Yesterday Rep. Adam Schiff opened the hearing with FBI Director Comey and NSA Chief Admiral Rogers with a scathing list of the various and sundry associations links and apparent opportunities for collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian Intelligences at of espionage against you government last year.
In his statement, Schiff went through a timeline of events that linked Trump campaign officials such as former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort to Russian government officials.
Furthermore, Schiff showed how members of the Trump campaign lobbied to change the Republican Party’s platform to delete a section that endorsed sending weapons to Ukraine — a change that was highly beneficial to the Russian government.
“The Republican Party delegate who offered the language in support of providing defensive weapons to Ukraine states that it was removed at the insistence of the Trump campaign,” Schiff explained.
Additionally, he outlined the way that Russian intelligence services meticulously leaked information damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign designed to do maximum political damage and undermine her candidacy.
“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible,” he said. “But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”
Yes, of course it’s possible all these connections and apparently coordinated efforts were just dumb luck, but it’s also really, seriously, incredibly, unlikely. I mean like hitting the Lotto Powerball Trifecta for week after week, unlikely.
Schiff: Starting 2015 Russian Intelligence lunches a series of spearfishing attacks against a broad away of democratic and republican organizations, think tanks and other entities.
Schiff: in Mid 2016 the Russians weaponize the stolen data and use platforms established by the intel services such as DCLeaks and existing third-party channels such as Wikileaks to dump the documents. The stolen documents were almost uniformly disparaging to the candidate Putin despised, Hillary Clinton.
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We know a lot about how the Russian operation, about the way they amplified the damage.. through the use of slick propaganda outlets like RT, the Kremlin’s media arm.
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Many of the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, have ties to Russia and Russian interests, this is of course no crime. On the other hand if the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it aided or abetted the Russians it would not only be a serious crime, it was also be one of the most shocking betrayals of democracy in history. In Europe, the Russians have using hacking and dumping of documents, but they’ve also used bribery, blackmail, compromising material and financial entanglement to secure cooperation from individual citizens of targeted countries.
Trump has repeated stated he has nothing to do with Russia, that he doesn’t own any property in Russia and he doesn’t owe any money to Russia. But then again, they apparently have paid a ton of money to him. Via Reuters.
“I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”
But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings. A Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.
The buyers include politically connected businessmen, such as a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm that works on military and intelligence facilities, the founder of a St. Petersburg investment bank and the co-founder of a conglomerate with interests in banking, property and electronics.
People from the second and third tiers of Russian power have invested in the Trump buildings as well. One recently posted a photo of himself with the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang that was sanctioned by the United States for its alleged role in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea.
Trump in fact has a long, long history of taking money from Russians. Not only has he leased $100 Million worth of property to Russians in South Florida, he’s rented tons of space to Russians in Trump Tower.
YBM Magnex International. ostensibly a world-class manufacturer of industrial magnets, was founded indirectly in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1995 by the “boss of bosses,” Semion Mogilevich, Moscow’s “brainy Don.”
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In 2003, Mogilevich was indicted in Philadelphia on 45 felony counts for this $150 million stock fraud. But there is no extradition treaty between the United States and Russia, and no chance that Russia will ever extradite Semion voluntarily; he is arguably a national treasure, especially now. Acknowledging these realities, or perhaps for other reasons, the FBI quietly removed Mogilevich from its Top Ten Most Wanted list in 2015, where he had resided for the previous six years.76
For our purposes, one of the most interesting things to note about this YBM Magnex case is that its CEO was a Russian-American named Jacob Bogatin, who was also indicted in the Philadelphia case. His brother David had served in the Soviet Army in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft unit, helping to shoot down American pilots like Senator John McCain. Since the early 1990s, David Bogatin was considered by the FBI to be one of the key members of Semion Mogilevich’s Russian organized crime family in the United States, with a long string of convictions for big-ticket Mogilevich-type offenses like financial fraud and tax dodging.
At one point, David Bogatin owned five separate condos in Trump Tower that Donald Trump had reportedly sold to him personally.77 And Vyacheslav Ivankov, another key Mogilevich lieutenant in the United States during the 1990s, also resided for a time at Trump Tower, and reportedly had in his personal phone book the private telephone and fax numbers for the Trump Organization’s office in that building.78
And there’s more.
Finally, several other interesting Russian/FSU connections have a more residential flavor, but they are a source of very important leads about the Trump network.
