The Russian Connection

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, Penny said:

This is so true, and most likely was the beginning of the end for Cheeto, and all his cronies. 

I texted my daughter that Cheeteo's lawyer was speaking after the hearing. She said, "You mean he found someone to represent him?"
 

Sunkist Orange probably has blackmail material on his own lawyer. All of the other big name lawyers know he's the client from hell, and are wisely keeping their distance.

[sawasdee]

He's a real estate lawyer, with no expertise at all in what he has now taken on - and it shows! I think he could well make a bad situation worse, except he did keep TT quiet for an entire day after the hearings...

Although if he has been TT's lawyer for a while, he might know where all the landmines with regard to Russian finance in his property are buried - which means Cheeto doesn't have to confess to someone else the - shall we say complexity? - of his dealings.

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, why am I not surprised? "Trump’s lawyer in Russia probe has clients with Kremlin ties"

Spoiler

The hard-charging New York lawyer President Trump chose to represent him in the Russia investigation has prominent clients with ties to the Kremlin, a striking pick for a president trying to escape the persistent cloud that has trailed his administration.

Marc E. Kasowitz’s clients include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin and has done business with Trump’s former campaign manager. Kasowitz also represents Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank, U.S. court records show.

Kasowitz has represented one of Deripaska’s companies for years in a civil lawsuit in New York and was scheduled to argue on the company’s behalf May 25, two days after news broke that Trump had hired him, court records show. A different lawyer in Kasowitz’s firm showed up in court instead, avoiding a scenario that would have highlighted Kasowitz’s extensive work for high-profile Russian clients.

Kasowitz, whose scrappy style in the courtroom mirrors Trump’s approach to politics, represented Trump in various matters for more than a decade before he took on either Deripaska’s company or Sberbank, according to one of Kasowitz’s partners in the firm.

Trump has turned to Kasowitz for matters that include debt restructuring and suing an author who Trump said undercounted his net worth. On Thursday, Kasowitz became the public face of Trump’s counterattack on former FBI director James B. Comey, challenging the former federal prosecutor’s credibility and calling for Comey to be investigated for leaks after his testimony to Congress.

As Kasowitz takes on his most high-stakes work for Trump yet, the lawyer’s Russian clients could cause complications.

“If the behavior of a Russian client of the firm or its relationship with Trump becomes an issue in the investigation, a conflict could arise,” said Stephen Gillers of New York University Law School, an expert on legal ethics.

Deripaska has said congressional investigators have contacted his attorneys seeking information about his business dealings with Paul Manafort, a Trump campaign manager during the presidential campaign. More than a decade ago, Deripaska invested in a fund that Manafort set up in the Cayman Islands that bought assets primarily in Ukraine.

The Associated Press reported in March that Manafort “secretly worked for” Deripaska as far back as 2006 to influence politics and business dealings inside the United States to benefit Putin’s government. Manafort signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006 and maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, the AP reported.

Deripaska has denied the report, and he sued the AP for libel last month. Deripaska said he “never had any arrangement, whether contractual or otherwise, with Mr. Manafort to advance the interests of the Russian government,” according to the lawsuit. In newspaper ads taken out after the AP story, he said, “I want to resolutely deny this malicious assertion and lie.”

Former associates of Sberbank, the other Russia-tied Kasowitz client, also have come under scrutiny in media reports.

The bank’s former vice president, who is now chief executive of another Russian state-owned financial institution, Vnesheconombank, met with Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, in December.

Kushner’s interactions with the Russian banker are a part of the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump campaign team.

Gillers said Kasowitz’s firm should closely monitor potential conflicts. If one arises, the firm probably would have to drop one of its clients, he said.

A White House spokesman did not respond to requests for comment Friday. Michael J. Bowe, a partner at the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, declined to say whether the firm had discussed the possibility of potential conflicts arising from its Russian clients. Bowe added that their representation of the Russian firms and Trump “are totally unrelated.”

CNN and BuzzFeed previously reported Kasowitz’s Russian clients.

Trump hired Kasowitz in 2001 to restructure debt on his firm’s Atlantic City casinos. More recently, Kasowitz filed a lawsuit against Timothy O’Brien, arguing that the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald” had libeled Trump by understating the businessman’s wealth. Trump lost the case in 2011. O’Brien told The Post last year that Trump used Kasowitz because he “always favored scrappy lawyers and street fighters.”

Kasowitz also wrote a letter during the presidential campaign threatening to sue the New York Times for an article that said two women had accused Trump of touching them inappropriately. Kasowitz said at the time it was “nothing more than a politically motivated effort to defeat Mr. Trump’s candidacy.” No suit has been filed.

On Tuesday, Deripaska’s company, Veleron, lost an appeal in federal court in Manhattan in its lawsuit against Morgan Stanley in a complex financial case involving a dispute over a loan on which Veleron defaulted during the height of the Great Recession. Kasowitz was scheduled to deliver oral arguments in the appeal last month. It’s not clear whether Kasowitz will continue to represent Veleron.

Records in the case reinforce Deripaska’s close ties to Putin. When Deripaska’s company ran into financial trouble in 2008 and needed to put up more collateral to cover some its liabilities, Deripaska put in a call to Putin, who authorized the state-run Vnesheconombank, or VEB, to offer his firm a bailout, Deripaska acknowledged in court records.

In 2008, Forbes magazine listed Deripaska as the ninth-richest man in the world. In 2006, the United States revoked his visa to enter the country, citing possible ties to organized crime. He has denied those links, claiming the allegations are part of an effort to smear him.

Kasowitz represents Sberbank in a 2016 lawsuit that is still in its preliminary stages. An owner of a Russian granite-mining business accuses the bank of conspiring with competitors to dismantle his company and seize its assets. The bank has not responded in court filings.

Sberbank was one of the sponsors of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow produced by Trump, who owned the competition. The deputy head of the bank at the time was Sergey Gorkov, who met with Kushner in December. Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic successor of the former Soviet KGB intelligence bureau, was named to head VEB in February 2016.

VEB has maintained that Gorkov’s meeting with Kushner was part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House has said the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of the inauguration.

 

[fraurosena]

Preet Bharara's weighing in on Sessions testifying:

Gotta love all those caring people in the comments.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is terrifying: "Russia has developed a cyber weapon that can disrupt power grids, according to new research"

Spoiler

Hackers allied with the Russian government have devised a cyber weapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life, according to U.S. researchers.

The malware, which researchers have dubbed CrashOverride, is known to have disrupted only one energy system — in Ukraine in December. In that incident, the hackers briefly shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev.

