Tag: Putin

  • Very legal & very cool

    This is a highly enjoyable read by a professor at the US Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer:

    This was the week that the bottom fell out of Donald Trump’s presidency. After almost two years of White House denials that Candidate Trump had any ties to Russia in 2016, that turns out to be just one more Trumpian lie. No amount of “NO COLLUSION” tweets from the Oval Office can undo the damage that has now been done.

    See what I mean by enjoyable?

    Cohen explained that he knowingly lied to the Senate and House intelligence committees regarding his client’s efforts during Trump’s presidential run to develop a luxury hotel and condominium complex in Moscow. This relationship is something the president repeatedly denied, most famously with his January 2017 tweet, days before his inauguration: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

    His own attorney just stated that was a flat-out lie. Cohen reached out to Russians multiple times during 2016 in futile efforts to get Trump Tower Moscow going, at last. Donald Trump sought to develop “his” luxury tower in Russia’s capital for decades. This was the reason for Trump’s flashy trip to the Soviet Union way back in the summer of 1987. Three decades later, Trump Tower Moscow remained a mirage that the presidential contender was determined to make reality. This clearly mattered more to Trump than winning the White House.

    That forlorn quest will cost President Trump more than he could possibly imagine. Cohen and other members of the Trump Organization amateurishly reached out to Kremlin officials. They even tried to entice the Kremlin by offering to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a penthouse in Moscow’s Trump Tower, valued at $50 million.

    Putin didn’t take the bait and this bizarre offer reveals the stunning ineptitude of Cohen and everybody else involved in the failed ploy to make Trump Tower Moscow happen. They tried hard to get the Kremlin to play ball with their development plans, to no avail. Trump’s representatives reached out to senior Russian government officials, not just private businesspeople. They seem never to have realized that the line between Kremlin bigwigs, Russian spies, and organized crime players, never thick in Moscow, has been erased entirely during two decades of Putin’s rule.

    Hey, listen here, they’ve watched the Godfather trilogy several times, what more do you want?

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate.

    Such a delightful read.

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate. For starters, Cohen kept detailed records of his work for Trump, including taping phone calls; it’s safe to assume that whatever Cohen tells Mueller about his former client can be backed up with evidence.

    Worse, Cohen is the first direct public connection made by Mueller and the Special Counsel between President Trump and his concealed business ties to Russia. In a revealing flourish, Mueller personally signed Cohen’s cooperation agreement with the Special Counsel’s office.

    As in: Gotcha, homey!

    It seems the president knows that Mueller is coming for him and his family, and at this point there’s nothing he can do except buy a bit of time with his customary histrionics before the Special Counsel’s boom falls. Twitter rage may still motivate the dwindling ranks of MAGA true believers, but it does nothing to deter Team Mueller.

    This morning, President Trump finally admitted that, lo-and-behold, he had business interests in Russia in 2016 after all. As hetweeted from Argentina, where he arrived for the G20 summit: “I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

    Well I’m sure Mueller will take that as sworn testimony and wholly exculpatory.

    But Putin not so much. Putin is pissed at Trump for not backing him all the way on Ukraine.

    Then Trump had the impudence to cancel (via tweet, naturally) his scheduled sidebar meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina because of “the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia.”

    Moscow’s response was furious, not least because they learned of the meeting’s cancellation from Trump’s tweet. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov stated, “We regret the decision of the U.S. administration to cancel the scheduled meeting of the two presidents in Buenos Aires,” adding that Trump’s rude move “means that discussion of serious issues on the international and bilateral agenda is being postponed indefinitely.”

    In other words: you don’t get to cancel meetings, we do—and if you think the Kremlin will help you out, Don, have we got news for you. Peskov’s statement leaves no doubt who the Kremlin thinks runs the Trump-Putin relationship. Given how distracted President Trump is with the Mueller investigation as it closes in on the Oval Office, it would be tempting for the White House to ignore the Kremlin.

    That would be a bad idea, as Moscow just made clear. As always, the threat of what Vladimir Putin knows about Donald Trump is unspoken but indelible. Kompromat is the coin of the realm in Putin’s Russia, and his Kremlin wants everybody—above all President Trump—to know it.

    Between Mueller and Putin…Donnie Two-scoops is going to be squashed like a bug.

  • But it’s all over now

    Uh oh.

    Putin and Trump at the G20 Summit welcoming ceremony on November 30, 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  • What Volodya knew and when he knew it

    Michelle Goldberg makes the “this is what Putin has on him” point:

    We still don’t know for certain if Russia has used leverage over Trump. But there should no longer be any doubt that Russia has leverage over him.

    Why? Because it’s now crystal clear that Trump was lying about his dealings with Russia all along and Putin knew it.

    In a Jan. 11, 2017, news conference, Trump said that the “closest I came to Russia” was in selling a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008. While we’re just learning precisely how dishonest this was, Putin has known it all along. That means that throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency, Putin has had the power to plunge him into political crisis.

