The Russian Connection 2

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, GrumpyGran said:

Any speculation, FJers, as to who these 'friends' are?

I'm sure Stephen Miller is leading the charge. Probably Ruddy. Likely Bannon and Gorka, if they are still speaking to the orange menace. Maybe even Ja'vanka, in a more quiet fashion. Possibly Kellyanne, since she seems to stroke his ego and probably knows where at least some of the bodies are buried.

[GrumpyGran]

21 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I'm sure Stephen Miller is leading the charge. Probably Ruddy. Likely Bannon and Gorka, if they are still speaking to the orange menace. Maybe even Ja'vanka, in a more quiet fashion. Possibly Kellyanne, since she seems to stroke his ego and probably knows where at least some of the bodies are buried.

Yeah, probably Miller. Have we ever heard Bannon say anything about the Mueller investigation, I can't remember. I don't think he goes to Kellyanne for that kind of thing anymore, she's just a blond sound barrier to him now.

As for Ja'vanka, they already have enough heat on them, I can't imagine they would be shit-stirring now. Maybe Omarosa? Perry? I think it would be one of the less aware old friend types who are riding the train. Huckabee, quite possibly. 

[fraurosena]

Whoo boy! This is going to be epic. They're going after Cambridge Analytica. In other words, they're going after the Mercers. And Bannon, who used to sit on the board and still has holdings in CA.

Russia Probe Now Investigating Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s ‘Psychographic’ Data Gurus

Spoiler

A data firm backed by some of Donald Trump’s closest allies is now facing scrutiny as part of an investigation into possible collusion between the president’s team and Russian operatives, The Daily Beast has learned.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) is looking at Cambridge Analytica’s work for President Donald Trump’s campaign as part of its investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 race, according to sources familiar with the probe.

The company is in the process of turning over documents to HPSCI, according to a source familiar with the committee’s work. Another source close to the investigation said that the probe’s focus on Cambridge Analytica is “fruitful.”

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had holdings in Cambridge Analytica worth between $1 million and $5 million as recently as April of this year, Bloomberg reported. Bannon, now back as the chairman of the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, hasn’t been publicly mentioned as a potential witness for or target of Russia investigators. He previously sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica.

Another key Cambridge Analytica investor is Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire who also generously backed Trump’s presidential campaign. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah introduced several top officials to Trump’s campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. The Mercers also are partial owners of Breitbart—among their many, many investment in far-right media outlets, think tanks, and political campaigns.

A recent Vanity Fair piece highlighted speculation among Washington Democrats that the Trump campaign’s data operation could point to collusion between Trump and Russia.

Cambridge purports to go beyond the typical voter targeting—relying on online clues like Facebook Likes to give a hint at a user’s political leanings and construct a picture of a voter’s mental state. The “psychographic” picture Cambridge ostensibly provides to a campaign is the ability to tailor a specific message based on personality type – angry, fearful, optimistic and so forth – rather than simply aiming ads at voters from likely convivial candidates.

Those purported capabilities have generated some speculation that there was a Russian link to the outfit, as Vanity Fair detailed. The Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda efforts on Facebook have evinced a level of sophistication surprising for a foreign entity, prompting speculation that Russians may have received some kind of targeting help. Such targeting reached voters in states where Clinton enjoyed a traditional advantage but went for Trump, including Michigan and Wisconsin, CNN reported.

As The Daily Beast and others have reported, Russian propaganda on Facebook and other social-media platforms passed itself off as authentic American voices; targeting refugees, posing as an American Muslim groupand backing an Atlanta-based duo supporting Black Lives Matter. Depending on which cohort was being targeted, the efforts encouraged pro-Trump voters to intensify political participation, black voters to abandon Hillary Clinton for Trump, and Muslim voters to consider Clinton an Islamophobe.

The congressional inquiry is not the only one Cambridge Analytica is facing. The UK Information Commissioner, Britain’s privacy watchdog, in March began examining the firm’s role in the successful 2016 push to persuade British voters to “Brexit” the European Union. But Cambridge has said it never actually advised the Leave.eu campaign beyond initial discussions, despite Leave.eu’s own statements that the firm “will be helping us map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters.”

In May, the Guardian’s Sunday Observer reported that Cambridge Analytica and its UK affiliate SCL––which owns 10 percent of Cambridge Analytica to Mercer’s 90 percent––have worked in Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova.

“Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities,” the Observer reported.

A Cambridge spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast that the company is cooperating with the House probe.

“As one of the companies that played a prominent role in the election campaign, Cambridge Analytica has been asked by the House Intelligence Committee to provide it with information that might help its investigation. We believe that other organizations that worked on the campaign have been asked to do the same,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “As you know, CA is not under investigation, and there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the company.”

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top White House advisor, played a role in Cambridge Analytica’s work. A cover story in Forbespublished shortly after the election noted that “Kushner’s crew” brought on the firm “to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most...”

Kushner’s attorney declined to comment. A spokesperson for Bannon did not immediately return a request for comment for this piece.

The admiration for Cambridge was hardly universal, however. “I just don't think it works,” Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale told 60 Minutes for its October 8 broadcast.

Numerous sources familiar with the company downplayed its effectiveness to The Daily Beast. One longtime Republican data operative put it this way: “People think they’re dealing with evil masterminds, when they’re really just Keystone Cops.”

The firm developed a bad-boy reputation in the early months of the 2016 campaign season, buoyed by its aggressive PR operation. One of the early pieces on it, published by Politico on July 7, 2015, reported the firm is connected to SCL Group, a company that provided “military disinformation campaigns,” among other services. And Cambridge Analytica’s claim to target ads by using “psychographic profiles” generated significant buzz—and significant pushback to that buzz.

A former Trump campaign staffer familiar with Cambridge Analytica’s work on the campaign downplayed its role.

“The news on Cambridge Analytica is not whether they colluded with the Russians or not,” the former staffer told The Daily Beast. “It’s how little work they did for the Trump campaign and the fact that they did zero psychographic data work.”

Another longtime Republican operative said it was unlikely the company would have had anything valuable to offer Russians.

“What were they going to do, send them a voter file?” the operative said. “Shit, you think the Russians can’t get a hold of a voter file if they want?”

The House inquiry has much on its plate before next week’s recess. Members of the panel have been asked to block out four hours for interviews on Friday, though it is unclear if those interviews concern Cambridge Analytica. One invited witness, The Daily Beast has learned, is Samantha Power, the United Nations ambassador under Barack Obama.

I do wonder what Samantha Power has to tell.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Reince Priebus, former Trump chief of staff, interviewed by Mueller team"

Spoiler

Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff to President Trump, was interviewed for a full day Friday by members of special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s team, Priebus’s lawyer said.

In a statement, William Burck said his client was interviewed voluntarily.

“He was happy to answer all of their questions,” Burck said.

The interview, which took place at the special counsel’s office in Washington, is a sign that Mueller’s investigation is now reaching into the highest levels of Trump’s aides and former aides.