But with modifications, it could be deployed against U.S. electric transmission and distribution systems to devastating effect, said Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that studied the malware and is issuing a report on Monday.

And Russian government hackers have already shown their interest in targeting U.S. energy and other utility systems, researchers said.

“It’s the culmination of over a decade of theory and attack scenarios,” Caltagirone warned. “It’s a game changer.”

The revelation comes as the U.S. government is investigating a wide-ranging, ambitious effort by the Russian government last year to disrupt the U.S. presidential election and influence its outcome. That campaign employed a variety of methods, including hacking hundreds of political and other organizations, and leveraging social media, U.S. officials said.

Dragos has named the group that created the new malware Electrum, and has determined with high confidence that it used the same computer systems as the hackers who attacked the Ukraine electric grid in 2015. That attack, which left 225,000 customers without power, was carried out by Russian government hackers, other U.S. researchers concluded. U.S. government officials have not officially attributed that attack to the Russian government, but some privately say they concur with the private sector analysis.

“The same Russian group that targeted U.S. [industrial control] systems in 2014 turned out the lights in Ukraine in 2015,” said John Hultquist, who analyzed both sets of incidents while at iSight Partners, a cyber intelligence firm now owned by FireEye, where he is director of intelligence analysis. Hultquist’s team had dubbed the group Sandworm.

“We believe that Sandworm is tied in some way to the Russian government — whether they’re contractors or actual government officials, we’re not sure,” he said. “We believe they are linked to the security services.”

Sandworm and Electrum may be the same group or two separate groups working within the same organization, but the forensic evidence shows they are related, said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos.

The Department of Homeland Security, which works with the owners of the nation’s critical infrastructure systems, did not respond to a request for comment Sunday.

Energy-sector experts said that the new malware is cause for concern, but that the industry is seeking to develop ways to disrupt attackers who breach their systems.

“U.S. utilities have been enhancing their cybersecurity, but attacker tools like this one pose a very real risk to reliable operation of power systems,” said Michael J. Assante, who worked at Idaho National Labs and is former chief security officer of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, where he oversaw the rollout of industry cybersecurity standards.

CrashOverride is only the second instance of malware specifically tailored to disrupt or destroy industrial control systems. Stuxnet, the worm created by the United States and Israel to disrupt Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability, was an advanced military-grade weapon designed to affect centrifuges that enrich uranium.

In 2015, the Russians used malware to gain access to the power supply network in western Ukraine, but it was hackers at the keyboards who remotely manipulated the control systems to cause the blackout — not the malware itself, Hultquist said.

With CrashOverride, “what is particularly alarming . . . is that it is all part of a larger framework,” said Dan Gunter, a senior threat hunter for Dragos.

The malware is like a Swiss Army knife, where you flip open the tool you need, and where different tools can be added to achieve different effects, Gunter said.

Theoretically, the malware can be modified to attack different types of industrial control systems, such as water and gas. However, the adversary has not demonstrated that level of sophistication, Lee said.

Still, the attackers probably had experts and resources available not only to develop the framework but also to test it, Gunter said. “This speaks to a larger effort often associated with nation-state or highly funded team operations.”

One of the most insidious tools in CrashOverride manipulates the settings on electric power control systems. It scans for critical components that operate circuit breakers and opens the circuit breakers, which stops the flow of electricity. It continues to keep them open even if a grid operator tries to close them, creating a sustained power outage.

The malware also has a “wiper” component that erases the software on the computer system that controls the circuit breakers, forcing the grid operator to revert to manual operations, which means driving to the substation to restore power.

With this malware, the attacker can target multiple locations with a “time bomb” functionality and set the malware to trigger simultaneously, Lee said. That could create outages in different areas at the same time.

The outages would last a few hours and probably not more than a couple of days, Lee said. That is because the U.S. electric industry has trained its operators to handle disruptions caused by large storms. “They’re used to having to restore power with manual operations,” he said.

So although the malware is “a significant leap forward in tradecraft, it’s also not a doomsday scenario,” he said.

The malware samples were first obtained by ESET, a Slovakian research firm, which shared some of them with Dragos. ESET has dubbed the malware Industroyer.

 

[fraurosena]

These doddering idiots should be prohibited from inhabiting a governmental office.

 

He and McCain should shut up and go and "sit behind the geraniums" (a Dutch saying, meaning to be retired and do nothing).

[GreyhoundFan]

I debated about putting this in the main Agent Orange thread, but since it's about the Special Counsel, I decided to post here. "Trump surrogates go after Mueller"

Spoiler

Robert Mueller’s glow is fading.

The special counsel who earned bipartisan praise last month as an unimpeachable investigator who would give President Donald Trump a fair shake in the Russia probe is now taking heat from Trump surrogates intent on trying to undercut his integrity.

Hardball complaints are coming at Mueller from several directions. His impartiality is being questioned because one of his likely chief witnesses, the ousted FBI Director James Comey, is a longtime friend. Others have flagged past campaign contributions from some of Mueller’s newly appointed prosecutors to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. A few say the whole probe is a sham and that Mueller should be removed as special counsel.

The wave of freelance attacks, which gathered steam over the weekend following Comey’s dramatic testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoes tactics used by Democrats in the 1990s to undercut special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation into the Clinton White House.

“I think the idea of having an enemy when you’re the object of a special prosecutor is a very important one,” said Dick Morris, who helped pioneer the anti-Starr strategy as a Clinton adviser but is now a Trump fan.

“Clinton only survived a special prosecutor because he made Ken Starr the enemy,” Morris added.

The attacks on Mueller started taking shape last week. Sidney Powell, a former Justice Department attorney who has written extensively about overzealous prosecutors, wrote an op-ed questioning one of Mueller’s staffers on the conservative site Newsmax, which is run by Trump friend Chris Ruddy. Powell zeroed in on Andrew Weissmann, who led the prosecution of Enron executives in the early 2000s. That task force, she wrote, “quickly devolved into a cabal that used mob tactics itself.”

Conservatives kept up their complaints on Monday. Writing in the Washington Examiner, columnist Byron York suggested Mueller may not be the right person for the job because he’s been friends with Comey for 15 years.

“Is that a conflict? Should a prosecutor pursue a case in which the star witness is a close friend? And when the friend is not only a witness but also arguably a victim — of firing — by the target of the investigation? And when the prosecutor might also be called on to investigate some of his friend’s actions? The case would be difficult enough even without the complicating friendship,” York wrote.

