The Russian Connection

[mamallama]

That could be yuuuuuuggggge!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Here’s the public evidence that supports the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election

Spoiler

Speaking at a news conference in Warsaw on Thursday, President Trump again cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Russian government tried to intervene in the 2016 presidential election by stealing private files and trying to disrupt voting systems.

“I think it was Russia,” Trump said, “but I think it was probably other people and/or countries, and I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure.”

There’s a lot packed into that statement: a cursory acceptance of the consensus view that Russia was involved, a shadow of doubt overlaid with the idea that Russia didn’t act alone, and a blanket shrug at the idea that the truth was really knowable. All of this, of course, comes alongside Trump’s repeated dismissal of investigations into what really happened last year as “witch hunts” — because they include a look at how allies of his may have helped the Russians to succeed.

Trump’s attempt to soften the accusation against Russia — whatever the motivation — is helped by the fact that the government agencies involved in the probes relied largely on classified information to find the Russians culpable of meddling. With that in mind, we’ve cobbled together the publicly available information to demonstrate why a layperson might have reasonable confidence that Russia was behind the election hacks — even if Trump, with access to a fuller set of information, does not concur.

The Democratic National Committee hack

In June 2016, The Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee’s computer network had been hacked, allowing access to email and chat transcripts, as well as files detailing research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

This was reported about a month before the hacked files were released, shortly before the Democratic convention began. As The Post reported at the time, the likely culprits had already been identified as Russian — not by the government but by an outside firm called CrowdStrike.

The firm identified two separate hacker groups, both working for the Russian government, that had infiltrated the network, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike co-founder and chief technology officer. The firm had analyzed other breaches by both groups over the past two years.

One group, which CrowdStrike had dubbed Cozy Bear, had gained access last summer and was monitoring the DNC’s email and chat communications, Alperovitch said.

The other, which the firm had named Fancy Bear, broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files, Henry said. And they had access to the computers of the entire research staff — an average of about several dozen on any given day.

That report was bolstered by other evidence. As the blog Motherboard reported, the additional evidence pointing to Russia includes:

• Analysis of DNC log files by two CrowdStrike competitors that reached the same conclusion based on the reuse of tools known to be linked to Russian hackers.
• The registration of a domain intended to trick DNC employees that pointed back to an Internet address that had been used in previous hacks.
• The accidental inclusion of Russian-language metadata in some of the leaked files, as well as some error messages that were printed in Russian. In later releases of the same files, those messages were removed.
• The fact that the leaker of the DNC documents, Guccifer 2.0, claimed to be Romanian but didn’t speak that language.

The October statement

About a month before the U.S. election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issued an unusual public statement.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” the statement read. “The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”

This is important for a simple reason: The president’s assertion that the focus of the investigation was meant to undermine his electoral victory is clearly incorrect, given the timing of this document. What’s more, the statement’s attribution is direct: The hacks bear the fingerprints of Russia.

The government analysis

In late December, the FBI and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center released a declassified overview — a joint analysis — of their evidence linking Russia to the hacks of the DNC.

“The U.S. Government confirms that two different actors participated in the intrusion into a U.S. political party. The first actor group, known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 29 entered into the party’s systems in summer 2015, while the second, known as APT28, entered in spring 2016,” the report read.

The evidence presented was light on details but centered on the tools and methods used by the hackers. The hackers sent “spearphishing” emails meant to trick the recipients into surrendering their passwords, which apparently was successful.

The FBI/NCCIC report did not address the hack of Clinton campaign chairman Jon Podesta, but the methodology used in that case was the same. The firm SecureWorks tracked the shortened URL sent to Podesta to lure him into giving up his password and discovered that similar URLs were sent by the same user to more than 5,000 Google accounts largely in Russia but also to government and military targets, including in the United States and at NATO.

The report on Russian influence efforts

In January, after news reports on the intelligence community’s analysis of the Russian interference emerged, the DNI released a declassified version of its broad assessment of Russia’s role.

“[W]hile the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment,” it said, by way of explaining its general lack of specifics, “the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods.”

The key assessment, held with high confidence by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency?

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US 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.

Much of the publicly available report focused on how Russian media tried to influence the election’s outcome. “Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls,'” it read.

The report mentions briefly that state elections systems were also targeted by the Russians, a point also made in the October report.

The leaked NSA report

In June, the Intercept published a document leaked to them from an employee of the NSA that provided classified analysis of those voting system intrusions.

“Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election,” the Intercept’s report said, detailing the NSA’s analysis supporting that claim. It noted, though, that the analysis represents only one point of evidence to the charges it presents and that the document does not include the raw intelligence supporting the claims. That said, it comports with what was released publicly by the intelligence agencies.

The Intercept was initially skeptical of Russia’s involvement in the hacking attempts, based on the generally light evidence presented by the U.S. government. Trump, however, seems to be arguing the opposite — that, with access to far more evidence, he still maintains some doubt. What evidence that might be is not clear, assuming it exists.

Publicly, the intelligence agencies under his command paint a much simpler picture: It was Russia.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Phone taps, power plays and sarcasm: What it’s like to negotiate with Vladimir Putin"

Spoiler

Relations between Russia and Georgia were strained in 2011 when Vice President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled past the Ferrari and Maserati dealerships to Vladi­mir Putin’s private dacha for their first meeting in a ritzy neighborhood outside Moscow.

Biden had laid the groundwork to ease tensions and made the case to Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, that Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili was not seeking to provoke the Kremlin.

“I just spoke to him,” Biden declared across a large conference table.

Putin was unmoved. “We know exactly what you’re saying to Saakashvili on the phone,” he shot back. Biden laughed, but Putin did not, according to a former U.S. official who recounted the exchange, which has not been previously revealed publicly. The American delegation took Putin at his word that Russian intelligence agents were listening in on their calls.

As President Trump prepares for his first face-to-face meeting this week with Putin, in Hamburg, those who have negotiated with the Russian leader caution that Trump must be ready for a shrewd, well-prepared and implacable adversary.

Putin — who reclaimed the presidency in 2012 — has outlasted three U.S. presidents, shifting his persona but never his demands in countless phone calls and summit meetings, according to interviews with former aides with firsthand knowledge of the conversations. Bill Clinton shared a dinner of spicy wild boar with him at the presidential palace. George W. Bush looked in his eyes to get “a sense of his soul.” Barack Obama pursued a “reset” of a troubled relationship.

But all three failed to forge a personal bond with Putin as bilateral relations tumbled into an ever-worsening state of affairs.

Enter Trump, who professed admiration for Putin during his campaign for the U.S. presidency, calling Putin a stronger leader than Obama. But their coming meeting has been tainted by an FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives who allegedly meddled in the U.S. election to aid Trump.

White House officials have said there is no formal agenda for the meeting, and they were noncommittal about whether the president intends to raise the election issue with Putin.

The meeting will be watched closely for the tone Trump takes with his counterpart. Jon Finer, who served as an aide to Biden in the White House and as chief of staff to John F. Kerry when Kerry was secretary of state, said it is imperative for Trump to draw “clear lines about American interests and then find common ground, if there is any. Part of why going in without an agenda is so dangerous — you could end up having the entire conversation on his topics and his terms.”

With Putin, Finer said, “there’s a sense that personalities matter, but at the end of the day, he’s someone who has a strong sense of what Russian interests should be, and he’s not going to deviate from that.”

Those who have met Putin describe him as a direct and forceful negotiator who wields nearly total power in the Kremlin. Although he and Bush developed an initial rapport, their relations soured amid the Bush administration’s war on terror and Russia’s conflict in neighboring Georgia.

After their first meeting in 2001, Bush proclaimed Putin “very straightforward and trustworthy.” That assessment has since been widely ridiculed, but Thomas E. Graham, who served as Russia director at the National Security Council under Bush, said critics leave out the rest of Bush’s assessment that Putin was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

“That turned out to be true,” Graham said. Putin “knew what he wanted; he had messages he wanted to convey.”

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, recalled Obama’s first meeting with Putin in 2009, also at Putin’s private residence. The Americans wanted the three-hour session, over tea, to be more than an icebreaker, viewing it as the opening bid in an “ambitious play” to reset relations.

Although Dmitry Medvedev was president and Obama met separately with him, U.S. officials thought at the time that Putin continued to wield significant influence — and later came to conclude that Putin remained in charge.

Putin was skeptical of the Americans. He told them he had tried to work with Bush, but then launched into a litany of complaints over how the United States had foiled efforts to cooperate on counterterrorism and on the folly of the Iraq invasion, McFaul recalled.

Putin, a former KGB officer, blamed the setbacks on U.S. intelligence agencies.

“He blamed the ‘deep state’ for thwarting efforts to cooperate,” McFaul said. “He went through a series of vignettes over eight years with Bush: ‘We did this, got close on this, yet it was your side that screwed it all up.’ ”

The Russian leader prefers smaller meetings, with fewer aides, which he thinks will result in fewer leaks, U.S. officials said. On one visit to Moscow by Kerry, there were so few officials permitted that the U.S. delegation asked ambassador John F. Tefft to serve as the official translator.

That’s not Putin’s only power play. While Trump is known to use forceful presidential handshakes to show dominance, Putin’s strategy is more subtle. He was 40 minutes late for a meeting with Obama at the G-20 Summit in Mexico in 2012 and kept Kerry waiting for three hours in Moscow in 2013.

“Our staff was really upset,” one former Obama aide recalled. “The president was like, ‘Who cares?’ It’s only a dis and a power play if you allow it.”

Yet for a macho leader who has been photographed riding a horse shirtless and drilling for oil, Putin’s demeanor in person is remarkably calm and composed, U.S. officials said.

Those who meet Putin are often surprised that his tone is “mild-mannered and soft-spoken,” Finer said. A famous photo of Obama and Putin looking uncomfortable during a 2013 meeting in Northern Ireland was interpreted as a sign of their mutual disdain.

But Finer said the Russian leader’s “body language tends to be slouched, looking down as if there are notes in front of him. He will then make eye contact for emphasis. I got the impression of someone who is supremely confident, relaxed, not super-animated. That’s not to say the content of his words is relaxed or soft in any way. He can deliver quite hard messages.”

Putin has developed a long list of grievances over U.S. actions, which he often recites to start meetings, former Obama aides said. Many have to do with visa delays for Russian officials or the treatment of Russian diplomats who are not granted meetings — a grievance U.S. officials found disingenuous, given that American diplomats are routinely harassed and intimidated in Moscow.

