October 30, 2017, 2:24 PM
(Photo: Wikimedia/The White House)
The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.
The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them.
Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had "nothing to do with Russia."
The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions of its own about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public, and presumably, under oath and to investigators.
And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo.
As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.
Let’s start with the surprise unsealing of the Papadopoulos plea agreement and stipulation of fact. Papadopoulos first became publicly affiliated with the Trump campaign in March 2016. That month, Trump faced significant pressure to announce foreign policy advisors after numerous Republican foreign policy and national security experts publicly vowed never to work for him. In response, Trump produced a list of names of purported experts, a list that included both Papadapoulos and Carter Page.
The Washington Post reported back in August of this year that Papadopoulos, between March and May of 2016, had “offered to set up ‘a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,’” but that the campaign had rebuffed his numerous attempts. It turns out he did a lot more than that.
His guilty plea is for lying to FBI investigators in a January 27, 2017 interview regarding his own conduct and contacts. As we’ve discussed in the past, it isn’t uncommon for false statements to the Bureau to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 offenses in these sorts of cases. Proving someone is lying is often easier than proving that the underlying offense violates the law. Here, for example, Papadopoulos’s underlying activity—working with Russian government officials to obtain “dirt” on Clinton and set up a Putin-Trump meeting—may have been legal, if wholly disreputable. Lying about it, however, is a crime. We can assume that Mueller had the goods on Papadopoulos beyond lying to the Bureau in some manner. The lying, after all, is merely the charge he pled to in the context of a plea deal in which prosecutors have cut him a break.
That said, the Papadopoulos stipulation offers a stunningly frank, if probably incomplete, account of what was occurring in the spring of 2016 in the Trump campaign. To wit, during that period, members of the Trump campaign team were actively working to set up a meeting with Russian officials or representatives. And from a very early point in the campaign, those meetings were explicitly about obtaining hacked, incriminating emails.
It isn’t clear which emails the various parties might have been discussing here. There are, after all, the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, which first became public on June 14, 2016 though the breach had occurred more than a year prior. There are the hacked emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, a breach the occurred on March 19, 2016 but did not become public until October 9, 2016. And there are also the purported 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, a matter stretching back to 2015, which may not have ever been hacked but which Trump campaign folks clearly believed had been. There is also possibly some other category of alleged emails that wasn’t a matter of public discussion. But it’s clear that Trump campaign officials were after emails and, well, let’s just say they didn’t go to the FBI when they found themselves in conversations with Russian officials about them.
The stipulation also contains some rather damaging information about President Trump himself. Papadopoulos says he attended a “national security” meeting on March 31, 2016 with Trump personally in attendance, along with his other foreign policy advisors. In that meeting, Papadopoulos told the group that he had connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and President Putin. This means that Trump either knew or should have known about his campaign’s effort to interface with Russia, even as news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the US election were becoming public.
The Manafort-Gates indictment is, in a different way, also dramatic. The amount of money allegedly at issue in breathtaking. According to paragraph 6 of the indictment, “more than $75,000,000 flowed through the offshore accounts” that Manafort and Gates controlled. Eighteen million of these dollars are specifically alleged to have been laundered. This money laundering “to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities” allegedly took place through the entire period of Manafort’s service in the Trump campaign.
Manafort’s alleged unregistered foreign agency on behalf of Ukraine and its Party of Regions, by contrast, allegedly ended in 2014, when then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych was ousted. So President Trump can at least claim that his campaign manager is not under indictment for being an unregistered foreign agent at the time he was running Trump’s campaign.
But that’s about the only good news in the indictment for the President. Because Manafort is alleged to have lied about his foreign agent status and made false statements into this year. In other words, at the same time as Papadopoulos admits he was working Russian government officials for Clinton emails and for a Trump-Putin meeting, Manafort was allegedly still laundering the money he had obtained by illegally representing one of Putin’s allied strongmen.
In the wake of the document releases, Trump naturally took to Twitter to dismiss it all:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 9569041409
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 8989715456
We offer no prediction as to how this will play politically or whether such antics will carry any water with Republicans who must be feeling a little uneasy today.
We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.
Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished this morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 30, 2017 8:21 pm
Robert Mueller Releases Information Showing Trump Campaign Tried to Collude With Russia
Sorry, Donald Trump, here’s more evidence your crew schemed with the enemy.
DAVID CORN
OCT. 30, 2017 12:45 PM
Special counsel Robert Mueller departs a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill.Andrew Harnik/AP
On Monday morning, shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller announced the indictments of former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, President Donald Trump tweeted, “There is NO COLLUSION!” But soon after that, Mueller’s office released a “statement of offense” outlining one major instance of when the Trump campaign tried to collude with Russia as the Kremlin was mounting a covert operation against the 2016 election to benefit Trump.
This case involved George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, who has pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents investigating the Trump-Russia scandal.
In August, the Washington Post reported that Papadopoulos had tried to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Mueller’s statement reveals that Papadopoulos, often with the knowledge of campaign officials, attempted to forge a back-channel bond with Russian officials—and he did so after there were public indications the Kremlin was behind the hack-and-dump operation targeting the Hillary Clinton campaign. The statement also suggests that he hoped to obtain Clinton emails from the Russians.
Here’s what happened. In early March 2016, Papadopoulos, a former intern and researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington who had briefly advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson, learned that he would be a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. He was living in London at the time. During a trip that month to Italy, he met a professor based in London who claimed to be well connected with Russian government officials. Papadopoulos thought that if he could cozy up to this person, it would boost his standing within the campaign.
Later, while back in London, he met with the academic, who brought along a Russian woman he introduced as a relative of Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Papadopoulos emailed his campaign supervisor that he had met with these two people and they had discussed setting up a meeting between the campaign and “the Russian leadership” to discuss US-Russia ties under a President Trump. The statement doesn’t identify the supervisor, but the Post reported in August that his supervisor was Sam Clovis, who was heading up the Trump campaign’s policy team. The supervisor replied that Papadopoulos should make no commitments but added, “Great work.”
Two weeks later, Papadopoulos attended a meeting in Washington with Trump and other national security advisers. He told the group he had connections that could arrange a tete-a-tete between Trump and Putin. In the following weeks, Papadopopulos kept in contact with the professor and the Russian woman and discussed a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government. He kept the campaign informed of his efforts.
In April, the professor introduced Papadopoulos through email to a person in Moscow who supposedly had close ties to officials within the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then had a series of conversations with this person about establishing “the groundwork” for a meeting between the campaign and Russian government officials. At one point, they discussed Papadopoulos getting together in London with the Russian ambassador to discuss the next steps.
In late April, Papadopoulos’ efforts took a turn. The professor (who is not named in Mueller’s statement) told him he had just returned from Moscow where he had met with senior Russian officials and learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Clinton. This included, as Papadopoulos later told the FBI, “thousands of emails.” So at this time, Papdopoulos, as an official representative of the Trump campaign, was talking to a go-between with Russia about inside (and stolen) information on Clinton that Moscow possessed. The statement suggests but does not explicitly state that Papadopoulos was interested in how the campaign could benefit from this material. It also does not indicate whether these emails are related to the Democratic National Committee or John Podesta emails hacked by the Russians. It would not be until June 14, 2016, that the DNC hack would become public.
In early June, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a Russian lawyer whom they were told was bringing them negative information on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government plot to help Trump. Here’s an interesting question: Had any of them been told that Papadopoulos had heard the Russians had emails related to Clinton?
Papadopoulos continued to communicate with campaign officials about arranging a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials. He informed the campaign that Putin was interested in hosting Trump. At one point, according to the statement, one campaign official emailed another, “We need to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” Did that mean the campaign did not want to offend Putin by rejecting the offers Papadopoulos was relaying?
Still, the statement notes that from mid-June through mid-August 2016, Papadopoulos pursued an “off the record” meeting between one or more campaign representatives and “members of Putin’s office” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On August 15, Papadopoulos’ supervisor told him, “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the campaign “to make the trip, if it is feasible.”
By now, there was plenty of information in the public record attributing the hack of the DNC and other Democratic targets and the subsequent release of stolen emails and documents to Russian intelligence. Papadopoulos’ trip to meet the Russians never happened. But these communications show that while Putin was attempting to subvert a US election, Trump campaign officials were hoping to arrange a private meeting with Putin officials.
In the past few weeks, Papadopoulos on his LinkedIn page has asked for recommendations for a speaker’s bureau and a publisher—as if he has a story to tell. Mueller’s statement does indicate that the Trump campaign was attempting to create a secret connection with Putin’s office just as Russia was waging information warfare against the United States. Imagine how the Kremlin might have interpreted such warm and welcoming signals from the Trump campaign. This was not a knock-it-off message. It was a let’s-work-together message being sent to an adversary while it was assaulting US democracy.