The anti-Mueller pot also is being stirred on Twitter. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter complained in a post that Attorney General Jeff Sessions “never should’ve recused himself” from the Russia investigation, adding: “Now that we know TRUMP IS NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION, Sessions should take it back & fire Mueller.”

Newt Gingrich, who in a Sunday interview on Fox News echoed the president’s complaints that the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt,” got a bit more specific on social media on Monday. He wrote: “Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring. Check fec reports. Time to rethink.”

It was a big reversal for the former House speaker, who wrote in a Twitter post on May 17, the day the Justice Department announced the special counsel appointment: “Robert Mueller is a superb choice. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down.”

Other Trump associates in recent days have been circulating links to federal fundraising databases showing several of Mueller’s new hires have given to Democrats. They include Weissmann, who is on detail from his post as head of DOJ’s criminal fraud division, who donated $2,300 to Obama during the 2008 campaign; Mueller’s former law partner, James Quarles, who donated $4,600 to Obama for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns and $2,700 to Clinton in 2016 (FEC records show he’s also donated to prominent Republicans, including Sen. George Allen and Rep. Jason Chaffetz); Michael Dreeben, who gave $500 to Obama for the 2008 campaign, as well as $1,000 to Clinton in 2006; and Jeannie Rhee, a former DOJ attorney who donated $5,400 to Clinton in 2015 and 2016, as well as $4,800 to Obama in 2008 and 2011.

Rhee also represented the Clinton Foundation in 2015, where her partner was Democratic Washington powerhouse attorney Jamie Gorelick — who now represents Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Morris, who now supports the Trump White House, called the special counsel’s hiring of past Democratic donors “a huge mistake on Mueller’s part.”

“He has to have a staff of virgins,” Morris said.

Trump and his associates haven’t shied away from aggressive tactics on other aspects of the Russia investigation. Last week, the president himself accused Comey of lying to Congress while under oath about conversations the two men had in the Oval Office and on the telephone regarding the 2016 campaign probe. The Trump White House had outsourced its initial attacks against Comey to prominent surrogates like officials from the Republican National Committee, Trump personal attorney Marc Kasowitz and the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

The shift from targeting Comey to targeting Mueller became apparent over the weekend, when one of the president’s personal attorneys, Jay Sekulow, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” declined to rule out the possibility the president might fire the special counsel. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said that while Mueller’s probe will “run its course” she also hoped it would “end quickly.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Kasowitz, Mark Corallo, declined to comment, as did Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr.

During the Clinton era, Democrats called Starr a “federally paid sex policeman” who ran an unethical probe and had a conflict of interest.Democrats today are warning that slamming the investigator is a risky approach.

“It’s a shameful, shameful ploy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Monday on the Senate floor concerning the conservative attacks on Mueller. “The right must be afraid of what Mr. Mueller’s going to find.”

Added Adam Goldberg, a former special associate counsel in the Clinton White House, “Why would you want to bait them and attack them? It would be crazy and motivate them on the investigation side.”

A white-collar attorney who is in the middle of the Russia investigation said Trump surrogates don’t need to level attacks against Mueller, even if such an approach has often been favored in the past by the president’s New York-based personal attorney.

“Kasowitz loves this junkyard dog thing,” the attorney said. “My experience is that’s, more often than not, not a winning strategy.”

“There are circumstances where people behave in a way that’s sufficiently awful that you need to get out there and create a trench and really go for it,” the attorney added. “But those instances are rare, and you need articulable facts that support it.”

Don Goldberg, who helped spearhead Clinton White House communications during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and congressional impeachment proceedings, said questioning Mueller over the staffers he’s appointed who donated to Democratic candidates “might be effective” for the Trump defense team. “It’s not an unreasonable narrative to start saying the team that has been put together is tainted,” he said.

But, he added, such a strategy could risk a backlash. “If you’re trying to affect the narrative, I think going after and attacking people of that stature who are not partisan people is really a mistake,” he said.

Several Republicans interviewed in recent days said they’re still struggling with where to land on attacking Mueller.

While Ruddy called the original special counsel appointment “flimsy stuff” without any legal basis, he said Trump would be asking for trouble if he heeded the calls from Coulter and others to fire the special counsel.

“It could trigger something well beyond anything they ever imagined. I think firing Mueller could trigger an impeachment process. It could be very dangerous. I don’t think it’d be very smart at all,” he said early Monday.

Later Monday, Ruddy told PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff that Trump was “considering perhaps terminating the special counsel.” Ruddy, who said that he thought it would be “a very significant mistake” to fire Mueller, added that Mueller had interviewed with Trump to succeed Comey as FBI director. Trump announced last week via Twitter that he will appoint former Justice Department official Chris Wray to the post.

A White House official said that Ruddy was in the building Monday but did not see the president. The official declined to comment on whether Mueller had been interviewed for the FBI director position.

In an interview Monday, former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg said he still welcomed Mueller as the leader of the Russia probe.

“Robert Mueller’s record at the FBI is not problematic like James Comey’s, in my opinion. I disagree with recent comments made by others going on a jihad against Mueller,” Nunberg said.

For now, Morris said “Comey represents a better enemy than Mueller.” But he also suggested that Mueller will become a ripe target as the investigation unfolds, allowing Trump’s defenders to paint the investigation as an either-or proposition.

“The strength of the special prosecutor is he’s a man with his staff with one mission to go get one man,” Morris said. “The weakness is if he doesn’t get that man he goes out of business and everyone gets unemployed and they lost that opportunity for a place in the limelight. The public can easily see this as a zero-sum game between Trump and Mueller.”

Ann Coulter just HAD to pipe in.

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this shit up: "RNC chair: Russia probe has dragged on too long"

Spoiler

(CNN)Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said Tuesday that the investigations into possible ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia have dragged on too long and should be closed.

"Why is this continuing? Why is this going almost a year?" McDaniel asked on CNN's "New Day."

"Isn't it time to put an end to it? If nobody can say there is definitive evidence, shouldn't we take that shadow off the White House and let the American people know there has been no evidence of collusion at all?"

But "New Day" anchor Alisyn Camerota pointed out that the probes were still ongoing.

"You know what they would say, 'Thus far.' That's why the investigation is continuing," Camerota said.

McDaniel countered, "It's almost a year. It started last July. The election ended in November. How long can you let this linger?"

Camerota said that former FBI Director Robert Mueller was just appointed special counsel to lead the Russia probe last month.

As the focus turned to Attorney General Jeff Sessions' scheduled testimony Tuesday before Congress, McDaniel argued that Democrats were seeking to cripple the work of the White House by targeting officials and creating turmoil.

