RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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a cop got killed in the Bronx.
this is gonna make Cheetos day.
tweets in coming soon im sure.
Police Officer Is Shot and Killed in Unprovoked Attack in the Bronx - Democratic Underground
A police officer was shot and killed early Wednesday while sitting in a police vehicle in the Bronx, in what the police commissioner called an “unprovoked attack.”
The officer, Miosotis Familia, 48, a 12-year veteran of the police force assigned to the anti-crime unit of the 46th precinct, was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The officer was sitting in a marked Police Department command vehicle near the corner of East 183rd Street and Creston Avenue, in the Fordham Heights neighborhood, around 12:30 a.m. when a gunman shot her through the window, the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said at a news conference at the hospital
According to Mr. O’Neill, the slain officer’s partner immediately called for assistance, and two other officers encountered the gunman, who was running on Morris Avenue, about one block away.
They opened fire, and the suspect then drew a silver revolver. The man was killed, and the revolver was recovered. The gunman has not been officially identified, but news agencies said he was a 34-year-old man with an extensive criminal record.
this is gonna make Cheetos day.
tweets in coming soon im sure.
Police Officer Is Shot and Killed in Unprovoked Attack in the Bronx - Democratic Underground
A police officer was shot and killed early Wednesday while sitting in a police vehicle in the Bronx, in what the police commissioner called an “unprovoked attack.”
The officer, Miosotis Familia, 48, a 12-year veteran of the police force assigned to the anti-crime unit of the 46th precinct, was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The officer was sitting in a marked Police Department command vehicle near the corner of East 183rd Street and Creston Avenue, in the Fordham Heights neighborhood, around 12:30 a.m. when a gunman shot her through the window, the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said at a news conference at the hospital
According to Mr. O’Neill, the slain officer’s partner immediately called for assistance, and two other officers encountered the gunman, who was running on Morris Avenue, about one block away.
They opened fire, and the suspect then drew a silver revolver. The man was killed, and the revolver was recovered. The gunman has not been officially identified, but news agencies said he was a 34-year-old man with an extensive criminal record.
Cops get shot everyday b
yup. but usually by white sovcit altright types.
in redder states and areas.
this was neither.
Made Myself A Boss
#Trolltruck
Cops get shot everyday b
Occupational hazard breh when you realize this aspect then come back to the table and talk..
And was she black? Or you mean she's Latino? Afro latino?
And she was shot by a black dude
Kathy Griffin may have been onto something when she said Trump was trying to ruin her life 
http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/kath...urce=msn&utm_medium=f1&utm_campaign=feed-full
A Month Into Investigation, Kathy Griffin Was Reportedly Interviewed by Secret Service for More Than an Hour
By David Canfield
When Kathy Griffin first accused Donald Trump of “trying to ruin [her] life forever” for releasing that notoriously gory and violent photograph, most viewed it as an additional gaffe on the comedian’s part, a poorly conceived attempt to redirect the conversation away from how she’d been near universally condemned for crossing the line. But while the intent of her rebuttal might still feel misguided, a month or so later, it appears that, substantively, Griffin was onto something. Per political reporter Yashar Ali, Griffin was recently interviewed for more than an hour by the Secret Service in person, and the federal agency’s investigation into Griffin remains open.
For context, it’s been more than a month since Griffin’s lawyers confirmed that an investigation had been opened and that they intended to fully co-operate. Responding to a Think Progress article arguing that TMZ had become the media’s “most potent” pro-Trump outlet, the comedian hinted last week at rising tensions around the Secret Service’s inquiry. “Hey… TMZ and [TMZ founder] Harvey Levin,” she wrote: “May you NEVER [be] under fed investigation like I am now.”
http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/kath...urce=msn&utm_medium=f1&utm_campaign=feed-full
A Month Into Investigation, Kathy Griffin Was Reportedly Interviewed by Secret Service for More Than an Hour
By David Canfield
When Kathy Griffin first accused Donald Trump of “trying to ruin [her] life forever” for releasing that notoriously gory and violent photograph, most viewed it as an additional gaffe on the comedian’s part, a poorly conceived attempt to redirect the conversation away from how she’d been near universally condemned for crossing the line. But while the intent of her rebuttal might still feel misguided, a month or so later, it appears that, substantively, Griffin was onto something. Per political reporter Yashar Ali, Griffin was recently interviewed for more than an hour by the Secret Service in person, and the federal agency’s investigation into Griffin remains open.
For context, it’s been more than a month since Griffin’s lawyers confirmed that an investigation had been opened and that they intended to fully co-operate. Responding to a Think Progress article arguing that TMZ had become the media’s “most potent” pro-Trump outlet, the comedian hinted last week at rising tensions around the Secret Service’s inquiry. “Hey… TMZ and [TMZ founder] Harvey Levin,” she wrote: “May you NEVER [be] under fed investigation like I am now.”
Mueller probe could draw focus to Russian crime operations
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has long warned that Russian organized crime posed a threat to democratic institutions, including “criminally linked oligarchs” who might collude with the Russian government to undermine business competition.
Those concerns, ever-present if not necessarily always top priorities, are front and center once more.
