The Russian Connection

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting about Manafort's use of his phone: "A very intriguing new subplot in the saga of Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting"

Spoiler

NBC News may have just buried the lede in its new story about the Russia scandal.

The report from NBC focuses on some specific words that appeared in notes that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort took during a meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016. This was the meeting before which Donald Trump Jr. had been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

But perhaps the more significant development is how NBC reported that Manafort had taken those notes: On his smartphone.

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Karoun Demirjian had previously reported that Manafort took notes during the meeting — notes that naturally were of interest to investigators — but this appears to be the first report to indicate he did so using his phone.

Why is that significant? Because Manafort being on his phone was presented by both Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, as evidence of his disinterest in the meeting. It was used to suggest that the meeting was rather insignificant — a disappointment to all involved — and didn't go anywhere. Trump Jr. and others have said that the information promised was a bust and was never used by the Trump campaign, whatever their intent in accepting the meeting was.

“All the time [Manafort] was looking at his phone,” Veselnitskaya told NBC last month. “He was reading something. He never took any active part in the conversation.” She described Manafort as appearing “absent-minded.”

During an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump Jr. also referenced Manafort apparently being distracted by his phone during the meeting:

HANNITY: The whole contact took how long? How long was the meeting?

TRUMP JR.: About 20 minutes or so.

HANNITY: About 20 minutes. And Jared [Kushner] left after 5 or 10?

TRUMP JR.: Yes.

HANNITY: Like she said? And Paul Manafort was on his …

TRUMP JR.: On his phone.

HANNITY: The whole time?

TRUMP JR.: Pretty much.

HANNITY: Pretty much.

TRUMP JR.: It — it — listen, like I said …

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP JR.: … pretty really apparent that this was not what we were in there talking about.

A word of caution here: Pretty much all we know right now is that Manafort took some notes, and investigators have them. NBC is reporting that they were “cryptic” and included some specific words — words that The Washington Post hasn't confirmed appeared in the notes.

It's entirely possible those notes had nothing to do with what was being discussed in the meeting and that Manafort was indeed distracted and not really paying attention. But if he was taking notes about the meeting on his smartphone, perhaps Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya mistook that as Manafort tuning the whole thing out.

Manafort seems to be an increasing focus of the investigation, with the FBI raiding his home in Virginia a month ago. New reports this week indicate that New York's attorney general is involved. That's significant because President Trump cannot pardon people for state crimes. There is a growing perception that investigators are focusing on Manafort to get him to turn on Trump.

Precisely what this means is up in the air. But Trump Jr.'s version of the Russia meeting has been wrong before. And it doesn't seem far-fetched to think that maybe he misunderstood how closely Manafort was paying attention in that meeting in June 2016 — and documenting the proceedings.

 

[sawasdee]

From a WaPo commenter - the best summary I've read of the WH reactions to the Don Jr. et al meeting with the Russians:

Quote

Dingus McFarlane

9/1/2017 10:42 PM GMT+0700 [Edited]

Donnie's excuses... an evolution:  
 
1. It did NOT happen  
2. OK it happened but we talked about adoption  
3. OK it was about Clinton, as the email said, but there was NO collusion  
4. OK there may have been collusion, but it's NOT a crime  
5. I knew NOTHING about it until I read it in the papers  
6. OK maybe someone mentioned it in passing a while back  
7. There were 4 people at the meeting (that we said didn't happen)  
8. OK there were 5 people at the meeting that we said didn't happen  
9. OK there were 8 people at the meeting that didn't happen, but they were all private citizens.  
10.OK one of the people at the meeting had been in contact with the Russian state prosecutor, by her own admission. All the rest, private citizens.  
11. Private citizens who had NOTHING to do with Hacking.  
12. OK The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the meeting with top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy. Akhmetshin told the Associated Press on Friday he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to the June 9, 2016, meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort.  
13. So what? "coulda been China" doing the hacking. It's not like I had ANY connection to anyone at the meeting.  
14. OK the eighth person at the meeting was Ike Kaveladze, is an executive at a Moscow-based property firm owned by Aras Agalarov, a business associate of mine accused of 1.4 billion in money laundering. 
15. OK Cohen admitted to emailing the Kremlin. But, the email was ignored. 
16. OK My business partner sent a representative from Russia, but it was just "politics as usual" except with a foreign government which ISN'T illegal.  
17. OK it's illegal, but WHAT ABOUT HILLARY?  
18. How do pardons work? 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@sawasdee -- that was fabulous!

I saw this last night on MSNBC. If the TT isn't puckering, he's more of a fool than we think: "IRS 'specialized, secretive investigative' unit aiding Mueller" The video is worth a watch.

Quote

Robert Mueller has reportedly enlisted the IRS criminal investigations unit in his Russia probe. Lawrence O'Donnell explains the investigation could put Trump through the most intense audit of his life. One error could result in big consequences for the president.

It sounds like this IRS team is more thorough than any other.  Good!

[sawasdee]

The Arpaio pardon seems to have kicked things into high gear.  Mueller and Schneiderman teaming up, so the TT can't pardon those indicted in NY State, the involvement of the IRS 'crack squad' - none of this is good news for the Mandarin Moron.

I have every finger, toe and limb crossed that indictments come soon.

I am REALLY scared he will start a 'diversionary' war - as he accused Obama of contemplating before the 2012 election.

It worked for Thatcher, it worked for Bush - we all know his decision making is instinctive, not reasoned - he could well do it.

And come close to destroying the world.

(I can't forget when he said in the primary debates, "Why do we have nuclear weapons if we don't use them?" He's too stupid to understand the concept of MAD.)

[onekidanddone]

49 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

(I can't forget when he said in the primary debates, "Why do we have nuclear weapons if we don't use them?" He's too stupid to understand the concept of MAD.)

No, in his view people who understand the concept of MAD are, in one word SAD! 

[fraurosena]

Please, America, get your shit together before the 2018 elections, or you will be stuck with the Repugliklans indefinitely.

This article from NYT is lengthy, and if you don't want to go into too much detail, just read the parts I bolded and you'll get the gist of it.

Software Glitch or Russian Hackers? Election Problems Draw Little Scrutiny

Spoiler

The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November.

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books— tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.

Neither VR Systems — which operates in seven states beyond North Carolina — nor local officials were warned before Election Day that Russian hackers could have compromised their software. After problems arose, Durham County rebuffed help from the Department of Homeland Security and Free & Fair, a team of digital election-forensics experts who volunteered to conduct a free autopsy. The same was true elsewhere across the country.

“I always got stonewalled,” said Joe Kiniry, the chief executive and chief scientist at Free & Fair.

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering. He added, though, that the problems in Durham and elsewhere raise questions about the auditing of e-poll books and security of small election vendors.

Ms. Greenhalgh shares those concerns. “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this,” she said about what happened in North Carolina. “But we still don’t know that they didn’t.”

Disorder at the Polls

North Carolina went for Donald J. Trump in a close election. But in Durham County, Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes, winning by a larger margin than President Barack Obama had against Mitt Romney four years earlier.

While only a fraction of voters were turned away because of the e-poll book difficulties — more than half of the county cast their ballots days earlier — plenty of others were affected when the state mandated that the entire county revert to paper rolls on Election Day. People steamed as everything slowed. Voters gave up and left polling places in droves — there’s no way of knowing the numbers, but they include more than a hundred North Carolina Central University students facing four-hour delays.

At a call center operated by the monitoring group Election Protection, Ms. Greenhalgh was fielding technical complaints from voters in Mississippi, Texas and North Carolina. Only a handful came from the first two states.

Her account of the troubles matches complaints logged in the Election Incident Reporting System, a tracking tool created by nonprofit groups. As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

The vendor does not make the touch-screen equipment used to cast or tally votes and does not manage county data. But without the information needed to verify voters’ identities and eligibility, which county officials load onto VR’s poll books, voters cannot cast ballots at all.

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

On Election Day, as the e-poll book problems continued, Ms. Greenhalgh urged an Election Protection colleague in North Carolina to warn the state Board of Elections of a cyberattack and suggest that it call in the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security. In an email, she also warned a Homeland Security election specialist of the problems. Later, the specialist told her Durham County had rejected the agency’s help.