Their plan is to "draw out, obstruct, play out the clock so that we can get to 2018 with this doubt over the White House," she said.

Camerota noted that 73% of Americans support an independent Russian probe, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, so the investigation isn't just of concern to Democrats.

"When is the end point? Where is the speediness? There is a point where it should be finished," McDaniel said.

Good grief. So, she doesn't like the investigation, so it should just go away. Right.

[bashfulpixie]

And yet I'm sure she was just fine with the 800 Benghazi investigations. Hypocrite is terrified that where there's smokes, there's fire, and that a bunch of her party will go down with it

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good explanation of the on-going Russia investigation: "Three prongs of the Russia investigation, explained"

Spoiler

As special counsel Robert S. Mueller III widens his inquiry of Russia's role in the 2016 presidential campaign, it can be difficult to keep track of who is under investigation for what. The Fix is here to help.

The law enforcement investigation led by Mueller now has three known prongs, after The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that Mueller will interview senior intelligence officials to help determine whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

I've broken down each of the three prongs below. Keep in mind that congressional committees are conducting investigations of their own: This post covers only the special counsel investigation. To better understand the others, check out Amber Phillips's guide.

Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign

This is where it all started. James B. Comey, who led the law enforcement investigation until he was fired as FBI director May 9, testified last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he has no doubt that Russia attempted to influence the presidential race by hacking the Democratic National Committee and launching cyberattacks on state election systems, among other tactics.

Comey's testimony was consistent with a joint report issued by the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency in January, which concluded: “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

A key question is whether Russia merely preferred Trump or worked with members of his campaign. Comey confirmed in previous testimony March 20 that the FBI was investigating the possibility of collusion between the campaign and Russia.

Former CIA director John Brennan testified May 23 that his agency alerted the FBI last year to a troubling pattern of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates.

“I was worried by a number of the contacts that the Russians had with U.S. persons,” Brennan said.

Trump associates reportedly under scrutiny include Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager, and former advisers Roger Stone and Carter Page.

Possible attempts to obstruct justice

Comey testified last week that while he was still head of the FBI, he told Trump on three occasions that the agency was not investigating him, individually. “Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing,” The Post reported Wednesday.

The timing of the FBI's decision to investigate the president for possible obstruction coincides with Trump's admission, in a May 11 interview with NBC News, that he was thinking of the Russia investigation when he terminated Comey.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,' " Trump told Lester Holt.

A second potential concern for Mueller relates to actions Trump may have taken to impede a separate FBI investigation of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. In his most recent testimony, Comey described a one-on-one conversation in which the president allegedly said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Comey testified that he “understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December.”

The Post reported last month that Trump, in addition to his direct appeal to Comey, asked Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to help persuade Comey to let Flynn go. Coats and Rogers have agreed to be interviewed by Mueller's team, according to Wednesday's Post report.

Possible financial crimes

We know less about this prong than the other two. The Post reported last month that “in addition to possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election, investigators are also looking broadly into possible financial crimes — but the people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly, did not specify who or what was being examined.”

In the same article, The Post reported that investigators are scrutinizing meetings held by Jared Kushner, Trump's adviser and son-in-law, including a December sit-down with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, which the Obama administration sanctioned after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Talking to the head of a bank under U.S. sanctions is not a crime, on its face, and Kushner has not been accused of wrongdoing.

Investigators also are examining the dealings of Flynn. A grand jury in Alexandria, Va., has issued subpoenas for records related to Flynn’s businesses and finances. A company owned by a Turkish American businessman who is close to top Turkish officials paid the Flynn Intel Group more than $500,000 for research on Fethullah Gulen, the cleric that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims was responsible for a coup attempt last summer.

In March, Flynn retroactively registered with the Justice Department as a paid foreign agent for Turkish interests.

 

 

[Howl]

On 6/12/2017 at 8:58 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said that while Mueller’s probe will “run its course” she also hoped it would “end quickly.”

Is this another Sarah Huckabee Sanders situation?

[bashfulpixie]

22 minutes ago, Howl said:

Is this another Sarah Huckabee Sanders situation?

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think she's Mitt's niece. So sort of

[GreyhoundFan]

5 minutes ago, bashfulpixie said:

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think she's Mitt's niece. So sort of

Yes, she's Mitt's niece.

[fraurosena]

Cue C+C Music Factory, or Things that make you go: "Hmmm."

Check out the comments!

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- The WaPo published an article about the Rosenstein release. I love Bill Kristol's tweet -- "The Rosenstein statement suggests there must be a heck of a Trump story coming based on alleged information from anonymous foreign officials". Also, this one: "“I would put that Rosenstein statement more in the ‘giving Trump enough rope’ bucket than in the ‘succumbing to pressure’ bucket,” tweeted Matt Yglesias of Vox." And, finally, Preet Bharara's: "Where is Rod Rosenstein's overdue statement responding to the President's repeated attacks on his appointment of Robert Mueller?"

[fraurosena]

 

@fraurosena -- The WaPo published an article about the Rosenstein release. I love Bill Kristol's tweet -- "The Rosenstein statement suggests there must be a heck of a Trump story coming based on alleged information from anonymous foreign officials". Also, this one: "“I would put that Rosenstein statement more in the ‘giving Trump enough rope’ bucket than in the ‘succumbing to pressure’ bucket,” tweeted Matt Yglesias of Vox." And, finally, Preet Bharara's: "Where is Rod Rosenstein's overdue statement responding to the President's repeated attacks on his appointment of Robert Mueller?"

The wording of that press-release is so ambiguous, that on the surface it seems to say: "There is going to be a fake news leak coming soon, don't believe it."

But if you read carefully, it says so much more. "A foreign source has information connected to the investigation. It's going to be leaked soon. We're not going to confirm it, but we're not going to deny it either." Which just might mean that it's explosive and quite possibly true.

I'm still on the fence about Rod Rosenstein, but I'd like to think he's part of a very, very smart game being played. He's acting like a good little trump-humper, but in the meantime he's working furiously to get the whole rotten gop-top ousted. Rosenstein has a good reputation, and he is supposedly friends with Mueller and Comey. If he is the 'double-agent' I would like him to be, let's hope his efforts succeed spectacularly. 

[Howl]

I just came across this: Report: House Intel Committee Wants To Talk To Trump’s Digital Director

Spoiler

Parscale would be on the list of Trump associates that the committee wants to testify about any connections between the Republican nominee’s campaign and Russian operatives. CNN reported in May that the campaign’s data analytics operation—widely credited with securing Trump’s surprise victory—was being scrutinized by federal investigators. Agents want to know whether Russian intelligence operatives relied on Trump campaign staffers or their data to assist with Russia’s targeted use of social media bots and “fake news” sites to sway American voters, as CNN previously reported.