Priebus served as chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2016 election campaign before joining the White House when Trump was inaugurated. He resigned as chief of staff in July after Trump had stewed for months about his handling of the White House’s legislative agenda in the president’s first months in office. He was replaced by John F. Kelly.

Mueller’s team has also indicated an interest in interviewing a series of other current and former White House aides, including White House counsel Don McGahn and director of communications Hope Hicks.

Mueller has also requested White House documents about a series of topics, including Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and interactions with Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was fired over December conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

During his six months as Trump’s top gatekeeper, Priebus oversaw a White House that was at times chaotic and freewheeling. Aides wandered in and out of important meetings, and Priebus sought to manage his often difficult boss by trying to be physically present with Trump as frequently as possible.

For that reason, Priebus was present at key moments that have drawn Mueller’s interest, including as Trump worked to limit the growing questions about Russia’s possible role in his election and in the discussions that led to Comey’s firing.

Priebus, for instance, figured in one important interaction between Comey and Trump before the FBI director’s dismissal.

Comey told Congress that during one Oval Office meeting in February, Trump shooed other aides from the room and then asked him about Flynn, who had recently been interviewed by the FBI and had been fired the day before.

“I hope you can let this go,” Comey has testified that Trump told him, referring to the FBI’s probe of Flynn.

In written testimony, Comey said that after he and Trump had been talking for a few minutes, Priebus “leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him.”

“The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed,” Comey wrote.

When he appeared at a public hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said he considered it a “significant fact” that Trump had sought to have the conversation one-on-one, suggesting that the meeting was intended to interfere with the investigation of Flynn.

“Why would you kick the attorney general, the president, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else?” he asked.

While Trump has repeatedly blasted Mueller’s probe, White House lawyers have been eager to show they are cooperating with the special counsel’s requests.

I can't see Rancid willingly going to prison for Agent Orange, so it would be fascinating to know what was said. It will be interesting to see who is interviewed next.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Adam Schiff: "The White House is trying to rush the Russia probes. We can’t let that happen."

Spoiler

In 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin directed an active-measures campaign of unprecedented scale against the United States. His object was to sow discord among Americans and influence the outcome of the presidential election. The Kremlin’s multipronged influence operation was not targeted at the United States alone but was part of a global attack on liberal democracy.

Over the past nine months, the House Intelligence Committee has learned a great deal about the scope of these Russian efforts. Like our Senate counterparts, we have found ample evidence to support and build upon the intelligence community’s January assessment that Russia was responsible for hacking our democratic institutions and dumping stolen data in an effort to turn Americans against one another, harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

Indeed, the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used its paid media outlets, as well as technology firms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and potentially others as a part of this effort has been borne out by the ever-increasing identification of Russian advertisements, promoted tweets, fake news and fake accounts designed to covertly move public opinion and stoke division.

Notwithstanding the real progress we have made, the committee has far more work to do to fully understand the extent of Russian interference and to investigate the politically fraught issue of whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. Although we are not at liberty to disclose evidence produced before the committee, certain significant matters have already been shared publicly, such as when Donald Trump Jr. revealed emails offering dirt on Clinton from Moscow to the Trump campaign as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help Donald Trump. In the email chain, the president’s son expressed an eagerness to accept this help, and much more remains to be learned about this interaction with Russian interlocutors and others.

Despite these discoveries, however, there are growing calls from the White House and outside parties aligned with the president to halt the congressional investigations rather than allow the evidence to dictate the pace and breadth of our inquiry. The White House may hope it can prematurely end the congressional probes and then apply pressure to wrap up special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s work as well.

This would be a terrible subversion of justice. But already these efforts are having an effect, as some witnesses are being rushed before Congress without regard for best investigative practices, sometimes out of order or before we obtain documents necessary to question them. Still other witnesses, essential to laying the foundation for the more significant interviews, have yet to be invited before the committee. My colleague Michael K. Conaway (R-Tex.) and I are doing our best to manage these pressures, mindful that our investigation must be thorough if it is to be of real value to the American people.

Mueller’s probe is far better resourced than any of the congressional probes, with an experienced team of prosecutors and investigators and the FBI able to assist its work. But his role differs from that of Congress. While he will determine whether U.S. laws have been violated and, if so, who should be prosecuted, it is not his job to tell the American people what happened or prescribe remedies. That is the sole responsibility of Congress, and we must perform it with the zeal that the public interest demands.

Here is the challenge: If Mueller finds evidence implicating the president, presumably he will share that information with Congress so that this body can determine whether it rises to a level justifying removal from office. If he finds evidence of criminality concerning other members of the Trump campaign that he believes he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, we will learn about that in an indictment. But what if he finds, with the stronger investigatory resources at his disposal, evidence of collusion that is clear or convincing but not strong enough to take to a jury — will that ever be shared with Congress? If it is not, can our report to the public ever be truly complete?

The answers to these questions may ultimately fall to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was sharply critical of former FBI director James B. Comey for sharing information with the public about the Clinton investigation. One thing is clear — the need to permit the investigations to fully run their course and not adhere to a political timetable is all the more essential if there are constraints on the ultimate sharing of information.

Six months ago, during our first open hearing of the investigation, I said that we — meaning Democrats and Republicans on our committee, and also the House and Senate intelligence committees — must make every effort to arrive at a common conclusion. This remains my hope — not consistency for the sake of consistency, or at the cost of incomplete work, but in the service of a public that has too often been forced to choose between competing narratives of the same events. The work must be allowed to continue.

 

[fraurosena]

I'm speculating here, but I think it's lies entirely in the realm of possibilities that Brad Parscale's information was shared with the Russians.

At the Intersection of Russia Probe and Social Media: Donald Trump’s Digital Chief

Spoiler

Congressional investigators are homing in on the connections between the 2016 presidential election and social-media giants Facebook and Twitter, a nexus that put Brad Parscale in charge of millions.

Brad Parscale was the Trump campaign’s digital director and his San Antonio company was its highest-paid vendor. Giles-Parscale drew nearly $88 million for about 18 months of work, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures, on top of an additional $4 million since Election Day, which included millions paid to Facebook and other social-media companies. As digital director, Mr. Parscale was responsible for creating and placing ads on social-media platforms such as Facebook, developing the campaign’s website and driving online fundraising efforts.

In July, Mr. Parscale agreed to an interview with the House Intelligence Committee, but later that month the panel postponed it. The committee hasn’t yet set a new date, and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Parscale hasn’t been contacted by the Senate Intelligence Committee or special counsel Robert Mueller, who, in addition to the congressional panels, is conducting a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign and its associates colluded with Moscow.

Mr. Trump has denied any collusion by him or any associates, and Russia has said it didn’t meddle in the election.

Mr. Parscale denies any collusion with Moscow. “I am unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operations of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign,” he said in a July statement.

Mr. Parscale’s work was prolific. The campaign tested 40,000 to 60,000 Facebook ads every day, according to a person familiar with the spending. A senior GOP campaign aide said the team would start each day with 70 ads in each target state, such as Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and buy new ads every five minutes, based on what was successful on a range of metrics. Peak days reached nearly 200,000 unique ad combinations, the person said.