When Ms. Greenhalgh, who works at Verified Voting, a nonprofit dedicated to election integrity, followed up with the North Carolina colleague, he reported that state officials said they would not require federal help.

“He said: ‘The state does not view this as a problem. There’s nothing we can do, so we’ve moved on to other things,’” Ms. Greenhalgh recalled. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘What could be more important to move on to?’”

An Interference Campaign

The idea of subverting the American vote by hacking election systems is not new. In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.

The Russians shied away from measures that might alter the “tallying” of votes, the report added, a conclusion drawn from American spying and intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government officials.

The most obvious way to rig an election — controlling hundreds or thousands of decentralized voting machines — is also the most difficult. During a conference of computer hackers last month in Las Vegas, participants had direct access and quickly took over more than 30 voting machines. But remotely infiltrating machines of different makes and models and then covertly changing the vote count is far more challenging.

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

The January intelligence assessment implied that the Russian hackers had achieved broader access than has been assumed. Without elaborating, the report said the Russians had “obtained and maintained access to multiple U.S. state and local election boards.”

Two previously acknowledged strikes in June 2016 hint at Russian ambitions. In Arizona, Russian hackers successfully stole a username and password for an election official in Gila County. And in Illinois, Russian hackers inserted a malicious program into the Illinois State Board of Elections’ database. According to Ken Menzel, the board’s general counsel, the program tried unsuccessfully “to alter things other than voter data” — he declined to be more specific — and managed to illegally download registration files for 90,000 voters before being detected.

On Election Day last year, a number of counties reported problems similar to those in Durham. In North Carolina, e-poll book incidents occurred in the counties that are home to the state’s largest cities, including Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Charlotte. Three of Virginia’s most populous counties — Prince William, Loudoun, and Henrico — as well as Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, and Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, also reported difficulties. All were attributed to software glitches.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, argued for more scrutiny of suspicious incidents. “We must harden our cyber defenses, and thoroughly educate the American public about the danger posed” by attacks,” he said in an email. “In other words: we are not making our elections any safer by withholding information about the scope and scale of the threat.”

In Durham County, officials have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome. “We do not believe, and evidence does not suggest, that hacking occurred on Election Day,” Derek Bowens, the election director, said in a recent email.

But last month, after inquiries from reporters and the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, Durham county officials voted to turn over laptops and other devices to the board for further analysis. It was not clear which government agency or private forensics firm, would conduct the investigation.

Ms. Greenhalgh will be watching closely. “What people focus on is, ‘Did someone mess with the vote totals?’” she said. “What they don’t realize is that messing with the e-poll books to keep people from voting is just as effective.’”

 

[fraurosena]

Ruh-Roh!

Mueller examining Trump’s draft letter firing FBI Director Comey

Spoiler

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is reviewing a letter drafted by President Trump and a top aide in the days before the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey laying out in detail why the president wanted to get rid of the country’s top law enforcement official, according to people familiar with the Mueller probe.

The multi-page letter enumerated Trump’s long-simmering complaints with Comey, according to people familiar with it, including Trump’s frustration that Comey was unwilling to say publicly that Trump was not personally under investigation in the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Trump drafted the letter with senior policy adviser Stephen Miller on an early-May weekend visit to his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and then shared it with senior aides during an Oval Office meeting the day before the firing, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Some aides urged caution, these people said. And Trump ultimately sent Comey a far shorter letter that described his decision as having been prompted by recommendations from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who served as Comey’s direct supervisors — a description that was echoed in initial public statements by White House officials.

The letter, which was first reported by the New York Times, as well as internal White House communications before Comey’s ouster, could now become key evidence for Mueller as he examines whether the Comey firing was part of an effort to obstruct the Russia investigation. The contents of the letter was described in detail by several people who had read versions of it. 

The letter documents what the White House eventually acknowledged in the days after Comey’s termination — that Trump had already decided to let the FBI director go before he solicited recommendations from Sessions and Rosenstein. 

Mueller is likely to look into whether Trump, in consulting the Justice Department’s top two officials, was seeking a pretense to remove the FBI director or, as some White House advisers said Friday, he was simply persuaded by his staff that their opinions should play a role in the process.

“I can’t comment on anything the special counsel might be interested in,” White House attorney Ty Cobb said. “But this White House is committed to being open and transparent with the special counsel’s investigation.”

A Mueller spokesman declined to comment.

Trump formally fired Comey late on Tuesday, May 9, dispatching his longtime security chief Keith Schiller to the Justice Department to hand-deliver his short termination letter. Attaching letters he had received from Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump wrote, “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”

The draft letter, however, shows that Trump had made up his mind during conversations that took place earlier at his New Jersey club. 

As the president stewed that weekend, he was surrounded by only a small handful of the aides — Miller, his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.

Comey had become an increasing irritant to the president, announcing in late March that the FBI was investigating whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

According to testimony Comey provided to Congress, he had told President Trump privately that the investigation was not focused on him personally — and Trump had been pressuring him to make a similar public announce, but he was hesitant, partly out of fear that he would then be obligated to update the public should Trump later fall under investigation.

People familiar with the letter said Trump provided the contents of the letter, which was formally drawn up by Miller at Bedminster. They said it did not dwell on Russia.

Instead, it contained language similar to what was included in the final version ultimately sent by Trump: “While I greatly appreciate you telling me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

The White House declined to comment on Miller’s behalf.

 

[47of74]

Where there's smoke....

Quote

Acrid, black smoke was seen pouring from a chimney at the Russian consulate in San Francisco Friday, a day after the Trump administration ordered its closure amid escalating tensions between the United States and Russia.

Firefighters who arrived at the scene were turned away by consulate officials who came from inside the building.

Mindy Talamadge, a spokeswoman from the San Francisco Fire Department, said the department received a call about the smoke and sent a crew to investigate but determined the smoke was coming from the chimney.

Talmadge said she did not know what they were burning on a day when normally cool San Francisco temperatures had already climbed to 95 degrees by noon.

Is the golden shower tape about to drop?  (Yeah, I know, pleasant image)

[onekidanddone]

29 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Where there's smoke....

Who is burning and what are they burning?  Is Trump behind this?

[GrumpyGran]

4 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Who is burning and what are they burning?  Is Trump behind this?

Probably SOP. You can't take everything back with you so burn what you can't take.

[fraurosena]

Welp! Seth Abramson has a MEGA-mega thread up, detailing all about the Moskow tower deal. It is incredibly long (213 tweets!) so you need to take your time if you want to read it. At the end he has links to all of his sources for those who want to know even more.

After you've read this, you'll understand the presidunce's fear of Mueller's investigation even more.

 

[GrumpyGran]

18 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Please, America, get your shit together before the 2018 elections, or you will be stuck with the Repugliklans indefinitely.

This article from NYT is lengthy, and if you don't want to go into too much detail, just read the parts I bolded and you'll get the gist of it.

Software Glitch or Russian Hackers? Election Problems Draw Little Scrutiny

  Hide contents

The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November.

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books— tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.

Neither VR Systems — which operates in seven states beyond North Carolina — nor local officials were warned before Election Day that Russian hackers could have compromised their software. After problems arose, Durham County rebuffed help from the Department of Homeland Security and Free & Fair, a team of digital election-forensics experts who volunteered to conduct a free autopsy. The same was true elsewhere across the country.

“I always got stonewalled,” said Joe Kiniry, the chief executive and chief scientist at Free & Fair.

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering. He added, though, that the problems in Durham and elsewhere raise questions about the auditing of e-poll books and security of small election vendors.

Ms. Greenhalgh shares those concerns. “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this,” she said about what happened in North Carolina. “But we still don’t know that they didn’t.”

Disorder at the Polls

North Carolina went for Donald J. Trump in a close election. But in Durham County, Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes, winning by a larger margin than President Barack Obama had against Mitt Romney four years earlier.

While only a fraction of voters were turned away because of the e-poll book difficulties — more than half of the county cast their ballots days earlier — plenty of others were affected when the state mandated that the entire county revert to paper rolls on Election Day. People steamed as everything slowed. Voters gave up and left polling places in droves — there’s no way of knowing the numbers, but they include more than a hundred North Carolina Central University students facing four-hour delays.