I recalled reading about a suspicious server in Trump Tower somehow connected to Russian bank via (somehow) a server for a medical/insurance business.  There were some articles written about it.  There was a damning pattern with a potentially innocuous explanation.  Then, in the comments section of the article above, one of the commenters posted this link to the Tea Pain web site: Data Patterns Reveal Trump Tower/Spectrum Health Ran a “Stealth Data Machine” With Russia dated April 3, 2017.  The gist of the article:  

Quote

The data traffic, when analyzed, tells a very different story, a story of automated, orchestrated data sharing among multiple sites [Alfa Bank, Trump Tower, Spectrum Health] for a strategic end.

 Like me, you may be asking yourself,  Spectrum Health, What the Heck?  Here we go:  Spectrum Health is owned by the DeVos family.  That would be the DeVos family -- as in Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- nee Betsy Prince, sister to Erik Prince.  Erik Prince is Pence's mentor.  Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the Tea Pain web site and I'm not tech savvy enough to know if this is a viable explanation, but the clear explanation about how this worked and their theory about how the data may have been utilized is fascinating with (to me) horrifying implications for manipulating populations through social media to affect voters. 

I have to say the Tea Pain web site passes the sniff test for me.  YMMV

[GreyhoundFan]

"At height of Russia tensions, Trump campaign chairman Manafort met with business associate from Ukraine"

Spoiler

In August, as tension mounted over Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sat down to dinner with a business associate from Ukraine who once served in the Russian army.

Konstantin Kilimnik, who learned English at a military school that some experts consider a training ground for Russian spies, had helped run the Ukraine office for Manafort’s international political consulting practice for 10 years.

At the Grand Havana Room, one of New York City’s most exclusive cigar bars, the longtime acquaintances “talked about bills unpaid by our clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement provided by Kilimnik, offering his most detailed account of his interactions with the former Trump adviser.

Kilimnik, who provided a written statement to The Washington Post through Manafort’s attorney, said the previously unreported dinner was one of two meetings he had with Manafort on visits to the United States during Manafort’s five months working for Trump. The first encounter was in early May 2016, about two weeks before the Trump adviser was elevated to campaign chairman.

The August dinner came about two weeks before Manafort resigned under pressure amid reports that he had received improper payments for his political work in Ukraine, allegations that he has denied.

Kilimnik is of interest to investigators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is examining possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, said a person familiar with the inquiry.

Kilimnik’s name also appeared this spring in a previously undisclosed subpoena sought by federal prosecutors looking for information “concerning contracts for work . . . communication or other records of correspondence” related to about two dozen people and businesses that appeared to be connected to Manafort or his wife, including some who worked with Manafort in Kiev.

The subpoena was issued by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, where, until recently, Manafort’s business was headquartered. The subpoena did not specify whether it was related to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election or a separate inquiry into Manafort’s business activities. Investigators in the Eastern District of Virginia have been assisting with the Russia investigation.

In Ukraine, Kilimnik’s political adversaries have said he may be working with Russian intelligence. U.S. officials have not made that charge.

Kilimnik rejected the allegation, telling The Post in his written statement that he has “no relation to the Russian or any other intelligence service.”

His dinner with Manafort came as Trump’s campaign chairman was facing mounting questions about his work in Ukraine and his business ties to allies of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

Kilimnik said his meetings with Manafort were “private visits” that were “in no way related to politics or the presidential campaign in the U.S.” He said he did not meet with Trump or other campaign staff members. However, he said their contacts included discussions “related to the perception of the U.S. presidential campaign in Ukraine.”

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said that Kilimnik was a “longtime business associate” who would have naturally been in touch with Manafort. Manafort told Politico, which first reported his relationship with Kilimnik, that his conversations included discussions about the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the release of its emails.

“It would be neither surprising nor suspicious that two political consultants would chat about the political news of the day, including the DNC hack, which was in the news,” Maloni said.

He added, “We’re confident that serious officials will come to the conclusion that Paul’s campaign conduct and interaction with Konstantin during that time was perfectly permissible and not in furtherance of some conspiracy.”

Before joining Trump’s campaign, Manafort had built a practice in Ukraine as an adviser to the Russia-friendly Party of Regions and helped elect former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. Manafort kept his Kiev office open until mid-2015.

Federal investigators have shown an interest in Manafort on several fronts beyond his work on behalf of Trump.

Subpoenas in New York have sought information about Manafort’s real estate loans, according to NBC News. Justice Department officials also are exploring whether Manafort should have more fully disclosed his work for foreign political parties, as required by federal law.

Former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia inquiry, and people familiar with his work said his office has now taken over investigations of Manafort’s conduct unrelated directly to the Russia probe.

A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to discuss the subpoena there. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.

Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik shows the challenge facing investigators as they seek to determine whether contacts between Russian allies and Trump associates during the height of Russian interference in the campaign amounted to collusion or reflected routine interactions between people with relationships unrelated to the campaign.

Kilimnik said he grew up in southeastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He said he moved to Moscow in 1987, when he was 17, and enrolled in the Military Institute of the Ministry for Defense, an elite academy for training military translators.

Kilimnik said he was trained in English and Swedish and spent the early 1990s serving as a military translator, including in 1993 on a trade mission of a Russian arms company.

He said the GRU, the military intelligence service that U.S. officials have linked to the 2016 cyberattacks, did not recruit from his language academy.

“No one ever spoke to me ever about doing any intelligence work — neither Russians or Ukrainians or any other foreign country,” he said.

Some experts disputed Kilimnik’s description of the Moscow academy.

Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank, and a longtime former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, called the institute a “breeding ground” for intelligence officers.

Mark Galeotti, a Russia security specialist at the Institute of International Relations, a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, said the school is one of the “favored recruiting grounds” of the GRU.

In 1995, amid uncertainty in the post-Soviet economy, Kilimnik said he needed money and took a job as a translator for the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party.

People who worked with Kilimnik said he was proficient in several languages and a savvy reader of people.

“I relied on him,” said Sam Patten, who was Kilimnik’s boss at the Moscow office of IRI from 2001 to 2004.

At the time, Kilimnik openly discussed his work in the Russian army, said Phil Griffin, a political consultant who hired him at the IRI. “He was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence,” Griffin said. “It was no big deal.”

Julia Sibley, a spokeswoman for the IRI, confirmed that Kilimnik worked for the organization a decade ago but declined to provide additional information.