The extent of the Trump digital operation’s activity was largely unreported because there are no federal disclosure requirements for online ads. Unlike when they air television and radio ads, campaigns running online ads aren’t required to disclose how much they paid for the ads, whom they paid and where the ads would run.

Now, lawmakers and Mr. Mueller want to know what role activity on Facebook and Twitter played in the election interference, and whether any Russian social-media activity was connected to the Trump campaign. Facebook has estimated that 10 million people saw ads on its website that were paid for by Russia. Mr. Mueller received copies of Russia-backed Facebook ads last month.

“This was a data crime that occurred, carried out at least by Russia, possibly with cooperation with Trump campaign officials, so any Trump campaign official that worked on data, I think, would be relevant to talk to,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Spokesmen for Facebook and Twitter have said they are looking to bolster transparency and toughen safeguards against improper use of their platforms.

Facebook is set to participate in public hearings on Nov. 1 held by the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Twitter and Google will take part in the Senate hearing.

The House panel also has contacted Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company paid $5 million by the Trump campaign last year that worked together with Mr. Parscale’s firm, for information related to the Russia probe, a Cambridge Analytica spokesman said.

The House panel referred questions to the company, whose spokesman said it would fully cooperate with the probe but added that Cambridge Analytica itself isn’t under investigation. “There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the company,” he said.

The White House referred questions to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, which declined to comment.

While broadcast stations are required to disclose to the Federal Communications Commission how much they earn from political campaigns and groups and where those dollars are directed, social-media companies don’t have to disclose what share of their advertising revenue comes from political ads.

Facebook has turned over the Russia-backed ads to congressional investigators and the House Intelligence Committee has said it will make them public soon. Facebook said in a statement earlier this month that it is “building new tools” that would allow users to see ads run by a specific individual or group, even if those ads aren’t targeted to that particular user.

Steven Passwaiter, vice president at Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks political advertising, said his firm is planning to track digital ads for the first time this year, but won’t be able to include ads on social-media platforms such as Facebook, the primary platform used by the Trump campaign.

“Facebook is a walled garden,” said Mr. Passwaiter. “You really don’t get the ability to look in.”

Candidates have traditionally spent the bulk of their advertising money on television, which is considered more effective in reaching mass audiences. Through late October 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton spent about $140 million on TV ads to Mr. Trump’s $60 million.

The Trump campaign devoted nearly half of its advertising spending to digital ads, according to the person familiar with the spending, much of it for Facebook ads, which helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee build a network of small donors that raised about $250 million in small-dollar donations.

By Election Day, the Trump campaign had spent about $70 million in advertising on Facebook, according to the person familiar with the spending.

“Facebook was the most significant way for the GOP to prospect to find donors,” Mr. Parscale said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week. “It’s a tool which allows you to find people who are supporters easier so you can get them into your campaign.”

Overseeing his efforts was Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who now serves as a senior White House adviser. Mr. Kushner was interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July. Mr. Kushner has denied colluding with Russia.

A person familiar with the effort said Mr. Kushner wasn’t involved in the day-to-day work of running digital advertising. Instead, Mr. Parscale would keep him apprised of the budget and of which voters the campaign was planning to target, the person said.

Much of the money paid to Mr. Parscale was dispersed to social-media platforms to pay for the advertising, as well as to at least one other vendor: Sprinklr, a social-media management service that allows companies to scale up their online presence.

Every vendor that worked with Mr. Parscale on the campaign signed a nondisclosure agreement, according to the person familiar with the spending, and didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Trump ads Mr. Parscale purchased on Facebook were largely focused on fundraising, showing users images of Mr. Trump or his family while asking them to donate, said the person. Images and videos of Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, were targeted to mothers. Some contained cartoons attacking Hillary Clinton as corrupt. The campaign also used Facebook to draw large crowds to Mr. Trump’s campaign rallies, the person said.

Images and videos were tested in battleground locations, comparing results by gender and in rural areas and urban areas using a range of metrics. If small ad buys on certain targets performed well, the campaign purchased more, the person said.

The Facebook ads typically bring in fairly small donations and Mr. Parscale’s low rate of financial return on them drew him criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, who questioned the effectiveness of his ads. In response, Mr. Parscale pointed to the high number of small-dollar donors the campaign was attracting.

“Fundraising small dollars literally followed two days ahead of poll data,” Mr. Parscale said of donations raked in through Facebook ads, speaking at a panel hosted by Google in December. “People would vote with their wallets.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign ultimately drew about 65% of its funds from donations of $200 or less. Mrs. Clinton’s share of small-dollar donations: 26%. Mr. Trump’s fundraising was, however, far outpaced by Mrs. Clinton’s. Over the course of the 2016 election cycle, Mr. Trump raised $350 million, to Mrs. Clinton’s $585 million.

It's about time the law requiring broadcast companies to disclose to the Federal Communications Commission how much they earn from political campaigns and groups and where those dollars are directed, is expanded to include social-media companies. 

[Howl]

On 10/11/2017 at 2:01 PM, GrumpyGran said:

Any speculation, FJers, as to who these 'friends' are?

I'd guess Hannity, maybe Bannon and/or Miller.   Cooperating with Mueller will lend credence and legitimacy to Mueller's investigation.   Pre-emptively fighting Mueller with the "fake" label will set the stage to delegitimize Mueller's ongoing investigation in the minds of Trump's base.  With this in place, they don't even have to consider what the base will think about Mueller's ultimate findings; the Trumpvidians will have already made up their minds that the entire investigation was fraudulent.   See?  Easy peasy!  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump campaign legal bills topped $1 million last quarter"

Spoiler

President Trump’s reelection committee spent more than $1 million on legal bills last quarter as investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election pressed on through the summer, according to a disclosure filed Sunday with the Federal Election Commission.

The filing shows the committee’s “legal consulting” expenditures came to $1.1 million between July and September, including $802,185 paid to the law firm Jones Day, which has represented the campaign. Another $267,000 was paid to attorneys representing the president’s ­eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., in the Russia investigations.

Since the beginning of the year, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have spent $2.4 million on legal fees — and the bills appear to be mounting. The latest FEC reports show that the campaign spent more on legal bills over the past three months than it did during the first and second quarters of this year combined.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and multiple congressional committees have active probes into Russian interference. The RNC and the campaign are helping the Trump family and employees pay legal fees incurred by the various investigations, which is permitted under federal law as long as the costs are related to campaign activity. Last month, the RNC confirmed it had directed more than $427,000 to lawyers representing Trump and his eldest son.

Overall, the Trump campaign and two related fundraising committees collected $11.6 million between July and September and spent $5.6 million.

The Trump committee’s payments included $237,924 to Alan Futerfas, a New York defense lawyer who is representing Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump Organization employees in the Russia probes. The campaign also paid $30,000 to the law firm Williams & Jensen, which has been working with Futerfas on matters concerning Trump Jr.