Indeed, partly because it has no prying co-op board, Trump Tower in New York has received press attention for including among its many honest residents tax-dodgers, bribers, arms dealers, convicted cocaine traffickers, and corrupt former FIFA officials.65
One typical example involves the alleged Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik, who went to prison in 2014 for running an illegal gambling ring out of Trump Tower—not only the headquarters of the Trump Organization but also the former headquarters of Bayrock Group LLC. This operation reportedly took up the entire 51st floor. Also reportedly involved in it was the alleged mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,66 who has the distinction of making the Forbes 2008 list of the World’s Ten Most Wanted Criminals, and whose organization the FBI believes to be tied to Mogilevich’s. Even as this gambling ring was still operating in Trump Tower, Tokhtakhounov reportedly travelled to Moscow to attend Donald Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest as a special VIP.
Which is all in addition to the money laundering ring that Tokhtakhounov was running out of suit 63A in Trump Tower, just 2 floors below Donald’s pent house.
So, at a minimum Trump has in the last decade or so received at least $195 Million from Russian benefactors of various unsavory stripes. Simply by canceling their leases and embarking on a mass exodus these Russian interests could put a rather severe dent in the cash flow for Trump Co. and family. But, y’know, it’s not like he’s brand conscious considering his last 10 Golfing Trips in the last 8 weeks were all at his own Golf clubs.
And then there the issue of of possible quid-pro-quo deal directly between the Russians and the Trump campaign. Is that even a possibility?
Schiff: The months of July to August 2016 seem to have been pivotal. It was at this time the Russians began using the information they had stolen to help Donald Trump and harm Hillary Clinton. And so the question is: Why?
In early July Carter Page, someone President Trump identified as one of his national security advisors traveled to Moscow on a trip approved the by Trump campaign. While in Moscow he gives a speech critical of the United States and western countries for what he believes is a hypocritical focus on democratization and efforts to fight corruption.
Russian sources also tell [former MI6 Officer Christopher Steele] that Page has also had a meeting Igor Sechin of the Russian gas giant Rosneft. Sechin is reported to be a former KGB agent and friend of Putin’s. According to Steele’s Russian sources Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19% share of the company. According to Reuters a sale of 19.5% shares later takes place with unknown purchasers.
This offer to of brokerage fees to Page on top the other hundreds of $Millions TrumpCo has made from Russians, could be consider in some circles — as. a. Bribe! But perhaps that wasn’t all that was being offered.
Schiff: According to Steele’s Russian sources the campaign is offered documents damaging to Hillary Clinton which the Russians would publish through an outlet that gives them deniability, like Wikileaks. The hacked documents would be in exchange for a Trump policy that de-emphasizes Russian invasion of Ukraine, instead focuses on criticizing NATO countries about paying their fair share. These efforts, including the Presidents recent visit with Angela Merkel have now presciently come to pass.
So basically the deal is “play ball” with Russia and they’ll take down Hillary. So did they say “Go Spit” or did the Trump’s go grab a catchers mit?
Schiff: In the middle of July Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager who was long on the parole of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests [and had a man with admitted links to Russian Military Intelligence on his payroll] attends the RNC. Carter Page back from Moscow also attends the Convention. According to Steele it was Manafort who chose Page as a go between with the Trump campaign on Russian interests.
Ambassador Kislyak who presides over the Russian embassy which contains personnel who would be later expelled as likely spies, attend the RNC and meets with Carter Page and additional Trump advisors J.D. Gordon and Waleed Farris. [He also met with Trump himself] It was J.D. Gordon who approved Page’s trip to Moscow. Ambassador Kislyak also met with Trump Campaign Chair, National Security Chair, and Senator Jeff Sessions. Sessions would later deny meeting with Russian Officials during his Senate confirmation hearing.
So immediately after Carter Page goes to Moscow to allegedly meet Sechin, Kislyak meets with Trump, Page, Gordon and Session at the RNC where the campaign delivers on the Kremlin’s first and foremost request. Don’t. Help. Ukraine.
Just prior to the convention the Republican party platform is changed, removing a section which supports the provision of lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine. An action that would be contrary to Russian interests. Manafort categorically denies involvement by the Trump campaign with altering the platform. But the republican party delegate who offered the amendment in support of provided defensive weapons to Ukraine states that it was removeed at the insistence of the Trump campaign. Later J.D. Gordon admits opposing the inclusion of the provision at the time it was being debated and prior to it’s being removed.