The Manafort and Gates indictments may not be directly related to the question of Trump interactions with Russia. But the Papadopoulos statement is further evidence the campaign was looking to collude with Putin’s crew. As significant as the Manafort and Gates arrests are, the Papadopoulos statement is far more important for developing a public understanding of how Trump’s gang did scheme with the enemy.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... th-russia/
Donald Trump’s ‘found hundred pound hacker’ remark may have been about his own adviser Sam Clovis
Bill Palmer
Updated: 8:33 pm EDT Mon Oct 30, 2017
Home » Opinion
During the debates, Donald Trump raised eyebrows when he tried to blame Russian interference in the election on a four hundred pound hacker. It was a bizarrely random and oddly specific remark, even by Trump’s bizarre standards, that it stood out as making no sense. In light of today’s events, Trump may have actually been referring to his own obese campaign adviser, who was incriminated today in Russian collusion.
The confession of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was released today, and in it he admitted to having colluded with a Kremlin-connected professor in an effort to get his hands on emails stolen from Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos also admitted that he ran it past his campaign supervisor, who has since been identified as Sam Clovis. This means that, according to Papadopoulos at least, Sam Clovis is a Russian colluder. Sam Clovis also weighs around four hundred pounds.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/400-hacker/5810/
by 8bitagent » Tue Oct 31, 2017 4:24 am
Morty » Fri Oct 27, 2017 10:31 pm wrote:$145 million dollars into the Clinton foundation is a fact that takes quite a lot to ignore, but the left press is managing to do so without breaking a sweat. They are either truly shameless, or utterly naive.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 31, 2017 4:30 am
The Uranium One deal was not Clinton’s to veto or approve
Despite transfer of ownership, the uranium remained in the U.S.
The timing of most of the donations does not match
https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton- ... ssia-deal/
Intel Dem: Uranium One probe is an ‘orchestrated’ distraction
BY OLIVIA BEAVERS - 10/25/17 10:09 PM EDT 452
© Keren Carrion
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, claimed Wednesday that the new probes of the Obama-era Uranium One deal and the FBI's investigation into the Clinton email server are part of a Republican effort to distract from the ongoing Russia investigation.
“So this is a partisan effort to distract. It’s a partisan effort aligned with what the White House has been urging, and Fox and Breitbart," Schiff said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports."
The Republican leaders of the Judiciary, Oversight, and Government Reform committees announced Tuesday they will jointly investigate the matters that took place when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of State.
"There are three committees involved in these new investigations: Judiciary Committee, Government Reform Committee and the Intelligence Committee. This had to be orchestrated with the approval of the Speaker of the House,” Schiff continued.
The California lawmaker said the Republicans ultimately made the decision to open the new Clinton-connected inquiries without the "consultation with the Democrats in Congress."
"You can't do a good investigation if it's conducted in bad faith," he added.
Schiff's remarks come in response to the decision of the House Intelligence chair, Rep. Devin Nunes (D-Calif.), to look into how the Justice Department handled the deal that gave a Russian-owned company partial control of U.S. atomic energy resources in 2010.
The Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees will also jointly investigate the Obama Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.
The seemingly coordinated investigations — both of which were announced within the same hour — come as special counsel Robert Mueller and several congressional panels are looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 election
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/35724 ... istraction
Hillary Clinton: Uranium One Stories "Debunked Repeatedly"
Posted By Tim Hains
On Date October 23, 2017
In an interview Monday with C-SPAN, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the controversy surrounding the 2010 "Uranium One" deal between Russia and the Obama administration had been "debunked."
According to The Hill, the FBI, "obtained an eyewitness account -backed by documents- indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation... during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow."
HILLARY CLINTON: I would say it’s the same baloney they’ve been peddling for years, and there’s been no credible evidence by anyone. In fact, it’s been debunked repeatedly and will continue to be debunked...
But here is what they are doing and I have to give them credit. Trump and his allies, including Fox News, are really experts at distraction and diversion. So the closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians, as we heard Jeff Sessions finally admit to in his testimony the other day, the more they want to just throw mud on the wall. I’m their favorite target. Me and President Obama, we are the ones they like to put in the crosshairs.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... tedly.html
How Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity ginned up the Hillary Clinton uranium story
Pro-Trump conservatives want to talk about their own Russia narrative. The only problem is that it’s nonsense
MATT GERTZ, MEDIA MATTERS
10.25.2017•2:32 PM
.
President Donald Trump has spent much of his presidency engulfed by congressional and criminal investigations into Russian efforts to help him win the 2016 presidential election. But today, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced he was joining a new congressional probe — one that appears to revolve around the purported Russian ties of Trump’s opponent in that race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This is no accident. Like the work of the House Select Committee on Benghazi before it, this is a partisan investigation with a political purpose, with its roots in the conspiratorial muck of the right-wing media. But while the Benghazi probe — as Republican leaders eventually acknowledged — was an offensive push to damage Clinton’s political standing in the lead-up to the 2016 election, the new one is a defensive move aimed at protecting Trump by diverting attention to his former opponent. The effort's loudest champion is Sean Hannity, the Trump propagandist and sometime adviser who has claimed for months that the “real collusion” with Russia revolves around a bogus conspiracy theory linking Clinton to the 2010 sale of the uranium mining company Uranium One to the Russian government.
The story begins with Breitbart.com head Stephen Bannon. In 2012, long before he became the Trump campaign’s chief executive and joined Trump’s White House as chief strategist, Bannon launched the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit conservative investigative research organization. Three years later, GAI’s president, the discredited author Peter Schweizer, authored the bestselling book "Clinton Cash." The book, built on GAI’s research, alleged that Bill and Hillary Clinton “typically blur the lines between politics, philanthropy, and business.” It was a trainwreck of sloppy research and shoddy reporting but was heavily promoted by mainstream outlets thanks to a cunning media strategy overseen by Bannon and taken up by Trump during the campaign.
One of the book’s bogus allegations was Schweizer’s claim that Hillary Clinton played a "central role" in approving the purchase of Uranium One by the Russian State Atomic Nuclear Agency. Schweizer speculated that she did so because of the money given to the Clinton Foundation and her husband by Russians and people linked to the deal. But this made no sense, and several reporters assessing Schweizer’s claims rejected them. The State Department had one of nine votes on the committee that approved the deal; the State Department rep said Clinton never intervened on the issue; there were critical questions about the timing of the donations Schweizer referenced; and even Schweizer said he had no direct evidence Clinton had intervened.
The false allegations might have been forgotten in the wake of the election. But in January, the U.S. intelligence community announced that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the aim of harming Clinton’s campaign because “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Reporting from a host of news outlets ever since has suggested that Trump’s campaign aides and associates had a series of troubling interactions with Russians, triggering congressional investigations and eventually a criminal probe by special counsel Robert Mueller. With Trump’s presidency hanging in the balance, his allies have searched for a way to rebut the charges.
Hannity eventually settled on the old "Clinton Cash" allegations. Claiming that there is no evidence to support what he terms “black-helicopter, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about so-called Trump-Russia collusion,” the Fox host declared that the “real collusion” is between Clinton and Russia, as demonstrated by the Uranium One tale. He pushed that argument over and over again to his audience of 3 million, making it in more than two dozen monologues over the summer.
Then a week ago, Hannity tweeted this:
Hannity was promoting a report by John Solomon, the executive vice president of The Hill, which purported to advance the Uranium One story. According to Solomon’s anonymous sources, “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow.” Solomon provides no evidence that the Clintons were aware this was happening, and of course the underlying conspiracy theory that Clinton pushed the Uranium One deal through still makes no sense. But it’s something the right-wing press can use to try to shift attention away from Trump.
Solomon is an investigative journalist who has had many acts in the business. This year, he’s drawn attention for his work as chief operating officer of Circa News, a mobile-first platform with an independent brand that the conservative goliath Sinclair Broadcast Group bought in 2015, hollowed out, and turned into its own pro-Trump news website. At Circa, Solomon and his colleague Sara Carter excelled at turning out stories — often anonymously sourced — alleging impropriety by former Obama national security officials and former FBI Director James Comey. Feeding into the right-wing narratives about efforts by nefarious deep-state actors to tear down the president, Circa’s reporting received glowing reviews from Trump’s most conspiratorial supporters.
But Circa’s biggest fan is Hannity — as The Hill put it in March, he “has repeatedly lauded Circa as the gold standard.” Indeed, for all intents and purposes, Solomon’s operation replaced Fox’s own journalists in providing the pro-Trump reporting Hannity needs to confirm his biases. According to Media Matters research, Carter appeared on 30 episodes of "Hannity" from May 15 through the end of August — the only guests to show up more often were Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett. Solomon made 14 appearances on Hannity’s Fox News show during the same time frame.
Hannity heavily promoted Solomon’s story on his Fox show, devoting extensive segments to the “explosive” “bombshell” on the night it broke and the next two nights. He’s hosted Solomon, Carter, and Schweizer, harangued the rest of the press for not covering the story and declared Uranium One “one of the biggest scandals this country has ever seen.” And on the night the story broke, he made clear what he thought should happen next:
Also, is Congress now going to do its job? Will they investigate these explosive reports immediately? Will the Special Counsel Robert Mueller start looking into this Russian plot to control American uranium?