    “If the Russians are aware that senior American officials are publicly stating things that are not true, it’s a counterintelligence nightmare,” Adam Schiff, the California Democrat in line to take over the House Intelligence Committee, told me.

    All this time Putin has been watching Trump lie to us, and watching us helpless to do anything about it.

  • What Putin had

    I hadn’t quite put that together before, I don’t think – the fact that Trump’s lies about the Trump Tower project in 2016 and after were themselves kompromat. Putin didn’t need any piss-stained sheets, because he already had the kompromat.

    And boy did Putin ever get what he wanted – the US turned into a corrupt malevolent reckless pile of shit.

  • Congratulations on your glorious triumph

    Trump has called Putin to congratulate him on stealing another election.

    President Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his reelection victory in a phone call on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.

    At the White House, Trump confirmed the call and said he congratulated Putin “on the victory.” Trump said they would get together “in the not too distant future.”

    Yes, the “victory” which he “won” by imprisoning or otherwise hobbling all the other candidates.

    Some world leaders have hesitated to congratulate Putin, since his reelection occurred in an environment of state control of much of the news media and his most prominent opponent was barred from the ballot.

    Picky picky picky.

    Putin won a fourth presidential term in Sunday’s Russian election, allowing him to serve until 2024. He took 77 percent of the votes, with 68 percent turnout, the government said. But Putin barely campaigned, opposition activist Alexei Navalny was barred from the ballot, and reports of ballot-stuffing and people being ordered to vote by their employers rolled in throughout election day.

    Idle gossip! Fake news! The FBI! It was Andrew McCabe with a candlestick in the library.

  • The indictment

    Rosenstein announced the indictment about 2o minutes ago.

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is announcing Friday the indictment of Russian nationals and entities accused of breaking U.S. laws to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, CBS News’ Paula Reid reports.

    On Friday, a D.C. federal grand jury returned an indictment against the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization which has connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin — it names 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities that accuses them of violating U.S. criminal laws to meddle in U.S. elections and political processes. According to a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, the indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., as well as “three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft.”

    According to the indictment, “Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.”

    Working with the Internet Research Agency, the defendants “posted derogatory information” about several candidates, the indictment says, and by mid-2016, their efforts included “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says.

    In other words they did things that genuine US citizens were doing, but they gave those doings an artificial outside-actor boost…and given how tight the election was and how carefully targeted the boosting was, they are why we are stuck with this immoral empty hateful monster of a “president.”

    Starting around 2014, the defendants began to track and study groups on U.S. social media dedicated to American politics and social issues.  They used metrics to track the performance of various social media groups. They then travelled to the U.S. (or in some cases, tried to travel to the U.S.) to collect intelligence for their interference operations.  They posted [probably “posed”] as Americans and contacted U.S. political and social activists and learned they should target “purple” states, those that were undecided in the campaign.

    And by god it worked, damn them to hell.

    They created hundreds of social media accounts and used them to develop fictitious U.S. personas into “leaders of opinion in the U.S.” The defendants worked day and night shifts to pump out messages, controlling pages targeting a range of issues, including immigration, Black Lives Matter, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. They set up and used servers inside the U.S. to mask the Russian origin of the accounts. The Internet Research Agency employed hundreds of people for these purposes — administrators, creators of personas, technical support — and spent the equivalent of millions of dollars for these efforts.

    In addition to disparaging Clinton, they denigrated other candidates, “such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio,” and they supported Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump. In the latter half of 2016, they used groups to discourage minorities from voting in the 2016 presidential election.

    They what?

    They used groups to discourage minorities from voting in the 2016 presidential election. 

    We’re living in Putin’s world.

  • Guest post: The only appropriate reaction is to charge at the danger with your hair on fire

    Originally a comment by quixote on Somewhat laid-back.

    I grew up in a Russian family, Russian was my first language, and I’ve lived in the US since forever, but post-Joe McCarthy. I’ve always thought the “better dead than Red” testerical nonsense in this country to be evidence of softening of the brain.

    I mean, the Russians’ idea of a national sport is watching a chess match. Weird, yes. Dangerous, no.

    And now this. This, take it from one who knows, is different. There’s a guy who made his bones running the KGB. The KGB, godammit! Americans seem to have no concept what that means. You’ve got to be some kind of intelligent extraterrestrial fungus without a shred of human feeling to rise to the top of that heap. That’s Putin.

    And that’s the guy who’s messing with democracies all over the Western world, not just the US, although that’s bad enough.

    That’s an existential threat on the order of climate change to the US way of life. The only appropriate reaction is to charge at the danger with your hair on fire.

    Instead we have Obama letting us know that he did tell Putin to “cut it out.” Oh, and time for vacay now. Not his problem. So long, suckers.

    This is beyond bizarre.

  • It’s worse than we thought

    The Washington Post says Russian psy-ops helped Trump win. That’s a cheery thought.

    You know, if we’re this easily pushed over by in idiot-strongman, we’re basically a failed state. We might as well be Somalia. Liars, cheats, frauds and bullies can team up and trick enough of us into voting for Their Guy so that he wins, and puts the whole damn world in danger. It’s ludicrous and disgusting, and there’s no coming back from it. The US is a disgrace and a global threat.

