RUSSIA 🇷🇺 / РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGENT
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Russia Poses Greater Election Threat Than Iran, Many U.S. Officials Say
nytimes.com
Russia Poses Greater Election Threat Than Iran, Many U.S. Officials Say
By Julian E. Barnes, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger
7-9 minutes
Russia’s hackers appeared to be preparing to sow chaos amid any uncertainty around election results, officials said.
Credit...Eve Edelheit for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — While senior Trump administration officials said this week that Iran has been actively interfering in the presidential election, many intelligence officials said they remained far more concerned about Russia, which in recent days has hacked into state and local computer networks in breaches that could allow Moscow broader access to American voting infrastructure.
- Oct. 22, 2020, 3:26 p.m. ET
The discovery of the hacks came as American intelligence agencies, infiltrating Russian networks themselves, have pieced together details of what they believe are Russia’s plans to interfere in the presidential race in its final days or immediately after the election on Nov. 3. Officials did not make clear what Russia planned to do, but they said its operations would be intended to help President Trump, potentially by exacerbating disputes around the results, especially if the race is too close to call.
There is no evidence that the Russians have changed any vote tallies or voter registration information, officials said. They added that the Russian-backed hackers had penetrated the computer networks without taking further action, as they did in 2016. But American officials expect that if the presidential race is not called on election night, Russian groups could use their knowledge of the local computer systems to deface websites, release nonpublic information or take similar steps that could sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results, according to American officials briefed on the intelligence.
Some U.S. intelligence officials view Russia’s intentions as more significant than the announcement Wednesday night by the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, that Iran has been involved in the spreading of faked, threatening emails, which were made to appear as if they came from the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group.
Officials briefed on the intelligence said that Mr. Ratcliffe had accurately summarized the preliminary conclusion about Iran. But Tehran’s hackers may have accomplished that mission simply by assembling public information and then routing the threatening emails through Saudi Arabia, Estonia and other countries to hide their tracks. One official compared the Iranian action as single A baseball, while the Russians are major leaguers.
Nonetheless, both the Iranian and the Russian activity could pave the way for “perception hacks,” which are intended to leave the impression that foreign powers have greater access to the voting system than they really do. Federal officials have warned for months that small breaches could be exaggerated to prompt inaccurate charges of widespread voter fraud.
Officials say Russia’s ability to change vote tallies nationwide is limited.
A hacking group believed to be operating at the behest of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the F.S.B. — the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B. — has infiltrated multiple state and local computer networks in recent weeks, according to officials and researchers. The group, known to private researchers as Energetic Bear or Dragonfly, has hacked into American nuclear, water and power plants and airports before. While it has stopped short of shutting them down, the group is considered to be among Russia’s most formidable.
The Russian hackers were able to get inside some election administrators’ systems and had access to voting information. What alarmed officials was the targets, the timing — the attacks began two months ago — and the adversary, which is known for burrowing inside the supply chain of critical infrastructure that Russia may want to take down in the future. The officials fear that Russia could change, delete or freeze voter data, making it harder for voters to cast ballots, invalidating mail-in ballots or creating enough uncertainty to undermine election results.
“It’s reasonable to assume any attempt at the election systems could be for the same purpose,” said John Hultquist, the director of threat analysis at FireEye, a security firm that has been tracking the Russian group’s foray into state and local systems. “This could be the reconnaissance for disruptive activity.”
The threat of Iranian interference, officials said, was real and troubling. But other current and former officials said there was little doubt that Russia remained a greater threat and questioned why the focus was on Iran on Wednesday night.
Administration officials said the news conference reflected the urgency of the intelligence about Iran. But some saw politics at play. Mr. Ratcliffe’s focus on the intelligence about Iran would potentially benefit Mr. Trump politically.
“It is concerning to me that the administration is willing to talk about what the Iranians are doing — supposedly to hurt Trump — than what the Russians are likely doing to help him,” said Jeh C. Johnson, the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration. “If the Russians have in fact breached voter registration data, then the American people deserve to know from their government what it believes the Russians are doing with that data.”