In 2005, Griffin, who had left Moscow to work for Manafort in Ukraine, invited Kilimnik to join him there, according to both men.

Kilimnik said he has worked largely in Ukraine ever since, although he declined to say whether he has become a Ukrainian citizen.

Kilimnik’s role for Manafort grew over time. Beyond his work as a translator, Kilimnik would “help Manafort understand the political context and why people were doing what they were doing,” Patten said.

People familiar with Kilimnik’s work in Ukraine for Manafort say his assignments included meeting with powerful Ukrainian politicians and serving as a liaison to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin and did business with Manafort.

A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, Volodymyr Ariev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who represents a party that opposed Manafort’s clients, requested that Ukraine’s top prosecutor investigate whether Kilimnik had worked with Russian intelligence services.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond to questions from The Post. The prosecutor’s office told Politico in March that Kilimnik was “not being processed now as a witness, suspect or accused.”

Others viewed Kilimnik as more aligned with Washington than Moscow.

Oleg Voloshin, who served as a spokesman for the foreign minister of Ukraine under Yanukovych, said Manafort and Kilimnik were pushing Yanukovych to ally with Europe rather than Russia, which angered some in Yanukovych’s party.

“Kilimnik was always trying to promote this message — if you want to be successful here, you want to look westward,” Voloshin said.

Kilimnik was also well known at the U.S. Embassy, and officials there and at other western embassies appeared to trust him, meeting with him frequently to discuss Ukrainian politics, said people familiar with his work.

“He’s not working for the Russians,” said a foreign policy expert close to Republicans who was working in Ukraine at the time. “If anything, he’s working for us.”

I'm sorry, I'm not buying that there's nothing there.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Here’s how to keep Russian hackers from attacking the 2018 elections"

Spoiler

“They’re coming after America,” former FBI director James B. Comey told the Senate intelligence committee this month. “They will be back.”

In a highly politicized hearing, this bold statement drew strikingly little partisan disagreement. Senators on both sides of the aisle have seemingly reached consensus that foreign agents did try to tamper with the 2016 election and that they are extremely likely to do so again.

The question is: What do we do about it?

While the ongoing Russia investigation has, understandably, received massive attention, there’s so far been scant public focus on the question of how we safeguard our electoral systems from outside interference in the future. Responding to the threat of election hacking isn’t exclusively a matter of diplomatic intrigue or international sanctions. It’s fundamentally a matter of computer science: how we harden our election technology through cybersecurity standards.

This week, we’re joining a group of more than 100 experts on election administration, computer science and national security in releasing a letter that lays out an actionable plan for safeguarding the vote. The experts include tea party Republicans and progressive Democrats, academic computer scientists and corporate security officials — all united in the view that our nation’s rough patchwork of voting security measures is wholly inadequate. One of us (Halderman) will testify Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russia’s attacks last year.

This shouldn’t be news to lawmakers. In the past decade, cybersecurity experts have revealed devastating vulnerabilities in every U.S. voting machine they’ve studied. In 2014, the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration sounded the alarm about an “impending crisis” of insecure voting technology. In 2015, Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University showed in a comprehensive study that the nation’s voting machines are largely past their shelf-lives and deeply insecure. According to a survey of 274 election administrators across 28 states, a strong majority of election officials claim they need security upgrades to voting machines but simply lack the resources.

Ten years ago, Halderman was part of the first academic research team to conduct a comprehensive security analysis of a Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. The study’s findings were deeply troubling: It’s possible to reprogram a machine to cause any candidate to win, without leaving a trace. The research team created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine to machine, much like a computer virus, and invisibly change the election outcome. Since then, cybersecurity experts have studied a wide range of U.S. voting machines — including both touch screens and optical scanners — and in every single case, they found severe vulnerabilities that would allow attackers to sabotage machines or alter votes

This month’s blockbuster reporting in the Intercept and Bloomberg News  show that hostile nations have our computerized election infrastructure in their sights. And the threats aren’t limited to the voting machines and tabulators: adversaries can also go after voter registration databases and electronic poll books to block voters, create long lines at polling places and instill distrust in the system.

So why hasn’t Congress acted?

One simple answer is that lawmakers need a straightforward policy agenda to fix the system. The new statement from the 100 election security experts provides a concrete road map:

First, Congress should provide time-sensitive matching funds to states to upgrade voting technologies, and, in particular, replace paperless DRE voting machines with systems that include a good old-fashioned paper ballot — that is to say, a physical record of the vote that’s out of reach from cyberattacks.

Second, Congress should call on states to conduct risk-limiting audits for every federal race, by inspecting enough of the paper ballots to tell whether the computer results are accurate. These audits are a common-sense quality control, and they should be routine. Since they only require officials to check a small random sample of ballots, they quickly and affordably provide high assurance that the election outcome was correct. As Ron Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Philip Stark of the University of California have explained, states can gain high confidence regarding election outcomes by checking as few as 0.5 percent of the ballots in a given contest.

Finally, Congress should instruct federal agencies to partner with states to conduct serious and comprehensive threat assessment, and to identify and apply best practices in cybersecurity from across sectors to the design of voting equipment and the management of federal elections. This will raise the bar for attacks of all sorts.

There’s evidence this agenda can fly even in the age of hyperpartisan gridlock.

While many Democrats have supported election security reforms since former Rep. Rush Holt proposed related reforms a decade ago, prominent conservatives are now championing the cause. Recently, retired Army Intelligence Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer — a Fox News contributor and fearless President Barack Obama critic — joined former CIA director R. James Woolsey — a leading national defense advocate — to call for audits and federal cybersecurity standards. In a Fox News op-ed last month, the two made a conservative case for election security reform as a matter of national security, explaining why, among other factors, Congress’ unfunded mandates under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 justify new security investments. Shaffer and Woolsey quote President Trump himself from an interview the morning of the election: “There’s something really nice about the old paper ballot system,” the then-candidate states. “You don’t worry about hacking.”

Perhaps the strongest argument why the new federal election security agenda can succeed is cost. New analysis from the Brennan Center finds that the country can replace insecure paperless voting systems for somewhere between $130 million and $400 million. Implementing risk-limiting audits nationally for federal elections would cost less than $20 million a year. These amounts are a rounding error in the administration’s $640 billion defense budget request, but the investment would be a guaranteed way to boost voter confidence and significantly strengthen an important element of our national security.

With many state and local officials keen to make necessary tech upgrades, Congress may  need to only cover a fraction of the overall costs.