An ongoing special counsel investigation is drawing attention to Russian efforts to meddle in democratic processes, the type of skullduggery that in the past has relied on hired hackers and outside criminals. It’s not clear how much the probe by former FBI Director Robert Mueller will center on the criminal underbelly of Moscow, but he’s already picked some lawyers with experience fighting organized crime. And as the team looks for any financial entanglements of Trump associates and relationships with Russian officials, its focus could land again on the intertwining of Russia’s criminal operatives and its intelligence services.
Russian organized crime has manifested itself over the decades in more conventional forms of money laundering, credit card fraud and black market sales. Justice Department prosecutors have repeatedly racked up convictions for those offenses.
In recent years, though, the bond between Russian intelligence agencies and criminal networks has been especially alarming to American law enforcement officials, blending motives of espionage with more old-fashioned greed. In March, for instance, two hired hackers were charged along with two officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service in a cyberattack on Yahoo Inc. in 2013.
It’s too early to know how Russian criminal networks might fit into the election meddling investigation, but central to the probe are devastating breaches of Democratic email accounts, including those of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. U.S. authorities have blamed those hacks on Russian intelligence services working to discredit Clinton and help Trump — but have said the overall effort involved third-party intermediaries and paid Internet trolls.
Former law enforcement officials say Russian organized crime has been a concern for at least a couple of decades, though not necessarily the most pressing demand given finite resources and budget constraints. The threat is diffuse and complex, and Russia’s historic lack of cooperation has complicated efforts to apprehend suspects. And the responsibility for combatting the problem often falls across different divisions of the FBI and the Justice Department, depending on whether it’s a criminal or national security offense — a sometimes-blurry boundary.
“It’s not an easy thing to kind of grasp or understand, but it’s very dangerous to our country because they have so many different aspects, unlike a traditional cartel,” said Robert Anderson, a retired FBI executive assistant director who worked counterintelligence cases and oversaw the criminal and cyber branch.
“You have to know where to look, which makes it more complicated,” he added. “And you have to understand what you’re looking for.”
Federal prosecutors continue to bring traditional organized crime cases, such as one last month in New York charging 33 members and associates of a Russian crime syndicate in a racketeering and extortion scheme that officials say involved cargo shipment thefts and efforts to defraud casinos. But there’s a heightened awareness about more sophisticated cyber threats that commingle the interests of the government and of criminals.
“An organized criminal group matures in what they do,” said retired FBI assistant director Ron Hosko. “What they once did here through extortion, some of these groups are now doing through cyberattack vectors.”
Within the Justice Department, it’s been apparent since the collapse of the Soviet Union that crime from that territory could affect national security in Europe and the U.S. Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was years ago a supervisory special agent of a task force created to deal with Eurasian organized crime.
A 2001 report from the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, a research arm, called America “the land of opportunity for unloading criminal goods and laundering dirty money.” It said crime groups in the region were establishing ties to drug trafficking networks, and that “criminally linked oligarchs” might work with the government to undermine competition in gas, oil and other strategic markets.
Three months later came the Sept. 11 attacks, and the FBI, then under Mueller’s leadership, and other agencies left no doubt that terrorism was the most important priority.
“I recall talking to the racketeering guys after that and them saying, ‘Forget any focus now on organized crime,’” said James Finckenauer, an author of the report.
Besides cyber threats, Justice Department officials in recent years have worried about the effect of unchecked international corruption, creating a kleptocracy initiative to recover money plundered by government leaders for their own purposes.
In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder pledged the Justice Department’s commitment to recouping large sums believed to have been stolen during the regime of Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president chased from power that year.
That effort led to an FBI focus on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman who did political consulting work on behalf of Yanukovych’s pro-Russia political party and who remains under scrutiny now.
But those same foreign links have also made cases hard to prove in court.
In many instances, foreign criminal hackers or those sponsored by foreign governments — including China, Iran and Russia — have remained out of reach of American authorities. In some cases, judges have chastised U.S. authorities for prosecutorial overreach in going after international targets.
A San Francisco federal judge, for instance, in 2015 dismissed an indictment involving two Ukrainian businessmen who’d been accused of bribing an official at a United Nations agency responsible for creating standards for machine-readable international passports.
The judge said he couldn’t understand how the government could apply a foreign bribery law to conduct that had no direct connection to the U.S.
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @dtownreppin214 @The Taxman @JKFrazier
John McCain: Russia threat is dead serious. Montenegro coup and murder plot proves it.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on the offensive against Western democracy. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Russia attacked America’s 2016 election, attempted to interfere in France’s 2017 election, and is expected to do the same in German and other future European elections.
But perhaps the most disturbing indication of Putin’s violent ambitions is what happened in October 2016 in the small Balkan country of Montenegro, when Russian intelligence operatives Russia viewed Montenegro’s pursuit of European Union and NATO membership as both insulting and threatening. After all, Montenegro was once part of Russia’s traditional Slavic ally, Serbia. The country has long been a favorite for Russian tourists. Indeed, Russian politicians and oligarchs are reported to own as much as 40% of the real estate in Montenegro.