The younger Trump testified for five hours before a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee in early September. During the session, he was asked for details about a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who reportedly promised to provide negative information about Hillary Clinton, his father’s Democratic opponent.

The campaign committee also reimbursed the president’s company, the Trump Organization, $25,800 for legal consulting.

During the first six months of the year, the Trump campaign reported spending $927,171 on legal fees — less than the $1.1 million total spent in the last three months.

The numbers are likely to go higher as Mueller’s team, along with the Senate and House intelligence committees, continue their probes into Russian interference.

The special counsel has focused investigative attention on two former campaign advisers, Paul Manafort, once Trump’s campaign chairman, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. On Friday, the special counsel’s office interviewed Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, for several hours behind closed doors.

Mueller’s team has also expressed interest in interviewing White House counsel Donald McGahn and Communications Director Hope Hicks, according to people familiar with his requests. Neither the Trump campaign nor the Trump Organization responded immediately to requests for comment Sunday.

And yet, people will keep donating to his campaign, so he and Junior can keep using those funds to pay their attorneys.

[Howl]

Russian Trolls Used ‘Up To 100’ Activists To Organize Events In US, Report Finds

Quote

 

As many as 100 unwitting activists were recruited to help organize events in the United States both before and after the election by the same St. Petersburg-based Russian troll farm behind scores of fake social media accounts that purchased ads to sow discord during the 2016 campaign.

The revelation comes from a report in the Russian business magazine RBC published on Tuesday morning.

For full text, click on title above. 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

In the same vein as the article @Howl posted,  this is scary stuff; "How the Russians pretended to be Texans — and Texans believed them"

Spoiler

...

In early 2016, while researching some of the most popular U.S. secession groups online, I stumbled across one of the Russian-controlled Facebook accounts that were then pulling in Americans by the thousands.

At the time, I was writing on Russia’s relationship with American secessionists from Texas, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. These were people who had hitched flights to Moscow to swap tactics, to offer advice and to find support. They had found succor in the shadow of the Kremlin.

That was how I eventually found my way to the “Heart of Texas” Facebook page (and its @itstimetosecede Twitter feed as well). Heart of Texas soon grew into the most popular Texas secession page on Facebook — one that, at one point in 2016, boasted more followers than the official Texas Democrat and Republican Facebook pages combined. By the time Facebook took the page down recently, it had a quarter of a million followers.

The page started slowly — just a few posts per week. Unlike other secession sites I’d come across, this one never carried any contact information, never identified any of the individuals behind the curtain. Even as it grew, there was nothing to locate it in Texas — or anywhere else, for that matter. It was hard to escape the suspicion that there might be Russian involvement here as well.

There were other oddities about the site. Its organizers had a strangely one-dimensional idea of its subject. They seemed to think, for example, that Texans drank Dr. Pepper at all hours: while driving their giant trucks, while flying their Confederate battle flags, while griping about Yankees and liberals and vegetarians.

But Heart of Texas, sadly, was no joke. At one point the page’s organizers even managed to stir up its followers into staging an armed, anti-Islamic protest in Houston. As gradually became clear, this was part of a broader strategy. The sponsors of the page were keen to exacerbate America’s own internal divisions. At certain moments they lent support to Black Lives Matter, while in others they would play to the latent (or obvious) racism of Donald Trump’s base.

By the summer of 2016, other themes began to emerge. Posts began to follow a perceptibly hard-right course, stressing Texas’s status as a “Christian state,” or touting the Second Amendment as a “symbol of freedom … so we would forever be free from any tyranny.” Some of the page’s contributors talked about the need to “keep Texas Texan,” whatever that meant. There was also a generous dollop of conspiracy theory. There were posts about the allegedly unnatural death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the supposed federal invasion orders behind the Jade Helm military exercise. Fake Founding Father quotes mingled with anti-Muslim screeds and paeans to Sam Houston. And the number of followers steadily crept into the hundreds of thousands.

Though the site’s authors understood their audience well, there was something off about their writing. The page’s “About” section proclaimed that “Texas’s the land protected by Lord [sic].” Grammatical and spelling glitches were everywhere: “In Love With Texas Shape,” “State Fair of Texas – Has You Already Visited?,” “Always Be Ready for a Texas Size,” “No Hypoclintos in the God Blessed Texas.” (Or take this caption for a photo of country music star George Strait: “Life is not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breth [sic] away.”) Yet the typos never seemed to raise any suspicions in readers’ minds.

Even the page’s calls for an early November protest across the state – part pro-secession, part anti-Clinton — were garbled. One post declared that “we are free citizens of Texas and we’ve had enough of this cheap show on the screen.” The site called on those who showed up to “make photos.”

Heart of Texas chugged on after the election, bringing in tens of thousands of new followers in 2017 who were unbothered by its mangled English, its rank nativism and its calls to break up the United States.

And then, in August, it was gone. Just like that, the most popular Texas secession page on Facebook was revealed to be a Russian front, operated by the notorious Internet Research Agency, with Facebook removing all of the posts from public view. (It’s worth noting that another Instagram account started posting Heart of Texas material as soon as the original Facebook page was taken down.)

Despite its claims of transparency, Facebook has effectively prevented the public from examining these posts and these pages. So far Heart of Texas remains the only example of a Russian account that I and other researchers managed to study in detail before Facebook pulled the rug out from underneath it.

We know that the Russians behind these sites played all of their readers, and especially those who showed up at its protests in places like Twin Falls and Fort Myers and Houston, for fools. Considering that the number of their combined followers ranged into the millions — with some estimates placing total views potentially in the billions — they’re probably right.

The creators of Heart of Texas not only targeted the sociopolitical tensions within the United States. They also exploited our gullibility, which turned out to be far greater than I could have ever imagined. And by assisting them in this massive lie, Facebook has enabled one of the greatest frauds in recent American history.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Spicer interviewed by Mueller's team"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer met with special counsel Robert Mueller's team on Monday for an interview that lasted much of the day, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting.

During his sitdown, Spicer was grilled about the firing of former FBI director James Comey and his statements regarding the firing, as well as about Trump’s meetings with Russians officials including one with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office, one person familiar with the meeting said.

Spicer declined to comment. His attorney, Christopher Mead, did not respond to multiple calls and emails requesting comment.

Spicer’s interview has long been expected as part of Mueller’s ongoing and widening investigation into Russia’s potential interference in the 2016 presidential election. Before joining the Trump administration, Spicer served as press secretary to the Republican National Committee, and then worked out of Trump Tower during the end of the general election campaign and during the transition, as part of the Republican nominee’s team.

Mueller’s team has been tight-lipped about its process. But Spicer’s Monday meeting shows that Mueller is starting to ramp up interviews with current and former Trump administration officials. Former chief of staff Reince Priebus met with Mueller last Friday.

Mueller’s team has also interviewed Keith Kellogg, who served as interim National Security Adviser after Michael Flynn was fired.

Current and former White House officials have been asked about former national security adviser Michael Flynn and a misleading statement written on Air Force One about a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with Russians.