Obama aides said they tried to funnel Putin’s complaints into a “separate channel” to be handled by lower-level aides while attempting to steer him back to geostrategic matters such as Ukraine, Syria and the Iran nuclear deal.

Those topics got him even more animated, however. Obama’s relations with Putin took a downward turn in 2014 when the United States and European allies imposed economic sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In meetings, Putin would refer to “Ukrainian fascists,” former Obama aides said.

The Russian leader is typically the only person on his side of the table who speaks, the former aides said. He seldom delegates authority, and he has a solid command of the issues, especially energy, where he recites facts and figures.

Although he only recently learned English, Putin has been known to correct a translator, the officials said. As he speaks, he scans for reactions, looking for signs of division, and he considers it a sign of weakness if another world leader is cut off, or corrected, by a lower-ranking aide.

Putin also has a penchant for trolling his rivals. During a meeting with Kerry in 2016, Putin mocked him for carrying his own luggage off the plane, suggesting that it was a cash bribe to work out disagreements over Syria. In 2007, Putin brought his black Labrador to a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is scared of dogs.

More recently, Putin said with a straight face on Russian television that he would offer asylum to former FBI director James B. Comey, who was fired by Trump and then gave damaging congressional testimony about Trump in the ongoing Russia probe.

Putin’s sarcastic asides can reveal his sharply different view of the world compared with the Americans’. In 2015, after a three-hour negotiating session with Kerry over Syria and Ukraine, Putin invited the U.S. delegation to a cocktail reception.

The American side was made up largely of women, prompting one to joke that Kerry was “not afraid of strong women.” Putin then teased Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about why the Russians had no female aides, which led to an off-color conversation about gender and sexual orientation, according to former U.S. officials familiar with knowledge of the exchange.

Regarding that formal meeting with Putin, Wendy Sherman, former undersecretary of state who was in attendance, said the U.S. delegation “came away thinking there might be some openings. But none of those really materialized.”

Yeah, the orange manbaby will be so over his head.

[Childless]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Phone taps, power plays and sarcasm: What it’s like to negotiate with Vladimir Putin"

  Reveal hidden contents

Relations between Russia and Georgia were strained in 2011 when Vice President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled past the Ferrari and Maserati dealerships to Vladi­mir Putin’s private dacha for their first meeting in a ritzy neighborhood outside Moscow.

Biden had laid the groundwork to ease tensions and made the case to Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, that Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili was not seeking to provoke the Kremlin.

“I just spoke to him,” Biden declared across a large conference table.

Putin was unmoved. “We know exactly what you’re saying to Saakashvili on the phone,” he shot back. Biden laughed, but Putin did not, according to a former U.S. official who recounted the exchange, which has not been previously revealed publicly. The American delegation took Putin at his word that Russian intelligence agents were listening in on their calls.

As President Trump prepares for his first face-to-face meeting this week with Putin, in Hamburg, those who have negotiated with the Russian leader caution that Trump must be ready for a shrewd, well-prepared and implacable adversary.

Putin — who reclaimed the presidency in 2012 — has outlasted three U.S. presidents, shifting his persona but never his demands in countless phone calls and summit meetings, according to interviews with former aides with firsthand knowledge of the conversations. Bill Clinton shared a dinner of spicy wild boar with him at the presidential palace. George W. Bush looked in his eyes to get “a sense of his soul.” Barack Obama pursued a “reset” of a troubled relationship.

But all three failed to forge a personal bond with Putin as bilateral relations tumbled into an ever-worsening state of affairs.

Enter Trump, who professed admiration for Putin during his campaign for the U.S. presidency, calling Putin a stronger leader than Obama. But their coming meeting has been tainted by an FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives who allegedly meddled in the U.S. election to aid Trump.

White House officials have said there is no formal agenda for the meeting, and they were noncommittal about whether the president intends to raise the election issue with Putin.

The meeting will be watched closely for the tone Trump takes with his counterpart. Jon Finer, who served as an aide to Biden in the White House and as chief of staff to John F. Kerry when Kerry was secretary of state, said it is imperative for Trump to draw “clear lines about American interests and then find common ground, if there is any. Part of why going in without an agenda is so dangerous — you could end up having the entire conversation on his topics and his terms.”

With Putin, Finer said, “there’s a sense that personalities matter, but at the end of the day, he’s someone who has a strong sense of what Russian interests should be, and he’s not going to deviate from that.”

Those who have met Putin describe him as a direct and forceful negotiator who wields nearly total power in the Kremlin. Although he and Bush developed an initial rapport, their relations soured amid the Bush administration’s war on terror and Russia’s conflict in neighboring Georgia.

After their first meeting in 2001, Bush proclaimed Putin “very straightforward and trustworthy.” That assessment has since been widely ridiculed, but Thomas E. Graham, who served as Russia director at the National Security Council under Bush, said critics leave out the rest of Bush’s assessment that Putin was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

“That turned out to be true,” Graham said. Putin “knew what he wanted; he had messages he wanted to convey.”

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, recalled Obama’s first meeting with Putin in 2009, also at Putin’s private residence. The Americans wanted the three-hour session, over tea, to be more than an icebreaker, viewing it as the opening bid in an “ambitious play” to reset relations.

Although Dmitry Medvedev was president and Obama met separately with him, U.S. officials thought at the time that Putin continued to wield significant influence — and later came to conclude that Putin remained in charge.

Putin was skeptical of the Americans. He told them he had tried to work with Bush, but then launched into a litany of complaints over how the United States had foiled efforts to cooperate on counterterrorism and on the folly of the Iraq invasion, McFaul recalled.

Putin, a former KGB officer, blamed the setbacks on U.S. intelligence agencies.

“He blamed the ‘deep state’ for thwarting efforts to cooperate,” McFaul said. “He went through a series of vignettes over eight years with Bush: ‘We did this, got close on this, yet it was your side that screwed it all up.’ ”

The Russian leader prefers smaller meetings, with fewer aides, which he thinks will result in fewer leaks, U.S. officials said. On one visit to Moscow by Kerry, there were so few officials permitted that the U.S. delegation asked ambassador John F. Tefft to serve as the official translator.

That’s not Putin’s only power play. While Trump is known to use forceful presidential handshakes to show dominance, Putin’s strategy is more subtle. He was 40 minutes late for a meeting with Obama at the G-20 Summit in Mexico in 2012 and kept Kerry waiting for three hours in Moscow in 2013.

“Our staff was really upset,” one former Obama aide recalled. “The president was like, ‘Who cares?’ It’s only a dis and a power play if you allow it.”

Yet for a macho leader who has been photographed riding a horse shirtless and drilling for oil, Putin’s demeanor in person is remarkably calm and composed, U.S. officials said.

Those who meet Putin are often surprised that his tone is “mild-mannered and soft-spoken,” Finer said. A famous photo of Obama and Putin looking uncomfortable during a 2013 meeting in Northern Ireland was interpreted as a sign of their mutual disdain.

But Finer said the Russian leader’s “body language tends to be slouched, looking down as if there are notes in front of him. He will then make eye contact for emphasis. I got the impression of someone who is supremely confident, relaxed, not super-animated. That’s not to say the content of his words is relaxed or soft in any way. He can deliver quite hard messages.”

Putin has developed a long list of grievances over U.S. actions, which he often recites to start meetings, former Obama aides said. Many have to do with visa delays for Russian officials or the treatment of Russian diplomats who are not granted meetings — a grievance U.S. officials found disingenuous, given that American diplomats are routinely harassed and intimidated in Moscow.

Obama aides said they tried to funnel Putin’s complaints into a “separate channel” to be handled by lower-level aides while attempting to steer him back to geostrategic matters such as Ukraine, Syria and the Iran nuclear deal.

Those topics got him even more animated, however. Obama’s relations with Putin took a downward turn in 2014 when the United States and European allies imposed economic sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In meetings, Putin would refer to “Ukrainian fascists,” former Obama aides said.

The Russian leader is typically the only person on his side of the table who speaks, the former aides said. He seldom delegates authority, and he has a solid command of the issues, especially energy, where he recites facts and figures.

Although he only recently learned English, Putin has been known to correct a translator, the officials said. As he speaks, he scans for reactions, looking for signs of division, and he considers it a sign of weakness if another world leader is cut off, or corrected, by a lower-ranking aide.

Putin also has a penchant for trolling his rivals. During a meeting with Kerry in 2016, Putin mocked him for carrying his own luggage off the plane, suggesting that it was a cash bribe to work out disagreements over Syria. In 2007, Putin brought his black Labrador to a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is scared of dogs.

More recently, Putin said with a straight face on Russian television that he would offer asylum to former FBI director James B. Comey, who was fired by Trump and then gave damaging congressional testimony about Trump in the ongoing Russia probe.

Putin’s sarcastic asides can reveal his sharply different view of the world compared with the Americans’. In 2015, after a three-hour negotiating session with Kerry over Syria and Ukraine, Putin invited the U.S. delegation to a cocktail reception.

The American side was made up largely of women, prompting one to joke that Kerry was “not afraid of strong women.” Putin then teased Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about why the Russians had no female aides, which led to an off-color conversation about gender and sexual orientation, according to former U.S. officials familiar with knowledge of the exchange.

Regarding that formal meeting with Putin, Wendy Sherman, former undersecretary of state who was in attendance, said the U.S. delegation “came away thinking there might be some openings. But none of those really materialized.”

Yeah, the orange manbaby will be so over his head.

Of course he will.  Putin will play him like a fiddle.  Hell, finding his way across a stage confuses him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, it looks like Putin didn't roll over in the wake of the orange manbaby's "forceful personality": "Putin denies election hacking after Trump pressed him, Tillerson says"

Spoiler

HAMBURG — President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday discussed brokering “commitments of noninterference” in the U.S. political system during a lengthy face-to-face meeting in Germany, the first in-person encounter between the two leaders about Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 election.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who attended the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute meeting, said it did not focus on the United States moving to punish Russia for the allegations that it hacked and leaked information that would help Trump win the election. Instead, Tillerson said the two leaders discussed “how do we move forward from what may be simply an in­trac­table disagreement at this point” regarding the election-hacking issue.

“The president pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement,” Tillerson said. “President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.”