Over the next few days, Trump’s allies on Fox and elsewhere worked themselves into a frenzy over the “real collusion” story (per Alex Jones, the “Beginning Of The End For Clinton Crime Family”). On the morning of October 19, apparently spurred on by a "Fox & Friends" segment on Solomon’s story, Trump himself joined the fray, tweeting, “Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn’t want to follow!”
And now Nunes — who had to recuse himself from Russia-related investigations earlier this year due to ethics charges that resulted from his effort to do the White House’s bidding and scuttle the Trump-Russia investigations — is taking a hand. At a press conference today, he announced that he would be launching an investigation into the Uranium One allegations. He will be working alongside the House Oversight Committee, helped by the former chairman of the Benghazi Committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
When there's a congressional investigation into a Clinton, Fox knows how to respond:
The New York Times yesterday detailed how Republican congressmen, including Nunes and Gowdy, are trying to “wrap up the investigations” into Trump’s Russia ties as quickly as possible. “Congressional investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,” Gowdy told the Times. He knows that from experience. A year into Trump’s presidency, egged on by sycophantic media allies like Hannity, the first congressional investigation into a Clinton has begun. It won’t end anytime soon.
https://www.salon.com/2017/10/25/how-st ... ium-story/
[/quote]What you need to know about Hillary Clinton, Russia, and uranium
President Donald Trump says the "real" Russia scandal involves Hillary Clinton and uranium. We took a closer look at what he's referring to.
A 2016 campaign attack involving former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her role in a uranium sale that involved Russia is back in the news.
With new revelations, increased media attention and reader requests, we decided to take another look. Because the details of the story are murky and based in part on anonymous sources, we won’t put any claims to the Truth-O-Meter.
See related rulings
Instead, we’ll explain what we knew previously, what new information has come to light, and what we still don’t know.
What we knew before
This complex tale involves a company with significant U.S. uranium assets, the Clinton Foundation, and a decision by several federal agencies to allow greater Russian influence in the United States’ uranium market.
It first emerged in the book Clinton Cash, a 2015 investigation by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer. The book looked into donations to the Clinton Foundation; an April 2015 New York Times article also documented the connections.
In 2007, Frank Giustra, a donor to the Clinton Foundation, sold his company, UrAsia, to another company, Uranium One, and unloaded his personal stake in it. The combined company kept Uranium One as its name but Toronto as its base. Under the terms of the deal, the shareholders of UrAsia retained a 60 percent stake in the new company.
Uranium One had mines, mills and tracts of land in Wyoming, Utah and other U.S. states equal to about 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity. Its actual production is a smaller portion of uranium produced in the United States, at 11 percent in 2014, according to Oilprice.com.
In 2009, Russia’s nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, bought a 17 percent share of Uranium One. In 2010, Rosatom sought to secure enough shares to give it a 51 percent stake.
On the one hand, Russia doesn’t have a license to export uranium outside the United States, so, as Oilprice.com noted, "it’s somewhat disingenuous to say this uranium is now Russia’s, to do with what it pleases."
That said, the possibility that a foreign entity would take a majority stake in the uranium operation meant that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, had to approve the deal. So did the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Utah’s nuclear regulator.
The membership of CFIUS includes the State Department, meaning that the Secretary of State would have had a voice. The panel also includes the attorney general and the secretaries of the Treasury (who chairs the committee), Defense, Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security, as well as the heads of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
CFIUS did approve the proposal, and in 2013, Russia assumed 100 percent ownership of Uranium One and renamed the company Uranium One Holding.
Why would the United States allow the transfer of a uranium company?
As others, including a New York Times’ investigation, have suggested, the United States was still seeking to "reset" its relationship with Russia and trying to get the Kremlin on board with its Iran nuclear deal. But another factor may have been that, at the end of the day, the Russian deal wasn’t that big.
Russia’s purchase of the company "had as much of an impact on national security as it would have if they set the money on fire," said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute and former director at the New America Foundation, in an interview with PolitiFact last year. "That’s probably why (CFIUS and the NRC) approved it."
Why some of the critics’ charges during the campaign went too far
In June 2016, we fact-checked a statement by then-candidate Donald Trump -- who was running against Clinton for president -- that Clinton’s State Department "approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation."
We gave the statement a rating of Mostly False. While the connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Russian deal may appear fishy, there was simply no proof of any quid pro quo.
Trump’s allegation went too far in two ways.
One, Trump seemed to say that Clinton bears all of the responsibility for the deal’s approval. That is incorrect.
Clinton told a New Hampshire TV station in June 2015 that "I was not personally involved because that wasn’t something the secretary of state did." And Jose Fernandez, who served as assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs under Clinton and represented the department on the panel, told the Times that Clinton "never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter."
But even if you don’t take either Clinton or Fernandez at their word, the reality is that the State Department was just one of nine government agencies that signed off on the transaction.
Second, while we concluded that nine people related the company did at some point donate to the Clinton Foundation, we found that the bulk of the $145 million came from Giustra. Guistra said he sold all of his stakes in Uranium One in the fall of 2007, "at least 18 months before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state" and three years before the Russian deal.
We couldn’t independently verify Giustra’s claim, but if he is telling the truth, the donation amount to the Clinton Foundation from confirmed Uranium One investors drops from more than $145 million to $4 million.
The main exception is Ian Telfer, an investor who the New York Times found donated between $1.3 million and $5.6 million to the Clinton Foundation during and after the review process for the Russian deal.
So while Trump was within his right to question links between foundation donors and their ties to Uranium one, his specific charge was exaggerated.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post Fact Checker subsequently looked at a similar Trump statement: "Remember that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium and, you know, she was paid a fortune. You know, they got a tremendous amount of money."
The Fact Checker came to the same conclusion about Trump’s misleading language, giving Trump’s assertion its worst rating of Four Pinocchios.
Why this story is coming up again
After Trump won the presidency, the Uranium One story received relatively little attention -- perhaps because Clinton is now a private citizen rather than serving as president. But that changed in the wake of a report published in the Hill newspaper on Oct. 17, 2017.
The article’s key finding was that by the time CFIUS was weighing the deal, the FBI had been investigating whether Russia was trying to gain influence in the U.S. nuclear industry. The report said that the FBI has already "gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States."
The implication of the Hill article is that Clinton either did know, or should have known, about problems with the Russian bid for Uranium One before deciding whether to let it go forward. (Clinton, the FBI and the Justice Department did not provide a comment on this story.)
The article cited FBI, Energy Department and court documents showing that the FBI had gathered "substantial evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the main Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the United States — was engaged in wrongdoing starting in 2009."
However, rather than bringing immediate charges in 2010, the article said, the Justice Department "continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions."
What remains unclear after the newest report?
The relevance of the Hill report for Clinton’s role would be whether she knew anything about this investigation at a time when she could have used her role in CFIUS to block the Russian deal. (It could also be relevant for the actions by then-Attorney General Eric Holder, whose department has a seat on CFIUS.)
For now at least, we aren’t aware of any evidence that Clinton knew anything about the FBI investigation. If anything, the Hill’s reporting suggests the opposite.
The Hill article quoted Ronald Hosko, who served as the assistant FBI director in charge of criminal cases when the investigation was underway, saying that he did not recall ever being briefed about Mikerin’s case.
" ‘I had no idea this case was being conducted,’ a surprised Hosko said in an interview," the Hill article reported.
At least one key lawmaker -- then-Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who chaired the House Intelligence Committee at the time -- also said he did not know about the investigation.
If the assistant FBI director at the time knew nothing of the investigation, then Clinton -- someone in a different department and several rungs higher in the organizational chart -- might not have known about it.
Stewart A. Baker, a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson, was skeptical that such information would have reached the Secretary of State -- "at least not until she was asked to weigh in on the transaction, and that would only happen if it were deeply controversial, which it was not. In my experience, the State Department was always one of the quickest agencies to urge approval of a deal, and they did that without checking with the Secretary."
The vast majority of cases that CFIUS reviews are handled by lower-ranking staffers and appointees, added Stephen Heifetz, a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson who specializes in CFIUS law.
"Even though the heads of the CFIUS agencies comprise CFIUS as a matter of law," he said, "it is relatively rare to have a cabinet secretary directly involved in a CFIUS case."
That said, several experts said they were surprised that word had not filtered up from the FBI.
The FBI "is well represented as part of the Justice Department’s CFIUS team," Baker said. "It would be somewhat surprising to me if a company was under scrutiny as a buyer in CFIUS and simultaneously under investigation for criminal behavior by the FBI, but the criminal investigation was not known to the FBI’s representatives on CFIUS."
In addition, it’s Justice Department policy to consolidate all Foreign Corrupt Practices Act inquiries within department headquarters in Washington, said Michael Koehler, a professor at Southern Illinois University School of Law and an expert on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This makes word of those cases more likely to reach top officials than other types of investigations.