At a call center operated by the monitoring group Election Protection, Ms. Greenhalgh was fielding technical complaints from voters in Mississippi, Texas and North Carolina. Only a handful came from the first two states.

Her account of the troubles matches complaints logged in the Election Incident Reporting System, a tracking tool created by nonprofit groups. As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

The vendor does not make the touch-screen equipment used to cast or tally votes and does not manage county data. But without the information needed to verify voters’ identities and eligibility, which county officials load onto VR’s poll books, voters cannot cast ballots at all.

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

On Election Day, as the e-poll book problems continued, Ms. Greenhalgh urged an Election Protection colleague in North Carolina to warn the state Board of Elections of a cyberattack and suggest that it call in the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security. In an email, she also warned a Homeland Security election specialist of the problems. Later, the specialist told her Durham County had rejected the agency’s help.

When Ms. Greenhalgh, who works at Verified Voting, a nonprofit dedicated to election integrity, followed up with the North Carolina colleague, he reported that state officials said they would not require federal help.

“He said: ‘The state does not view this as a problem. There’s nothing we can do, so we’ve moved on to other things,’” Ms. Greenhalgh recalled. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘What could be more important to move on to?’”

An Interference Campaign

The idea of subverting the American vote by hacking election systems is not new. In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.

The Russians shied away from measures that might alter the “tallying” of votes, the report added, a conclusion drawn from American spying and intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government officials.

The most obvious way to rig an election — controlling hundreds or thousands of decentralized voting machines — is also the most difficult. During a conference of computer hackers last month in Las Vegas, participants had direct access and quickly took over more than 30 voting machines. But remotely infiltrating machines of different makes and models and then covertly changing the vote count is far more challenging.

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

The January intelligence assessment implied that the Russian hackers had achieved broader access than has been assumed. Without elaborating, the report said the Russians had “obtained and maintained access to multiple U.S. state and local election boards.”

Two previously acknowledged strikes in June 2016 hint at Russian ambitions. In Arizona, Russian hackers successfully stole a username and password for an election official in Gila County. And in Illinois, Russian hackers inserted a malicious program into the Illinois State Board of Elections’ database. According to Ken Menzel, the board’s general counsel, the program tried unsuccessfully “to alter things other than voter data” — he declined to be more specific — and managed to illegally download registration files for 90,000 voters before being detected.

On Election Day last year, a number of counties reported problems similar to those in Durham. In North Carolina, e-poll book incidents occurred in the counties that are home to the state’s largest cities, including Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Charlotte. Three of Virginia’s most populous counties — Prince William, Loudoun, and Henrico — as well as Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, and Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, also reported difficulties. All were attributed to software glitches.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, argued for more scrutiny of suspicious incidents. “We must harden our cyber defenses, and thoroughly educate the American public about the danger posed” by attacks,” he said in an email. “In other words: we are not making our elections any safer by withholding information about the scope and scale of the threat.”

In Durham County, officials have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome. “We do not believe, and evidence does not suggest, that hacking occurred on Election Day,” Derek Bowens, the election director, said in a recent email.

But last month, after inquiries from reporters and the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, Durham county officials voted to turn over laptops and other devices to the board for further analysis. It was not clear which government agency or private forensics firm, would conduct the investigation.

Ms. Greenhalgh will be watching closely. “What people focus on is, ‘Did someone mess with the vote totals?’” she said. “What they don’t realize is that messing with the e-poll books to keep people from voting is just as effective.’”

 

To my deathbed, I will believe that the voter rolls were manipulated. I believe that some people who think they voted in fact did not. In places like Durham it doesn't matter, pretty sure all the districts there are Dem so the electoral college negates any advantage of having more people able to vote.

But in some of the other areas mentioned, there are Repub districts and so manipulated rolls, as well as long lines at certain polling places, could indeed effect the outcome in that district. And party-specific registration does exist in NC. I registered as a Independent just so I wouldn't be targeted by the Repubs for contributions but I didn't want to be identified as Dem for this very reason.

I think there needs to be a closer look in states where there has been a variation in party choice in national elections but the state legislature is firmly Republican. 

[candygirl200413]

@GrumpyGran Yes to all of this! I live in PA which I think hasn't gone red since HW re-election. I was legitimately shocked when we went red for orange fuckface because even though I remember reading how many Amish people came out to vote for him for example, Philly and its surrounding counties are always strong enough to help turn the state blue (as well as Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties.). I believed and will continue to believe that we were also hacked. Is this something I have to call my MOC about? Or election integrity groups

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, candygirl200413 said:

@GrumpyGran Yes to all of this! I live in PA which I think hasn't gone red since HW re-election. I was legitimately shocked when we went red for orange fuckface because even though I remember reading how many Amish people came out to vote for him for example, Philly and its surrounding counties are always strong enough to help turn the state blue (as well as Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties.). I believed and will continue to believe that we were also hacked. Is this something I have to call my MOC about? Or election integrity groups

Yeah, PA didn't make sense either. I can see him getting more support in the center of the state. And he did yammer about mining. But I think it was a target state for voter roll shenanigans in districts that were close. And it was shocking how many supposed "conservative Christians" came out to vote for him, people who had stayed out of it before. How can Amish people support him, he is aggressively supportive of everything they are against? 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Intensifying Russia probes could pit Hill against Mueller"

Spoiler

Washington (CNN)Lawyers working with a team led by special counsel Robert Mueller approached the Senate intelligence committee this summer with a request: They wanted the transcript of an interview Senate staff had conducted with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

But they were blocked. Manafort's lawyers said they had not authorized Mueller's legal team to access the interview transcript under the agreement with the committee, even though Mueller's attorneys said they had been given permission. The matter is still under discussion, sources say.

The previously undisclosed fight, described to CNN by multiple sources, underscores the new challenges as congressional committees and Mueller's operation head into a more intense phase of their parallel -- and sometimes, conflicting -- investigations into Russian election meddling and any collusion with Trump associates.

There are three committees on Capitol Hill competing for information and witnesses -- and there is little, if any, communication among them, even as congressional officials say they all are preparing to intensify the pace of their inquiries this fall. While the Hill investigations into Russia's meddling have been underway since the beginning of the year, the next few months could be the most consequential in terms of hearing from witnesses and gathering documents, sources say.

That could mean early signs of tension between the special counsel and the Hill become more pronounced as the competing congressional inquiries try to determine whether there was any collusion and as Mueller potentially pursues criminal charges.

Top lawmakers on the committees say they have confidence they can avoid conflicts with Mueller's team, but the investigations have different purposes. Mueller's is geared toward prosecuting potential crimes. If no charges result, there's no guarantee the public will find out what Mueller found in his inquiry.

Mueller's team has employed some aggressive tactics. In one such case, Mueller's team may have obtained evidence in the raid of Manafort's home that was not covered by the search warrant, sources told CNN.

Moreover, Mueller's team has kept top lawmakers mostly out of the loop about the developments in its inquiry and has urged Congress to schedule testimony of some key witnesses in public session -- to avoid the possibility that the special counsel may be blocked from accessing information given to the committees privately.

But lawmakers, who take pride in their oversight role, have instead moved forward with private witness interviews, including Donald Trump Jr., who is expected to head to the Senate intelligence committee this month, sources say, and is expected to meet with the Senate judiciary committee as well.

The Senate intelligence panel is considering holding public hearings this fall with some key witnesses, according to a source familiar with the private talks. And, sources said, the committee is now searching for new details around the late Republican operative Peter Smith, who claimed he tried to obtain Clinton emails hacked by the Russians during the last election season.

Across the Capitol, the House intelligence committee now is increasingly focused on the past efforts by Trump associates to move forward on a Trump Tower project in Moscow, sources familiar with the probe told CNN, a matter almost certainly under review by Mueller's team as well.

Plus the House panel is now trying to get its hands on a draft memo that reportedly included President Donald Trump's initial justification in his firing of then-FBI Director James Comey -- a memo that Mueller already has but one that the committee may need to access through the White House rather than the special counsel.

"It's probably past time for our committee to subpoena the White House to make sure we get all relevant documents," California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told CNN.

How multiple inquiries complicate the investigation

On Capitol Hill, the closed-door transcribed interviews are causing complications in the delicate relationship with the special counsel.