Trump also started threatening that the US wouldn’t help defend NATO nations that “hadn’t paid up” just like the Kremlin wanted. His personal lawyer, Michael Cohen for some reason decided he was a diplomat and tried to broker a peace deal with a Ukrainian lawyer over their conflict with Russia that would have allowed the sanctions that have been crippling their economy to be lifted. Why exactly would he do that right out of the blue, except that that is, again, what the Kremlin wanted in exchange for all that sweet, sweet anti-Hillary intel?
And then what happened once TrumpCo had held up their end of the deal?
Later in July and after the convention, the first stolen emails detrimental to Hillary Clinton appear on Wikileaks. A hacker who goes by the moniker Guccifer 2.0 claims responsibility for hacking the DNC and giving the information to Wikileaks.
Literally the day immediately after the end of the RNC convention the DNC emails were up on Wikileaks, from here forward it’s best to let the former member of the Clinton Campaign, Glen Caplan, who was responsible for the reaction to these leaks describe how things went from there.
Glen talks about how the initial hacking release was posted on the DCLeaks site in June which wasn’t user friendly and also continued meta-data in Cyrillic with URLs that linked back to Russia as discovered by Crowdstrike the IT firm brought in the DNC in April of 2016.
When CrowdStrike came to the DNC, it moved quickly. Using a system called Falcon, a two-megabyte agent installed on systems without the need for a reboot, it profiled every action that occurred at a programme level on the hundreds of machines owned by the DNC. One clue might be a programme behaving abnormally; it might be the unusual transfer of millions of documents. "We're not looking at any personal data, any documents or emails," explains Alperovitch. "We're just looking at what is being executed."
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One question had been answered: there was definitely someone rummaging around the DNC servers. But who? CrowdStrike checked its records, seeing whether the methods used for the hack matched any they already had on record. They did. Two groups, working independently, were secreting away information, including private correspondence, email databases and, reportedly, opposition research files on Donald Trump. "We realised that these actors were very well known to us," Alperovitch says. This is because of a handful of small but significant tells: data exfiltrated to an IP address associated with the hackers; a misspelled URL; and time zones related to Moscow. "They were called FANCY BEAR and COZY BEAR, and we could attribute them to the Russian government."
Both the groups had a long rap sheet. COZY BEAR - which had been inside the DNC's system since the summer of 2015 - had previously hacked the White House and the US State Department. FANCY BEAR - which had breached the network separately in April 2016 - had hacked victims across the world, including the German Bundestag. The vulnerabilities were quickly closed, but the damage had already been done.
Some of the intel disclosed on DCLeaks information included donor lists and the Clinton campaigns oppo-research file on Donald Trump. How convenient, since he hadn’t bother to do any oppo-research on himself at that point?
Next from the Clinton perspective was the Wikileaks Dump on the eve of the DNC — right after the RNC had concluded, and all the meetings between Page, Morgan, Sessions, and Trump with Sechin and Kislyak had concluded and the platform was changed — and this leak was much more detailed, much more user friend and much more damaging. It’s almost as if the DCLeaks release had been a test run, a proof of concept. Kicking the tires on the product.
Russia showed via DCLeaks that they had inside information on Clinton and the DNC. Trump co-operated and coordinated by dropping the pro-Ukraine plank from the RNC platform — they aggressively lied about it and about any and all contacts with the Russian government — then they got their reward. Another big dump of even more information on Wikileaks that was even more damaging to the Clinton campaign alleging that the DNC had sandbagged Bernie Sanders, massively angering his supporters and forcing then DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign.
This alone one could contend presents a prima facie case of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Proving it behind mere circumstance and coincidence is another matter.
But that wasn’t all
You also have the issue the Trump associate Roger Stone — who had appeared on the Kremlin’s broadcast network RT to spout the Sputnik theory that “Russia didn’t hack the DNC, one of their staffers did it” — who also communicated both with Julian Assange and Guccifer 2.0.
On Wednesday, the Smoking Gun published a story asserting that longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone had exchanged private direct messages via Twitter with "Guccifer 2.0," an account that's believed by U.S. officials and other analysts to be a front for the allegedly Russian-affiliated group that hacked Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. Stone told the Gun that he did not remember having done so. He now tells the Washington Times, however, that he did indeed DM with the Guccifer 2.0 account—though he claims the contact was "innocuous" and provided the publication with copies of what he says are the only three messages he sent
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Stone has said publicly that he has connections to WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange through an intermediary that he described as a libertarian member of the media. Assange has denied having any connection to Guccifer 2.0 and said he was not supplied with the DNC or Podesta emails by a state actor.