Tillerson said the White House was not “dismissing the issue” but wanted to focus on “how do we secure a commitment” that there will not be interference in the future.

Tillerson’s comments came during a briefing with reporters following the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Putin. He said they also agreed to a “de-escalation agreement” regarding a section of southwestern Syria. Jordan was also part of that agreement.

Syria’s lengthy civil war has left more than 400,000 people dead and led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands more.

The United States and Russia have supported opposite parties during the civil war. Russia has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the United States has supported and trained groups that oppose Assad. 

Past cease-fires in Syria have not lasted long. Tillerson suggested he was skeptical that the cease-fire would endure, saying, “We’ll see what happens.”

He also said that the U.S. position is that there will be a political transition in Syria that will lead to the ouster of Assad, but he said the circumstances for this are unclear.

Tillerson said the United States and Russia agreed that working groups set up by both countries would follow up on the political interference issue. 

Tillerson would not say whether Trump flatly told Putin that Russia interfered in the election, saying instead: "He pressed him and then felt like at this point, how do we go forward?" 

The meeting lasted much longer than expected. At one point, Trump's wife entered the room to try to see if it could wrap up soon, but it continued much longer.

"We went another hour [after] she came in to see us, so clearly she failed," Tillerson said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian reporters that Moscow was pleased with the outcome of the meeting.

"My feeling is that it's been confirmed that the presidents, both the Russian and the American, are driven above all by the countries' national interests and that they understand these interests primarily as looking for mutually beneficial agreements and not trying to act out some confrontation scenarios, not trying to create problems out of nothing," Lavrov said.

The world watched closely as the two met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in a meeting whose length far exceeded expectations and suggested that a broad range of topics may have been covered.

"I had a very long conversation with the president of the United States,” Putin told reporters after the meeting. “Many issues had accumulated, including Ukraine, Syria and other problems, some bilateral issues. We again went back to counterterrorism and cyber security issues."

The mood was genial as Putin and Trump, sitting side by side, addressed reporters before the meeting.

“It’s an honor to be with you,” Trump said.

“We've had some very, very good talks. We're going to have a talk now and obviously that will continue,” Trump added. “We look forward to a lot of very positive happenings for Russia and for the United States and for everyone concerned.”

Putin, referring to the phone conversations the two presidents have had, said that “phone conversations are never enough definitely.”

“I'm delighted to be able to meet you personally,” Putin said. “And I hope that, as you have said, our meetings will yield positive results.”

Trump and Putin were joined in the meeting by Lavrov and Tillerson. The contrast was clear: the Russian side has decades of diplomatic and leadership experience under its belt, while Trump and Tillerson are political newcomers despite extensive international business ties.

Trump on Thursday once again downplayed the notion that Russia meddled on his behalf in the 2016 election, which would seem to play into one of the Kremlin’s main objectives. Any signal from Trump that Moscow and Washington can put aside past differences and forge a new relationship is a victory for Putin. 

In two tweets earlier Friday, Trump said he was looking forward to the meeting, and that “I will represent our country well and fight for its interests!”

The Kremlin has said that Putin wants the United States to hand back two compounds that the previous administration seized in late December in retaliation for Russia’s actions in the U.S. campaign. 

The Trump administration has already indicated it might return those compounds, which the Obama administration said were being used to gather intelligence. But Trump is facing bipartisan opposition at home not to lift sanctions against what many in Washington see as an adversary intent on weakening democratic institutions and diminishing U.S. global leadership. 

“The return of these two facilities to Russia while the Kremlin refuses to address its influence campaign against the United States would embolden President Vladimir Putin and invite a dangerous escalation in the Kremlin’s destabilizing actions against democracies worldwide,” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), all members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump on Thursday. 

The Senate recently voted 97 to 2 in favor of a Russian sanctions amendment to the Iran sanctions bill that “would require strict congressional review of any decision to overturn or lift existing policies on Russia, including the return of these two dachas, and would impose new sanctions to deter Russian aggression against the U.S. and its allies.”

In a speech in Poland, Trump gave mixed signals on the eve of the summit, urging Russia “to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes including Syria and Iran.”  

Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said in a briefing Friday that Putin was told about the remarks and that the Russian leader “is taking that into account.” 

“Let’s wait for the results of the meeting,” Peskov said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Along with that note Thursday, Trump also repeated a position shared by Putin, saying that “nobody really knows” who was behind the hacking during the U.S. presidential campaign, and questioning U.S. intelligence agencies’ affirmation of Russia’s involvement because they were wrong about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003. 

That both of these statements align with the Kremlin’s own stance on the election hacking creates another interesting look for the U.S. president, who once famously wanted Putin to be his “new best friend.” 

More recently, Trump caused a stir when he met with Lavrov in the White House and shared intelligence on the Islamic State provided to the United States by Israel. 

There’s also the sense expressed by Russian observers that Putin, the seasoned leader with a clear objective, notoriously well-prepared and ever the operative, will have a notable advantage over a neophyte politician who has so far led the free world in fitful jerks and stops that have left even America’s closest allies confused.

And while Peskov this week warned against expecting anything more than a get-to-know-you meeting, Tillerson this week floated a proposal that would expand U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria. 

In advance of the Trump-Putin meeting, Tillerson held an hour-long conversation with Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “The parties discussed key topics on the international and bilateral agenda,” read the ministry’s statement.

Peskov on Thursday said Putin would raise Russia’s concerns that Ukraine is violating the Minsk peace accords, which call for a cease-fire in the three-year-old war with pro-Russian separatists. U.S. sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea were broadened to punish Moscow for backing the separatists militarily, which Putin has denied. Ukraine said a recently captured soldier it said was working for the Russian military is further proof.

Putin was expected to pressure Trump to back a de-escalation plan for the Korean Peninsula that would have North Korea halt its ballistic missile program and the United States and South Korea call off their large-scale military drills.

Above all, Putin is hoping to forge a relationship that will open the way for dealmaking later on, if and when domestic pressure on Trump over Russian meddling abates, even if it means putting up with Trump’s mixed signals.

Seriously? Melania came in and asked him to end the meeting? Good grief.

[GrumpyGran]

53 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Gee, it looks like Putin didn't roll over in the wake of the orange manbaby's "forceful personality": "Putin denies election hacking after Trump pressed him, Tillerson says"

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HAMBURG — President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday discussed brokering “commitments of noninterference” in the U.S. political system during a lengthy face-to-face meeting in Germany, the first in-person encounter between the two leaders about Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 election.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who attended the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute meeting, said it did not focus on the United States moving to punish Russia for the allegations that it hacked and leaked information that would help Trump win the election. Instead, Tillerson said the two leaders discussed “how do we move forward from what may be simply an in­trac­table disagreement at this point” regarding the election-hacking issue.

“The president pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement,” Tillerson said. “President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.”

Tillerson said the White House was not “dismissing the issue” but wanted to focus on “how do we secure a commitment” that there will not be interference in the future.

Tillerson’s comments came during a briefing with reporters following the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Putin. He said they also agreed to a “de-escalation agreement” regarding a section of southwestern Syria. Jordan was also part of that agreement.

Syria’s lengthy civil war has left more than 400,000 people dead and led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands more.

The United States and Russia have supported opposite parties during the civil war. Russia has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the United States has supported and trained groups that oppose Assad. 

Past cease-fires in Syria have not lasted long. Tillerson suggested he was skeptical that the cease-fire would endure, saying, “We’ll see what happens.”

He also said that the U.S. position is that there will be a political transition in Syria that will lead to the ouster of Assad, but he said the circumstances for this are unclear.

Tillerson said the United States and Russia agreed that working groups set up by both countries would follow up on the political interference issue. 

Tillerson would not say whether Trump flatly told Putin that Russia interfered in the election, saying instead: "He pressed him and then felt like at this point, how do we go forward?" 

The meeting lasted much longer than expected. At one point, Trump's wife entered the room to try to see if it could wrap up soon, but it continued much longer.

"We went another hour [after] she came in to see us, so clearly she failed," Tillerson said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian reporters that Moscow was pleased with the outcome of the meeting.

"My feeling is that it's been confirmed that the presidents, both the Russian and the American, are driven above all by the countries' national interests and that they understand these interests primarily as looking for mutually beneficial agreements and not trying to act out some confrontation scenarios, not trying to create problems out of nothing," Lavrov said.

The world watched closely as the two met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in a meeting whose length far exceeded expectations and suggested that a broad range of topics may have been covered.

"I had a very long conversation with the president of the United States,” Putin told reporters after the meeting. “Many issues had accumulated, including Ukraine, Syria and other problems, some bilateral issues. We again went back to counterterrorism and cyber security issues."

The mood was genial as Putin and Trump, sitting side by side, addressed reporters before the meeting.

“It’s an honor to be with you,” Trump said.

“We've had some very, very good talks. We're going to have a talk now and obviously that will continue,” Trump added. “We look forward to a lot of very positive happenings for Russia and for the United States and for everyone concerned.”

Putin, referring to the phone conversations the two presidents have had, said that “phone conversations are never enough definitely.”

“I'm delighted to be able to meet you personally,” Putin said. “And I hope that, as you have said, our meetings will yield positive results.”

Trump and Putin were joined in the meeting by Lavrov and Tillerson. The contrast was clear: the Russian side has decades of diplomatic and leadership experience under its belt, while Trump and Tillerson are political newcomers despite extensive international business ties.

Trump on Thursday once again downplayed the notion that Russia meddled on his behalf in the 2016 election, which would seem to play into one of the Kremlin’s main objectives. Any signal from Trump that Moscow and Washington can put aside past differences and forge a new relationship is a victory for Putin. 

In two tweets earlier Friday, Trump said he was looking forward to the meeting, and that “I will represent our country well and fight for its interests!”

The Kremlin has said that Putin wants the United States to hand back two compounds that the previous administration seized in late December in retaliation for Russia’s actions in the U.S. campaign. 

The Trump administration has already indicated it might return those compounds, which the Obama administration said were being used to gather intelligence. But Trump is facing bipartisan opposition at home not to lift sanctions against what many in Washington see as an adversary intent on weakening democratic institutions and diminishing U.S. global leadership. 

“The return of these two facilities to Russia while the Kremlin refuses to address its influence campaign against the United States would embolden President Vladimir Putin and invite a dangerous escalation in the Kremlin’s destabilizing actions against democracies worldwide,” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), all members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump on Thursday. 