And the fact that the Mikerin case included a confidential informant makes it "more likely than not that top Justice Department or FBI officials either knew of the inquiry or should have known of the inquiry," Koehler said.
Even if word had filtered up to CFIUS this way, it might not have been enough to scuttle the deal, Heifetz added.
"CFIUS often has cleared transactions when there is adverse information about foreign investors but no apparent risk to national security," he said.
Ultimately, we don’t know enough to be able to say whether the apparent lack of information about the FBI investigation among higher ups was due to internal reporting failures or the more mundane reality that ground-level FBI investigations take time to mature and solidify.
But for now, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that Clinton’s actions -- ill-advised as they might have been -- were any more problematic than it seemed they were a year ago.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... and-urani/
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 04, 2017 12:34 pm
THIS IS A LIST OF ADVERTISERS WHO HAVE DROPPED BREITBART - 3408 ADVERTISERS
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Q/htmlview
RenTech’s Robert Mercer to Exit as Co-CEO, Sell Breitbart Stake
By Janet Lorin and Katherine Burton
November 2, 2017, 9:52 AM CDT Updated on November 2, 2017, 10:11 AM CDT
Rentech's Robert Mercer to Resign as Co-CEO
Renaissance Technologies’ Co-Founder Robert Mercer will resign as CO-CEO. Bloomberg’s Zach Mider reports.
Renaissance Technologies’ Robert Mercer plans to step down as co-chief executive officer effective Jan. 1, according to a letter he sent to investors in the firm’s funds.
Peter Brown, 62, will continue as CEO, the letter said. Mercer, 71, will also leave the board but remain at the company as a member of the technical staff focusing on research work. Mercer and Brown took the co-CEO posts in 2010 after founder James Simons retired.
Read Robert Mercer’s letter to his staff at Renaissance
In recent months, Mercer’s personal political projects dragged him and his firm into the national spotlight. Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, are prominent Republican donors and patrons of Stephen Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News and a driving force behind the populist, nationalist wing of the Republican party that carried Donald Trump to the White House.
In a Nov. 2 letter to colleagues at the hedge fund, Mercer said "for personal reasons" he has decided to sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters.
Mercer’s politics have put him at odds with those of other top figures at Renaissance. Simons, who remains chairman of the Renaissance board, was one of Hillary Clinton’s top financial backers during last year’s election.
Brown and Mercer were both hired by Renaissance in 1993 from the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where they were language technology experts. The firm has been a pioneer in the growing industry of computer-driven investing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -fund-firm
[/quote]Data Guru’s Assange Outreach Is Trump Camp’s Closest Tie To WikiLeaks Yet
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published OCTOBER 25, 2017 2:09 PM
A few bizarre connections have cropped up since summer 2016 between Julian Assange, the founder of radical transparency site WikiLeaks, and allies of President Donald Trump, but a new report has unveiled the closest connection between Assange and the Trump campaign yet.
The Daily Beast on Wednesday delivered the news that Alexander Nix, head of the data-analytics firm that received millions of dollars from the Trump campaign, reached out to Assange about coordinating the release of 33,000 emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, citing a “third party” Nix told about the exchange.
Assange confirmed to the Beast that he received an “approach by Cambridge Analytica,” the firm in question, and that “it was rejected by WikiLeaks.”
Congressional investigators reportedly are probing the work that Cambridge Analytica, a firm heavily backed by major Trump donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, performed on behalf of the President’s campaign. The Daily Beast’s reporting is the first indication that a company directly hired by the Trump campaign tried to link up with WikiLeaks, presumably with the aim of damaging Clinton’s campaign.
Despite Trump’s public plea for Russia to obtain them and some freelancers’ best efforts to do so, Clinton’s 33,000 private emails never surfaced, and there’s no evidence that her private server was ever hacked in the first place. But the Daily Beast’s report spells out the strongest in a line of contacts Trump’s orbit has had with the founder of an organization that released tens of thousands of other embarrassing emails from Clinton campaign officials and top Democratic operatives during the 2016 race.
Roger Stone claims secret “back-channel communication” with WikiLeaks
In August 2016, about a month after WikiLeaks began releasing its trove of damaging Democratic Party emails, Trump’s longtime confidante and short-lived campaign adviser Roger Stone claimed that he had communicated with Assange about what documents the site would be making public in the future, including a mysterious “October surprise.”
Stone, an eccentric GOP operative and prominent Trump surrogate, later said that he hadn’t talked to Assange directly but instead had a “back-channel communication” with him through a mutual friend who traveled between London and the U.S.
On the same afternoon in October 2016 that Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked, on which he could be heard saying he could grab women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks started publishing emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Stone said he had no idea that the leaks were coming, although Podesta pointed out that Stone had predicted in an August tweet that it would “soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
For its part, WikiLeaks has denied any relationship with Stone, insisting that there was “no communications, no channel.”
It’s unclear whether the Trump ally, who is under scrutiny in both congressional and federal investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has provided congressional investigators with the identity of his intermediary to Assange after they threatened to subpoena him.
Earlier this year, Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage denied serving as Stone’s go-between. Farage stumped for Trump on several occasions, and visited Assange earlier this year at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has taken asylum for the past five years after facing a sexual assault charge in Sweden.
Assange offers to publish Trump Jr.’s email chain with Russian operatives
Assange claimed this summer that he offered up WikiLeaks as a platform that Donald Trump Jr. could use to release an email chain on which the President’s son set up a meeting to receive information about Hillary Clinton that was described to him as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to help his father’s campaign.
“Contacted Trump Jr this morning on why he should publish his emails (i.e with us),” Assange said in a tweet. “Two hours later, does it himself.”
After a series of increasingly damaging reports about the lead-up to his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-linked officials, Trump Jr. elected instead to publish the entire thread on his own Twitter feed.
Assange later offered more information on why he thought WikiLeaks would have been a better option.
“I argued that his enemies have it – so why not the public?” he wrote on Twitter. “His enemies will just milk isolated phrases for weeks or months … with their own context, spin and according to their own strategic timetable. Better to be transparent and have the full context … but would have been safer for us to publish it anonymously sourced. By publishing it himself it is easier to submit as evidence.”
Pro-Russia lawmaker meets Assange to talk pardon deal he wants to pitch Trump
After holding a surprise August meeting with Assange at the Ecuadorian assembly in London, “Putin’s favorite congressman” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said Assange convinced him that Russia did not play a role in passing Democrats’ stolen emails to WikiLeaks.
Rohrabacher then spent several weeks boasting that he would provide the information he gleaned from Assange directly to Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported that he ultimately ended up making his pitch, which would offer Assange a pardon in exchange for information that would clear Russia of interfering in the 2016 race, to Trump’s chief-of-staff John Kelly instead.
Kelly reportedly directed Rohrabacher to the intelligence community, and, at least as of late last month, Trump appeared unaware of these backdoor maneuverings.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... paign-ties
Republicans move to take down GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher as Trump-Russia scandal closes in on him
Bill Palmer
Updated: 9:58 pm EDT Tue Oct 24, 2017
Home » Politics
Dana Rohrabacher is so blatantly a Russian puppet, his fellow Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy accused him last year of being on Vladimir Putin’s payroll. Since that time Rohrabacher has taken things even further, meeting with fellow Russian puppet Julian Assange in an attempt to negotiate a pardon. Now the Republican Party is making moves to try to take Rohrabacher down, presumably because it fears he’s about to be taken down by the Trump-Russia scandal anyway.
House Republicans officially neutered Dana Rohrabacher on Tuesday by taking away his ability to travel overseas to conduct official business, and by taking away his ability to hold committee hearings, according to a Daily Beast report (link). The moves leave Rohrabacher largely unable to do his job. This is the closest the House can come to shutting down one of its members, short of expulsion – and it’s nothing short of shocking to see the House majority do it to a member of their own party who hasn’t been formally charged with any crime. That may be about to change.
Even as House Republicans moved to distract from Donald Trump’s Russia scandal by trying to create a phony Obama-Hillary-Russia scandal today, they’re suddenly marching Dana Rohrabacher toward the door today for a reason. They’re locking him down for fear that he’ll continue trying to do Putin’s bidding in the Trump-Russia scandal. But they wouldn’t be worried about that one way or the other, unless they believe Rohrabacher is about to become a central figure in the scandal.
This is, in effect, an attempt by the Republican Party at insulating itself from Dana Rohrabacher before the ceiling drops on him. What do they know that we don’t? Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller targeting Rohrabacher as part of his investigation? What do they think is about to come out about Rohrabacher’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal?
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ro ... rump/5693/
by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 08, 2017 10:52 am
ALL IN
Exclusive: Russia Activated Twitter Sleeper Cells for 2016 Election Day Blitz
In its final, climactic push for Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s troll army enlisted new members: semi-dormant propaganda accounts created as far back as 2009.