During the debates Trump stedfastly and stubbornly refuse to admit that Russia might have anything to do with he hack, even as more and more intelligence agencies began to reach that conclusion echoing the same type of abject doubt being put forward by RT who were fighting anonymous sources with more anonymous sources.
Anonymous allegations that Russian government hackers interfered with the US elections are “evidence-free,” several retired intelligence professionals argued in an open letter. Any hack would have been noticed by the NSA, which has stayed silent, they say.
Last Friday, the New York Times and the Washington Post cited anonymous sources claiming the CIA believed Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, with the intent of aiding the campaign of Donald Trump. Several Democratic senators have called for a special investigation into the allegations, while
Trump dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”
A hack, the group explained, is when someone remotely enters a computer system and extracts data. Any such attempt, however, would have been detected by the NSA.
When Trump eventually got into serious trouble with the release of the Access Hollywood Tape in the middle of the debates on October 7th, less that an hour later Wikileaks released their hacks of John Podesta emails a release that had been pre-warned by Roger Stone.
"On Oct. 7, the Access Hollywood tape comes out. One hour later, WikiLeaks starts dropping my emails," Podesta told Chuck Todd on Dec. 18, 2016. "One could say that those things might not have been a coincidence."
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The tape was discovered and first published by the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold right around 4 p.m. ET on Oct. 7. Fahrenthold shared a link to his story on Twitter.
Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks revealed that it had received 50,000 of Podesta’s emails. It released 2,050 initially. It, too, shared the news via Twitter.
Wikileaks would strategically time their releases, breaking the Podesta emails into 33 separate sections, one per day as if to provide “message of the day” for the Trump campaign, each of which was dutifully re-reported by Sputnik News — tightly coordinating their media message.
The coordination of these messages wasn’t just through RT and Sputnik but also using social media “bots” the auto generate links to right-wing “News” sites such as Brietbart and Infowars who also part of the FBI investigation.
WASHINGTON — Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump's presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.
Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as "bots," to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.
The bots' end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year's elections.
And once the stories went up and were retweeted of liked, Trump and his surrogates would mention them at his rallies and on TV whenever they could to deflect from criticism of Trump. During the month of October Trump mentioned Wikileaks on the campaign trail 164 Times.
One person who thought Wikileaks and the hacked information could and should have an impact on the result was Donald Trump. In the final month of the campaign Trump mentioned Wikileaks every day and in virtually every public appearance.
Trump mentioned Wikileaks in each presidential debate, which were watched by tens of millions of people.
Trump described the contents of the emails released by Wikileaks as disqualifying Hillary Clinton from the presidency. Trump used Wikileaks as proof to his claims that she was corrupt and the system was corrupt — both the political system and the media. (The media, Trump insisted, would not cover Wikileaks.)
Trump encouraged his supporters to read Wikileaks. He delighted in each new release. He marveled at the damage Wikileaks was doing to her campaign.
Wikileaks, in short, was a core part of Trump’s closing argument against Hillary Clinton.
Trump spoke about the Wikileaks emails at least 164 times from October 10 to election day, saying the word Wikileaks 124 times. That means, on average, Trump discussed Wikileaks more than five times per day.
Trump was so tightly linked not just to Wikileaks but also to arguments being put out by Sputnik News and RT that he even repeated some of their mistakes, essentially verbatim.
Trump on Monday told his crowd of supporters in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that "sleazy Sidney" was "now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi. This just came out a little while ago."
The problem, though, is that the "admission" Trump was referring to — a line in the leaked email saying "the attack was almost certainly preventable. Clinton was in charge of the State Department" — was not written by Blumenthal.
On Monday, WikiLeaks had released a second batch of emails taken from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's inbox. One of those emails, addressed to undisclosed recipients with the subject line "the truth," was from Blumenthal, but the words in the email were not his. They were taken from a Newsweek article titled "Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages," written by Kurt Eichenwald in October 2015.
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An article published Monday by the state-sponsored Russian news agency Sputnik may provide a partial answer. The article, either purposefully or mistakenly, also attributed the Newsweek quote to Blumenthal.
