RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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John Kelly's personal cell phone was compromised, White House believes
John Kelly's personal cell phone was compromised, White House believes
White House tech support discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to tech support staff this summer.
By JOSH DAWSEY, EMILY STEPHENSON and ANDREA PETERSON
10/05/2017 05:29 PM EDT
White House officials believe that chief of staff John Kelly’s personal cellphone was compromised, potentially as long ago as December, according to three U.S. government officials.
The discovery raises concerns that hackers or foreign governments may have had access to data on Kelly’s phone while he was secretary of Homeland Security and after he joined the West Wing.
Tech support staff discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to White House tech support this summer complaining that it wasn’t working or updating software properly.
Kelly told the staffers the phone hadn’t been working properly for months, according to the officials.
White House aides prepared a one-page September memo summarizing the incident, which was circulated throughout the administration.
A White House spokesman said Kelly hadn’t used the personal phone often since joining the administration. This official said Kelly relied on his government-issued phone for communications.
The official, who did not dispute any of POLITICO’s reporting on the timeline of events or the existence of the memo, said Kelly no longer had possession of the device but declined to say where the phone is now.
Kelly has since begun using a different phone, one of the officials said, though he relies on his government phone when he’s inside the White House.
Several government officials said it was unclear when — or where — Kelly’s phone was first compromised. It is unclear what data might have been accessed, if any.
Kelly’s travel schedule prior to joining the administration in January is under review. The former Marine general retired in 2016 as chief of U.S. Southern Command.
Staffers reviewed the cellphone for several days and tried to decipher what had happened to it, the officials said. Many functions on the phone were not working.
The IT department concluded the phone had been compromised and should not be used further, according to the memo.
The document triggered concern throughout the West Wing about what information might have been exposed, one of the officials said.
The revelation comes amid an internal probe at the White House into personal email use. Senior officials, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, have at times used personal email for government business, POLITICO has reported.
Additional storage lockers were recently added in the West Wing for personal devices and aides have been warned to limit personal cellphone use in the building.
Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, said the worst-case scenario would be “full access,” in which an attacker would be able to essentially control a device, including its microphone and camera.
“The [attackers] I would be most worried about are nation-states or other actors who may have access to resale of commercial spyware sold to nation-states,” he said.
“The average user won’t notice anything at all. Really the only way to pick up on that is to do forensics on the phone,” he added.
This article was reported in coordination with the Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit investigative watchdog organization.
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Tillerson’s News Conference Only Highlights Strains With Trump
Tillerson’s News Conference Only Highlights Strains With Trump
By PETER BAKER, MAGGIE HABERMAN and GLENN THRUSHOCT. 4, 2017
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, at a news conference on Wednesday, denied that he had considered resigning.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS. Photo by Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »
WASHINGTON — Long-simmering tension within President Trump’s national security team spilled into public view on Wednesday as Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson took the extraordinary step of calling a news conference to affirm his support for Mr. Trump, despite what associates describe as his deep frustration with the president and talk of resignation.
Mr. Tillerson praised Mr. Trump but did not deny a report that he once referred to the president as a “moron.” Mr. Trump welcomed Mr. Tillerson’s statement of support and declared “total confidence” in his secretary of state.
If Mr. Tillerson had hoped to douse questions about how long he would stay, he instead further fueled a debate about his future. Although he insisted he had never considered resigning, several people close to Mr. Tillerson said he has had to be talked out of drafting a letter of resignation on more than one occasion by his closest allies, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. And they said he has regularly expressed astonishment at how little Mr. Trump understands the basics of foreign policy.
A former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Mr. Tillerson has never found his place as a subordinate to the hard-charging, unpredictable president. He has bristled at being undercut, as he was over the weekend when Mr. Trump publicly said Mr. Tillerson was “wasting his time” by trying to open talks with North Korea. At the same time, Mr. Tillerson has alienated lawmakers, foreign policy veterans and the news media while demoralizing the State Department, and critics inside and outside the White House consider his troubles self-inflicted.
The president initially viewed Mr. Tillerson as a granite-jawed cabinet secretary who fit Mr. Trump’s requirement that top advisers look as if they came out of “central casting,” as he has put it. Mr. Trump regularly boasted about hiring the head of the world’s largest corporation — and in the presence of a profoundly uncomfortable Mr. Tillerson, whom the president for months referred to as “Mr. Exxon.”
But the deliberate, slow-talking oil executive has little personal chemistry with the quick-talking, impulsive Mr. Trump. Mr. Tillerson has avoided expressing his pique to the president. But aides and Trump associates who have been in the room with them said Mr. Tillerson’s body language, eye rolling and terse expressions left little doubt that he disapproves of Mr. Trump’s approach.
Mr. Trump, they said, has noticed how Mr. Tillerson slouches in his presence, particularly when he disagrees with a decision. When overruled, Mr. Tillerson often says, “It’s your deal,” to the president’s irritation, according to two former administration officials.
Mr. Tillerson felt compelled on Wednesday to address the internal schism after NBC News reported that he had been prepared to step down this summer until he was talked out of it and that after a meeting of national security officials at the Pentagon he had derided Mr. Trump as a “moron.” Vice President Mike Pence at one point counseled Mr. Tillerson on how to ease tension with the president, according to the report.
“There’s never been a consideration in my mind to leave,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters. “I serve at the appointment of the president, and I am here for as long as the president feels I can be useful to achieving his objectives.”