KEVIN POULSEN
11.07.17 7:30 PM ET
As U.S. polling places opened last Nov. 8, Russian trolls in St. Petersburg began a final push on Twitter to elect Donald Trump.
They used a combination of high-profile accounts with large and influential followings, and scores of lurking personas established years earlier with stolen photos and fabricated backgrounds. Those sleeper accounts dished out carefully metered tweets and retweets voicing praise for Trump and contempt for his opponent, from the early morning until the last polls closed in the United States.
“VOTE TRUMP to save ourselves from the New World Order. Time to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” read one. “Last chance to stop the Queen of Darkness! Vote Trump!” urged another.
The Daily Beast analyzed a dataset of 6.5 million tweets containing election keywords like “Hillary” and “Trump” that was collected over 33 hours last Nov. 7-9 by Baltimore-based data scientist Chris Albon.
The data are not comprehensive—only tweets with one of the keywords were collected, and limitations in Twitter’s API prevent a full capture even of those. But they represent a significant sampling of Election Day Twitter.
By filtering for the 2,752 users identified by Twitter as Russian troll accounts—a list the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released last week—we isolated 80 accounts dishing Election Day agitprop and reconstructed the big finish to Russia’s months-long active measures campaign.
The contours of that campaign, allegedly ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, have become clearer in the year since the 2016 election, thanks to declassified intelligence findings, congressional hearings, and media reports.
Twitter Bans RT, Which Retaliates With Powerpoint
The Kremlin employed hackers in Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal documents and emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which were leaked with strategic timing via WikiLeaks, as well as to members of the press and directly to the web.
Russian state-run media was enlisted to produce and promote narratives helpful to Trump, and full-time paid internet trolls at the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency worked long hours on social media to amplify criticism of Clinton, spread misinformation, and, as first reported by The Daily Beast, organize real-life demonstrations on American soil.
After months of work, Russia’s hard-fought campaign was drawing to a close in November 2016, and the trolls in St. Petersburg were priming their final push. On election eve an account called “World News Politics,” set up less than three weeks earlier, rolled out scheduled tweets attacking Clinton and the Democratic Party.
“Hillary’s Violent Paid Protesters Attack Trump Supporters in Chicago,” blared one election-eve headline a little after 11 p.m. Eastern. Two seconds later, another tweet hit Clinton on her health: “HILLARY STUMBLES AGAIN! Watch The 15-Second Video That Just Made Trump President.”
The morning of Election Day, another Russia-operated news feed, the Phoenix Daily News, tweeted a story from an Arizona ABC affiliate’s website, “Group to watch for voter fraud on Election Day.” The article was genuine, but the tweet was a glimpse at the theme Russia would develop throughout the day: The election was rigged for Hillary Clinton.
Evidently anticipating a Trump loss, as nearly everyone did, the trolls’ final election mission was to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the vote, “crippling [Clinton’s] presidency from its start,” according to U.S. intelligence findings. “Democrats BUSTED Breaking Election Law on VIDEO in Ohio,” read a tweet from World News Politics. Then, at 11 a.m. Eastern, “BREAKING : Mass Election Fraud, Voting Irregularities and Discrimination Against Trump Voters Reported #VoterFraud.”
Viral Gold
Russia’s most influential troll accounts began signing on at around 7 a.m., but they eased into the stolen election theme cautiously.
TEN_GOP, a fake account purporting to represent Tennessee Republicans, spent most of the morning circulating pro-Trump and anti-Clinton quotes. “Hillary Clinton is the most dishonest candidate for POTUS since Richard Nixon,” read a 9:13 a.m. tweet accurately quoting Mike Pence. The more alt-right flavored account of John “TheFoundingSon” Davis begged voters to remember Benghazi.
Then Russia struck viral gold with a glitchy voting machine in Pennsylvania. A voter had captured cellphone video showing him attempting to change the selection on his electronic ballot from Clinton to Trump, and the machine stubbornly refusing to register his button-press. He tweeted about the incident afterward, noting that the poll workers fixed the issue and he cast his intended Trump vote, but the machine “was on some nut shit at first.”
In the hands of Russia’s propagandists, the Pennsylvania glitch was frothed into clear evidence of a conspiracy to steal the election from Trump.
At 1:14 p.m. the TEN_GOP account, which then had 51,690 followers, tweeted out an election fraud alert complete with a Drudge-style police car revolving light emoji: “BREAKING: Machine Refuses to Allow Vote For Trump in Pennsylvania!! RT [retweet] the hell out of it! #VoterFraud.”
The alert accumulated more than 14,000 retweets by the end of the day and helped make TEN_GOP the seventh most mentioned user on Election Day Twitter, according to data from the George Washington University.
“Anticipating a Trump loss, the Russian trolls’ final election mission was to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the vote.”
From then on the Russian trolls pushed the election-rigging trope relentlessly.
The fake Texan Pamela_Moore13, with 24,020 followers, aired a video that she said proved the DNC hacked the primaries. “Man PROVES software stole votes in ALL ‘Hillary won’ counties! DNC rigged elections! Voter Fraud is Real!” The account America_1st_ separately alerted its 24,744 followers to “massive” election fraud in Colorado, possible absentee voter fraud in Florida, and a “Van Full Of Illegals” that showed up “To Vote Clinton At SIX Polling Places!”
The account MarchForTrump took things a step further. In the months before the election, Russia successfully organized pro-Trump demonstrations behind the MarchForTrump front and its linked Facebook page, “Being Patriotic.”
Now it unveiled its own Voter Fraud hotline, promoted in a series of overheated tweets. “This election is being rigged! REPORT VOTER FRAUD: 888 486 8102 (Being Patriotic hotline) [...]”
It’s unclear where the phone number went or who answered. Today it’s disconnected.
Second Wave
While the high-profile accounts occupied the front lines of Russia’s information war, at the rear a legion of low-key sleeper personas, with fewer than 5,000 followers each, pushed a steady stream of tweets and retweets praising Trump and condemning Clinton, voiced as the Election Day thoughts of ordinary American voters.
This astroturf portion of Russia’s campaign kicked into high gear just after noon Eastern time. “Only YOU can prevent a Hillary Victory. Get out and vote,” read a typical tweet from “Lara Pretty,” who purports to be an Air Force veteran, an NRA member, a Christian, and a Blue Star mother with a son or daughter on active duty in the military.
“JUSTICE FOR HILLARY -- BRING HER TO HEEL To Lock Her Up --WE MUST-- Lock Her Out,” another account said. An account named “Kelvin Chambers” joined in: “All I ask is please go out and vote today... unless your [sic] voting for Hillary then just stay home your vote isn’t necessary #TrumpForPresident.”
Other accounts peddled misogyny, Benghazi, and alt-right conspiracy theories attempting to link the Clinton campaign to pedophilia and/or Satanism. “I’m a Democrat and would never vote for #SpiritCooking Suoer [sic] Child Predator Scum like #HillaryRottenClinton,” read one such tweet from “John Larsen,” a self-described conservative who believes in “patriotism & optimism.”
The creation dates on those accounts show that Russia began quietly accumulating and maintaining them as early as 2009, with surges in account creation in August 2013 and late 2015.
They churned along largely unnoticed, averaging two or three tweets a day, then perked up on Election Day to contribute five to eight tweets each to America’s political discourse.
It’s a typical pattern for Russia’s trolling operation, which is known to retask long-standing accounts to different Kremlin causes or set up accounts for future use.
“They may have some sitting on the bench, just to let them mature,” said former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, who’s been studying Russia’s election interference. “Then when you ramp up, you have personas to match.”
“The sleeper accounts joined in with the heavy hitters to hammer on the theme that the election was rigged in favor of Clinton.”
One of the prominent accounts, USA_Gunslinger—“Gunslinger Girl” from “Wisconsin” with 25,858 followers—linked to a Breitbart article reporting that President Obama was phoning into local radio stations to encourage Democratic voter turnout in some battleground states. “Outrageous!” USA_Gunslinger tweeted.
A Trump campaign insider, Michael Flynn Jr., personally replied to the Russian troll account with his own commentary: “desperation stinks.”
‘See How Your Democracy Works?’
At 7 p.m. Eastern, voting ended in some states, and, to no one’s surprise, Indiana and Kentucky were immediately called for Trump. The Russian tweets continued. At 7:20, MarchForTrump pushed a reminder that “This election is being rigged!” along with the special voter fraud hotline. But that was the last Russian tweet in our dataset that complained about a rigged election.
In the United States, ballots in the key battleground state of Florida were being counted, and millions of voters, along with a room full of Russian propagandists, were hanging on every update.
At 7:45 p.m., with more than half the votes counted, Trump was slightly ahead with 49.8 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 47.3 percent. It was closer than most pundits had expected, and after endless predictions of an easy Clinton victory, a Trump win began to seem possible. “Trump’s lead in Florida is growing!” TEN_GOP tweeted at 8:24 p.m.