A senior official briefed on the intelligence said American spy agencies have been tracking the Iranian group responsible for the spoofed emails for some time. As a result, the government was able to quickly debunk the falsified Proud Boys emails and identify Iran as responsible.
Iran’s hackers appear to have scanned or penetrated some state and local networks, government officials said on Thursday. But security experts said the Proud Boys email campaign that the government attributed to Iran did not appear to be based on hacked materials and instead relied on publicly available information that Florida officials regularly distribute.
“This was an email sent from a nonexistent domain using publicly available information,” said Kevin O’Brien, the chief executive of GreatHorn, a cybersecurity firm. “There was no hack here. Your name, your party affiliation, your address and email address are all, generally speaking, public information.”
Mr. O’Brien said the information presented publicly had not persuaded him that Iran was culpable.
Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
Its been fukk Taibbi for some time now. Can't stand that dude.
they booted you from the election thread too?
Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
Yes. For the hunter biden shyt. Shyt aint fair
Michael Cohen: ‘I lied for Trump, but that doesn’t make me a liar’ | The Spectator
spectator.co.uk
Michael Cohen: ‘I lied for Trump, but that doesn’t make me a liar’ | The Spectator
Paul Wood
8-10 minutes
When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s name bearing down on Cohen’s head in gold letters three feet high. We’d already had a long lunch and I was trying to say goodbye but as he spoke about one injustice or humiliation he remembered another, a torrent of self-pity. Everyone had treated Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer unfairly: the Feds, Congress, the media, above all his former boss. ‘I go to jail because he gets his pecker pulled by a porn star?’
He was talking about Stormy Daniels. Cohen had given her $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with Trump at a golf tournament in Utah in 2006. The money was paid six days before the presidential election, so he was charged with making an illegal campaign contribution. Cohen used a loan against his house to get the money, but hadn’t told the bank what it was for, so he was charged with fraud. Back in 2018, he told me that his wife’s signature was on the bank loan and the FBI had said she would go to jail if he didn’t plead guilty to everything. So he became inmate number 86067-054 at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York.
Cohen wrote a memoir at Otisville, Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump. Stormy gets two chapters. He writes that both he and Trump ‘figured sleeping with the blonde bombshell porn star of Revenge of the Dildos wouldn’t help in the swing states’. The point of this story, he tells me now on the phone from Manhattan, is that her payment ‘was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald Trump’. If Cohen committed a felony by paying off Stormy, did Trump commit one by ordering the payment? That depends on whether Cohen is telling the truth about Trump’s involvement. The Department of Justice says a sitting president can’t be indicted, only impeached, but in principle Trump could be charged after he leaves office. Would Cohen give evidence? ‘If called, I would,’ he says, and leaves it at that, though satisfaction radiates from the phone. I picture him and the hangdog expression is gone.
Cohen writes that working for Trump was like being in a cult. ‘Whatever he wanted done, I would do, no matter how dishonest or dishonourable. Trump saved the crappiest jobs for me, a fact that I took pride in.’ After he talked to the Feds about what he’d done, in return for a lighter sentence, he appeared before Congress. It was a performance that gripped America, Cohen denouncing Trump as a conman, a racist and a cheat. It was also the moment, he writes, when he realised he had finally escaped the cult. ‘I started to cry, a flood of emotions overwhelming me: fear, anger, dread, anxiety, relief, terror. It felt something like when I was in the hospital awaiting the birth of my daughter and son… Only now, I was that child being born, and all of the pain and blood were part of the birth of my new life and identity.’
You would have to have a heart of stone to read this without laughing (as Oscar Wilde said) but it’s worth wading through passages like these to get to the terrifying eyewitness portraits of Trump the sociopath in his most unguarded moments. Disloyal shows Trump giving orders like a mafia don: nods, winks, hints, never anything that could be pinned on him. And he never cared about the damage he did, the lies he told, the lenders he stiffed, the small businesses he bankrupted, the ‘little people’ whose lives he ruined. Cohen tells me on the phone: ‘I believe that Donald Trump will do anything in order to protect himself and his position of power.’