Montenegro is also strategically located on the Adriatic Sea. Russia unsuccessfully sought a naval base in Montenegro a few years ago. But if Montenegro joined NATO following the election, the entire Adriatic Sea would fall within NATO’s borders.
Montenegro’s entry into NATO would also send a signal that membership was a real possibility for other nations of the Western Balkans. That's why, in Russia’s eyes, Montenegro’s Oct. 16 election was a last chance to stop it from joining NATO and to reassert Russian influence in southeastern Europe. Few would have guessed how far Russia was willing to go. But now we know.
This month, a Montenegrin court accepted indictments against two Russians and 12 other people for their roles in the coup attempt. The American people must be aware of the allegations made in these indictments, which are now public. Pieced together, they reveal not only another blatant attack on democracy by the Russian government, but also an unmistakable warning that Putin will do whatever it takes to achieve his ambition to restore the Russian empire.
According to the indictments, two members of the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, took over a plot to destabilize Montenegro sometime in 2016 in league with Montenegrin opposition politicians and Serbian nationalists. One of the leading Serb plotters was brought to Moscow multiple times, once on a ticket paid for with funds sent from a Western Union on the same street as GRU headquarters in Moscow.
The plan was this:
As Election Day protests were under way in front of the Montenegrin parliament, a group of 50 armed men, recruited by the Russian GRU agents and wearing police uniforms, would ambush and kill the members of Montenegro’s Special Anti-Terrorist Unit to prevent them from interfering with the coup. The armed men would then proceed to the parliament, where they'd begin shooting at members of the police defending the building.
Led by the coup plotters, the protesters would then storm parliament and declare victory for the opposition. Within 48 hours, a new government would be formed and arrests would be made across the capital, including of Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic. If the prime minister could not be captured, he'd be killed.
It appears the plot might even have involved trying to blame the United States for the violence. An Orlando company was contacted about providing security services in the Montenegrin capital during the election. One can only speculate that American security personnel on the ground during a coup would have made excellent patsies for stories on Sputnik and Russia Today.
Fortunately, the plan never got off the ground. Several days before Election Day, one of the plotters got cold feet and informed the Montenegrin authorities. Arrests were made, and the plot was disrupted. In the aftermath, the Russian GRU agents tried to hire an assassin to kill Montenegro’s prime minister, but to no avail. The agents eventually made their way back to Moscow.
This heinous plot should be a warning to every American that we cannot treat Russia’s interference in our 2016 election as an isolated incident. We have to stop looking at this through the warped lens of politics and see this attack on our democracy for what it is: just one phase of Putin’s long-term campaign to weaken the United States, to destabilize Europe, to break the NATO alliance, to undermine confidence in Western values, and to erode any and all resistance to his dangerous view of the world.
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
It won’t be long before Putin takes interest in another American election. The victim may be a Republican. It may be a Democrat. To Putin, it won’t matter as long as he achieves his dark and divisive goals.
We must take our own side in this fight — not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans. The Senate passed strong new sanctions against Russia this month by an overwhelming 97-2 vote. I hope the House will delay no further, send this bill to the president, and send a message to Vladimir Putin that America will stand strong in defense of our democracy.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during US election
Questions raised as to whether Trump supports coordinated with Moscow to spread bogus stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton
Julian BorgerWednesday 5 July 2017 06.30 EDT
Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, says there was evidence that fake news campaigns appeared to target voters in swing states. Photograph: Jay Laprete/AFP/Getty Images
The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clintonon social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.
The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.
Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.
It is a wide-ranging investigation that is examining the unusually large number of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign, as well as the possibility that the Kremlin has personal or financial leverage over members in the Trump camp, including the president himself according to his own remarks on Twitter.
The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.
Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.
“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.
Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.
Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.
Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found that was a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.
“This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,” Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject.
Bernie Sanders at a rally during the 2016 election. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
“What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?”
Mattes believes that the aim of the campaign was to damage Clinton, who Vladimir Putin saw as his arch foe, and then, after the primaries were over, to minimise the number of Sanders voters who switched their support to Clinton in the face-off against Trump.
He was particularly struck by a report on 10 August that formed part of the dossier on the Russian interference campaign compiled by the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, which quoted an unnamed Trump associate discussing a Russian-driven campaign to alienate Sanders supporters from Clinton.
“He was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn’t articulate until September,” he said. Because the Sanders online campaign was so open, democratic and relatively unregulated, Mattes says he now realises: “We basically set ourselves up to be victims of an international cyberwarfare campaign. We were pawns in this but very effective pawns.”
Clint Watts, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert, said that a Russia-driven influence campaign also became apparent in the Republican primaries.
He told the Senate intelligence committee the campaign “may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed”.
He saw the same pattern that Mattes had observed, of seemingly independent operators across Europe suddenly starting to propagate similar messages consistent with messaging from Moscow.
“What you have to look at now is how were these sites financed and you have look at their ownership. How did they get the funds to get started?” said Watts, now a senior fellow at the Centre For Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
He has also found a high degree of apparent coordination in the dissemination of fake news between official Russian propaganda outlets and “alt-right” sites in the US.
“They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,” he added. “And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @dtownreppin214 @The Taxman @JKFrazier