The Senate recently voted 97 to 2 in favor of a Russian sanctions amendment to the Iran sanctions bill that “would require strict congressional review of any decision to overturn or lift existing policies on Russia, including the return of these two dachas, and would impose new sanctions to deter Russian aggression against the U.S. and its allies.”

In a speech in Poland, Trump gave mixed signals on the eve of the summit, urging Russia “to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes including Syria and Iran.”  

Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said in a briefing Friday that Putin was told about the remarks and that the Russian leader “is taking that into account.” 

“Let’s wait for the results of the meeting,” Peskov said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Along with that note Thursday, Trump also repeated a position shared by Putin, saying that “nobody really knows” who was behind the hacking during the U.S. presidential campaign, and questioning U.S. intelligence agencies’ affirmation of Russia’s involvement because they were wrong about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003. 

That both of these statements align with the Kremlin’s own stance on the election hacking creates another interesting look for the U.S. president, who once famously wanted Putin to be his “new best friend.” 

More recently, Trump caused a stir when he met with Lavrov in the White House and shared intelligence on the Islamic State provided to the United States by Israel. 

There’s also the sense expressed by Russian observers that Putin, the seasoned leader with a clear objective, notoriously well-prepared and ever the operative, will have a notable advantage over a neophyte politician who has so far led the free world in fitful jerks and stops that have left even America’s closest allies confused.

And while Peskov this week warned against expecting anything more than a get-to-know-you meeting, Tillerson this week floated a proposal that would expand U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria. 

In advance of the Trump-Putin meeting, Tillerson held an hour-long conversation with Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “The parties discussed key topics on the international and bilateral agenda,” read the ministry’s statement.

Peskov on Thursday said Putin would raise Russia’s concerns that Ukraine is violating the Minsk peace accords, which call for a cease-fire in the three-year-old war with pro-Russian separatists. U.S. sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea were broadened to punish Moscow for backing the separatists militarily, which Putin has denied. Ukraine said a recently captured soldier it said was working for the Russian military is further proof.

Putin was expected to pressure Trump to back a de-escalation plan for the Korean Peninsula that would have North Korea halt its ballistic missile program and the United States and South Korea call off their large-scale military drills.

Above all, Putin is hoping to forge a relationship that will open the way for dealmaking later on, if and when domestic pressure on Trump over Russian meddling abates, even if it means putting up with Trump’s mixed signals.

Seriously? Melania came in and asked him to end the meeting? Good grief.

Ha ha, WTH, Melania? It seems she was able to escape the guest house but wasn't she suppose to be doing things with the other Firsts? I'm picturing her charging into the room, twirling her finger around in the air and saying "Wrap it up." I swear her whole day was all about embarrassing him.

And "positive happenings", oh Lord, what is that? The Tillerson Report makes it sound, to me, like there was love in the air! Giddy school boys.

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting: "Rachel Maddow warns media about forged document on Trump-Russia: ‘Heads up, everybody’"

Spoiler

It wouldn’t have been the first time that a major media organization had reported a stunning development that turned out to be untrue. But it surely would have made the Top 5.

On her MSNBC program last night, host Rachel Maddow told viewers that her show had received an apparent NSA document over tip-routing portal SendItToRachel.com. Though Maddow didn’t display the document or detail all of its allegations, she did say that it purported to be very secret. “People who are in a position to recognize or authenticate this kind of document, people who have worked with things at this level of classification, they typically will refuse to even look at a document like this if there’s any chance that it is real, that it is real classified information that has been improperly disclosed,” she said. “That’s because the terms of their own security clearance mean effectively they can’t review anything like that without it creating legal obligations on them.”

And its political implications? “People talk about finding the smoking gun. What got sent to us was not just a smoking gun; it was a gun still firing proverbial bullets,” said Maddow, who went on to note that it “names a specific person in the Trump campaign as working with the Russians on their hacking attack on the election last year.”

And that wrinkle was just one of the fishy details in the over-the-transom tip. According to experts consulted by Maddow and her staff, it’s unlikely that a U.S. citizen would be named in a document of this sort. Other telltale signs relate to printer codes and digital sleuthing that Maddow presented in her trademarked long-form TV narrative style — the particulars of which we won’t detail here. May it suffice to say, however, that “The Rachel Maddow Show” took a pass on this potentially explosive document, except to point out that it appears to be a forgery.

As to who may have sent the document to the show, Maddow says, “We’re working on it.” It could have come from a two-bit trickster or some hanger-on with no agenda whatsoever. Then again: Maddow outlined a scenario with frightening implications for the tip-receiving media on the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia:

Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up.

You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent — who knows — as to whether that too might be false like that other story, whether that too might be based on fake evidence.

No way this is the first time that a media organization has received a forgery or a bogus tip. It happens all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Maddow herself pointed to CBS News’s 2004 reporting on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, which stemmed from documents whose origin Maddow described as “murky.” Explaining that CBS News was “ripped to shreds” over its approach to the story, she noted, “that was a spike through the heart of the story of George W. Bush’s National Guard service keeping him out of Vietnam, which was a true and interesting story and which really might have been a serious ongoing political liability for candidate George W. Bush. But nobody was ever willing to touch it again during that campaign because of the way those documents purporting to prove out the worst aspects of that story blew up like a pipe bomb at CBS News.”

These are dangerous times for reporters — dangerous because they may be body-slammed; dangerous because their resignations may be very readily accepted over a story gone wrong; and dangerous because — yes — there’s misinformation out there. If there once was a stigma attached to spreading bogus tips for the purpose of discrediting the media, it’s receding, according to this comment from Maine Gov. Paul LePage to WGAN-AM: “I just love to sit in my office and make up ways so they’ll write these stupid stories because they are just so stupid, it’s awful,” said LePage. Any excuse to fling the accusation: “FAKE NEWS!”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Yeah, I like Angela Merkel's eye roll: "Merkel appears to roll her eyes at Putin, and the Internet can’t get enough"

Spoiler

As the world examined the first face-to-face encounter between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit, the Internet turned its attention to a different interaction between two world leaders.

Cameras captured a candid exchange between Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — one that is as humorous as it is fleeting. Putin, with one hand in his pocket and the other emphatically gesturing, appears to be discussing a topic that Merkel seems to find less than riveting based on her reaction. There’s a strong chance the two were speaking German. Putin worked in East Germany from 1985 to 1990 and speaks the language fluently.

The Internet wasted no time in guessing the conversation topic that prompted Merkel's eye roll.

... <the video with the eyeroll is posted here>

This is not the first awkward moment Merkel and Putin have shared. In a 2014 New Yorker profile on Merkel that explores her relationship with Putin, George Packer wrote that Putin brought his dog into a 2007 meeting with Merkel, who is afraid of dogs.

In 2007, during discussions about energy supplies at the Russian President’s residence in Sochi, Putin summoned his black Lab, Koni, into the room where he and Merkel were seated. As the dog approached and sniffed her, Merkel froze, visibly frightened. She’d been bitten once, in 1995, and her fear of dogs couldn’t have escaped Putin, who sat back and enjoyed the moment, legs spread wide. “I’m sure it will behave itself,” he said. Merkel had the presence of mind to reply, in Russian, “It doesn’t eat journalists, after all.” The German press corps was furious on her behalf — “ready to hit Putin,” according to a reporter who was present. Later, Merkel interpreted Putin’s behavior. “I understand why he has to do this—to prove he’s a man,” she told a group of reporters. “He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Putin says he thinks Trump ‘agreed’ with assurances that Russia did not interfere in U.S. elections"

Spoiler

HAMBURG — Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on Saturday said that he assured President Trump that Moscow had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and that it appeared to him that Trump had agreed with his assurances.

“It seemed to me that he took it into account, and agreed” Putin told reporters on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. The Russian president added “you should ask him.

Russia’s foreign minister’s on Friday had said that Trump had “accepted” Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not run a hacking and disinformation campaign to help Trump’s campaign.

Putin Saturday said that Trump “asked many questions” about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The Russian leader said he had repeated Moscow’s stance that “there was no basis to believe that Russia” interfered in the elections.

“I feel as though my answers satisfied him,” Putin said.

“What’s important is that we agreed that there should not be a situation of uncertainty about this,” Putin said, adding that the two sides had agreed to create a group to work on how to prevent interference in “the internal affairs of other countries.”

Putin said that based on his talks with Trump, “there is a chance that we can at least partly restore the level of cooperation that’s needed” in the U.S.-Russian relationship.

After the two presidents met Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters that Trump, after listening to Putin’s denial, accepted the Kremlin leader’s assurances and dismissed the U.S. investigation into Russian interference. 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at a separate news conference that Putin, along with the denials, had nonetheless agreed to bilateral talks to address preventing future interference in U.S. elections.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked about the differing accounts Saturday, said only: “You should trust Lavrov. I don’t work for Tillerson.”

Peskov was otherwise tight-lipped in a conference call with reporters.

On Saturday, Putin reaffirmed Russia’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement, which Trump pulled the United States out of earlier this year.

“You know our stance: We honor the Paris agreement,” Putin said at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg.

The highly anticipated meeting of Trump and Putin during the G-20, eight months after a presidential election that U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia tried to sway, was unique in the annals of modern U.S. history. It pitted Trump, under fire at home for alleged collusion with Russia, against the man accused of overseeing that interference. 

When Tillerson and Lavrov emerged with different accounts of how the meeting had gone, it caused a stir that overshadowed the other outcomes — a deal on a partial cease-fire in the Syrian war and an agreement to hold bilateral talks on a range of issues. 

And the session offered little clarity on the question of Russian election interference, which had made this the most anticipated meeting between a U.S. president and his Russian counterpart in recent memory. Instead, both sides indicated that they wanted to move beyond the subject

Lavrov came away from the meeting saying Trump had heard out Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not run a hacking and disinformation effort, and had dismissed the entire U.S. investigation into the Russian role.

“The U.S. president said that he heard clear statements from President Putin about this being untrue and that he accepted these statements,” Lavrov told Russian reporters.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who also attended the 2 hour 16 minute meeting, told reporters at a separate news conference that during the session, Trump pressed Putin “on more than one occasion” on Russia’s interference.