Cohen predicts that if Trump loses the election he will bring a ‘multitude’ of lawsuits against individual states, claiming fraud at the polls. ‘Enablers’ like the attorney general, Bill Barr, would go to the ‘farthest depths imaginable’ to carry out a coup by manipulating the courts. If that doesn’t work, then Cohen expects Trump might resign the presidency during the 90 days he would have left and get Mike Pence to pardon him. During the Russian investigation, Trump said he had the power to pardon himself. Either way, a pardon would apply only to federal crimes. State prosecutors would still be free to act and Cohen says Trump has questions to answer about tax evasion and bank fraud. ‘Top members’ from the team of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance junior, visited him while he was in Otisville. ‘They were extremely appreciative of the information I provided.’
The White House — and Trump himself — have called Cohen a disbarred attorney and a convicted perjurer. That’s true — if only part of the story — and I ask Cohen why any evidence he might eventually give in court should be believed. Wouldn’t Trump’s defence lawyer be bound to say: ‘You lied before, aren’t you lying now?’ Cohen takes exception to this line of inquiry. ‘Why don’t you tell me what my lies were? Because if you can’t… this conversation is over, my friend.’
I point out that he admitted to a charge of perjury after lying to the House intelligence committee about trying to get a Trump building put up in Moscow, in Red Square, with the $50 million penthouse offered to Vladimir Putin. This was a far more consequential lie that the one about Stormy Daniels. Cohen replies: ‘My lies to Congress were not to my benefit; they were for the benefit of and at the direction of Donald J. Trump.’ I tell him that he concealed the Trump Tower Moscow discussions from Robert Mueller’s investigators the first time he spoke to them. ‘That’s not true. I didn’t lie to them. I didn’t give them the answer.’ Isn’t that the same thing, I ask, a lie by omission? ‘No, it’s not.’
Cohen challenges me to name other lies he has told. I am flabbergasted, as Cohen’s book is one long litany of the lies he told for Donald Trump. One story is about how Cohen paid a computer hacker to make sure Trump got into the top ten in a poll of the country’s most influential business leaders. Trump hadn’t even been in the top 100. ‘Fixing a poll doesn’t make me a liar, does it?’ To anybody with a normal moral compass it does, I say: he was a professional liar for Trump. ‘What the fukk kind of a question is that? Yes, I lied on behalf of Donald Trump. I bullied people. I brought lawsuits. Yes, I did. But does that make me a professional liar? Did I lie for my boss? Sure, I did. But that doesn’t make me a liar. I was doing my job.’
Cohen is shouting at me now and I’m getting a glimpse of the pitbull who used to work for The Donald. ‘Have you ever written something that you knew wasn’t accurate? Tell me you haven’t and I’m going to say “You’re a liar as well!”’ No, I don’t think I have, I say, not knowingly, not deliberately. Cohen shouts: ‘I say you’re a liar!’ I start to wonder if he really knows the difference between lying and telling the truth. One person who has spent a lot of time with Cohen told me: ‘He’s a sociopathic fantasist like Trump. They believe their lies even as they’re telling them.’ Did he leave the cult of Trump simply because he was caught? Only Michael Cohen can say for certain if his journey of redemption is real or if it’s just another play.
Cohen is so certain that Trump will lose the election he’s put a $10,000 dollar bet on it. (It was placed by a website called Guesser.-com — mentioning that was a condition of our interview.) He says Trump knows he will be ‘putting on the bracelets’ as soon as he is out of office — and there will never be a peaceful transition of power. Cohen thinks that while the Republican party’s lawyers challenge the result, Trump will call armed MAGA supporters to the streets ‘to sow chaos and fear’. Then he will declare martial law. ‘In Trump’s mind, no autocracy has been established without some bloodshed.’ Trump himself has joked about staying in office whatever the result, of making himself president for life. Cohen says Trump jokes but he never really jokes — and, he says, he should know.