The Russians changed tack and completely abandoned the election fraud message they’d been pushing since dawn, joining with American Trump supporters to celebrate the turn the election was taking. “Alabama is RED!” tweeted “America First!” at 8:33 p.m. “Hope Texas goes red,” added “South Lone Star” three minutes later. “Saddest day for the Media!” TEN_GOP vowed at 10 p.m. “Trump is winning in a landslide!”
The next day, with Trump officially the victor, the popular Russian account “Jenna Abrams” appeared to momentarily break character to share the popular vote tallies from the presidential race and deliver the troll factory's final judgement on America’s 2016 election: “See how your democracy works?”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive ... -day-blitz
Why the White House Dreads a Flynn Indictment
Unlike the Paul Manafort case, charges against the former national-security adviser would touch the White House itself and could ensnare the president.
Reuters
DAVID A. GRAHAM NOV 6, 2017 POLITICS
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In the indictments sweepstakes ahead of last week’s first moves by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, Paul Manafort was the odds-on favorite, but Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser, was a good bet too.
Monday, and the rest of the week, came and went, bringing indictments for Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates and a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, but nothing on Flynn. But NBC News reported over the weekend that federal investigators have enough evidence to charge Flynn, and that’s a prospect that should be particularly worrisome to the White House.
It’s worth noting that Flynn might already have been indicted. Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, for example, came on October 5 but wasn’t revealed until October 30; he was arrested months earlier. There’s speculation that Mueller’s grand jury may have already handed down new indictments that haven’t been unsealed yet.
Whether a Flynn indictment is sealed or still forthcoming, any charges would make the administration’s situation, already complex, even more headache-inducing. From any rational point of view, the Manafort indictment was bad news for President Trump: No one wants a former campaign chairman to be accused of moving around $75 million, and charged with money laundering and lying to the federal government. But the White House quickly adopted a positive spin, noting that the charges concerned behavior before Manafort joined the Trump campaign.
As I wrote last week, that reflects poorly on Trump as a judge of character and as an employer, but it also allowed the president to distance himself from the investigation and point out that none of the charges against Manafort indicated collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. (The Papadopoulos plea, though somewhat enigmatic, struck much closer to that matter.) As Trump made that point publicly, The Washington Post and Axios both reported that staffers inside the White House were relieved that Manafort had been charged, rather than Flynn.
The charges that Flynn seems most likely to face are similar to some that were brought against Manafort. Like Manafort, Flynn did not register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act at the time he did work for foreign governments, though like Manafort, he retroactively registered. Like Manafort, who is charged with making false statements, Flynn may have lied to the FBI. Flynn was pushed out of his job as national-security adviser on February 14, making him the shortest-tenured holder of that job in history, after the Post revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about conversations he had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the paper later reported that Flynn had also lied to the FBI about those conversations.
There are also other counts on which Flynn might be in trouble: His conversations with Kislyak could violate a law that prevents private citizens from conducting foreign policy, though it has never successfully been used to prosecute an American, and many analysts doubt it will be here. There is scrutiny of Flynn’s work for Turkey, for which he retroactively filed under FARA, including an alleged scheme to kick Fethullah Gulen, a cleric and enemy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan out of the country. Members of Congress have focused on trips he made overseas, including one to celebrate the anniversary of the Kremlin propaganda network RT. As a former top general, Flynn was required to seek permission to be paid for those trips, and he also stands accused of not disclosing them when seeking renewed security clearance. Flynn was also involved in a bizarre Middle Eastern civil-nuclear scheme.
Whatever the superficial similarities between the Manafort and Flynn situations, though, the key difference is that a Flynn indictment would put the Mueller probe in the White House. Manafort was pushed out of the campaign in August and never worked in the Trump administration (though he is said to have remained in contact with Trump for months). Flynn, however, worked in the White House for almost a month. That means he could have discussed many of the potential areas for charges—from conversations with Kislyak to Gulen to who knows what—with any number of White House staffers on any level. Mueller could call them in for questioning. Even if none of those staffers did anything illegal, and at this point there’s no indication they did, the threat of testimony will create new stress and distraction in a White House already riven with both. They’ll also all need lawyers, and good expensive ones; the Papadopoulos plea-deal is a vivid illustration of the dangers of talking to federal agents. (Trump has offered to contribute $430,000 to legal fees, but the more staffers involved, the faster that will be used up.)
Moreover, a Flynn investigation would move things much closer to Trump himself. The president distanced himself from Manafort—former Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed he played a “very limited role” in the campaign—but not from Flynn. Trump allowed Flynn to stay in the administration even after it became clear he had lied to Pence, and also after a conversation between then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and White House Counsel Don McGahn. Yates would not divulge the contents of that late-January conversation when she testified to Congress in May, but if Flynn did lie to the FBI, it appears likely that Yates told McGahn then.
Then, after Flynn’s departure, Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey if he could let Flynn go, saying he was a good guy, according to sworn testimony Comey offered to Congress. “General Flynn at that point in time was in legal jeopardy,” Comey said in June. “There was an open FBI criminal investigation of his statements in connection with the Russian contacts, and the contacts themselves, and so that was my assessment at the time.” Then, several months later, Trump fired Comey, a decision he attributed to Comey’s investigation into Russian interference in the election.
That creates two separate occasions on which Trump could potentially have obstructed justice—first by meddling in the FBI’s probe into Flynn, then by firing Comey altogether. As the law professor Ryan Goodman writes at Just Security, it would be possible to make an obstruction-of-justice case against Trump in the absence of charges against Flynn, but it’s much more straightforward to make such a case if there’s actual evidence of a case that Trump was attempting to obstruct. Actual criminal charges against Flynn would provide that.
No wonder the Trump team was pleased that Manafort, rather than Flynn, took the first hit—but that relief could be short-lived. Even if one takes Trump’s staunch denials of collusion with Russia entirely at face value, that doesn’t mean Robert Mueller can’t go after him on obstruction of justice or something else entirely. A Flynn indictment is the shortest path to that outcome.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... source=twb
by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 15, 2017 10:33 am
8bitagent » Tue Oct 31, 2017 3:24 am wrote:Morty » Fri Oct 27, 2017 10:31 pm wrote:$145 million dollars into the Clinton foundation is a fact that takes quite a lot to ignore, but the left press is managing to do so without breaking a sweat. They are either truly shameless, or utterly naive.
Only those with an "R" next to their name on tv can do any wrong
Study: Fox spent nearly 12 hours pushing the Uranium One pseudoscandal over the last three weeks
Trump propagandist Sean Hannity led the way with almost three and a half hours of coverage
Blog ››› November 9, 2017 8:30 AM EST ››› MATT GERTZ
Fox News host Sean Hannity opened his program on the night of October 17 by promising “explosive new evidence on what is becoming the biggest scandal -- or at least one of them -- in American history.” Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between President Donald Trump’s associates and Russia has captured the attention of the mainstream press. But Hannity, a fervent fan and sometime adviser to the president, focused his audience on what he termed a “big bombshell” from The Hill on the “real Russia collusion story.” Hillary Clinton, Hannity claimed, had “sold out America to the Russians” by approving the Russian nuclear energy agency’s 2010 acquisition of Uranium One, a company with licenses to extract U.S. uranium. According to the Fox host, Clinton had benefited from Russian government bribes and then the Obama administration had covered it all up. The story was so damning, Hannity said, that Mueller and Congress should shut down their Trump probes immediately and instead focus on the allegations against Clinton.
Hannity’s segment was the first in what became a network obsession. Over the past three weeks, Fox has spent nearly 12 hours discussing Uranium One. Trump himself seized on the story, at first directly responding to the network’s coverage. And Hannity’s demand that Congress “do its job” was answered within days when House Republicans launched an investigation into the deal.
The problem, of course, is that the Uranium One story is a bogus conspiracy theory, a sloppy mishmash of shoddy reporting, fabrications, and motivated reasoning whose central premise -- that Clinton played a role in the deal -- has been debunked. The president and his allies in Congress and in the conservative press -- particularly at Fox News -- have created a phony scandal to divert attention away from Trump’s Russia ties, focus criticism instead on their longtime foe Clinton, and justify calls to remove Mueller from his post.In this report:
In the three weeks from October 17 through November 6, Fox News devoted about 11 hours and 49 minutes to the Uranium One story (all times in this write-up were rounded to the minute). Ten hours and 47 minutes of the coverage came in the first two weeks of that period.
Hannity spent three hours and 27 minutes on the story, which was 29 percent of the network’s total coverage. The program covered Uranium One in 14 of 15 possible broadcasts over the term of the study.
Other programs devoting the most time to the story were Fox & Friends, America’s Newsroom, and Tucker Carlson Tonight, each with roughly an hour of coverage, and Justice with Judge Jeanine, a once-a-week program that nonetheless totaled 52 minutes.
Fox host Shep Smith did not mention the story on his weekday afternoon news program.
Over the first week, the network combined for three hours and 46 minutes of Uranium One coverage, led by their pro-Trump opinion hosts.