Tillerson said that “President Putin denied such involvement,” but he did not say whether Trump accepted that assertion. Rather, Tillerson said Trump decided to move on because Russia would not admit blame. Tillerson said, though, that the United States wasn’t dismissing Russian responsibility and that the two sides had agreed to organize talks “regarding commitments of noninterference in the affairs of the United States and our democratic process.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Putin ordered a campaign of cyberattacks and propaganda last year aimed at undermining the presidential election and helping Trump by discrediting his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Justice Department has named a special counsel to investigate possible coordination between Trump’s associates and Russian officials during the campaign. 

U.S. lawmakers from both parties had urged Trump to raise the election meddling with Putin when the leaders met on the sidelines of the G-20. Afterward, some worried whether Trump had confronted Putin firmly enough. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dismissed the outcome as “disgraceful.”

“President Trump had an obligation to bring up Russia’s interference in our election with Putin, but he has an equal obligation to take the word of our Intelligence Community rather than that of the Russian President,” Schumer said in a statement.

Before the meeting, analysts in both countries said any signal from Trump that Moscow and Washington could put aside past differences and forge a new relationship would be a victory for Putin. In Moscow, political leaders were celebrating Friday night.

“In some sense it’s a breakthrough,” Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the foreign relations committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament, told the Interfax news agency. “Absolutely definitely psychologically and possibly practically.” 

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the upper house, issued a statement saying that “there is no doubt that this meeting may become a step toward the solution to the situation in which the relations between our states currently are.”

The world had been waiting for the first in-person encounter between the president whose associates face an investigation into possible collusion with Russia and the Kremlin leader who allegedly intervened in Trump’s favor. But the presidents seemed intent Friday on moving the relationship past that explosive issue.

Trump told Putin that members of Congress were pushing for additional sanctions against Russia over the election issue, Tillerson said. “But the two presidents, I think, rightly focused on: How do we move forward?” he added.

Trump and Putin designated top officials to collaborate on the creation of a framework that would prevent future political interference, Tillerson said, as part of a bilateral commission that would also discuss counterterrorism and the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. 

Tillerson said they also reached a “de-escalation agreement” regarding a section of Syria near the cities of Daraa and Quneitra. Jordan was also part of that agreement. 

Syria’s lengthy civil war has left more than 400,000 people dead and led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands more. The United States and Russia have supported opposite parties during the war. Russia has backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the United States has supported and trained groups that oppose him. 

Past cease-fires in Syria have not lasted long. Tillerson suggested he was skeptical that this cease-fire would endure, saying, “We’ll see what happens.”

The meeting lasted much longer than expected. At one point, Trump’s wife, Melania, entered the room to see if it could wrap up soon, but it continued.

“We went another hour [after] she came in to see us, so clearly she failed,” Tillerson said.

Yeah, I have little doubt Agent Orange took Putin at his word.

[fraurosena]

Oh my. I wonder what spin they're going to give on this bombshell. If they're going by Rancid Penis's defense that "it's a big nothing burger", or in other words the first part of, "nothing to see here, hey, look over there!" you can bet that deflection tactics will start in 3...2...1...

Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton

Spoiler

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.

And while President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, he said only that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”

Lawyers and spokesmen for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them what the meeting was about.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the material on July 22.

A special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration.

Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. On Sunday, two days after his first meeting as president with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post: “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.....” He also tweeted that they had “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded...””

On Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”

“Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.

But Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that was at that meeting.”

“There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” Mr. Schiff said after the initial Times report.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act.

The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit the man after whom it was named, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in 2009 in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.

Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.

Ms. Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort walked out.

She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”

The Trump Tower meeting was disclosed to government officials in recent days, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance.

The Times reported in April that he had failed to disclose any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.

Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing.

In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said: “He has since submitted this information, including that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”

Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events. Neither Mr. Manafort nor Mr. Kushner was required to disclose the content of the meeting.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

Since the president took office, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire. Because he does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, Donald Trump Jr. was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts.

Ms. Veselnitskaya is a formidable operator with a history of pushing the Kremlin’s agenda. Most notable is her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, which provoked a Cold War-style, tit-for-tat dispute with the Kremlin when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012.

Under the law, about 44 Russian citizens have been put on a list that allows the United States to seize their American assets and deny them visas. The United States asserts that many of them are connected to the fraud exposed by Mr. Magnitsky, who after being jailed for more than a year was found dead in his cell. A Russian human rights panel found that he had been assaulted. To critics of Mr. Putin, Mr. Magnitsky, in death, became a symbol of corruption and brutality in the Russian state.

An infuriated Mr. Putin has called the law an “outrageous act,” and, in addition to banning American adoptions, he compiled what became known as an “anti-Magnitsky” blacklist of United States citizens.

Among those blacklisted was Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney in Manhattan, who led notable convictions of Russian arms and drug dealers. Mr. Bharara was abruptly fired in March, after previously being asked to stay on by President Trump.

One of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of Prevezon Holdings, an investment company based in Cyprus. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money linked to the $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by putting it in New York real estate and bank accounts. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.

Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client also hired a team of political and legal operatives to press the case for repeal. And they tried but failed to keep Mr. Magnitsky’s name off a new law that takes aim at human-rights abusers across the globe. The team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire. Fusion GPS, a consulting firm that produced an intelligence dossier that contained unverified allegations about Mr. Trump, was also hired to do research for Prevezon.

Ms. Veselnitskaya was also deeply involved in the making of a film that disputes the widely accepted version of Mr. Magnitsky’s life and death. In the film and in her statement, she said the true culprit of the fraud was William F. Browder, an American-born financier who hired Mr. Magnitsky to investigate the fraud after three of his investment funds companies in Russia were seized.

Mr. Browder called the film a state-sponsored smear campaign.

“She’s not just some private lawyer,” Mr. Browder said of Ms. Veselnitskaya. “She is a tool of the Russian government.”

John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director, testified in May that he had been concerned last year by Russian government efforts to contact and manipulate members of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Russian intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to support their objectives,” he said.

The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation last year into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page and Roger J. Stone Jr.

Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.

Congress later discovered that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.

In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel.

The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

In case you were feeling a little too secure: "U.S. officials say Russian government hackers have penetrated energy and nuclear company business networks"

Spoiler

Russian government hackers were behind recent cyber-intrusions into the business systems of U.S. nuclear power and other energy companies in what appears to be an effort to assess their networks, according to U.S. government officials.

The U.S. officials said there is no evidence the hackers breached or disrupted the core systems controlling operations at the plants, so the public was not at risk. Rather, they said, the hackers broke into systems dealing with business and administrative tasks, such as personnel.

At the end of June, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security sent a joint alert to the energy sector stating that “advanced, persistent threat actors” — a euphemism for sophisticated foreign hackers — were stealing network log-in and password information to gain a foothold in company networks. The agencies did not name Russia.

The campaign marks the first time Russian government hackers are known to have wormed their way into the networks of American nuclear power companies, several U.S. and industry officials said. And the penetration could be a sign that Russia is seeking to lay the groundwork for more damaging hacks.

The National Security Agency has detected specific activity by the Russian spy agency, the FSB, targeting the energy firms, according to two officials. The NSA declined to comment. The intrusions have been previously reported but not the attribution to Russia by U.S. officials.

The joint alert from the FBI and DHS, first reported by Reuters on June 30, said the hackers have been targeting the industry since at least May. Several days earlier, E & E News, an energy trade publication, had reported that U.S. authorities were investigating cyber-intrusions affecting multiple nuclear-power-generation sites.

The malicious activity comes as President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday acknowledged “the challenges of cyberthreats” and “agreed to explore creating a framework” to better deal with them, including those that harm critical infrastructure such as nuclear energy, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in remarks to reporters. On Saturday, Putin told reporters that he and Trump agreed to set up a working group “on the subject of jointly controlling security in cyberspace.”

The Russian government, which is the United States’ top adversary in cyberspace, targeted U.S. infrastructure in a wide-ranging campaign in 2014.

Moscow has demonstrated how much damage it can do in other countries when it goes after energy systems.

In December 2015, Russian hackers disrupted the electric system in Ukraine, plunging 225,000 customers into darkness. Last December, they tested a new cyberweapon in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, capable of disrupting power grids around the world.

The recent activity follows the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin was behind a campaign to interfere with the 2016 election through hacking and information warfare. Putin has denied such meddling.

The working group that is being set up will also address “how to prevent interference in the domestic affairs of foreign states, primarily in Russia and the U.S.,” Putin said.

The U.S. officials all stressed that the latest intrusions did not affect systems that control the production of nuclear or electric power.

“There is no indication of a threat to public safety, as any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks,” the DHS and FBI said in a joint statement Friday.

One nuclear power company that was penetrated, Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp. in Kansas, issued a statement saying that “there has been absolutely no operational impact to Wolf Creek.” The reason is that the plant’s operational computer systems are completely separate from the corporate network, spokeswoman Jenny Hageman said. “The safety and control systems for the nuclear reactor and other vital plant components are not connected to business networks or the Internet,” she said.

In general, the nation’s 100 or so commercial nuclear power plants are safer from cyberattack than other energy plants because they isolate their control systems from the open Internet, said Bill Gross, director of incident preparedness at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

According to U.S. officials, fewer than a dozen energy companies, including several nuclear energy firms, were affected by the latest Russian cyber-reconnaissance campaign.

While nuclear-power companies are fairly well protected, electric-power plants are less so, experts said.

“It’s a plausible scenario that the adversaries in electric power business networks could pivot to the industrial networks,” said Robert M. Lee, founder and chief executive of Dragos, a cyberfirm that focuses on industrial control systems. “But it’s still not a trivial matter to compromise the industrial systems.”

Dragos last month issued a report analyzing a new Russian cyberweapon that can disrupt electric power grids. Dubbed CrashOverride, the malware is known to have affected only one energy system — in Ukraine in December. But with modifications, it could be deployed against U.S. electric grids, Dragos concluded.

While the current campaign shows no signs — at least not yet — of disrupting the companies’ operations, it is not clear what the adversary’s true motive is, officials said.

“In some sense, this could be significant if this is precursor planning,” said one U.S. official, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “That’s what all cyber bad guys do. They do reconnaissance and they try to establish a presence and maintain access. This in my mind was a reconnaissance effort — to scope things out and figure out” points of entry.

The same actor has also targeted energy and other critical sector firms in Turkey and Ireland, said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a cyberthreat-intelligence firm. He added that the firm has found evidence that the adversary has been hacking into global energy firms since at least 2015.