    The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

    Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

    I wonder how many of the leering bullies we’ve all been fighting on Twitter for years are working for Russia.

    There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

    “They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

    Well by god they’ve certainly eroded mine! Or rather they’ve obliterated it. A country that can elect a Trump should be a pariah state.

    The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

    PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

    Some were in on it, others were the useful idiots. Together, they’re Team Destroy Everything!

    It’s not even clear to me what’s in it for Russia. It weakens the rival power, ok, but at the price of unleashing a nuclear-armed imbecile on the world, and accelerating global warming. It seems a tad overkill.

    The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)

    This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.

    Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.

    The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said.

    “The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”

    And it worked because people who trend the other way are less likely to be taken in by that kind of bullshit. Is that ironic enough for you? It’s way too ironic for me.

    A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that RT and Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.

    McFaul said Russian propaganda typically is aimed at weakening opponents and critics. Trump’s victory, though reportedly celebrated by Putin and his allies in Moscow, may have been an unexpected benefit of an operation that already had fueled division in the United States. “They don’t try to win the argument,” said McFaul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”

    Well congratufuckinglations, Russia, the kingdom of ultimate cynicism is here.

    The findings about the mechanics of Russian propaganda operations largely track previous research by the Rand Corp. and George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

    “They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a GWU professor who studies Russia. “It’s starting to undermine our democratic system.”

    Starting?

    The Rand report — which dubbed Russian propaganda efforts a “firehose of falsehood” because of their speed, power and relentlessness — traced the country’s current generation of online propaganda work to the 2008 incursion into neighboring Georgia, when Russia sought to blunt international criticism of its aggression by pushing alternative explanations online.

    The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union.

    So we’re living in Russia’s world now. I don’t like it.

    Another crucial moment, several researchers say, came in 2011 when the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin was accused of rigging elections, sparking protests that Putin blamed the Obama administration — and then-Secretary of State Clinton — for instigating.

    Putin, a former KGB officer, announced his desire to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams” during a 2013 visit to the broadcast center for RT, formerly known as Russia Today.

    “For them, it’s actually a real war, an ideological war, this clash between two systems,” said Sufian Zhemukhov, a former Russian journalist conducting research at GWU. “In their minds, they’re just trying to do what the West does to Russia.”

    It’s an extension of the Cold War except that Russia now represents the extreme right as opposed to any kind of left.

    Though widely seen as a propaganda organ, the Russian site has gained credibility with some American conservatives. Trump sat for an interview with RT in September. His nominee for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, traveled to Russia last year for a gala sponsored by the network. He later compared it to CNN.

    The content from Russian sites has offered ready fodder for U.S.-based websites pushing far-right conservative messages. A former contractor for one, the Next News Network, said he was instructed by the site’s founder, Gary S. Franchi Jr., to weave together reports from traditional sources such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times with ones from RT, Sputnik and others that provided articles that often spread explosively online.

    It’s the boot stamping on the human face forever. We’ve arrived.

  • Putin to gays: you’re welcome here but hands off the kids

    And that’s not a joke. That’s what he said. From the Washington Post:

    President Vladimir Putin said Friday that gay people have nothing to fear in Russia as long as they leave children alone.

    Putin met with a group of volunteers in the Olympic mountain venue at Krasnaya Polyana on Friday to wish them success at the Games. During a question-and-answer session, one volunteer asked him about Russia’s attitudes toward gays, a subject that has provoked worldwide controversy, and Putin offered what was apparently meant to be a reassuring answer for visitors to the Olympics.

    “One can feel calm and at ease,” he said. “Just leave kids alone, please.”

    That scummy piece of shit. What’s he got for the Jews? “Come on in. Just no killing kids for matzoh flour, thank you.”

    News flash, Volodya: some straight men fail to “leave kids alone” – like Warren Jeffs for instance, like various Catholic bishops and priests for instance, like football coach Jerry Sandusky for instance.

    In speaking to a room full of volunteers dressed in their Sochi warm-up gear, Putin attempted to put Russia on higher moral ground than other countries. Homosexuality is not a crime in Russia, as it was in the Soviet Union. Homosexuality was legalized in 1993. Police, he said, do not pluck gays off the street. In the United States, he asserted, some states impose criminal penalties for homosexual relations. Not Russia, he said. (In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that laws prohibiting gay sex were unconstitutional.)

    …

    Putin asserted that the idea of legalizing pedophilia has been discussed in some countries.

    “There is nothing secret about it, look it up on the Internet and you’ll find it straightaway,” he said. “Parties have raised the issue with certain parliaments. So what, are we supposed to shuffle behind them like obedient dogs toward unknown consequences? We have our own traditions, our own culture, we treat all our partners with respect and ask for our traditions and our culture to be treated with respect as well.”

    Ah yes the respect for traditions and cultures defense. You want us to respect your personal culture of homophobia, Mr Putin? Not going to happen.