Here’s another head scratcher, RT scooped Wikileaks on their own release by tweeting it was going to be released before they had done so themselves.
Russia’s state propaganda organ, RT (previously known as “Russia Today”), scooped Wikileaks yesterday on Wikileaks’ own story.
On October 22, at 8:20AM Eastern Time, the Russians tweeted a new story of theirs about the Wikileaks Podesta emails.
Then, 30 minutes later, at 8:50AM ET, Wikileaks announced its new Podesta emails to the world.
In other words, the Russians broadcast the Wikileaks story to the world before Wikileaks itself, and the Russians even had enough notice to write a story about it.
So all through the rest of the election, Trump and Russian Intelligence were working hand-in-glove on their messaging using the trove of data they had stolen from the DNC and Podesta to do everything they could to knee-cap Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There’s no denying this didn’t help Trump and hurt Clinton. Also the fact that the FBI investigation of all this remained undisclosed while Comey was openly speaking with Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails, sharply criticizing her while also exonerating her and her staff of any legal wrong-doing, releasing leaks of many of these emails which gave tons of life to the bogus Clinton “Pay for Play” scandal, and then dropped the letter about the Weiner/Abedin email before they had even obtained an warrant just barely a week before the election — didn’t help much either. Comey himself may have struck the deathblow for her campaign, but she’d been deeply weakened by the Russians for months.
Following the election it was discovered that Michael Flynn — after it was revealed that he repeatedly taken money from the Kremlin via RT and other Russian businesses, while holding a Security Clearance and being a foreign lobbyist for Turkey — had multiple contacts with Kislyak that were undisclosed including discussing the Ukrainian sanctions — possibly in violation of the Logan Act — and meeting privately with him inside Trump Tower along side Jared Kushner.
Then after he testified to the contrary during his confirmation hearing it was found that Jeff Sessions had twice me with Kislyak, once at the RNC and again in his Senate Offices forcing 100 Democrats to call for him to resign and Senator Al Franken to say that he perjured himself, all of which caused Sessions to recuse himself from any investigation of Russia and/or the Trump campaign.
in the midst of all this, Trump blew his stack over Session recusing himself from any investigation of Russia and decided to pull an RT and use anonymous sources against anonymous sources and make up the completely bogus claim that “Obama hacked my phones in Trump Tower” largely based on a willful misunderstanding of reports about intercepts that look place between Russian nationals about Trump’s associates and one transcript of Flynn talking to Kislyak which was incidentally captured not because there was a criminal or FISA warrant targeting anyone in the Trump campaign and have ended in Anthony Napoliano being kicked off Fox News for his false claims.
Now we hear, tonight as I type this, that SecState Rex Tillerson — who has his own deep and long links to Russia and Putin as the former head of Exxon who penned a $500 Billion deal for arctic oil that is now hung up by the Crimea/Ukraine sanctions — that instead of attending a meeting of NATO foreign ministers next month, he’s instead going on a trip to Russia.
Will these hits just stop screaming up the charts?
All we need to know, is whether this coordination was part of a pre-arranged deal as alleged by Steele in regards to the Page/Sechin meeting — or whether it was just a long, long stream of amazing, incredible fantastic… innocent coincidences. The later is wild dumb luck, the former is a treasonous criminal conspiracy.
But seriously, just going over what is known publicly if you had to apply Occam’s Hatchet — which way would you cut?
Simply asking the people involved probably isn’t going to generate an honest answer since Trump, Page, Manafort, Flynn and Session have all lied about it, especially their having met Kislyak and/or what they may have discussed during those meetings and contacts.
Trump did not specifically address questions regarding whether members of his staff were in contact with Russian officials during the campaign. When a reporter repeated that question to Trump afterwards as the president-elect approached the elevator to exit the room, he answered "No."
They said they didn’t have any contacts with the Russian Government, but clearly we now know that was bullshit and they clearly did. Since they’ve lied before, all of them, they’re likely to keep on lying until caught in those lies.
We’re gonna need really iron-clad evidence to prove this case and that won’t be easy to find unless there are recordings or transcript of some real incriminating conversations or we somehow get it from the Russians themselves.
In the meanwhile we can expect lots and lots more lies, distractions and diversionary tactics like phony wiretap allegations and whining about “leaks” from the guy who favorite website was wikiLEAKS — to come flying over the transom like a barrel full of ping pong balls being dumped on our heads.