Fox aired six hours and 54 minutes of coverage during the second week as the network’s “news” shows reported on GOP congressional actions that likely came in response to the network’s “opinion” shows. The higest single-day total was on October 26, the day the Justice Department announced a key witness could testify to Congress, when 11 programs combined to give Uranium One more than two hours of coverage
The network's coverage receded to one hour and nine minutes in the third week.
Conservative author and Breitbart.com writer Peter Schweizer and his boss Steve Bannon launched the Uranium One tale in Schweizer’s 2015 book, Clinton Cash. Schweizer alleged that Hillary Clinton played a "central role" in approving the Russian atomic nuclear agency’s purchase of the mining company. He suggested that Clinton did so because Russians and people linked to the deal had given money to the Clinton Foundation and to Bill Clinton. A panoply of conservative media figures pushed Schweizer’s allegation; Trump himself parroted it on the campaign trail. But the conspiracy theory fell apart when examined by reporters, not least because there was no evidence Hillary Clinton had actually intervened.
Following Trump’s election, the story became dormant, mentioned only by pro-Trump propagandists like Hannity, who would use it to deflect attention from the mounting evidence that Trump’s associates had colluded with Russia during the campaign, claiming that the Uranium One deal proved Clinton guilty of the “real collusion.”
The story re-emerged thanks to John Solomon, the executive vice president of The Hill, whose reporting is frequently cited by Trump’s media allies because it feeds their paranoia about a “deep state” conspiracy targeting the president. In an October 17 story, he cited anonymous sources to suggest that Clinton had approved the Uranium One deal because of Russian bribes that had been investigated by the FBI but covered up by the Obama administration. These claims quickly collapsed under scrutiny, with Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noting that the “fatal flaw in this allegation is Hillary Clinton, by all accounts, did not participate in any discussions regarding the Uranium One sale.”
This did not deter the feedback loop between Fox News, Trump, and congressional Republicans. Over the following weeks, overwrought coverage from the network’s pro-Trump hosts would trigger responses from the president and the House GOP, which in turn led the network’s “news” team to give the story substantial attention. While the coverage has since subsided, an ongoing congressional witch hunt could provide the network with fodder for years to come.
C-Span’s Steve Scully asked Clinton about the allegations by Hannity and Trump during an interview about her book last month. Clinton responded by calling the claims “baloney” and noting that they have been “debunked repeatedly and will continue to be debunked.” “But here’s what they’re doing,” she added. “Trump and his allies, including Fox News, are really experts at distraction and diversion. So the closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians [gets], … the more they want to just throw mud on the wall, and I’m their favorite target.”
She’s right.
Who covered Uranium One at Fox
Fox gave Uranium One nearly 12 hours of coverage over three weeks
Thirty Fox programs covered the story for a total of 11 hours and 49 minutes in the three weeks from October 17 through November 6. In the first two weeks of that period, the network devoted 10 hours and 47 minutes to Uranium One.
Hannity led the charge with more than three hours of coverage
Sean Hannity’s program devoted three hours and 27 minutes to the story. That total is more than two hours over that of Fox & Friends, which had the second highest amount. Even that comparison grossly underestimates Hannity’s obsession, as he accomplished the feat in a third of the time -- the Fox morning show runs for three hours each day, not a single hour like Hannity. Hannity’s coverage amounts to 29 percent of the network’s total coverage of Uranium One.
Hannity covered the deal in 14 of his 15 episodes during the period studied. The sole exception came on October 20, when he instead aired a special tribute to the Las Vegas mass shooting victims featuring musical performances and interviews with victims and first responders. Hannity hosted Solomon eight times during that period. Victoria Toensing, a right-wing lawyer who is representing a former FBI informant related to the case, appeared on the program five times.
The pro-Trump propagandist’s Uranium One coverage should be viewed as part of his dark and authoritarian push to end criminal investigations into the activities of Trump and his associates and instead pursue charges against the president’s foes. Night after night, he’s castigated the media for not pursuing the story and explicitly stated that wants congressional hearings into the deal and a federal criminal investigation into Clinton. He’s also repeatedly used the story to push for Mueller’s resignation as special counsel because Mueller was FBI director at the time the deal occurred. As the Fox host put in on October 24, “There's no way the American people can trust Robert Mueller to investigate anything Russian-related; to be fair and impartial, it's impossible, because of his past role in this. He should resign immediately, tonight.”
Trump himself would later adopt Hannity’s talking points, calling Uranium One “the biggest story that Fake Media doesn't want to follow” and “Watergate, modern-age.”
Trump’s allies at Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro all heavily covered the story
Fox & Friends covered Uranium One during 10 of its 15 episodes during the period of the study, for a total of one hour and nine minutes. This constituted 10 percent of Fox’s total Uranium One coverage during the period.
Tucker Carlson Tonight covered the story during eight of its 15 episodes, for a total of an hour, or 8 percent of the network’s total coverage.
Justice with Jeanine Pirro is a weekly program that aired only three times during the course of the study but nonetheless accumulated 52 minutes of coverage, the fifth-highest total at the network and 7 percent of Fox’s total Uranium One coverage during the period.
The hosts of each of these programs are among the president’s staunchest defenders on cable news. In particular, the president regularly watches Fox & Friends and praises its coverage.
America’s Newsroom provided the most coverage among the network’s “news” programs
Among the programs Fox presents as “news” rather than “opinion” programming, the two-hour weekday morning show America’s Newsroom was the clear leader in Uranium One coverage, with one hour and four minutes across eight editions. The one-hour weekday shows Special Report with Bret Baier and Happening Now provided significantly less coverage, with 19 minutes over four broadcasts and 11 minutes across three broadcasts, respectively.
Shep Smith has not touched the story
Fox anchor Shep Smith, whose work stands out at Fox for its commitment to accuracy and who at times has directly or indirectly criticized other Fox personalities for pushing falsehoods in support of Trump, notably did not mention the Uranium One story at all during the period of the study. The story was discussed on his Shepard Smith Reporting show for two minutes on October 27, when Trace Gallagher guest-hosted the program.
When Fox covered Uranium One
Week one (Oct. 17 - Oct. 23): Story surfaces with Fox’s pro-Trump hosts
In the first week after The Hill’s story broke, the Uranium One fever spread from Hannity to several of the network’s other pro-Trump hosts, with only occasional mentions on Fox’s daytime “news” hours.
Hannity showed how excited he was about the story immediately after its October 17 publication:
That night, Hannity devoted his opening monologue to the story. He also discussed the allegations with Solomon, in an interview with Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich, and in another segment featuring Schweizer and network legal analyst Greg Jarrett. His was the only Fox program to discuss the story that day.
But on October 18, the story not only was featured by Hannity, but it also spread to Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Story with Martha MacCallum. Both shows adopted Hannity’s line that the story proved that it was the Obama administration, not the Trump administration, that colluded with Russia.
On the 19th, Fox & Friends devoted several segments to the story. Trump was apparently watching the program and gleefully tweeted along with it in response, giving the story an added boost. America’s Newsroom also did its first segment on the story that day, interviewing Toensing. Hannity and Carlson added additional coverage that night.
That Friday, Fox & Friends, the panel show The Five, and Carlson all devoted time to Uranium One. Over the weekend, the story received heavy coverage on Justice but little on the network’s other offerings.
On Monday, October 23, C-Span aired the interview in which Clinton was asked about Hannity’s Uranium One allegations and responded by calling them “baloney” and saying that Fox was trying to distract from the “real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians.”
That day, Fox devoted more than an hour of coverage to Uranium One across eight programs, the most of any day up until that point. This included the first Uranium One discussion on Special Report since The Hill’s story broke, with the show using Clinton’s comments to introduce its report.
Overall, the network devoted three hours and 47 minutes to Uranium One that week. Hannity was responsible for one hour and 25 minutes of the total.
Week two (Oct. 24 - Oct 30): As Congress responds, Fox moves to all-out obsession
Thanks in no small part to the constant agitation from Hannity and the other pro-Trump hosts at Fox, the second week of the story would bring action from congressional Republicans, Trump, and his administration.
On October 24, Republicans on the House oversight and intelligence committees announced a joint investigation into Uranium One. On the same day, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called for a special counsel to review the deal. Trump termed Uranium One “Watergate, modern age” the next day, while October 26 brought the Justice Department’s announcement that Toensing’s former FBI informant client could testify to Congress about the deal.
These actions provided fresh news hooks that would lead to heavy coverage across the spectrum of Fox’s offerings.
The network provided more than an hour and a half of coverage on October 24, roughly an hour on October 25, more than two hours on October 26, and roughly 50 minutes each on October 27 and 28. Each day featured reporting and commentary on Uranium One during nearly every hour of the network’s programming.
But by Monday, October 30, with an absence of fresh news hooks to keep the chatter going, the story had receded back to the network’s pro-Trump opinion shows.
Overall, the network devoted six hours and 54 minutes of coverage to Uranium One the second week. Hannity led the way with one hour and 37 minutes, but America’s Newsroom was in second place with 49 minutes, beating out Fox & Friends’ 35 minutes.