Other White House officials expected to meet with Mueller include communications director Hope Hicks and White House lawyer Don McGahn, although their interviews have not yet been scheduled.

It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall.

[Howl]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

this is scary stuff; "How the Russians pretended to be Texans — and Texans believed them"

As a Texan living in the state capital, I find this fascinating and horrible at the same time.  I've not noted secession as a big theme on the political stage, but I don't hang out in wing-nut sites either.  There's been only one kinda serious secession attempt (other than actually seceding 1861) back in 1997 when the group Republic of Texas took two Fort Davis residents hostage, resulting in a week-long standoff with state troopers, and (IIRC) at least one death. 

However, in September 2015,  Texas Monthly magazine reported on the Texas Nationalist Movement: Group Most Likely to Secede: On tour with the Texas Nationalist Movement.  The Texas Nationalist Movement did a "Take Back Texas" tour in 2015 in an attempt 

Quote

 

 to collect the 75,000 signatures necessary to get a referendum on secession added to the 2016 state Republican primary ballot. The referendum would ask Governor Greg Abbott to call a special legislative session to discuss including another version of the referendum on next year’s general election ballot. Because Texas doesn’t have voter-led ballot initiatives, Miller explained, this roundabout process is the only way the people can get the chance to vote on independence, a concept supported by 36 percent of Texan respondents in a 2014 Reuters poll...

...The court’s decision on same-sex marriage, along with the recent backlash against the Confederate flag, motivated 38-year-old Brandon Burk­hart, of San Antonio, to attend the July 18 meeting. “That goes against the beliefs of Christians, Catholics, and others, and you can’t tread on someone else’s rights,” Burkhart said. “There’s only one thing that stands above Texas in my book, and that’s God—and I think they go hand in hand. Texas has always blazed a trail for everyone else in rights and freedoms.”*

 

*except for women, Native Americans and any non-white person. So yup, Texas has a long history of standing up for Christian white guys. 

and more irony from that article: 

Quote

For 63-year-old Guy Franceschini, of Devine, the appeal of Texas leaving the union is opting out of “a communist agenda that’s being dictated from D.C.”

I guess a communist agenda from Russia is OK. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Michael Flynn, Nicki Minaj shared content from this Tennessee GOP account. But it wasn’t real. It was Russian."

Spoiler

Russian operatives used a fake Twitter account that claimed to speak for Tennessee Republicans to persuade American politicians, celebrities and journalists to share select content with their own massive lists of followers, two people familiar with the matter said.

The list of prominent people who tweeted out links from the account, @Ten_GOP, which Twitter shut down in August, includes political figures such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, celebrities such as Nicki Minaj and James Woods, and media personalities such as Ann Coulter and Chris Hayes.

There is no evidence that any of them knew the account was run by Russians. Independent researchers had suspected the account was Russian, and their work was confirmed Wednesday by two people familiar with the investigations into the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

The spread of links from the account shows the remarkable reach of a disinformation campaign that harnessed the power of American celebrity and the immediacy of social media to propel messages further, faster and more cheaply than possible even a few years ago.

At a time when public scrutiny has focused on Russia’s exploitation of Facebook, the new discoveries about the reach of @Ten_GOP underscore the role Twitter and other social media platforms also played in reaching audiences, including people influential in shaping political narratives.

“They were trying to influence influencers,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Like several other researchers, Albright has used analytics tools to map the spread of the reported Russian account. “They’re creating buzz,” he said. “It’s a buzz machine.”

Michael Sullivan, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party — whose verified Twitter handle is @TNGOP — said his group had complained to Twitter about the account in September of last year, as well as in March and August.

“We’ve done a significant job trying to improve our digital footprint, so it’s very frustrating when you see something like that come out and continue to impersonate you,” Sullivan said.

He said he never tweeted back at the account to set the record straight. “We didn’t want to give them credit for getting under our skin,” Sullivan said.

The Russian news site RBC named @Ten_GOP in a report this week on the disinformation campaign. The account was created, according to archived versions of its account page, in November 2015 and included Tennessee’s state seal.”

Twitter declined to comment for this report.

In terms of sheer numbers, Twitter is a fraction of the size of Facebook, with fewer than 70 million U.S. users logging in monthly, compared with 210 million for Facebook. But Twitter’s reach extends far because so many celebrities and media personalities use the platform to share their views and embed tweets into their own content. That made it an ideal target for Russian operatives seeking to shape public opinion in the 2016 election, said Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Twitter can spread conspiracies much more quickly” than Facebook, Watts said. “These accounts show that they were engaging at the highest levels of the campaign. If they [Russian operatives] can get their messages into the feeds of the leaders of campaign narratives, it has tremendous weight.”

A tweet by @Ten_GOP on Oct. 10, 2016, the day after the second presidential debate, was featured in an online People magazine article on prominent online reactions. “Trump slaughtered Hillary,” tweeted @Ten_GOP, with the words followed by images of knives and the hashtag #debate.

Another widely traveled tweet came from Flynn three days before the election and linked to an ad bashing Democrat Hillary Clinton as dishonest. The ad, showing an African American actress in what at first appeared to be a pro-Clinton campaign spot, abruptly changed tone halfway through, with the actress stopping the action to say that she can’t deliver scripted lines praising Clinton because they were so at odds with the truth. “I’m not that good of an actress,” said the unidentified woman. Written on the screen, in red, are the words: “SOME PEOPLE ARE BETTER LIARS THAN OTHERS. STOP HILLARY.”

That ad — produced by Make America Number 1, a super PAC largely underwritten by conservative hedge fund executive Robert Mercer — was featured in an October 2016 article by Breitbart and reportedly played on television in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The account @Ten_GOP also tweeted about it in then. Flynn linked to that tweet on Nov. 5, calling it “great” and saying it deserved to be shared widely. More than 5,300 accounts retweeted it or hit a heart-shaped “like” button to pass a link to the ad onward to their followers, according to Twitter data available on Flynn’s tweet. He later served a brief tenure as President Trump’s national security adviser and now is being scrutinized by federal investigations probing possible links between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

Flynn, through his attorney, declined to comment on the tweet.

Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump presidential campaign and another figure in the Russia probe, linked to a tweet and a picture from @Ten_GOP that has been deleted by Twitter and is not available on the Wayback Machine, an online site maintained by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. Stone said in an email that he recalled tweeting about a photo.

“There’s no way of knowing the province of the image,” Stone wrote.

Those who shared links from @Ten_GOP tended to lean conservative, according to Albright’s research, but included some liberals and others.

Minaj, a pop singer and rapper, tweeted a link in April 2017 that originated from @Ten_GOP. An archived version of the original tweet focuses on the disturbing shooting of an elderly man in Cleveland and live-streamed on Facebook Live. The tweet said of the killer, “He has claimed on Facebook to have killed 15 people in an ‘Easter Day Slaughter.’ ”

Minaj, whose representatives did not respond to queries from The Washington Post seeking comment, appeared to be reacting to the events themselves more than the tweet from @Ten_GOP, which she linked to in her tweet. “The video u posted is so disturbing,” she said. “Be safe in CLEVELAND today everyone. He just killed this old man live on social media. Jesus have mercy.”