In their alert, the DHS and FBI stated that the hackers are using spearphishing emails and “watering hole” techniques to ensnare victims. A spearphish targets a user with an authentic-looking email that contains attachments or links embedded with malware. In this case, the hackers often used Microsoft Word attachments that appeared to be legitimate résumés from job applicants, the agencies said. In a watering-hole attack, an unsuspecting victim navigates to a website laced with malware, infecting his or her computer. In both cases, the adversary sought to collect victims’ log-in and password data so that they could sneak into the network and poke around.

Galina Antova, co-founder of the cyberfirm Claroty, said: “There’s no need for hype and hysteria, but this is an issue that should be taken seriously because of the state of the industrial networks” — in particular the non-nuclear systems.

The current cyber-campaign, dubbed Palmetto Fusion by the government, is significant as a warning, officials said. “It signals an ability to get into a system and potentially have a continued presence there, which at a future date, at someone else’s determination, might be exploited to have an effect” that could be particularly disruptive.

 

[fraurosena]

Uh-oh...

 

His case for plausible deniability is becoming thinner and thinner.

[fraurosena]

And thinner, and thinner...

 

And thinner still.

 

[GrumpyGran]

17 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oh my. I wonder what spin they're going to give on this bombshell. If they're going by Rancid Penis's defense that "it's a big nothing burger", or in other words the first part of, "nothing to see here, hey, look over there!" you can bet that deflection tactics will start in 3...2...1...

Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.

And while President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, he said only that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”

Lawyers and spokesmen for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them what the meeting was about.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the material on July 22.

A special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration.

Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. On Sunday, two days after his first meeting as president with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post: “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.....” He also tweeted that they had “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded...””

On Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”

“Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.

But Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that was at that meeting.”

“There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” Mr. Schiff said after the initial Times report.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act.

The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit the man after whom it was named, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in 2009 in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.

Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.

Ms. Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort walked out.

She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”

The Trump Tower meeting was disclosed to government officials in recent days, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance.

The Times reported in April that he had failed to disclose any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.

Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing.

In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said: “He has since submitted this information, including that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”

Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events. Neither Mr. Manafort nor Mr. Kushner was required to disclose the content of the meeting.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

Since the president took office, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire. Because he does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, Donald Trump Jr. was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts.

Ms. Veselnitskaya is a formidable operator with a history of pushing the Kremlin’s agenda. Most notable is her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, which provoked a Cold War-style, tit-for-tat dispute with the Kremlin when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012.

Under the law, about 44 Russian citizens have been put on a list that allows the United States to seize their American assets and deny them visas. The United States asserts that many of them are connected to the fraud exposed by Mr. Magnitsky, who after being jailed for more than a year was found dead in his cell. A Russian human rights panel found that he had been assaulted. To critics of Mr. Putin, Mr. Magnitsky, in death, became a symbol of corruption and brutality in the Russian state.

An infuriated Mr. Putin has called the law an “outrageous act,” and, in addition to banning American adoptions, he compiled what became known as an “anti-Magnitsky” blacklist of United States citizens.

Among those blacklisted was Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney in Manhattan, who led notable convictions of Russian arms and drug dealers. Mr. Bharara was abruptly fired in March, after previously being asked to stay on by President Trump.

One of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of Prevezon Holdings, an investment company based in Cyprus. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money linked to the $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by putting it in New York real estate and bank accounts. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.

Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client also hired a team of political and legal operatives to press the case for repeal. And they tried but failed to keep Mr. Magnitsky’s name off a new law that takes aim at human-rights abusers across the globe. The team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire. Fusion GPS, a consulting firm that produced an intelligence dossier that contained unverified allegations about Mr. Trump, was also hired to do research for Prevezon.

Ms. Veselnitskaya was also deeply involved in the making of a film that disputes the widely accepted version of Mr. Magnitsky’s life and death. In the film and in her statement, she said the true culprit of the fraud was William F. Browder, an American-born financier who hired Mr. Magnitsky to investigate the fraud after three of his investment funds companies in Russia were seized.

Mr. Browder called the film a state-sponsored smear campaign.

“She’s not just some private lawyer,” Mr. Browder said of Ms. Veselnitskaya. “She is a tool of the Russian government.”

John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director, testified in May that he had been concerned last year by Russian government efforts to contact and manipulate members of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Russian intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to support their objectives,” he said.

The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation last year into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page and Roger J. Stone Jr.

Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.

Congress later discovered that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.

In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel.

The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.

 

Yeah, I saw Kellyanne (Yikes!) blathering their deflection on this. So, never mind that little trump told one story about the meeting on Saturday and then when he found out there was evidence that might reveal that lie, he came clean the next day. And it was a meeting with, surprise, a Russian. And we were looking for dirt on Hillary. Yeah, the REAL story, folks, is that we failed. She was a lying bitch! Just wanted to talk about orphans, why would we care about that? Nothing here, keep moving. 

They can't even do effective denial anymore.

 

[fraurosena]

Junior could be in deeper doo-doo than we thought.

Former CIA officer sees potential danger Don Jr. could face with Russia meeting

Spoiler

Former CIA officer Phil Mudd warned that President Donald Trump’s son Donald Jr. has a larger problem than merely meeting with yet another Russian contact: he may have lied to investigators.

“You’re talking about the substance of what happened,” Mudd began in a Monday morning CNN panel. “Having been at the FBI, there’s another piece I find fascinating, lying to a federal officer. The collusion piece I think will be difficult. I think it’s going to be tough.”

Mudd explained to the “New Day” panel that investigators are now looking at phone and e-mail contacts among each of these people and now the stories aren’t matching.

“If you’re a federal investigator, you’re collating stories and seeing now a year later that the stories don’t line up,” Mudd continued. “When the stories don’t line up, you have a simple question, did they tell the truth during the enter initial interviews? If not, that’s a federal violation, a 1001 charge. These guys are vulnerable to a charge from the special counsel Robert Mueller if they didn’t tell the truth.”

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who contributed to the reporting on the Sunday night story explained that there is no evidence that Trump lied to investigators, only that we know they lied to reporters.

The Trumps explain that they were merely doing opposition research on Hillary Clinton and that the Russian lawyer said that there was information.

“Obviously all campaigns do opposition research on their rivals. What makes this different?” co-host Alisyn Camerota asked Daily Beast editor John Avlon.

“They’re usually not outsourced to a hostile foreign power,” Avlon replied. “You can’t say that loudly enough. I’ve participated in campaigns. It’s perfectly normal to do opposition research. It’s totally abnormal to have foreign governments, particularly Russia at a time when they’re not only trying to hack our election we find out subsequently on this campaign’s behalf, have so many connections with this campaign, the extended family, so to speak, and to have them be denied. I mean, just look at the cadence of this reporting: ‘never met with Russians in the context of this campaign.’ Earlier this weekend it was purely about adoption, I mean, this is as close as you can get to apple pie in a conversation — to maybe we were shopping information — negative information about Hillary Clinton. That’s a big deal. It also just one more example of stories of the Trump senior staff not lining up with reality.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote in a Sunday evening tweet that there is now a growing list of Trump associates who have given on-the-record or under-oath falsehoods about meeting with Russians over the course of the last year. That list includes Vice President Mike Pence, former national security council head retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, senior White House aide Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr.

Fox News has spent Monday denying that the meeting resulted in anything “meaningful,” however, the meeting was the first in a series of meeting, which showed Russians that the campaign was willing to make a deal.

The Trump legal team said that they didn’t know who Trump Jr. and former campaign chair Paul Mannafort was meeting with.

A video with the full discussion is embedded in the article.

I so, so, so hope Mueller will stick it to him for lying to federal investigators.

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, color me surprised... "Meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer was requested by Russian pop star whose family is close to Putin"

Spoiler

A meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was set up at the request of Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose Kremlin-connected family has done business with President Trump in the past, according to the person who arranged the meeting.

Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who represents Agalarov, confirmed on Monday that he requested the Trump Tower meeting at Agalarov’s request. Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras Agalarov, a wealthy Moscow real estate developer, helped sponsor the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Russia in 2013.

After the pageant, the Agalarovs signed a preliminary deal with Trump to build a tower bearing his name in Moscow, though the deal has been on hold since Trump began running for president.

Goldstone had previously told The Washington Post that he set up and attended the meeting for the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, so that she could discuss the adoption of Russian children by Americans.

The revelations about the meeting come as federal prosecutors and congressional investigators explore whether the Trump campaign coordinated and encouraged Russian efforts to intervene in the election to hurt Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

In a new statement, Goldstone confirmed what Trump Jr. himself revealed Sunday: That he enticed the then-Republican candidate’s son by indicating that Veselnitskaya could provide damaging information about Democrats.

“The lawyer had apparently stated she had some information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the DNC which she believed Mr. Trump Jr. might find important,” he said.

At the meeting, which also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, the Russian lawyer offered “a few very general remarks” about campaign funding, Goldstone said.

She then proceeded to discuss the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russia for its alleged human rights abuses. Angered over the law, Russia retaliated by halting U.S. adoptions of Russian children.

Trump Jr. has said his father was unaware of the meeting, and both he and Goldstone said there was no additional follow-up beyond the brief June 2016 session.

The involvement of the Agalarovs brings the meeting closer to both Trump’s past business interests and to the Kremlin. Trump has spent time with both Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras — appearing in a music video for the Russian musician, which was filmed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2013.

Meanwhile, the Agalarovs are also close to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. Aras Agalarov’s company has been awarded several large state building contracts, and shortly after the pageant, Putin awarded the elder Agalarov the “Order of Honor of the Russian Federation,” a prestigious designation.

Emin Agalarov told The Post last year that he had spoken with Trump numerous times about the need to build stronger ties between Russia and the United States.

“He kept saying, ‘Every time there is friction between United States and Russia, it’s bad for both countries. For the people to benefit, this should be fixed. We should be friends,’ ” Emin Agalarov told The Post last year about his conversations with Trump.

A spokesman for the Agalarovs did not respond to request for comment, nor did a spokeswoman for Trump Jr.

On Monday, the Kremlin said it was unaware of a the meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer purported to have information that could potentially damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Asked about the meeting Monday, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that the Kremlin does not know the lawyer, and added that the Kremlin “cannot keep track of every Russian lawyer and their meetings domestically or abroad.”

Peskov, asked about Veselnitskaya by reporters on a conference call, said, “We do not know who that is.”