After Manafort privately interviewed with Senate intelligence committee staff in late July to discuss the June 2016 meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian operatives, Mueller's lawyers have struggled to get a copy of the interview transcript.

Manafort's attorneys, in talks with the special counsel's office, agreed to allow Mueller's team only to get the documents Manafort had turned over to the committee, not the interview transcript, according to the sources.

Yet an attorney with the Mueller team later told the committee that they were authorized by Manafort's representatives to have the Manafort interview transcript, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN. Committee lawyers later learned from Manafort's attorneys that they had not provided that consent, the sources say.

As a result of the dispute, the committee hasn't turned over any documents and the matter is still under discussion, sources say.

A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment, as did a Manafort spokesman and the intelligence committee.

Mueller has privately met with leaders of the main three committees investigating the Russian election meddling, in an effort to "deconflict" with Capitol Hill to ensure the two sides are not in conflict when it comes to witnesses.

But sharing information hasn't always been easy. After weeks of demands on Capitol Hill for memos Comey wrote describing his interactions with Trump, including when the President allegedly asked him to drop the FBI investigation into his ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, top lawmakers eventually got to see it -- with conditions.

The leaders of the Senate judiciary committee, for instance, could read the memos but not take notes or get copies of them, sources said.

The aggressive tactics by Mueller's team extend beyond Capitol Hill. He has put enormous pressure on Manafort -- someone who is also in the crosshairs on the Hill given his past work with a pro-Russian Ukranian political party. Mueller issued subpoenas to Manafort's former lawyer and current spokesman and authorized a pre-dawn raid of his Virginia home in late July.

During that raid, Mueller's investigators took documents considered to be covered by attorney-client privilege, sources told CNN.

Lawyers from the WilmerHale law firm, representing Manafort at the time, warned Mueller's office that their search warrant didn't allow access to attorney materials. The documents in question have now been returned, the sources say.

The episode raised questions about whether investigators have seen materials they weren't entitled to obtain.

"You can't unsee something," one source said.

It's not an uncommon problem in FBI investigations. US attorneys typically have separate document-review teams to prevent investigators from handling materials they aren't allowed to have. It's not clear what procedures Mueller's office uses.

Mueller's spokesman declined to comment.

After meeting with Mueller earlier this summer, Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said it was not necessary for the committee leaders to meet with Mueller again. "I think we'll be in communication personally with him on any aspects that might bleed over from one to the other," he told CNN.

Busy fall on the Hill

Each of the three committees received more than 20,000 pages of documents from the Trump campaign about communications involving Russia, and aides to each of the panels have spent the August recess digging through the documents.

This week, members of each of the committees will be briefed on some of the findings and will discuss new leads they will want to chase, lawmakers said.

One area of intense interest surrounds Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Russian-American businessman Felix Sater -- both of whom are expected to be called to meet with the House intelligence committee and likely the Senate panel as well. In emails provided to Congress, both men discussed efforts to move forward on a Trump Tower project in Moscow and sought to get help from the highest levels of the Kremlin, undercutting the President's repeated claims of not having any business in Russia.

Cohen was scheduled to meet with the House panel this week but has rescheduled his interview, according to people familiar with the matter.

"It's A-level interest," said one source close to the House inquiry, referring to the Trump Tower project in Moscow.

But that's hardly the lone area that lawmakers plan to probe nor the last big-name witness expected to be called in to testify.

Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law who attended the June 2016 Russia meeting with Trump Jr. and had multiple contacts with Russian officials last year, is expected to be called back to meet with senators after he met with just Senate staff in July, senators said. The Russians who attended the Trump Tower meeting also remain of high interest to the panels.

Roger Stone, the President's longtime friend and adviser whose name has often surfaced as part of the Russia probe, could meet with the House panel as soon as this month, sources said. It's unclear when he'll meet with senators.

And the Senate intelligence committee is pushing to obtain new information about the unusual circumstances surrounding Smith, the veteran GOP operative who told The Wall Street Journal he was on a mission to obtain the hacked Clinton emails. After the stories about his efforts were published this summer, Smith killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room.

Matt Tait, a cybersecurity expert who publicly acknowledged in July being contacted by Smith, is among those the Senate panel is interested in hearing from, sources said.

Tait declined to comment to CNN.

Lawmakers are trying to learn whether that's an area the special counsel is probing as well.

 

[fraurosena]

Raging Rufus! Seth Abramson has found out that Trey Gowdy (of House Intel committee replacement of Nunes fame) is almost certainly colluding with the presidunce to stop the Mueller investigation, AND will quite possibly get Sessions FIRED.

Not a mega thread, but very explosive information nonetheless. A must read if you ask me.

Shit, who would have thought we would be outraged by Jeff Sessions possible ousting?

 

(Gowdy sure has a malevolent Draco Malfoy vibe going)

[GreyhoundFan]

"Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election"

Spoiler

Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said, although they declined to say which candidate the ads favored.

Most of the ads, according to a blog post published late Wednesday by Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help elect Trump, including by using paid social media trolls to spread fake news intended to influence public opinion.

Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months.

Facebook reported in its blog post Wednesday that about one-quarter of the ads in question were “geographically targeted,” although company officials declined to provide specifics about what areas or demographic groups were the recipients. Of those targeted ads, the company said, more ran in 2015 than 2016.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that the disclosure by Facebook confirmed one of the ways Russia sought to interfere in U.S. politics and serves as a “profound warning to us and others about future elections.”

“This is a very significant set of data points produced by Facebook,” Schiff said, adding: “Left unanswered in what we received from Facebook — because it is beyond the scope of what they are able to determine — is whether there was any coordination between these social media trolls and the campaign. We have to get to the bottom of that.”

The House panel, whose staff investigators heard briefly from Facebook representatives behind closed doors Wednesday, will follow up with Facebook and other social media companies and platforms to see “to what degree they are able to confirm similar metrics,” Sciff said.

An official familiar with Facebook’s internal investigation said the company does not have the ability to determine whether the ads it sold represented any sort of coordination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook follows months of criticism that the social media company served as a platform for the spread of false information before the November election. In a statement posted days after the election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to explore the issue but said that 99 percent of information found on Facebook is authentic and only “a very small amount” is fake or hoaxes. In December, however, the company announced that it would begin flagging articles that had been deemed false or fake, with the assistance of fact-checking organizations.

Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company.

Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads.

A Facebook official said “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm.” The official declined to release any of the ads it traced to Russian companies or entities.

“Our data policy and federal law limit our ability to share user data and content, so we won’t be releasing any ads,” the official said. The official added that the ads “were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment and immigration.”

Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has studied Russian online influence campaigns, said Wednesday that Facebook’s report served as “validation” for findings by him and his researchers, who he said had spotted what they believed to be Russians posing as Americans to press political messages on Facebook as early as 2015.

He said his analysis showed that Facebook ads in 2015 were largely concerned with divisive social messages and were used to identify other Facebook users most susceptible to messaging. Those users were then targeted with election-oriented ads in 2016, he said.

“We had these suspicions, but we could never see who was purchasing the accounts,” said Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Facebook’s being brave. They probably could have buried this, and they did the right thing by coming forward.”

Stamos, the Facebook security chief, said the company is committed to continuing to protect the integrity of its site and improve its ability to track fraudulent accounts. He said Facebook has shut down the accounts that remained active.

“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” he said.

This year, Facebook announced technology improvements to detect fake accounts and more recently announced that it would no longer allow Facebook pages to advertise if they have a pattern of sharing false news stories. Over the past few months, Stamos said, the company has also taken action to block fake accounts tied to election meddling in France and Germany.

The Internet Research Agency has received attention in the past for its activity.

In 2013, hackers released internal company documents showing it employed 600 people across Russia. Ex-employees who have gone public with their experiences at the company in Internet postings and in media interviews have said their work entailed creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts and using them to circulate pro-Kremlin propaganda. They said Internet Research Agency employees, for instance, spread derogatory information about Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in the days after his 2015 murder.

In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched social media campaigns in the United States, including a sophisticated hoax that spread false news of a chemical leak in Louisiana in 2014, apparently to sow chaos and fear.

In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency’s “likely financier” is a “close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”

In May, Time magazine reported that U.S. intelligence officials had discovered evidence that Russian agents had purchased ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. A Facebook spokesman told the magazine that the company had no evidence of such buys.

Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election.

Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC. (Permanent residents who hold green cards, however, are not considered foreign nationals.) Violators face civil penalties, as well as criminal prosecution, if they are found to have knowingly broken the law.

No big surprise.

[candygirl200413]

Does Zuckerberg still think he is running for President?

[GreyhoundFan]

9 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Does Zuckerberg still think he is running for President?

I hope not. He would not be my last choice, but he'd be way down the list.

[GreyhoundFan]

This article was linked by Seth Abramson. It's an interesting, albeit lengthy read. "A Second Look at the Steele Dossier—Knowing What We Know Now"

Spoiler

[Editor’s Note: In this special Just Security article, highly respected former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, John Sipher examines the Steele dossier using methods that an intelligence officer would to try to validate such information. Sipher concludes that the dossier’s information on campaign collusion is generally credible when measured against standard Russian intelligence practices, events subsequent to Steele’s reporting, and information that has become available in the nine months since Steele’s final report. The dossier, in Sipher’s view, is not without fault, including factual inaccuracies. Those errors, however, do not detract from an overarching framework that has proven to be ever more reliable as new revelations about potential Trump campaign collusion with the Kremlin and its affiliates has come to light in the nine months since Steele submitted his final report.]

 

Recent revelations of Trump campaign connections to Russia have revived interest in the so-called Steele Dossier.  The dossier is composed of a batch of short reports produced between June and December 2016 by Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based firm specializing in commercial intelligence for government and private-sector clients.  The collection of Orbis reports caused an uproar when it was published online by the US website BuzzFeed, just ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration.  Taken together, the series of reports painted a picture of active collusion between the Kremlin and key Trump campaign officials based on years of Russian intelligence work against Trump and some of his associates.  This seemed to complement general statements from US intelligence officials about Russia’s active efforts to undermine the US election.  The greatest attention was paid to the first report, which conveyed salacious claims about Trump consorting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013.  Trump himself publicly refuted the story, while Trump associates denied reported details about their engagement with Russian officials.  A lot of ink and pixels were also spent on the question whether it was appropriate for the media to publish the dossier. The furor quickly passed, the next news cycle came, and the American media has been largely reluctant to revisit the report over the months since.

Almost immediately after the dossier was leaked, media outlets and commentators pointed out that the material was unproven. News editors affixed the terms “unverified” and “unsubstantiated” to all discussion of the issue in the responsible media.  Political supporters of President Trump simply tagged it as “fake news.”  Riding that wave, even legendary Washington Post reported Bob Woodward characterized the report as “garbage.”

For professional investigators, however, the dossier is by no means a useless document.  Although the reports were produced episodically, almost erratically, over a five-month period, they present a coherent narrative of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.  As a result, they offer an overarching framework for what might have happened based on individuals on the Russian side who claimed to have insight into Moscow’s goals and operational tactics.  Until we have another more credible narrative, we should do all we can to examine closely and confirm or dispute the reports.

Many of my former CIA colleagues have taken the Orbis reports seriously since they were first published.  This is not because they are not fond of Trump (and many admittedly are not), but because they understand the potential plausibility of the reports’ overall narrative based on their experienced understanding of both Russian methods, and the nature of raw intelligence reporting.  Immediately following the BuzzFeed leak, one of my closest former CIA colleagues told me that he recognized the reports as the obvious product of a former Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, since the format, structure, and language mirrored what he had seen over a career of reading SIS reports provided to CIA in liaison channels.  He and others withheld judgment about the veracity of the reports, but for the reasons I outline further below they did not reject them out of hand.  In fact, they were more inclined for professional reasons to put them in the “trust but verify” category.

So how should we unpack the so-called Steele dossier from an intelligence perspective?

I spent almost thirty years producing what CIA calls “raw reporting” from human agents.  At heart, this is what Orbis did.  They were not producing finished analysis, but were passing on to a client distilled reporting that they had obtained in response to specific questions.  The difference is crucial, for it is the one that American journalists routinely fail to understand.  When disseminating a raw intelligence report, an intelligence agency is not vouching for the accuracy of the information provided by the report’s sources and/or subsources.  Rather it is claiming that it has made strenuous efforts to validate that it is reporting accurately what the sources/subsources claim has happened.  The onus for sorting out the veracity and for putting the reporting in context against other reporting – which may confirm or deny the new report – rests with the intelligence community’s professional analytic cadre.  In the case of the dossier, Orbis was not saying that everything that it reported was accurate, but that it had made a good-faith effort to pass along faithfully what its identified insiders said was accurate.  This is routine in the intelligence business. And this form of reporting is often a critical product in putting together more final intelligence assessments.

In this sense, the so-called Steele dossier is not a dossier at all.  A dossier suggests a summary or case history.  Mr. Steele’s product is not a report delivered with a bow at the end of an investigation.  Instead, it is a series of contemporaneous raw reports that do not have the benefit of hindsight.  Among the unnamed sources are “a senior Russian foreign ministry official,” “a former top-level intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” and “a close associate of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.”  Thus, the reports are not an attempt to connect the dots, but instead an effort to uncover new and potentially relevant dots in the first place.

What’s most relevant in the Orbis reports?

Let me illustrate what the reports contain by unpacking the first and most notorious of the seventeen Orbis reports, and then move to some of the other ones.  The first 2 ½ page report was dated June 20, 2016 and entitled “Company Intelligence Report 2016/080.”  It starts with several summary bullets, and continues with additional detail attributed to sources A-E and G (there may be a source F but part of the report is blacked out).  The report makes a number of explosive claims, all of which at the time of the report were unknown to the public.

Among other assertions, three sources in the Orbis report describe a multi-year effort by Russian authorities to cultivate, support and assist Donald Trump.  According to the account, the Kremlin provided Trump with intelligence on his political primary opponents and access to potential business deals in Russia.  Perhaps more importantly, Russia had offered to provide potentially compromising material on Hillary Clinton, consisting of bugged conversations during her travels to Russia, and evidence of her viewpoints that contradicted her public positions on various issues.

The report also alleged that the internal Russian intelligence service (FSB) had developed potentially compromising material on Trump, to include details of “perverted sexual acts” which were arranged and monitored by the FSB.  Specifically, the compromising material, according to this entry in the report, included an occasion when Trump hired the presidential suite at a top Moscow hotel which had hosted President and Mrs. Obama, and employed prostitutes to defile the bed where the President had slept.  Four separate sources also described “unorthodox” and embarrassing behavior by Trump over the years that the FSB believed could be used to blackmail the then presidential candidate.

The report stated that Russian President Putin was supportive of the effort to cultivate Trump, and the primary aim was to sow discord and disunity within the U.S. and the West.  The dossier of FSB-collected information on Hillary Clinton was managed by Kremlin chief spokesman Dimitry Peskov.

Subsequent reports provide additional detail about the conspiracy, which includes information about cyber-attacks against the U.S.  They allege that Paul Manafort managed the conspiracy to exploit political information on Hillary Clinton in return for information on Russian oligarchs outside Russia, and an agreement to “sideline” Ukraine as a campaign issue.  Trump campaign operative Carter Page is also said to have played a role in shuttling information to Moscow, while Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, reportedly took over efforts after Manafort left the campaign, personally providing cash payments for Russian hackers.  In one account, Putin and his aides expressed concern over kick-backs of cash to Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which they feared might be discoverable by U.S. authorities.  The Kremlin also feared that the U.S. might stumble onto the conspiracy through the actions of a Russian diplomat in Washington, Mikhail Kalugin, and therefore had him withdrawn, according to the reports.

In late fall 2016, the Orbis team reported that a Russian-supported company had been “using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.”  Hackers recruited by the FSB under duress were involved in the operations.  According to the report, Michael Cohen insisted that payments be made quickly and discreetly, and that cyber operators should go to ground and cover their tracks.

Assessing the Orbis reports

What should be made of these leaked reports with unnamed sources on issues that were deliberately concealed by the participants?  Honest media outlets have reported on subsequent events that appear to be connected to the reports, but do not go too far with their analysis, concluding still that the dossier is unverified.  Almost no outlets have reported on the salacious sexual allegations, leaving the public with very little sense as to whether the dossier is true, false, important or unimportant in that respect.