That tweet was retweeted and “liked” more than 24,600 times. The original tweet was shared nearly 8,700 times. The content also appeared in news reports that ricocheted across the Internet, in outlets such as Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post and Fox News.

But those numbers almost certainly undercount how many Twitter users saw the tweet. When a celebrity such as Minaj retweets or “likes” a link, it can potentially end up in the feeds of all 21 million of her followers. There is no way to know how many read it.

Investigators, lawmakers and propaganda researchers have said that the Russian disinformation campaign was shrewd in its use of trolls, who are people often hired to push certain types of content, and bots, which are automated accounts that can be programmed to post particular types of messages to amplify the spread of favored narratives.

Bots and trolls are most effective, experts say, when they find ways to interact online with actual people — an especially those with large followings.

“By getting a celebrity or someone famous to retweet what a bot or troll network is sending out gives an illusion of legitimacy and allows it to get picked up by the broader public,” said Samuel C. Woolley, an online propaganda researcher and research director at the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank.

Hayes, the MSNBC host, linked to an @Ten_GOP tweet, calling it “the best #EarthDay tweet so far.” The original tweet said, “Nothing says more about environmental ‘activists’ at #MarchForScience than piles of trash they left behind. #EarthDay.” It showed pictures of two overflowing garbage cans.

“I vaguely remember the tweet being pretty bonkers and thought it was the actual Tennessee GOP account because of the name,” Hayes said.

Coulter retweeted @Ten_GOP content in March on the way Trump’s handling of U.S. attorneys was being portrayed by news reports. Actor James Woods retweeted @Ten_GOP several times, including one from February in which Woods added the words above the link, “Paris resonates with the sweet sound of Islamist terrorism.”

Neither Coulter nor Woods responded to requests for comment.

More and more of the disinformation is being illuminated.

[Howl]

On 10/15/2017 at 4:24 AM, fraurosena said:

I'm speculating here, but I think it's lies entirely in the realm of possibilities that Brad Parscale's information was shared with the Russians.

If true, that is terrifying on many levels, because the way Parscale cracked the social media code was brutally effective. 

[GrumpyGran]

6 hours ago, Howl said:

If true, that is terrifying on many levels, because the way Parscale cracked the social media code was brutally effective. 

I'm starting to think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg right now. I believe there is a lot more of this than people think and it scares me.

[Howl]

17 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

I'm starting to think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg right now. I believe there is a lot more of this than people think and it scares me.

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo from Oct. 19th talks about the depth and extent of this on his editor's blog: 

Russia’s Pro-Trump Operation Keeps Expanding

Spoiler

While the storm and anguish of President Trump’s latest controversy rolls over the news, we’ve learned a lot more about the Russian influence operation supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy last year. Over recent weeks we had already found out about those few hundreds of accounts on Facebook and something in the range of $100,000 in paid advertising on the Facebook platform. Then there was a comparable series of findings on Twitter. More is in the process of emerging from Google and the various platforms it controls. But over recent days, as the information keeps coming, the very repetitiveness of the new findings or the constancy of the flow has perhaps obscured its newness and how much it expands the story.

On Tuesday we noted a Russian publication’s story about how Russian trolls from what was previously known as the “Internet Research Agency” (now renamed the Federal News Agency) had recruited up to 100 unwitting American activists to organize events on its behalf in the US. Last month we had learned about seemingly abortive attempts by Russian trolls to organize an anti-Muslim rally in a town in Idaho. That was the first evidence of the pro-Trump campaign going offline and trying to organize real life events. But that just scratched the surface.

ABC News published a story last night documenting numerous Americans (real names and specific people now) who were paid money (apparently not knowing its origins), recruited to attend or organize events or take other actions. One hip-hop artist in St. Louis was even paid to record a song for the campaign’s ersatz black activist organization “BlackMattersUS.”

Even some of the Twitter accounts which had already been found were considerably more prolific and influential than we had known. One Russia-created Twitter account for the Tennessee Republican Party had more than ten times the followers of the real Tennessee GOP Twitter account. The Tennessee party had apparently complained about it to Twitter, to no avail. A number of top Trump aides engaged with the ersatz account late in the 2016 campaign and President himself thanked an affiliated account on Twitter just last month!

What’s clear is that these small numbers of accounts on Facebook and Twitter were only a very small part of the larger story. Frankly, I suspect they are only a very small part of the story on those platforms themselves. The idea that these platforms can or even have a strong interest in identifying all the accounts tied to this campaign is naive. That is especially so since the Russian-created accounts and actors had a penumbra of Americans who were, knowingly or not, amplifying and disseminating the campaign. At a minimum, this went far beyond the hacking and Wikileaks-disseminated emails. It went far beyond a small number of troll accounts and bots on the major social networks. It involved a significant number of fake activist organizations, hiring and recruiting Americans, paying them for various services. It is also clearly still underway.

 

[GrumpyGran]

33 minutes ago, Howl said:

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo from Oct. 19th talks about the depth and extent of this on his editor's blog: 

Russia’s Pro-Trump Operation Keeps Expanding

  Hide contents

While the storm and anguish of President Trump’s latest controversy rolls over the news, we’ve learned a lot more about the Russian influence operation supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy last year. Over recent weeks we had already found out about those few hundreds of accounts on Facebook and something in the range of $100,000 in paid advertising on the Facebook platform. Then there was a comparable series of findings on Twitter. More is in the process of emerging from Google and the various platforms it controls. But over recent days, as the information keeps coming, the very repetitiveness of the new findings or the constancy of the flow has perhaps obscured its newness and how much it expands the story.

On Tuesday we noted a Russian publication’s story about how Russian trolls from what was previously known as the “Internet Research Agency” (now renamed the Federal News Agency) had recruited up to 100 unwitting American activists to organize events on its behalf in the US. Last month we had learned about seemingly abortive attempts by Russian trolls to organize an anti-Muslim rally in a town in Idaho. That was the first evidence of the pro-Trump campaign going offline and trying to organize real life events. But that just scratched the surface.

ABC News published a story last night documenting numerous Americans (real names and specific people now) who were paid money (apparently not knowing its origins), recruited to attend or organize events or take other actions. One hip-hop artist in St. Louis was even paid to record a song for the campaign’s ersatz black activist organization “BlackMattersUS.”

Even some of the Twitter accounts which had already been found were considerably more prolific and influential than we had known. One Russia-created Twitter account for the Tennessee Republican Party had more than ten times the followers of the real Tennessee GOP Twitter account. The Tennessee party had apparently complained about it to Twitter, to no avail. A number of top Trump aides engaged with the ersatz account late in the 2016 campaign and President himself thanked an affiliated account on Twitter just last month!