Week three (Oct. 31 - Nov. 6): Uranium One on the backburner
Without substantial news hooks to drive the story, Fox’s Uranium One coverage largely dissipated over the past week. Outside of diehards Hannity and Pirro, who devoted 28 minutes and 17 minutes, respectively, to the story, it was largely reduced to stray segments and passing mentions. The network gave Uranium One a comparatively mere one hour and nine minutes from October 31 to November 6.
But the story isn’t over. Fox maintained steady coverage of the September 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, for years, increasing the tempo whenever events provided the news hooks to do so.
The joint investigation by two congressional committees will provide Republican partisans with plenty of opportunities to stir up bogus charges against Clinton and the Obama administration. Congressional Republicans have started following in Hannity’s footsteps by using the Uranium One sideshow to call on Mueller to resign. And most of Fox’s on-air talent have already showed they are more than willing to be spun on the president’s behalf.
Methodology
Media Matters searched for the term “Uranium One” in Fox News Channel transcripts from the SnapStream database for all programming excluding reruns from October 17 through November 6, 2017.
We timed segments in their entirety if Uranium One was the stated topic of discussion at the start of the segment. This included host monologues, news reports, interviews, and panel discussions.
We also timed the relevant portions of segments where we found “significant discussion” of Uranium One during a segment about another topic or during a multitopic segment.
We defined “significant discussion” as discussion about Uranium One between two or more speakers in a single exchange.
We did not include passing mentions of Uranium One or teasers of upcoming segments about Uranium One.
Graphics by Sarah Wasko.
Rob Savillo and Shelby Jamerson contributed research
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/ ... 18475#shep
by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 15, 2017 10:46 am
Trump Campaign’s Foreign-Policy Team Is Under Mueller’s Microscope
More stories by Shannon PettypieceNovember 15, 2017, 3:00 AM CST
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing his interviews with White House staff this month, where a key topic are the connections emanating from a little-known foreign policy lightweight who served as an unpaid campaign aide -- George Papadopoulos.
Mueller has only given the public glimpses into his probe of alleged connections between President Donald Trump’s associates and Russian meddling of the U.S. election. But a court filing by Mueller related to Papadopoulos provides one possible path toward a case showing collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Papadopoulos was among a handful of names that Trump rattled off in March 2016 to introduce his hastily assembled policy team, a decision that is coming back to haunt him.
The bulk of Papadopoulos’s experience was as an unpaid intern and contract researcher at the Hudson Institute, a Washington research group. During the campaign, Papadopoulos tried to arrange a meeting with Russian officials and potentially a trip for Trump to Russia, according to court filings by Mueller. New details keep emerging about additional campaign conversations and emails related to Russians.
Here are the figures in Papadopoulos’s circle:
Sam Clovis
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Clovis, the campaign’s national co-chairman and chief policy adviser, selected Papadopoulos to be among a group of Trump’s foreign policy advisers in March 2016, even though he had little experience. Clovis is referred to as his "supervisor" in court filings related to Papadopoulos’s guilty plea.
A former Iowa talk radio host and Air Force officer, Clovis was included in at least four emails or conversations in which Papadopoulos discussed setting up a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials, according to the court filings. In one August exchange, Clovis suggests Papadopoulos and an unnamed campaign foreign policy adviser take a trip to Russia "if feasible" in response to a suggestion by Papadopoulos.
Clovis’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said in a statement that all of Papadopoulos’s communication with the campaign was "self generated" and that Clovis was against any Russian trip for Trump or staff. She added that if a volunteer made a suggestion, "Dr. Clovis, a polite gentleman from Iowa, would have expressed courtesy and appreciation."
Since the Papadopoulos guilty plea was unsealed, Clovis has asked for his name to be withdrawn from consideration for undersecretary for research at the Agriculture Department, although he continues to work at the agency. NBC News reported that Clovis has spoken to Mueller. Toensing declined to comment on that saying only that he is cooperating with the investigation.
Carter Page
Photographer: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images
Like Papadopoulos, Page came from outside the foreign policy establishment and his inclusion as a campaign adviser raised eyebrows. He had worked in Russia for years, including a stint at Merrill Lynch, and had numerous connections in the country.
Based on what is known so far, Page and Papadopoulos had little interaction beyond a few meetings and being copied on campaign-related emails. But the two men’s stories have a number of parallels.
Like Papadopoulos, Page also had Russian contacts during the campaign. Page said he was invited by a Russian university to speak at a commencement and asked the campaign for permission to go. J.D. Gordon, the campaign’s full-time national security adviser, said he told Page it wouldn’t be a good idea to have someone from the campaign traveling to Russia and wouldn’t pass along his request for approval. But Page went around him to then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who ultimately told Page he could go as long as it was for personal business and not related to the campaign, according to Gordon.
Page had told the media that he had no contacts with Russian officials while there for the speech, but in congressional testimony admitted meeting at least one Russian official. After returning from the trip, Page emailed campaign staffers offering to share "incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislatures and senior members of the presidential administration here."
J.D. Gordon
A former Pentagon spokesman and the campaign’s national security adviser, Gordon was tasked with overseeing the campaign’s nascent foreign policy team.
Gordon took part in a March 2016 meeting with then-Senator Jeff Sessions and Trump, where Papadopoulos offered to broker a meeting with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Gordon said that after Page went around him to secure permission to travel to Russia, he never had a follow-up conversation with him about the trip. He said Papadopoulos also went around him after Gordon shot down his idea in March to do an interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Page contacted Gordon and others on the campaign in July 2016 to praise them for a change in the Republican Party platform that softened the party’s support for Ukraine.
Corey Lewandowski
Lewandowski was Trump’s campaign manager until he was fired on June 20, 2016 and replaced by Paul Manafort. Lewandowski has mostly stayed out of headlines surrounding the investigation. But Mueller’s document, as well as Page’s testimony, show Lewandowski was aware of contact between members of the campaign and Russians.
The accounts say that Lewandowski approved a trip by Page to Moscow on the condition it was personal business and not representing the campaign. The Washington Post reported that Lewandowski also received several emails from Papadopoulos informing him that he was in contact with Russians intermediaries about trying to set up a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials.
Lewandowski said in an interview with Fox News on Nov. 7 that he had initially forgotten about the email from Page about his trip, but that his memory has since been "refreshed." Lewandowski has also repeatedly said he didn’t know Page though Page testified that Lewandowski interviewed him for his position as a foreign policy adviser.
Since the campaign, Lewandowski has done political consulting work and is an adviser to a political action committee working to re-elect Trump. Lewandowski has been a frequent visitor to the White House and has talked to Trump regularly throughout his presidency, according to people close to Lewandowski.
Jeff Sessions
The attorney general, who was a GOP senator from Alabama during the campaign, headed the Trump foreign policy team that included Papadopoulos and Page and had two encounters where he was informed about contacts the pair had with Russians. The revelations from Papadopoulos’s statement to Mueller, along with Page’s testimony, have raised questions about whether Sessions has been transparent about what he knew about campaign contacts with Russia in his confirmation hearing.
At Session’s confirmation hearing in January, he said he wasn’t aware of any campaign contacts with Russia. On Tuesday, he told the House Judiciary Committee that he didn’t lie or mislead Congress, saying he simply forgot about the meeting where Papadopoulos touted his Russian connections and pushed for a meeting between Trump and Putin.
“I do now recall the March 2016 meeting at Trump Hotel that Mr. Papadopoulos attended, but I have no clear recollection of the details of what he said during that meeting,” Sessions said. “After reading his account, and to the best of my recollection, I believe that I wanted to make clear to him that he was not authorized to represent the campaign with the Russian government, or any other foreign government, for that matter.”
Separately, Page told congressional investigators that he informed Sessions that he was traveling to Russia as the pair were leaving a dinner.
Paul Manafort
Manafort joined the campaign in March around the same time as Papadopoulos and Page. While his initial job was to help with the delegate count, he was named campaign chairman in May and at the end of June replaced Lewandowski as campaign manager.
Based on testimony from Page and court filings related to Papadopoulos, he had little if any contact with the pair. According to Papadopoulos’s statement, Manafort shot down his idea of Trump traveling to Russia. Page said he sent one email to Manafort, who didn’t respond.
On the same day Papadopoulos’s guilty plea was unsealed, Manafort was indicted by Mueller on charges of laundering millions of dollars.
Other Players
Keith Kellogg -- Now chief of staff for Trump’s National Security Council, Kellogg was named as a foreign policy adviser, along with Page and Papadopoulos, and attended several meetings of the group with them. Kellogg was interviewed by Mueller in early October, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Stephen Miller -- According to a New York Times report, Miller was in contact with Papadopoulos throughout the campaign. Papadopoulos told Miller that Trump had an "open invitation" from Putin to visit Russia and told him he had some "interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right," the New York Times reported. CNN reported that Miller has been interviewed by Mueller’s team of investigators.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... microscope
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