While the reluctance of the media to speculate as to the value of the report is understandable, professional intelligence analysts and investigators do not have the luxury of simply dismissing the information.  They instead need to do all they can to put it into context, determine what appears credible, and openly acknowledge the gaps in understanding so that collectors can seek additional information that might help make sense of the charges.

Step One: Source Validation

In the intelligence world, we always begin with source validation, focusing on what intelligence professionals call “the chain of acquisition.”  In this case we would look for detailed information on (in this order) Orbis, Steele, his means of collection (e.g., who was working for him in collecting information), his sources, their sub-sources (witting or unwitting), and the actual people, organizations and issues being reported on.

Intelligence methodology presumes that perfect information is never available, and that the vetting process involves cross-checking both the source of the information as well as the information itself.  There is a saying among spy handlers, “vet the source first before attempting to vet the source’s information.”  Information from human sources (the spies themselves) is dependent on their distinct access to information, and every source has a particular lens.  Professional collectors and debriefing experts do not elicit information from a source outside of the source’s area of specific access.  They also understand that inaccuracies are inevitable, even if the source is not trying to mislead.  The intelligence process is built upon a feedback cycle that corroborates what it can, and then goes back to gather additional information to help build confidence in the assessment.  The process is dispassionate, unemotional, professional and never ending.

Faced with the raw reports in the Orbis document, how might an intelligence professional approach the jumble of information?

The first thing to examine is Christopher Steele, the author of the reports, and his organization Orbis International.  Are they credible?

Steele was the President of the Cambridge Union at university, and was a career British intelligence officer with service in Moscow, Paris and Afghanistan prior to work as the head of the Russia desk at British intelligence HQS.  While in London he worked as the personal handler of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko.  He was a respected professional who had success in some of the most difficult intelligence environments.  He retired from SIS in 2009 and started Orbis Business Intelligence along with a former colleague.  Prior to his work on the Russian dossier for Orbis, he was best known for his investigation of the world soccer association (FIFA), which provided direct support to the FBI’s successful corruption case.  Steele and Orbis were also known for assisting various European countries in understanding Russian efforts to meddle in their affairs.

Like any private firm, Orbis’ ability to remain in business relies on its track record of credibility.   Success for Steele and his colleagues depends on his integrity, reliability, and the firm’s reputation for serious work.  In this regard, Steele is putting his reputation and his company’s continued existence on the line with each report.  Yes, as with anyone operating in the murky world of intelligence, he could be duped.  Nonetheless, his reputation for handling sensitive Russian espionage operations over the years suggests that he is security conscious and aware of Russian counterintelligence and disinformation efforts.  His willingness to share his work with professional investigative agencies such as the FBI and the British Security Service also suggest that he is comfortable opening his work to scrutiny, and is seen as a serious partner by the best in the business.

The biggest problem with confirming the details of the Steele “dossier” is obvious: we do not know his sources, other than via the short descriptions in the reports.  In CIA’s clandestine service, we spent by far the bulk of our work finding, recruiting and validating sources.  Before we would ever consider disseminating an intelligence report, we would move heaven and earth to understand the access, reliability, trustworthiness, motivation and dependability of our source.  We believe it is critical to validate the source before we can validate the reliability of the source’s information.  How does the source know about what he/she is reporting?  How did the source get the information?  Who are his/her sub-sources?  What do we know about the sub-sources?  Why is the source sharing the information?  Is the source a serious person who has taken appropriate measures to protect their efforts?

One clue as to the credibility of the sources in these reports is that Steele shared them with the FBI.  The fact that the FBI reportedly sought to work with him and to pay him to develop additional information on the sources suggest that at least some of them were worth taking seriously.  At the very least, the FBI will be able to validate the credibility of the sources, and therefore better judge the information.  As one recently retired senior intelligence officer with deep experience in espionage investigations quipped, “I assign more credence to the Steele report knowing that the FBI paid him for his research.  From my experience, there is nobody more miserly than the FBI.  If they were willing to pay Mr. Steele, they must have seen something of real value.”

Step Two: Assessing the Substantive Content

As outsiders without the investigative tools available to the FBI, we can only look at the information and determine if it makes sense given subsequent events and the revelation of additional information.  Mr. Steele did not have the benefit of knowing Mr. Trump would win the election or how events might play out.  In this regard, does any of the information we have learned since June 2016 assign greater or less credibility to the information?  Were the people mentioned in the report real?  Were their affiliations correct?  Did any of the activities reported happen as predicted?

To a large extent, yes.

The most obvious occurrence that could not have been known to Orbis in June 2016, but shines bright in retrospect is the fact that Russia undertook a coordinated and massive effort to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election to help Donald Trump, as the U.S. intelligence community itself later concluded.  Well before any public knowledge of these events, the Orbis report identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to discuss the receipt of stolen documents.  Mr. Steele could not have known that the Russians stole information on Hillary Clinton, or that they were considering means to weaponize them in the U.S. election, all of which turned out to be stunningly accurate.  The U.S. government only published its conclusions in January 2017, with an assessment of some elements in October 2016.  It was also apparently news to investigators when the New York Times in July 2017 published Don Jr’s emails arranging for the receipt of information held by the Russians about Hillary Clinton. How could Steele and Orbis know in June 2016 that the Russians were working actively to elect Donald Trump and damage Hillary Clinton? How could Steele and Orbis have known about the Russian overtures to the Trump Team involving derogatory information on Clinton?

We have also subsequently learned of Trump’s long-standing interest in, and experience with Russia and Russians.  A February 2017 New York Times article reported that phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian officials in the year before the election.  The New York Times article was also corroborated by CNN and Reuters independent reports. And even Russian officials have acknowledged some of these and other repeated contacts. Although Trump has denied the connections, numerous credible reports suggest that both he and Manafort have long-standing relationships with Russians, and pro-Putin groups.  In August 2017, CNN reported on “intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort…to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton’s election prospects” including “conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.”

We learned that when Carter Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016, he met with close Putin ally and Chairman of the Russian state oil company, Igor Sechin.  A later Steele report also claimed that he met with Parliamentary Secretary Igor Divyekin while in Moscow.  Renowned investigative journalist Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 that U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Page met with both Sechin and Divyekin during his July trip to Russia. What’s more, the Justice Department obtained a wiretap in summer 2016 on Page after satisfying a court that there was sufficient evidence to show Page was operating as a Russian agent.

While the Orbis team had no way to know it, subsequent reports from U.S. officials confirmed that Washington-based diplomat Mikhail Kalugin was an undercover intelligence officer and was pulled out of the Embassy and sent home in summer 2016.

The Orbis documents refer repeatedly to Paul Manafort’s “off-the-books” payments from ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian party, and Russian concerns that it may be a vulnerability that could jeopardize the effort.  According to the Orbis report, the Russians were concerned about “further scandals involving Manafort’s commercial and political role in Russia/Ukraine.” And, indeed, there have been further scandals since the Orbis reports were written. Those include Manafort being compelled in June 2017 to register retroactively as a foreign agent of a pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine, and Mueller and New York Attorney Generals’ reported investigation of Manafort for possible money laundering and tax evasion linked to Ukrainian ventures.

We do not have any reporting that implicates Michael Cohen in meetings with Russians as outlined in the dossier.  However, recent revelations indicate his long-standing relationships with key Russian and Ukrainian interlocutors, and highlight his role in a previously hidden effort to build a Trump tower in Moscow. During the campaign, those efforts included email exchanges with Trump associate Felix Sater explicitly referring to getting Putin’s circle involved and helping Trump get elected.

Further, the Trump Administration’s effort lift sanctions on Russia immediately following the inauguration seems to mirror Orbis reporting related to Mr. Cohen’s promises to Russia, as reported in the Orbis documents.  A June 2017 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff described the Administration’s efforts to engage the State Department about lifting sanctions “almost as soon as they took office.”  Their efforts were halted by State Department officials and members of Congress.  Following the inauguration, Cohen was involved, again with Felix Sater, to engage in back-channel negotiations seeking a means to lift sanctions via a semi-developed Russian-Ukrainian plan (which also included the hand delivery of derogatory information on Ukrainian leaders) also fits with Orbis reporting related to Cohen.