What’s clear is that these small numbers of accounts on Facebook and Twitter were only a very small part of the larger story. Frankly, I suspect they are only a very small part of the story on those platforms themselves. The idea that these platforms can or even have a strong interest in identifying all the accounts tied to this campaign is naive. That is especially so since the Russian-created accounts and actors had a penumbra of Americans who were, knowingly or not, amplifying and disseminating the campaign. At a minimum, this went far beyond the hacking and Wikileaks-disseminated emails. It went far beyond a small number of troll accounts and bots on the major social networks. It involved a significant number of fake activist organizations, hiring and recruiting Americans, paying them for various services. It is also clearly still underway.

 

Yes, this. I'll adjust my tin-foil hat here. From my very limited experience this is what I see: articles compiled and disseminated by Yahoo are not necessarily a great source of accurate information but if you look at the comments on these articles it is obviously becoming a battleground with trolls and bots encouraging dissension.

Trump has several trolls who comment on his tweets regularly. They are easy to spot, with the America! emblems and some pretty horrific images that most Americans would cringe at.

I occasionally look for information on line and sometimes end up on Wikipedia. Again not necessarily a solid source of information but I have recently noticed a notification at the top of some articles informing me that the article is available in Russian with other information in the article. What does that mean? I know articles on Wikipedia are available in several languages but this notice is always specific to only Russian.

I guess my point is that here seems to be more and more noise coming from 'sources' and 'people' who don't appear, to me, to be genuine or at least who or what they claim to be. And people are easily mislead. I fear the fox may already be in the hen house. 

[Howl]

In the last month, I don't "like" any thing on FB, other than posts with personal content from friends.  I don't click on links that friends have posted, even if I find the topic of interest, except cat videos and funny cat pics.  Sometimes. I've found myself suspicious over a few things popping up on fb that seem too weird to be true or ping too many of my liberal snowflake hot button issues at once. 

I go to CNN for broad news overviews and to Talking Points Memo or WaPo for solid news and trends.  Hubs watches Morning Joe and The Lead with Jake Tapper.  Joe annoys me no end with his obnoxious habit of talking over people, particularly Mika (way to disrespect your fiancee or whatever she is, you ass hole), but they have many interesting talking heads on their panels. 

Russian interference in our elections and political life and LIFE should be THE topic of discussion and basically a red flag national emergency.  

[Audrey2]

I've never wanted a social media account in any form- no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. The only things I'm on are Free Jinger and a fan started website about my University and it's athletic programs.

[Zola]

The only social media account I have is on Facebook, using my middle name and my great-grandmother's maiden name because I don't want to be found. The reason I have it is to make sure I can see all of the insanity that Jill Rodrigues posts. I don't make personal posts about myself or fam, don't put photos of self or fam up, don't 'like' things. I have like seven friends total - my son, my stepsons, the girl I used to babysit (from age of 4 months to 12 years old - I consider her to be another of my kids), my siblings, and my lifelong friend from high school. My husband doesn't have any social media accounts at all.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, Zola said:

The only social media account I have is on Facebook, using my middle name and my great-grandmother's maiden name because I don't want to be found. The reason I have it is to make sure I can see all of the insanity that Jill Rodrigues posts. I don't make personal posts about myself or fam, don't put photos of self or fam up, don't 'like' things. I have like seven friends total - my son, my stepsons, the girl I used to babysit (from age of 4 months to 12 years old - I consider her to be another of my kids), my siblings, and my lifelong friend from high school. My husband doesn't have any social media accounts at all.

@Zola, I'm the reflection of you. I'm only on Facebook so I can see all of the pictures my DIL posts of my grandson. She's getting better about finding ways to share them, though. I have four friends-my husband, my son, my DIL and my sister. My name is there but my picture isn't and there are others with my name so I'm not obvious. I comment on my DIL's stuff but never put stuff on my own page. I'm also on my neighborhood's FB site but, I swear I'm going to dump that because I'm sick of their crap. That and here, that's it for me.

[fraurosena]

I find that 'news' travels fastest on social media, so I get the latest news on them even before the news-sites post them. It's also easier to follow foreign (for me: American news ) news on social media. 

In order to do so, most of the social media accounts I have are so-called 'eggs'. I don't post or like with them, only follow subjects / posters I am interested in.

[fraurosena]

Ruh-roh, Raggy...

It looks like another Trump adviser has significantly changed his story about the GOP’s dramatic shift on Ukraine

Spoiler

The Trump campaign’s national-security policy representative for the Republican National Convention, J.D. Gordon, told CNN on Thursday that he pushed to alter an amendment to the GOP’s draft policy on Ukraine at the Republican National Convention last year to further align it with President Donald Trump’s views.

Gordon’s remarks represent a dramatic shift from previous comments, and they come as Attorney General Jeff Sessions faces intense scrutiny over two previously undisclosed meetings with Russia’s ambassador to the US – one of which was timed to the convention.

In January, Gordon told Business Insider that he “never left” his “assigned side table” nor spoke publicly at the GOP national security subcommittee meeting, where the amendment – which originally called for “providing lethal defense weapons” to the Ukrainian army to fend off Russian-backed separatists – was read aloud, debated, and ultimately watered down to “providing appropriate assistance” to Ukraine.

According to CNN’s Jim Acosta, however, Gordon said that at the RNC he and others “advocated for the GOP platform to include language against arming Ukrainians against pro-Russian rebels” because “this was in line with Trump’s views, expressed at a March national security meeting at the unfinished Trump hotel” in Washington, DC.

“Gordon says Trump said at the meeting … that he didn’t want to go to ‘World War Three’ over Ukraine,” Acosta said.

Trump’s apparent involvement in steering the language change – Gordon reportedly told CNN that “this was the language Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March [2016]” – is also at odds with what Gordon told Business Insider in January, when he said “neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Manafort were involved in those sort of details, as they’ve made clear.”

When asked why he told Acosta that Trump did weigh in on the subject, when he told BI in January that neither Trump nor Manafort were involved, Gordon emphasized that he had told BI that Trump was not involved “in the details” of the platform.

“Meaning they weren’t part of the process to write, draft, edit the document, or weigh in with the delegates at all,” Gordon said in an email. “That said, the overarching thought of better relations with Russia was certainly their strategic position.”

Paul Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager from April through August. He served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012 and helped the Russia-friendly strongman Viktor Yanukovych win the Ukrainian presidency in 2010.

An unverified dossier presented to Trump in January by top US intelligence officials alleges that Trump “agreed to sideline” the issue of Russian intervention in Ukraine during his campaign after Russia promised to feed the emails it stole from prominent Democrats’ inboxes to WikiLeaks. The dossier also claims Manafort was receiving “kickback payments” from Yanukovych’s associates in Ukraine, where Manafort “had been commercially active … right up to the time (in March 2016) when he joined campaign team.”

Manafort and Trump later denied having anything to do with softening the language of the GOP’s platform on Ukraine. “I wasn’t involved in that,” Trump said in an interview with ABC after the convention. “Honestly, I was not involved.”

But he said his supporters were. “They softened it, I heard, but I was not involved,” he said.