If lawmakers agree with Comey’s assessment that foreign agents are “coming after America,” it stands to reason that Congress should devote resources to addressing the threat. This is a small price tag for the defense of our democracy.

My county went back to paper ballots that get scanned into a machine several years ago when it was discovered that the paperless ballots were not reliable.

[VixenToast]

Nebraska uses paper ballots and has no voter ID laws... it works just fine and dandy here

I would 100% will that the country used paper ballots again. I don't care how many hours it saves you, paper ballots can't be hacked.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Warner chastises DHS for withholding state election hack details"

Spoiler

Sen. Mark Warner tore into DHS Wednesday for not revealing which states Russian hackers targeted during the 2016 election, warning that its silence was making the nation less secure for upcoming elections.

The department's decision to keep "secret" the number of states that were attacked is "just crazy in mind," Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a Wednesday hearing.

The Virginia lawmaker's remarks come on the heels of a media report that 39 states suffered intrusions into their voter databases and software systems during the election. To-date, though, only two states — Arizona and Illinois — are publicly known.

"That makes absolutely no sense," said Warner, who sent a letter to DHS chief John Kelly on Tuesday demanding the agency release all of the information about the breaches.

If the government doesn't "tell the public how many states were attacked, or potentially how many could be attacked in the next cycle, I don’t think we get to where we need to be" in protecting the election system for the 2018 and 2020 elections, Warner added.

Jeanette Manfra, DHS' acting deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity and communications, told the panel that 21 states were targeted during the election-year, reiterating information the agency released in October.

But Manfra declined to offer the names of those states, or any specifics about the attacks.

She argued that the agency wants to protect "the information around that victim," something it does for all sectors deemed to be critical infrastructure — like hospitals or the power grid. DHS slapped the critical infrastructure label on the electoral system in January.

Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, also told lawmakers that the bureau has "a number of investigations open" into state-level hacking attempts during the election.

"We continue to learn things," he added, but declined to commit to making those findings public.

Warner asked if states other than Illinois and Arizona are at least aware they were targeted by Russian hackers. Manfra said state officials did, but conceded it's possible that local officials, including registrars, might not.

"I have no interest in trying to embarrass any state," Warner said, but added he didn't want information swept "under the rug."

Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr suggested that he and Warner would send a letter to the 19 anonymous states, asking them to come forward.

Burr also vowed to bring in the FBI for a closed-door briefing with the panel on the open investigations into state-level hacking. The Intelligence Committee has been investigating the scope of Russia's alleged digital meddling campaign during the election.

Once that investigation is done, Burr said, he would declassify as much information as possible so the "public gets a true understanding."

Warner stressed that such public disclosures were critical.

"We are not making our country safer if we don’t make sure that all Americans understand the breadth and extent of what the Russians did in 2016," he said, "and frankly, if we don’t get our act together, what they will do in an even more dramatic form in 2018 and 2020."

This is just worse and worse -- 39 states?

[GreyhoundFan]

"We just learned the government knows Russia will sabotage the next election. Now what?"

Spoiler

The Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing this morning on Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, and on what the government knows about Russian intentions to meddle in future contests. The Committee heard from three federal officials, two from the Department of Homeland Security, and one from the FBI.

Together, those officials made clear that not only did Russians peddle in propaganda and fake news in an effort boost the fortunes of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016; they also penetrated election systems via cyber warfare.

But they also hinted at another important truth, which a forward looking one. Here it is: The very core of our democracy is at extraordinary risk if we are not prepared to prevent Russian interference in our next election, which is less than 18 months away.

Not only did today’s hearing make clear that election systems remain vulnerable to cyberattack; it also laid bare significant uncertainty in how the government is going about addressing those vulnerabilities. If the public knows that the vulnerabilities exist, but has doubts about how the government plans to fix them, that, in turn, will only damage our democracy further, by reinforcing public doubts about the integrity of the systems and therefore weakening public confidence in our election outcomes.

All of this is just as the Russians want.

In today’s hearing, it emerged that the Department of Homeland Security knows of Russian attempts to hack into election systems in 21 states during the 2016 cycle. This came courtesy of Samuel Liles, the DHS’s acting director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Cyber Division — though he was quick to add that the hack didn’t have any impact on voting tallies or outcomes. The efforts amounted to a “scan of vulnerabilities,” Liles said, likening it to casing the neighborhood to collect information to aid possible future efforts to infiltrate these computer systems. Election results were not altered. This time, at least.

But that was the only bit of good news, if it could even be characterized as good, to emerge from the hearing.

One official starkly laid out not just how brazen the Russians’ 2016 efforts were — but also that there’s little doubt that they will continue to pursue these efforts in 2018 and beyond. Bill Priestap, Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Division at the FBI, noted that, while the Kremlin has engaged in influence operations since the Cold War era, its 2016 efforts were “its boldest to date in the United States,” and included “a multi-faceted approach intended to undermine confidence in our democratic process.” This approach included discrediting Hillary Clinton, the “weaponization of stolen cyber information” (such as that stolen from the Democratic National Committee); and the use of trolls and social media to further spread propaganda and misinformation. According to Priestap, the Russians could use data obtained this cycle to “determine whether it can be manipulated going forward,” in order to influence future elections.

This was further commented on by ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA), who said, “the bad news is this will not be their [the Russians’] last attempt,” adding that he was “deeply concerned” about future Russian “efforts to undermine confidence in our whole electoral system.” Indeed erosion of Americans’ confidence in the integrity of our election system is a a central goal of Russian active measures — which is why the hearing’s exposure of what appears to be a disjointed, opaque approach to combating the hacks was so alarming.

Unfortunately, however, DHS was in many cases unwilling to communicate basic information. Senators of both parties expressed frustration with the refusal to specify things such as which states, beyond Arizona and Illinois, were among the 21 whose systems were infiltrated by Russian actors — and about how DHS is working with state and local officials to prevent future cyber attacks.

This could have far reaching implications — if voters know that the cyber warfare has taken place, but remain unclear about its scope and effect, or about how it might be used again, that can fuel suspicion and distrust. As Marco Rubio (R-FL) put it, “Even the news that a hacker from a foreign government could have gotten into a computer system” could “create the specter of a losing candidate arguing the election was rigged.” In other words, without clear and accurate information about the nature of the attacks — and, crucially, how the government is preventing future ones — there is an open door for trolling, fake news, and conspiracy theories that further undermine voters’ confidence in the integrity of democratic processes.