The quid pro quo as alleged in the dossier was for the Trump team to “sideline” the Ukrainian issue in the campaign.  We learned subsequently the Trump platform committee changed only a single plank in the 60-page Republican platform prior to the Republican convention.  Of the hundreds of Republican positions and proposals, they altered only the single sentence that called for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian military.  The Trump team changed the wording to the more benign, “appropriate assistance.”

Consider, in addition, the Orbis report saying that Russia was utilizing hackers to influence voters and referring to payments to “hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.” A January 2017 Stanford study found that “fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared a total of 30 million times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Hillary Clinton shares leading up to the election.”  Also, in November, researchers at Oxford University published a report based on analysis of 19.4 million Twitter posts from early November prior to the election.  The report found that an “automated army of pro-Trump chatbots overwhelmed Clinton bots five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election.”  In March 2017, former FBI agent Clint Watts told Congress about websites involved in the Russian disinformation campaign “some of which mysteriously operate from Eastern Europe and are curiously led by pro-Russian editors of unknown financing.”

The Orbis report also refers specifically to the aim of the Russian influence campaign “to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump,” based on information given to Steele in early August 2016. It was not until March 2017, however, that former director of the National Security Agency, retired Gen. Keith Alexander in Senate testimony said of the Russian influence campaign, “what they were trying to do is to drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group.” A March 2017 news report also detailed that Sanders supporter’s social media sites were infiltrated by fake news, originating from “dubious websites and posters linked back to Eastern Europe,” that tried to shift them against Clinton during the general election. John Mattes, a former Senate investigator who helped run the online campaign for Sanders, said he was struck by Steele’s report. Mattes said, Steele “was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn’t articulate until September.” It is important to emphasize here that Steele’s source for the change in plan was “an ethnic Russian associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump [who] discussed the reaction inside his camp.”

A slew of other revelations has directly tied many of the key players in the Trump campaign – most notably Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, and Michael Flynn – who are specifically mentioned in the Orbis reports to Russian officials also mentioned in the reports.  To take one example, the first report says that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responsible for Russia’s compromising materials on Hillary Clinton, and now we have reports that Michael Cohen had contacted Peskov directly in January 2016 seeking help with a Trump business deal in Moscow (after Cohen received the email from Trump business associate Felix Sater saying “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”).  To take another example, the third Orbis report says that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was managing the connection with the Kremlin, and we now know that he was present at the June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, who has reportedly boasted of his ties to ties and experience in Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence.  According to a recent New York Times story, “Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort.”

The Orbis reports chronicle, and subsequent events demonstrate, that the Russian effort evolved over time, adapting to changing circumstances.  When their attack seemed to be having an effect, they doubled down, and when it looked like negative media attention was benefiting Ms. Clinton, they changed tactics.  The Orbis reports detail internal Kremlin frictions between the participants as the summer wore on.  If the dossier is to be believed, the Russian effort may well have started as an anti-Clinton operation, and only became combined with the separate effort to cultivate the Trump team when it appeared Trump might win the nomination.  The Russian effort was aggressive over the summer months, but seemed to back off and go into cover-up mode following the Access Hollywood revelations and the Obama Administration’s acknowledgement of Russian interference in the fall, realizing they might have gone too far and possibly benefitted Ms. Clinton.  However, when Trump won, they changed again and engaged with Ambassador Kislyak in Washington to get in touch with others in the Trump transition team.  As this process unfolded, control of operation on the Russian side passed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the FSB, and later to the Presidential Administration.  It should be noted in this context, that the much-reported meetings with Ambassador Kislyak do not seem to be tied to the conspiracy. He is not an intelligence officer, and would be in the position to offer advice on politics, personalities and political culture in the United States, but would not be asked to engage in espionage activity.  It is likewise notable that Ambassador Kislyak receives only a passing reference in the Steele dossier and only having to do with his internal advice on the political fallout in the U.S. in reaction to the Russian campaign.

Of course, to determine if collusion occurred as alleged in the dossier, we would have to know if the Trump campaign continued to meet with Russian representatives subsequent to the June meeting.  As mentioned, in February, the New York Times, CNN, and Reuters, reported that members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian officials in the year before the election, according to current and former American officials.  Subsequent reports cite receipt of intelligence from European security agencies reporting on odd meetings between Trump associates and Russian officials in Europe.  And, perhaps the best clue that there might be something to the narrative of meetings in summer 2016 was former CIA Director John Brennan’s carefully chosen phrase in front of the Senate intelligence committee about the contacts – “frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”  This period will likely be the one most closely scrutinized by FBI investigators.

In retrospect, there is even some indication that the salacious sexual allegations should not be dismissed out of hand.  Efforts to monitor foreigners and develop compromising material is completely consistent with Russian M.O.  I am certain that they have terabytes of film and audio from inside my apartment in Moscow.  Putin himself is known to have been implicated in several sex stings to embarrass his rivals, to include the famous broadcast of a clandestinely-acquired sex video to shame then Prosecutor General Yuriy Skuratov.

Perhaps more intriguing, the most explosive charge in the Steele document was the claim that Trump hired prostitutes to defile a bed slept in by former President Obama.  The important factor to consider is that Trump did not engage with the prostitutes himself, but instead allegedly sought to denigrate Obama.  If there is anything consistent in what we have learned about President Trump, it seems that his policies are almost exclusively about overturning and eradicating anything related to President Obama’s tenure.  In this sense, he is akin to the ancient Pharaohs, Byzantine and Roman Emperors like Caligula, who sought to obliterate the existence of their predecessors, even destroying and defacing their images.  Is it inconceivable that he would get some satisfaction from a private shaming of the former President?

Separate Orbis reports also asserted that Trump himself engaged in unorthodox, perverted sexual behavior over the years that “has provided authorities with enough embarrassing and compromising material on the Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.”  While it is not worth serious exploration, the notion that Trump might be involved with beautiful young women as alleged in the reports doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch.  His private life is well documented and litigated, such that it doesn’t seem wholly out-of-bounds to tie the reports about his activity in Russia with his history of undue interest in young women.  Again, there is no means to independently confirm the information and the media shouldn’t try.  An intelligence professional or investigator cannot shy away, however, and should try to ascribe some level of confidence in the information as part of the process of validating the various sources and the overall credibility of the reporting.  If the specific reports prove untrue, it would cast doubt on other reporting from that source.

In these cases, blackmail does not need to be overt to be useful.  Simple knowledge that a potential adversary might have compromising information can influence behavior.  Whether or not his subsequent behavior as a candidate and President is consistent with possible overt or subtle blackmail is beyond my ability to assess or the FBI’s ability to prove, and is instead for each citizen to ponder.  Suffice it to say that Trumps obsequiousness toward Putin, his continued cover-ups, and his irrational acquiescence to Russian interests, often in direct opposition to his own Administration and Party, keep the issue on the table.

On the other hand, there is also information in the Steele reports that appears wrong or questionable.  For example, the notion that Steele and his team could develop so many quality sources with direct access to discussions inside the Kremlin is worth serious skepticism.  The CIA and other professional intelligence services rarely developed this kind of access despite expending significant resources over decades, according to published accounts.  It is also hard to believe that Orbis could have four separate sources reporting on the incident at the Moscow hotel. The reputation of the elite hotel in the center of Moscow depends on the discretion of its staff, and crossing the FSB is not something taken lightly in Russian society.  A source that could be so easily identified would be putting themselves at significant risk.  Further, additional information in the reports cannot be checked without the tools of a professional investigative service.  Of course, since the dossier was leaked, and we do not have additional follow-up reports, we don’t know if Orbis would have developed other sources or revised their reporting accordingly as they were able to develop feedback.  We also don’t know if the 35 pages leaked by BuzzFeed is the entirety of the dossier.  I suspect not.

* * *

So, more than a year after the production of the original raw reports, where do we stand?

I think it is fair to say that the report is not “garbage” as several commentators claimed.  The Orbis sources certainly got some things right – details that they could not have known prior.  Steele and his company appear serious and credible.  Of course, the failure of the Trump team to report details that later leaked out and fit the narrative may make the Steele allegations appear more prescient than they otherwise might.  At the same time, the hesitancy to be honest about contacts with Russia is consistent with allegations of a conspiracy.