“There was nothing different in what I told you and Jim,” Gordon said in an email, referring to Acosta. “His tweet was an issue of semantics, which I’ve shared with him just now to ensure we’re all on the same page.”

“The RNC & Trump Campaign intent @ GOP Platform Week was to ‘prevent’ adding any glaring contradictions to the draft GOP Platform we brought to Cleveland and previously stated Trump positions,” Gordon added. “This included the notion that arming Ukraine would have been contrary to the goal of improved relations with Russia.”

“The RNC and Nominee’s Campaign have the authority and responsibility to shape the GOP Platform,” Gordon said. “Delegates who have their amendments defeated in part and in whole should understand the process.”

Gordon said in January that neither Trump nor Manafort was involved in the platform change, however. He also said his only role as a Trump campaign representative at GOP Committee Week – which took place in the week before the RNC’s kickoff – was “to monitor the process and facilitate any questions from delegates.”

Campaign representatives are not permitted to publicly debate the merits of an amendment at a subcommittee platform meeting, a member of the subcommittee told Business Insider on the condition of anonymity.

USA Today on Thursday reported that Gordon and another former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, met with Russia’s ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, at the RNC. Gordon said he considered it “an informal conversation just like my interactions with dozens of other ambassadors and senior diplomats in Cleveland.”

According to CNN, Gordon said he and Kislyak discussed the Trump campaign’s “goal to forge a better US relationship with Russia.” He added that he briefed Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the meetings on Thursday, according to CNN.

Sanders told BI in an email that she and Gordon spoke on Thursday “for about three minutes, mostly about the conference logistics – how many people, who put it on, how many ambassadors, etc. It was far from a briefing and JD was a volunteer on an advisory committee on the campaign.”

Gordon insisted in January that his only role as a Trump campaign representative at GOP Committee Week – which took place in the week before the RNC’s kickoff – was “to monitor the process and facilitate any questions from delegates.”

“This is standard practice,” he said, “yet the media unfortunately reported it as something out of the ordinary.”

Diana Denman, the GOP delegate who proposed amending the Ukraine platform to include the “lethal weapons” language, contradicted Gordon’s version of events in an interview with Business Insider in January. She said Gordon and another Trump campaign representative asked the cochairmen of the subcommittee to table the amendment after she read it aloud.

“Two men sitting over to the side of the room – I had no idea who they were but later found out they were Trump representatives – jumped up and tore over to get behind the three cochairmen,” she said.

Gordon then left the room to make a phone call, Denman said. Equal parts confused and angry over her proposal being scuttled, Denman said she confronted Gordon about whom he was calling.

“I’m calling New York,” Gordon replied, according to Denman.

“I work for Mr. Trump, and I have to clear it,” she recalled him saying, apparently in reference to the amendment.

Gordon said in an email at the time that Denman “sought to significantly elevate the Ukraine-Russia issue beyond the already strong position of RNC and Trump campaign,” so the language had to be watered down.

But the committee member present at the meeting, who requested anonymity to discuss the deliberations, said “the language of Diana’s original amendment didn’t seem strong.”

“It was controversial if you hold Donald Trump’s express views on Russia, but it wasn’t controversial with regard to GOP orthodoxy on the issue,” the committee member said.”This change definitely came from Trump staffers – not from RNC staffers.”

This story has been updated to include comments from Gordon and Sanders.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier"

Spoiler

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS’s role.

The dossier has become a lightning rod amid the intensifying investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. Some congressional Republican leaders have spent months trying to discredit Fusion GPS and Steele and tried to determine the identity of the Democrat or organization that paid for the dossier.

Trump tweeted as recently as Saturday that the Justice Department and FBI should “immediately release who paid for it.”

Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement.

A DNC spokeswoman said “[Chairman] Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened.”

Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he wasn’t aware of the hiring during the campaign.

“The first I learned of Christopher Steele or saw any dossier was after the election,” Fallon said. “But if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it. Opposition research happens on every campaign, and here you had probably the most shadowy guy ever running for president, and the FBI certainly has seen fit to look into it. I probably would have volunteered to go to Europe myself to try and verify if it would have helped get more of this out there before the election.”

Some of the details are included in a Tuesday letter sent by Perkins Coie to a lawyer representing Fusion GPS, telling the research firm that it was released from a ­client-confidentiality obligation. The letter was prompted by a legal fight over a subpoena for Fusion GPS’s bank records.

People involved in the matter said that they would not disclose the dollar amounts paid to Fusion GPS but that the campaign and the DNC shared the cost.

Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier is a compilation of reports he prepared for Fusion GPS. The dossier alleged that the Russian government collected compromising information about Trump and that the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist his campaign for president.

U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment asserting that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether Trump associates helped the Russians in that effort.

Trump has adamantly denied the allegations in the dossier and has dismissed the FBI probe as a witch hunt.

Officials have said that the FBI has confirmed some of the information in the dossier. Other details, including the most sensational accusations, have not been verified and may never be.

Fusion GPS’s work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when the GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate the real estate magnate’s background.

Fusion GPS did not start off looking at Trump’s Russia ties but quickly realized that those relationships were extensive, according to the people familiar with the matter.

When the Republican donor stopped paying for the research, Elias, acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, agreed to pay for the work to continue. The Democrats paid for research, including by Fusion GPS, because of concerns that little was known about Trump and his business interests, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Those people said that it is standard practice for political campaigns to use law firms to hire outside researchers to ensure their work is protected by attorney-client and work-product privileges.

The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’ since November 2015 — though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.

At no point, the people said, did the Clinton campaign or the DNC direct Steele’s activities. They described him as a Fusion GPS subcontractor.

Some of Steele’s allegations began circulating in Washington in the summer of 2016 as the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into possible connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Around that time, Steele shared some of his findings with the FBI.

After the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele was publicly identified in news reports.

The dossier was published by BuzzFeed News in January. Fusion GPS has said in court filings that it did not give BuzzFeed the documents.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that Steele was respected by the FBI and the State Department for earlier work he performed on a global corruption probe.

In early January, then-FBI Director James B. Comey presented a two-page summary of Steele’s dossier to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. In May, Trump fired Comey, which led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia matter.

Congressional Republicans have tried to force Fusion GPS to identify the Democrat or group behind Steele’s work, but the firm has said that it will not do so, citing confidentiality agreements with its clients.

Last week, Fusion GPS executives invoked their constitutional right not to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee. The firm’s founder, Glenn Simpson, had previously given a 10-hour interview to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Over objections from Democrats, the Republican leader of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), subpoenaed Fusion GPS’s bank records to try to identify the mystery client.

Fusion GPS has been fighting the release of its bank records. A judge on Tuesday extended a deadline for Fusion GPS’s bank to respond to the subpoena until Friday while the company attempts to negotiate a resolution with Nunes.

Of course Nunes had to issue a subpoena. So much for stepping away.

[candygirl200413]

It's not even news!! Another way for tax payer dollars to be wasted.