Veselnitskaya has for the past several years been a leading advocate around the world to fight a policy imposed on Russia for human rights abuses, which have been vehemently opposed by Putin and other leading Russian officials.

Putin personally assured Trump at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg over the weekend that Russia had not meddled in the 2016 election. Putin’s comments, however, did little to change widespread views in the United States that Russia was behind the election meddling intended to help Trump.

Hackers began leaking emails stolen from the Democratic Party in July 2016, and U.S. intelligence agencies have said the effort was orchestrated by Russia.

Trump officials have vigorously denied they colluded with Russia in any way.

The president’s eldest son said in a statement Sunday said that he had agreed to the meeting at Trump Tower in New York because he was offered information that would be helpful to the campaign of his father, then the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

At the meeting, the Russian lawyer opened by claiming she knew about Russians funding the Democratic National Committee and Clinton, the statement said.

Trump Jr. said that her comments during the meeting were “vague, ambiguous and made no sense” and that she then changed the subject to discuss a prohibition that the Russian government placed on the adoption of Russian children as retaliation for sanctions imposed by Congress in 2012.

Trump Jr. said that his father “knew nothing of the meeting or these events” and that the campaign had no further contact with the woman after the 20- to 30-minute session.

On Monday, the younger Trump added a bit of sarcasm against the growing scrutiny over the meeting. “Obviously,” he said in a tweet, “I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent . . . went nowhere but had to listen.”

The president’s son did not disclose the discussion when the meeting was first made public by the New York Times on Saturday and did so only on Sunday as the Times prepared to report that he had been offered information on Clinton at the session.

The meeting suggests that some Trump aides were in the market to collect negative information that could be used against Clinton — at the same time that U.S. government officials have concluded Russians were collecting such data.

In his statement, Trump Jr. said he did not know the lawyer’s name before attending the meeting at the request of an acquaintance. He said that after pleasantries were exchanged, the lawyer told him that “she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton.” 

“No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information,” he said, saying he concluded that claims of helpful information for the campaign had been a “pretext” for setting up the meeting.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s attorney, said the president was unaware of the meeting and did not attend it.

Neither Manafort nor his spokesman responded to requests for comment. Attorneys for Kushner also did not respond to requests for comment Sunday. On Saturday, a Kushner attorney, Jamie Gorelick, said her client had previously revised required disclosure forms to note multiple meetings with foreign nationals, including the session in June with Veselnitskaya. “As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows,” Gorelick said.

In his statement, Trump Jr. said he was approached about the meeting by an acquaintance he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.

Veselnitskaya has not responded to requests for comment from The Post but told the Times in a statement that she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government and that the meeting included no discussion of the presidential campaign.

She has for the past several years been a leading advocate around the world to fight the Magnitsky Act, sanctions intended to rebuke Russia for human rights abuses. Putin reacted angrily to the passage of the act, and has since denounced it repeatedly.

The acts are named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian auditor who died under mysterious circumstances in a Moscow prison in 2009 after exposing a corruption scandal. 

The meeting occurred during a period of intense focus on the Magnitsky sanctions. Four days after the June 9 Trump Tower session, Veselnitskaya was in Washington attending a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing about sanctions and other aspects of U.S.-Russia relations.

That evening, a film critical of the Magnitsky sanctions — and the story behind them — showed at the Newseum. On June 15, Veselnitskaya was featured on the Sputnik News website criticizing the sanctions and its leading advocate, William Browder, a financier who left Russia a decade ago amid concerns about corruption, including what was exposed by Magnitsky, the auditor he had hired. 

Have there been meetings between the Agent Orange campaign and every person in Russia? It certainly seems so.

[WiseGirl]

Watching the news and it just seems there are so many "unplanned meetings" with "unplanned people." Hoping where there is smoke the fire will be found no matter how many denials. If Donny Jr. Is so innocent, why get a lawyer? Why meet with a popstar? Planning a duet?

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, WiseGirl said:

Why meet with a popstar? Planning a duet?

That's one tune I'd never buy. In fact, I'd change the station whenever it came on.

[Cartmann99]

7 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

 If Donny Jr. Is so innocent, why get a lawyer? Why meet with a popstar? Planning a duet?

The Trumps are obviously giving me brain damage. As soon as I read the word "duet", Donald Trump and Putin popped into my head and started singing this song:

 

[fraurosena]

Oh dear. Things are pretty dire when the only come-back you've got is "No we didn't!"

White House insists there was no collusion with Russia

Spoiler

Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted again on Monday that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election.

The denial came after bombshell revelations over the weekend that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer tied to the Kremlin alongside White House aide Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, first reported by The New York Times. Representatives for Trump Jr. and Kushner confirmed on Saturday the meeting occurred, and on Sunday, Trump Jr. issued a statementsaying they had been promised information "helpful to the campaign." 

Further, Trump Jr. said the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, promised information about "individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting [Hillary] Clinton." But he said Veselnitskaya's statements were "vague, ambiguous and made no sense." Trump Jr. said they then discussed a disbanded Russian adoption program, which Trump Jr. had earlier said was the purpose of the meeting.

[...]

Sanders insisted that there was nothing abnormal about the "very short meeting." But CBS News' Major Garrett then pressed Sanders of the administrations numerous "blanket denials" that campaign officials had "any meetings, under any circumstances" with Russian officials.

Garrett noted that the original explanation for the meeting between Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer "was amended within 24 hours." 

"How are we to take all of these blanket denials that have occurred through the transition and now when it has been proven and recognized by the president's attorney and [Trump Jr.] that those blanket denials were not factual?" Garrett asked.

Sanders responded that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Garrett noted that this was a "different question," and that the question had originally been about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, which was met with "blanket denials."

"Now we have a whole pattern of lots of different meetings that have to be confirmed later, and those original questions were not about collusion, Sarah, they were just about contacts," Garrett said. 

Sanders said the "whole premise" of the journalists' questions were implying collusion, but she insisted "the point we've tried to make, over and over again, and that we will continue to make, is that there wasn't [collusion]."

The Trump campaign repeatedly said that there were no contacts between their team and Russian officials.

When asked in December by CBS News' John Dickerson on "Face the Nation" if anyone involved in the Trump campaign had "any contact with Russians trying to meddle with the election," Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway replied "absolutely not."

A month later, incoming Vice President Mike Pence repeated that denial to Dickerson. "Well, of course not," he replied when Dickerson asked Pence the same question he had asked Conway.

In addition, Sanders and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer have both said that there were no meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. 

It's like a little kid with crumbs all around his mouth and his hand in the cookie jar.

"Donnie, did you take a cookie?"

"No."

"Then what are those crumbs on your mouth?"

*wipes mouth with back of hand*

"Nothing."

"Are you sure you didn't take a cookie, Donnie?"

"I didn't!"

"What's your hand doing in the jar then?"

*quickly removes hand, hides it behind his back*

"It's not in the jar! I didn't touch the jar! There is no jar!"

"Donnie."

"Covfefe!"

 

[fraurosena]

And things are ramping up, according to the Chairman of the Democratic Coalition, Jon Cooper.

 

[formergothardite]

I'm trying to not get my hopes up to much since the Trumps seem to slither out of everything, but I so hope that Don Jr. is the first Trump domino to fall and that in the end none of them are left standing. 

[Penny]

28 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I'm trying to not get my hopes up to much since the Trumps seem to slither out of everything, but I so hope that Don Jr. is the first Trump domino to fall and that in the end none of them are left standing. 

I agree I hope this is the beginning of the end.

[fraurosena]

The latest post on Lawfare is an interesting —though long— read. 

The Wall Begins to Crumble: Notes on Collusion

Spoiler

The Trump White House’s key defensive wall has developed some major cracks.

Ever since the first revelations of L’Affaire Russe, President Trump and his defenders have insisted that there’s no evidence of “collusion” between Russian operatives and either the Trump campaign or the candidate himself.

This defense was always a highly qualified one that conceded a great deal, despite being often presented in bombastic terms—as when Trump himself repeatedly insisted he had “nothing to do” with Russia. It conceded, though inconsistently and sometimes quite grudgingly, that yes, the Russians had conducted an active measures campaign within the election designed to aid Trump. It also conceded a point on which the public record simply brooks no argument: that Trump took obsequiously out-of-the-mainstream positions during the campaign towards Russia and its strongman, Vladimir Putin, covered for their involvement in the hacking with a web of denials, and even at times openly encouraged the hacking. The “no collusion” defense, in other words, was always a modest one that did not really deny that the Trump campaign gleefully accepted Russian aid during the campaign and promised a different relationship with Russia in a hundred public statements; it denied only that the campaign did these things in secret collaboration with Russian state actors. The defense conceded that Trump benefited from Russia’s actions, denying only that he or his people were parties to them in a covert fashion that went beyond the very visible encouragement Trump gave.

The problem with dwelling too much on the covert forms of collaboration, which we have come to call “collusion,” is that doing so risks letting Trump at least a little bit off the hook for what is not meaningfully disputed: that the president publicly, knowingly, and repeatedly (if only tacitly) collaborated with a foreign power’s intelligence effort to interfere in the presidential election of the country he now leads. Focusing on covert collusion risks putting the lines of propriety, acceptable candidate behavior, and even (let’s be frank) patriotism in such a place where openly encouraging foreign dictators to hack your domestic opponent’s emails falls on the tolerable side. It risks accepting that all is okay with the Trump-Russia relationship unless some secret or illegal additional element actually involves illicit contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives. Yet it’s hard to imagine how any scandal of illegality could eclipse the scandal of legality which requires no investigation and has lain bare before our eyes for months.

But it is this very distinction, in which Trump’s own defenders are so heavily invested, that now appears poised to crumble. Over the past two weeks, two major stories have developed suggesting that there may, after all, have been covert contacts, meetings, and agreements between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Notably, these stories are not “leaks”—that is, improper disclosures from investigators or congressional overseers. The first story is sourced to an individual involved in the effort that the story describes who independently sought out the Wall Street Journal to tell his tale, along with other non-government sources connected to the matter. The second story is sourced to individuals “briefed on” and “with knowledge” of the relevant material, including “three advisers to the White House,” who described the relevant information to the New York Times. Some of the story is sourced to private defense lawyers communicating with reporters in an effort to help their clients.