All that said, one large portion of the dossier is crystal clear, certain, consistent and corroborated.  Russia’s goal all along has been to do damage to America and our leadership role in the world.  Also, the methods described in the report fit the Russians to a tee.  If the remainder of the report is largely true, Russia has a powerful weapon to help achieve its goal.  Even if it is largely false, the Kremlin still benefits from the confusion, uncertainty and political churn created by the resulting fallout.  In any regard, the Administration could help cauterize the damage by being honest, transparent and assisting those looking into the matter.  Sadly, the President has done the opposite, ensuring a Russian win no matter what.  In any event, I would suspect the Russians will look to muddy the waters and spread false and misleading information to confuse investigators and public officials.

As things stand, both investigators and voters will have to examine the information in their possession and make sense of it as best they can. Professional investigators can marry the report with human and signals intelligence, they can look at call records, travel records, interview people mentioned in the report, solicit assistance from friendly foreign police and intelligence services, subpoena records and tie it to subsequent events that can shed light on the various details.  We, on the other hand, will have to do our best to validate the information at hand.  Looking at new information through the framework outlined in the Steele document is not a bad place to start.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From CNN: "Exclusive: Mueller seeks interviews with WH staff over Trump Tower meeting statement"

Spoiler

Washington (CNN)Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has approached the White House about interviewing staffers who were aboard Air Force One when the initial misleading statement about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower was crafted, three sources familiar with the conversations said.

The special counsel's discussions with the White House are the latest indication that Mueller's investigators are interested in the response to the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller wants to know how the statement aboard Air Force One was put together, whether information was intentionally left out and who was involved, two of the sources said.

Mueller's questions could go to the issue of intent and possible efforts to conceal information during an obstruction of justice investigation. The answers to Mueller's questions also could illuminate the level of anxiety surrounding the meeting and the decision-making that followed.

The interviews with White House staffers who were aboard Air Force One have not begun, the sources said. They currently involve only a small number of people, but the sources cautioned that number could increase. At this time, Mueller has not asked to interview President Trump. Trump Jr. was on the Hill Thursday for an interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In his first response to a report this summer about his meeting at Trump Tower, the President's son claimed in a statement that he "primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children" during his meeting with a Russian lawyer he believed to be connected to the Russian government. That claim was later debunked by multiple accounts of the meeting.

Emails later released by Trump Jr. revealed that he believed the lawyer would provide him with incriminating information about his father's campaign rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on behalf of the Russian government. The Trump Tower meeting also included Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

"Out of respect for the special counsel process, the White House doesn't comment on any individual special counsel request," White House special counsel Ty Cobb told CNN.

Mueller's office declined to comment for this story.

Sources previously told CNN that Trump was involved in the crafting of the statement aboard Air Force One and that he involved some of his closest aides.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders -- then the deputy press secretary -- confirmed in August that Trump "weighed in as any father would" during the drafting of the statement but declined to characterize his involvement further.

Mueller considers some of the aides aboard Air Force One who helped craft the statement to be witnesses.

The White House is trying to figure out legal defense funding for some of the staffers who have needed to hire lawyers as a result of the Russia probe, two of the sources told CNN.

CNN previously reported that Mueller sent a notice asking that White House staff save "any subjects discussed in the course of the June 2016 meeting" and also "any decisions made regarding the recent disclosures about the June 2016 meeting," according to a source, who read portions of the letter to CNN.

The conversations aboard Air Force One about how to respond to reports of Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer may have exposed those White House aides to the special counsel's scrutiny.

Some of the President's closest aides who had joined Trump for the return flight from diplomatic summits in Europe, helped strategize Trump Jr.'s response to the statement, people briefed on the matter told CNN in July.

Keep digging, there's plenty more dirt...

[fraurosena]

Seth has a (mini) thread on Junior's testimony.

 

[fraurosena]

Oh my! 

House Intel Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-CA) tells CNN that he has seen classified information that strongly suggests collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The link leads to a video.

[fraurosena]

Oh, to be a fly on the wall during those interviews...

Spicer, Priebus, Hicks among six current and former Trump aides Mueller has expressed interest in interviewing for Russia probe

Spoiler

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will likely seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request.

Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, ex-press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.

Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey and the White House’s initial inaction following warnings that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had withheld information from the public about his private discussions in December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, according to people familiar with the probe.

The advisers are also connected to a series of internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.

Roughly four weeks ago, the special counsel’s team provided the White House with the names of the first group of current and former Trump advisers and aides that investigators expect to question.

In addition to Priebus, Spicer and Hicks, Mueller has notified the White House he will likely seek to question White House counsel Don McGahn, and one of his deputies, James Burnham. Mueller’s office has also told the White House that investigators may want to interview Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

White House officials are expecting that Mueller will seek additional interviews, possibly with family members, including Kushner, who is a West Wing senior adviser, according to the people familiar with Mueller’s inquiry.

Spicer declined to comment, while Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.

Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer focused on the probe, declined to comment on behalf of current White House aides McGahn, Burnham, Hicks and Raffel. Cobb also declined to discuss the details of Mueller’s requests.

“Out of respect for the special counsel and his process and so we don’t interfere with that in any way, the White House doesn’t comment on specific requests for documents and potential witnesses,” Cobb said.

A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.

No interviews have been scheduled, people familiar with the requests said. Mueller’s team is waiting to first review the documents, which the White House has been working to turn over for the last three weeks.

But people familiar with the probe said the documents Mueller has requested strongly suggest the topics that he and his investigators would broach with the aides.

McGahn and Burnham were briefed by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Jan. 26, days after Trump’s inauguration, about the department and FBI’s concerns that Flynn could be compromised by the Russians. She warned that the FBI knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth — to Vice President Pence and the public — about his December conversations about U.S. sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Courts have held that the president does not enjoy attorney-client privilege with lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office and their testimony about their Oval Office dealings can be sought in investigations.

Spicer had been drawn into the White House’s handling of the Flynn matter before the inauguration. After The Washington Post reported that Flynn had talked with Kislyak about sanctions, Spicer told reporters that Flynn had “reached out to” Kislyak on Christmas Day to extend holiday greetings — effectively rejecting claims that they had talked about U.S. sanctions against Moscow. A few days later, President Barack Obama had announced he was expelling Russian diplomats in response to the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election.

After Obama’s announcement, Spicer said Kislyak had sent a message requesting that Flynn call him.

“Flynn took that call,” Spicer said. But he stressed that the call “centered on the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and [Trump] after the election.”

As chief of staff, Priebus was involved in many of Trump’s decisions, including the situations involving Flynn and Comey. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June that Priebus was among a group of White House aides whom Trump instructed to leave the Oval Office before he asked the FBI director to drop the inquiry into Flynn.

Hicks, who is now White House communications director, and Raffel were both involved in internal discussions in July over how to respond to questions about a Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. organized with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign in the summer of 2016. The two communications staffers advocated being transparent about the purpose of the meeting, which Trump Jr. had accepted after he was offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton that he was told was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

Ultimately, the president dictated language for the statement that his son would release to the New York Times, which was preparing a story about the meeting. The response omitted important details about the meeting and presented it as “primarily” devoted to a discussion of the adoption of Russian children.

CNN first reported on Thursday that Mueller has sought interviews with White House staff related to the preparation of that statement but did not name them.

 

[onekidanddone]

35 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, to be a fly on the wall during those interviews...

Spicer, Priebus, Hicks among six current and former Trump aides Mueller has expressed interest in interviewing for Russia probe

On the night of November 8th I was in a fetal position on the floor crying, sobbing not able to take a breath.  My husband told me to be patient.  Hubby promised me Trump would fall and I just had to let the process work. He has had to tell me that many many MANY times since.  Well here we are 7 and 1/2 months from Jan 20th and I'm sick of being patient. Chancellorsville, Muslim ban, DACA, the transgender ban. How much longer? Yes we all know Pence is also a nightmare, but if Trump falls and Pence takes over he won't be re-elected.  

Will any of these lackeys turn on him? Please? Hicks won't, but maybe Spicey poo or Rancid unless they take there loyalty pledge over telling the truth under  oath.