Lawmakers were not alone in their frustration. Secretaries of state, who oversee the election process in 40 states, complained in their testimony that DHS has failed to share vital information with them about their own cyber vulnerabilities. What’s more, the extent of Russian penetration remains unknown. These secretaries of state, it emerged, themselves do not know which states are among the 21 whose systems were infiltrated by Russian cyber warfare, an information gap Warner described as “stunning.” And in an ominous moment, the FBI’s Priestap declined to answer a question about whether Russians had installed malware in penetrated systems, because of the pending special counsel investigation into Russian interference.

“The key lesson from 2016 is that hacking threats are real,” summed up J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan and a cybersecurity expert. “There is no doubt that Russia has the technical ability to commit widescale attacks against our voting system, as do other hostile nations.”

This is not a partisan issue, or an occasion for finger-pointing. Urgent solutions are needed — and ensuring Congressional oversight of that could well be the most vital work on the Committee’s agenda in the coming months. This will require not only well-coordinated efforts by officials within DHS who are working with state and local elections officials, but will also demand that Republicans abandon President Trump’s efforts to discredit the entire Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.” Our democracy depends on it.

So, let me get this straight? The government knows that there will be more interference by Russia, yet the people in the know won't share information or shore up the vulnerabilities? This is crazy.

[candygirl200413]

Will it just open up the fact that this entire administration actually needs to be removed cause they are extremely tainted?!

[GreyhoundFan]

WTDH? "Trump: Russian interference is ‘all a big Dem HOAX!’"

Spoiler

President Trump on Thursday called Russia's meddling in the 2016 election “all a big Dem HOAX” and accused former president Barack Obama and his administration of not doing enough last year to “stop” Russian interference.

In morning tweets, Trump opined on the Russia probe and sought to assert his innocence, even as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III expands the investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to look at possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Trump tweeted, “Why did Democratic National Committee turn down the DHS offer to protect against hacks (long prior to election). It's all a big Dem HOAX!”

,,,

The president appeared to be referring to Wednesday's congressional testimony by Jeh Johnson, Obama's former homeland security secretary, who said that after the Democratic National Committee's email servers were hacked, the DNC declined an offer by the Department of Homeland Security to help the party committee, which also had been in touch with the FBI, identify intruders and patch vulnerabilities.

DNC officials said it did not hear from DHS until months after the hack had been made public and after the FBI had worked to close the intrusion, and that the DNC provided the DHS a detailed report on the incident.

“The DNC has and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement on Russia's interference in our election,” DNC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement responding to Trump's tweet. “The DNC has been in regular contact with the FBI for many months and the FBI confirmed the DNC has provided all the information it needed to make its assessment.”

In another Thursday tweet, Trump wrote, “If Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn't they stop them?”

...

Josh Earnest, Obama's former White House press secretary, responded to Trump's tweet in an appearance on MSNBC. Noting that Russia's overall goal was to shake confidence in the United States' ability to have an election, Earnest said it would have been “irresponsible” for the administration to have taken more active public steps expressing worry about Russia's actions.

“We wanted to make sure that we were instilling confidence in people that we could conduct a free and fair election,” Earnest said.

Trump used the caveat of “if Russia was working so hard,” making clear that he is not yet convinced that Russia interfered in the election with its cyberattacks and other activities.

...

Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia did in fact meddle in the election, through cyberattacks and other activities, with the explicit aim of influencing the outcome. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday that he did not know whether the president believed the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies.

In a third tweet Thursday, Trump sought to use Johnson's testimony as proof of his vindication in the Russia investigation. “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia,” the president tweeted.

...

Yet Johnson is not involved in Mueller's expanding federal investigation into Russian interference and therefore would not have the knowledge or authority to exonerate Trump. The Washington Post reported last week that Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, as well as probing Russia's activities to influence the election and whether there was any collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign.

In testimony Wednesday before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Johnson said that Russia's meddling, directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was “unprecedented” in scale and scope.

The level of delusion is unbelievable.

[Childless]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTDH? "Trump: Russian interference is ‘all a big Dem HOAX!’"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump on Thursday called Russia's meddling in the 2016 election “all a big Dem HOAX” and accused former president Barack Obama and his administration of not doing enough last year to “stop” Russian interference.

In morning tweets, Trump opined on the Russia probe and sought to assert his innocence, even as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III expands the investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to look at possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Trump tweeted, “Why did Democratic National Committee turn down the DHS offer to protect against hacks (long prior to election). It's all a big Dem HOAX!”

,,,

The president appeared to be referring to Wednesday's congressional testimony by Jeh Johnson, Obama's former homeland security secretary, who said that after the Democratic National Committee's email servers were hacked, the DNC declined an offer by the Department of Homeland Security to help the party committee, which also had been in touch with the FBI, identify intruders and patch vulnerabilities.

DNC officials said it did not hear from DHS until months after the hack had been made public and after the FBI had worked to close the intrusion, and that the DNC provided the DHS a detailed report on the incident.

“The DNC has and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement on Russia's interference in our election,” DNC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement responding to Trump's tweet. “The DNC has been in regular contact with the FBI for many months and the FBI confirmed the DNC has provided all the information it needed to make its assessment.”

In another Thursday tweet, Trump wrote, “If Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn't they stop them?”

...

Josh Earnest, Obama's former White House press secretary, responded to Trump's tweet in an appearance on MSNBC. Noting that Russia's overall goal was to shake confidence in the United States' ability to have an election, Earnest said it would have been “irresponsible” for the administration to have taken more active public steps expressing worry about Russia's actions.

“We wanted to make sure that we were instilling confidence in people that we could conduct a free and fair election,” Earnest said.

Trump used the caveat of “if Russia was working so hard,” making clear that he is not yet convinced that Russia interfered in the election with its cyberattacks and other activities.

...

Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia did in fact meddle in the election, through cyberattacks and other activities, with the explicit aim of influencing the outcome. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday that he did not know whether the president believed the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies.

In a third tweet Thursday, Trump sought to use Johnson's testimony as proof of his vindication in the Russia investigation. “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia,” the president tweeted.

...

Yet Johnson is not involved in Mueller's expanding federal investigation into Russian interference and therefore would not have the knowledge or authority to exonerate Trump. The Washington Post reported last week that Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, as well as probing Russia's activities to influence the election and whether there was any collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign.

In testimony Wednesday before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Johnson said that Russia's meddling, directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was “unprecedented” in scale and scope.

The level of delusion is unbelievable.

The Russians have made Trump look like an inept fool.  Why does he continue to stand up for them?  For the love of God, one of their jets played chicken with a military transport aircraft.  That could have ended with military deaths if it had caused a crash.  What is he thinking?