And while the stories don’t—yet—show any actual collusive agreement or specific actions, they do show two separate incidents in which the Trump campaign or someone purporting to act on its behalf knowingly sought to engage Russian representatives in order to garner damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

In other words, if the Trump campaign didn’t collude with the Russians, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Let’s review the facts.

• First came the Wall Street Journal’s series of reports late last month on the late GOP operative Peter W. Smith’s attempt to obtain emails that he believed were stolen from Clinton's private server by Russian hackers. In Smith’s conversations with people he tried to recruit to the effort, he strongly implied that Michael Flynn—the Trump campaign’s key national security figure—was an ally. In a follow-up story, the Journal reported that Smith had listed Flynn, Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Sam Clovis in a recruiting document, although his purpose was not clear and the document did not indicate he requested or received their assistance. The story also named former GCHQ information security specialist Matt Tait as the individual who provided the Journal the document.
• The document, entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016" and dated September 7, 2016, was ostensibly the cover page of a dossier of opposition research that was to be compiled by Smith’s group and which purported to note the involved participants.
• In a separate first-hand account at Lawfare, Tait then offered a detailed account of his communications with Smith, who reportedly reached out to him for help authenticating emails ostensibly stolen from Clinton's private email server and being provided to Smith by people on the "dark web" whom Smith believed to be Russian hackers.
• Then, on Saturday, the New York Times reported that last summer, Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties, at Trump Tower. The meeting took place on on June 6, 2016, the same day Trump tweeted at Clinton, "[W]here are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?" Trump Jr. issued a statement confirming his meeting with Veselnitskaya but explaining that the subject was mainly "the adoption of Russian children.” Trump Jr. also noted that he "asked Jared [Kushner] and Paul [Manafort] to stop by."
• On Sunday, however, the Times reported that Trump Jr. met with Veselnitskaya specifically after he was promised damaging information about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. then issued a second, significantly more detailed statement. In it, he specified that Kushner and Manafort were told "nothing of the substance” of the meeting before arriving and stated that his father “knew nothing of the meeting or these events." He revealed that the intermediary who asked him to have the meeting was an acquaintance he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which Donald Trump convened in Moscow. And he admitted both that he was told in advance that the person he was meeting “might have information helpful to the campaign” and that during the meeting Veselnitskaya "stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton." Later on Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, the manager of Azerbaijani pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father Aras Agalarov is a billionaire Moscow developer who reportedly previously served as a liaison between Trump and Vladimir Putin. (See also Emin Agalarov's 2013 music video featuring a cameo from Trump, and Trump’s November 2013 tweet declaring, “EMIN was WOW!”)
• Last night, the Times reported what is perhaps the most significant detail to emerge yet from the story: that before arranging the meeting with Veselnitskaya, Goldstone allegedly informed Donald Jr. in an email that the information she would offer was part of a Russian government attempt to help his father's candidacy.

It’s important to be careful about what we don’t know in both stories. With respect to the Wall Street Journal and Tait story, three questions stand out: First, what was Flynn’s actual involvement in Smith’s email operation? Was Smith really acting with Flynn’s knowledge and involvement or was he just blowing smoke and puffing himself up—and if Flynn was involved, to what extent was he involved in his Trump campaign capacity? Second, were the interlocutors on the other end of Smith’s attempted transactions really Russian operatives or were they just fraudsters trying to take an old man for a ride? In other words, was Smith colluding with the Russians or colluding with pretend Russians? Third, were there any actual emails at issue or was the entire matter a fantasy on the part of Smith and whomever he was working with in Trump’s world? Without knowing the answers to these questions, it’s hard to know how deep the problem goes—that is, whether we’re dealing with one guy on the periphery of the campaign pursuing a delusional fantasy or whether we’re dealing with the campaign, through a cut-out, negotiating with Putin’s hackers.

The Times stories leave big open questions, too. For example, is there any connection between the meeting and the release of DNC emails? The meeting took place on June 9. The previous day, DCLeaks—an outlet listed in the intelligence community’s report on Russian election interference as a GRU cut-out—had begun its first releases of information, publicizing files belonging to prominent Clinton donor George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and General Philip Breedlove. The week after the meeting, on June 14, DCLeaks published internal Clinton campaign documents for the first time. Then, on July 22, Wikileaks released a trove of hacked DNC emails. The disclosures of hacked information continued into the summer and fall.

Trump Jr. claims there was no followup to the meeting on his end, but the question of whether the Russian side took further action following the conversation is also critical. Was this really a one-off meeting that didn’t go anywhere, or was it an effort to sound out the people around the candidate to determine their willingness to accept Russian help before taking further steps?

There’s also the question of the candidate’s personal knowledge. The White House has denied that the President knew of the meeting; deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Trump had learned of the meeting recently. That said, he was clearly in the building on the relevant day, and the meeting involved two close family members and his campaign chairman and a woman purporting to be bringing news of a foreign government effort to help his campaign. So again, the story as it stands today is consistent with an abortive effort to gather dirt that never went anywhere and of which the President neither knew nor approved—and on which nobody followed up. But it’s also consistent with a covert contact that precipitated the first major release of Russian-hacked material stolen from Trump’s opponents. It’s certainly consistent with individuals willing to publicly lie to cover up their contacts, and only acknowledge such contacts when caught by the media.

There’s also the question of whether these two stories are connected to one another. It’s possible to see them both as isolated incidents. Campaigns are complicated and chaotic; the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. The Trump campaign was more complicated and more chaotic than most, and there was a significant block of time between the Veselnitskaya and the Smith operation, which took place in the fall. So maybe these are two unrelated events that both just happen to involve people purporting to act on behalf of the Trump campaign seeking dirt on Clinton from people purporting to be helping the campaign on behalf of the Russian state. Again, it’s hard to assess the ultimate significance of the story without more insight into the answer to this question.

All that said, let’s take a moment to recognize the significance of the cracks in the “no collusion” wall. These stories, particularly the New York Times story, take the problem directly into the campaign itself. We’re not talking here just about shady actors on the periphery. We’re talking about the campaign chairman and—at least if you believe Peter Smith—about the candidate’s top national security adviser, who later became the President’s national security adviser. It also takes the story deep inside the Trump family. We’re talking about his son and son-in-law, both personally meeting with a woman purporting to offer dirt on Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help Trump and who explicitly then pivots the conversation to what she wants: “adoption,” after all, is the flip side of the sanctions coin.

So what is the Trump world’s response to all of this? To attack James Comey, of course. On Sunday, The Hill published a story indicating that “the revelation that four of the seven memos” in which Comey documented his private interactions with Trump “included some sort of classified information opens a new door of inquiry into whether classified information was mishandled, improperly stored or improperly shared.” On Monday, FOX & Friends then tweeted on the basis of The Hill’s story that the memo provided to the New York Times, “contained top secret information.” President Trump retweeted FOX & Friends’ misleading tweet and added:

James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017

Trump has not said a word in public in defense of his son or son-in-law.

The “Comey leaked” defense, of course, is a bit of a non sequitur. The story, after all, is not coming from investigators, let alone an investigator fired months ago. The information in question is not classified either. This is material that is coming from family, from staff at the President’s own White House, and from people who participated in the events in question.

Trump Jr. yesterday tried a different line of defense, tweeting:

Obviously I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen. https://t.co/ccUjL1KDEa

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 10, 2017

This isn’t going to fly—or, at least, it shouldn’t fly. There is simply nothing normal about a campaign’s meeting with a foreign lawyer who purports to be acting on behalf of an adversary foreign power seeking to aid the campaign against a domestic opponent.

How unusual is it? On September 14, 2000, former congressman Tom Downey, a close advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, received an anonymous package in the mail containing a videotape of George W. Bush practicing for the upcoming presidential debates and more than 120 pages of planned debate strategies. Downey and his lawyer contacted the FBI and handed the cache over that very day, and Gore campaign officials then immediately reached out to the Associated Press to provide a timeline of the events. The Gore campaign had no hint of who had sent the materials—nothing indicated the involvement of a foreign power; indeed, the package was eventually traced to a low-level employee at a media firm. But the materials were on their face likely provided to the Gore campaign as part of an attempt to damage Gore’s opponent, and that was enough to prompt a call to authorities.

The rightness of the Gore officials’ course of action is in no way diminished by the fact that, as suggested at the time, they were probably in part motivated by the desire to avoid the accusations of ill-gotten advantage that had rocked the Reagan administration. A couple years after the fact, it had been revealed that the Reagan campaign had obtained secret briefing materials on then-President Jimmy Carter’s debate strategy in the run-up to the 1980 election; those revelations in turn triggered long-running congressional and Justice Department investigations. Those investigations—which eventually ended in a whimper—raised questions about whether and what kind of crime had been committed, but note that the Justice Department concluded at the time that there was ''no criminal intent of any kind” and “no criminal wrongdoing” committed in connection with the transfer of the materials. This scandal too did not involve any indication of involvement by a hostile foreign power or its intelligence services.

So what happens now? Three things. There are a lot of threads here for congressional investigators to sink their teeth into. Robert Mueller’s people undoubtedly have even more. So expect a great deal of investigative intensity, much of it invisible, on the part of the official government investigators both on the legislative and executive branch sides. Second, the journalism is not slowing down. The more that comes out, the more people who know things will call reporters, and the more people will find it in their interests to take calls when reporters call them. These stories have a way of snowballing, and we have definitely reached a tipping point where this one has reached escape velocity. That’s what happened over the weekend with the New York Times, and you can expect it to continue. Third, the President appears incapable of not making things worse for himself, so expect his conduct to, day in and day out, make the situation worse.

When the travel ban executive order came down, one of the present authors famously labeled it, “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” This situation, as another one of us tweeted last night, is something else: “malevolence exacerbated by incompetence.”

Such stuff can crumble the mortar of the strongest walls—and the “no collusion” wall was never a strong one to begin with.

Benjamin Wittes (of twitter 'tick, tick, tick' fame) is Lawfare's editor in chief. He makes some good points in the article, and has an interesting perspective. Well worth the read!

[GrumpyGran]

Our female Russian lawyer has spoken and it wasn't good for little Donnie Jr. She denies offering any info on Clinton. Says they "wanted it so badly." Little Donnie replies in typical Trump fashion-on Twitter. Promptly gets flamed on Twitter. Even Daddy weighs in on Twitter(doesn't he have a job?).

Welcome to today's dumpster fire. And it's only 10am.