Asked directly if he had called Mr. Trump a “moron,” Mr. Tillerson would not say. “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” he said.
When that left the impression that it was true, a State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, appeared before reporters hours later to deny it on his behalf. “He did not say that,” she said.
The spectacle left the State Department paralyzed. In the moments leading up to Mr. Tillerson’s statement, hallways in the department’s cavernous headquarters were nearly deserted as diplomats were glued to televisions wondering whether he would join the parade of top Trump administration officials who have resigned.
Indeed, the news conference was the latest rupture in an administration consumed by palace intrigue from the start. Just last week, Tom Price resigned as secretary of health and human services after being publicly scolded by Mr. Trump for using chartered flights. Mr. Trump has lost a chief of staff, a national security adviser, a chief strategist, a press secretary and two communications directors. He has fired the F.B.I. director, belittled his attorney general and publicly assailed the deputy attorney general.
That turnover is one reason Mr. Trump has not pushed Mr. Tillerson out, according to advisers. Speaking with reporters in Las Vegas, Mr. Trump dismissed the report that Mr. Tillerson considered resigning. “It was fake news,” he said. “It’s a totally phony story.” Asked about the secretary, Mr. Trump said, “Total confidence in Rex. I have total confidence.”
But even as Mr. Tillerson denied a rift with the president on Wednesday, he alluded to significant differences over North Korea and Iran. He stressed a peaceful resolution of the nuclear dispute with North Korea and associated himself with Mr. Mattis, who just a day earlier endorsed retaining the nuclear agreement with Iran that Mr. Trump has threatened to rip up.
“President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda has given voice to millions who felt completely abandoned by the political status quo and who felt their interests came second to those of other countries,” he said. “President Trump’s foreign policy goals break the mold of what people traditionally think is achievable on behalf of our country.”
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, expressed hope that Mr. Tillerson would not leave because he serves as a check on instability. “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos, and I support them very much,” he said.
But others said it was time for him to go. “Rex Tillerson has been dealt a bad hand by the Potus & has played it badly,” Richard N. Haass, a State Department official for Republican presidents and now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter, using the initials for president of the United States. “For both reasons he cannot be effective SecState & should resign.”
Mr. Tillerson has been frustrated for months, not just by Mr. Trump’s unpredictable policy positions but by his provocative leadership style. He publicly distanced himself when Mr. Trump blamed “both sides” for violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and bristled when the president gave a political speech to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Mr. Tillerson once headed. NBC reported that he was so offended by the Boy Scouts speech that he threatened not to return to Washington from a visit to Texas.
The episode that Mr. Tillerson called a real breaking point, according to associates, came when he was trying to mediate a dispute between the Persian Gulf state of Qatar and its Arab neighbors. The secretary had long told colleagues that relationships he built over decades in business made him uniquely qualified to broker a deal.
But he complained bitterly that he was undermined by Mr. Trump and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom he accused of siding with the United Arab Emirates. When Mr. Tillerson publicly called for a “calm and thoughtful dialogue,”the president less than an hour later lashed out at Qatar as a financier of terrorism.
Mr. Tillerson was also angry with Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, whom he accused of planting negative news stories, including a report that the secretary had dressed down a White House official, Johnny DeStefano, in the West Wing. During that same meeting, Mr. Tillerson groused to White House officials about Mr. Trump’s tweets, describing them as counterproductive to his efforts at diplomacy, according to a person with direct knowledge.
His aides also have been looking over their shoulders at Nikki R. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, who is seen as a probable replacement if Mr. Tillerson leaves. R. C. Hammond, Mr. Tillerson’s spokesman, told NBC that Mr. Pence had asked Mr. Tillerson if Ms. Haley was helpful to the administration.
Mr. Hammond on Wednesday said he “spoke out of line about conversations I wasn’t privy to,” and a spokesman for Mr. Pence said any suggestion that the vice president questioned Ms. Haley’s value was “categorically false.”
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str8cashhomie87
All Star
I wouldn't be surprised if Mueller told Steele not to meet with Congress because some of the Members of Congress may be compromised. This exchange was reported earlier this year:Steele wouldn't give them the time of day but probably picked up the phone first ring for Mueller. Making Congress look like some chumps.
Jesus H. Christ
I died for your sins
Trump mad because Tillerson didn't deny calling him a moron
So mad he skipped out on Vegas to fix this issue in the WH?
So mad he skipped out on Vegas to fix this issue in the WH?
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Trump mad because Tillerson didn't deny calling him a moron
So mad he skipped out on Vegas to fix this issue in the WH?
I thought he was there? I didn’t see anything on tv though
FYI, Christopher Steele was the head of the Russia Desk at MI6 
Jesus H. Christ
I died for your sins
I thought he was there? I didn’t see anything on tv though
Brain fart he was there
From reading several reports looks like Tillerson is on thin ice. Tomorrow is Friday so you know what that means
...
Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
this is where shyt gets super sketchy.
branches of governent having a check on one another is a great idea but we are seeing what that means when a macro issue is handled at a micro level.
i understand the macro completely, therefore i follow the micro side of it.
hope that makes sense.
So mueller already interviewed the dossier? 
DaddyFresh
Superstar
During summer.So mueller already interviewed the dossier?
Real G's really do move in silence
.Congress getting left on read like they hit up a bad light skin bytch they met at the club