OK. Now that this is all over.
did the Russians murk Seth Rich?
DC and unsolved crimes doesn't really make sense to me.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
did the Russians murk Seth Rich?
DC and unsolved crimes doesn't really make sense to me.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
WOW
Schindler is saying Trump is making moves to cover up 2016 NSA PROOF OF HIS COLLUSION
TRUMP IS TRYING TO COVER UP HIS COLLUSION IN 2016 ON THE WAY OUT THE DOOR!!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...1d31a4-239d-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html
A furious behind-the-scenes battle to counter Trump’s threat to national security
CIA Director Gina Haspel attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House in July 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Opinion by
David Ignatius
Columnist
November 10, 2020 at 6:23 p.m. EST
President Trump’s senior military and intelligence officials have been warning him strongly against declassifying information about Russia that his advisers say would compromise sensitive collection methods and anger key allies.
An intense battle over this issue has raged within the administration in the days before and after the Nov. 3 presidential election. Trump and his allies want the information public because they believe it would rebut claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin supported Trump in 2016. That may sound like ancient history, but for Trump it remains ground zero — the moment when his political problems began.
CIA Director Gina Haspel last month argued strongly at a White House meeting against disclosing the information, because she believed that doing so would violate her pledge to protect sources and methods, a senior congressional source said. This official said a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators has been trying to protect Haspel, though some fear that Trump may yet oust her.
Rumors have been flying this week about Haspel’s tenure, but a source familiar with her standing as CIA director said Tuesday that national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had both “assured her that she’s good,” meaning she wouldn’t be removed. Haspel also met personally with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Tuesday. She sees him regularly as a member of the “Gang of Eight” senior congressional leaders. But Tuesday’s visit was another sign of GOP support.
Haspel’s most unlikely defender has been Attorney General William P. Barr, who opposed a pre-election push to declassify the sensitive material, according to three current and former officials. At a showdown meeting at the White House, Barr pushed back against revealing the secret information.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, has also argued vehemently against disclosure, according to a senior defense official and the senior congressional source. Like Haspel, Nakasone took the unusual step of directly opposing White House efforts to release the intelligence, because he feared the damage that disclosure would cause.
President Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper in a Nov. 9 tweet, marking the fourth Pentagon chief the president has let go during his administration. (Reuters)
The issue may have played a role in Trump’s surprise decision on Monday to fire Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. According to the senior defense official, Esper wrote a letter last month to John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, strongly endorsing Nakasone’s position and “urging that the information not be released due to the harm it would do to national security, including specific harm to the military,” the senior defense official said.
Trump’s ceaseless attempts to argue that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” — and to force the intelligence community to declassify information he believes would support this view — may animate some of his otherwise inexplicable moves.
At the Pentagon, Trump replaced Esper with acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, a former National Security Council official who had been nominated in March to run the National Counterterrorism Center. The job was vacant because Trump had fired Russell E. Travers, the previous acting NCTC chief, who had worked closely with former acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire, who was bounced in February. Maguire’s supposed crime was that he had allowed intelligence officials to brief Congress on Russian efforts to support Trump in the 2020 election.
At the NSA, the Trump team just installed as general counsel Michael Ellis, a former chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a locus of pro-Trump arguments that the Russia investigation was poisoned fruit. As the spy agency’s chief legal officer, Ellis could be an ally in a Ratcliffe-led campaign to declassify intelligence that would otherwise be tightly held because it might reveal sources and methods.
Senate Republicans, who might stop the post-election revenge campaign, face a growing tension between Trump’s demands and the country’s interests. The senior congressional source described it this way: “How much do you stay quiet during the tantrum period? What damage will it do to national security? That’s a real-time discussion that’s going on.”
Trump will depart the White House Jan. 20, barring an unlikely legal miracle. The question is how much damage he will do to national security before he leaves.
THIS IS PROOF TRUMP WANTS MORE INFO ABOUT THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION TO LEAK TO DENY HIS ROLE IN THE COLLUSION OF 2016!