RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Yall were saying?


(BTW, this guy ran CIA's RUSSIA desk for a period of time)




Opinion | Russia is furious. That means the sanctions are working.

Russia is furious. That means the sanctions are working.




Anne Applebaum Columnist October 27 at 8:18 PM





In yet another display of spitting fury, the Russian state this week put Bill Browder on the Interpol list, an international register of “most wanted” criminals. This was the fifth time Russia had issued an international arrest warrant for Browder, a businessman who once worked in the country. Wearily, Interpol lifted the warrant on Thursday. But the gesture once again confirmed something few have yet acknowledged: The sanctions on Russia are working.

Browder’s real “crime”? He persuaded another government, this time the Canadians, to pass a “Magnitsky Act,” a bill applying sanctions on Russian tax officials and police involved in a vast scam, one that involved changing the names of companies, hijacking their bank accounts and using them to steal money from the Russian state. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the scam. He was investigated and imprisoned, beaten and deprived of medical care until he died. Ever since, Browder has crusaded to punish those responsible by depriving them of access to Western banks, Western vacation homes and Western educations for their children.

As I’ve argued before, the Russian government really, really hates the Magnitsky sanctions, and it hates them with disproportionate fury. Recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, jeered at Browder during a news conference. The Russian lawyer who met with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 — the one whose fixer dangled the tantalizing offer of “official documents and information that would incriminate” Hillary Clinton — was seeking to have the Magnitsky sanctions lifted, too.

The Magnitsky sanctions also set the template the Obama administration followed in 2014, when, following the invasion of Ukraine, it imposed sanctions not on “Russia,” or on “Russians,” or even on broad Russian economic sectors, but on particular Russian businessmen and officials known to be closely connected to Putin or directly responsible for his policy in Ukraine. At the time, I argued that our sanctions on Russia were too little and had come too late. For a decade, the West turned a blind eye to Russian corruption and money-laundering in Europe and the United States, as well as to growing Russian attempts to manipulate politics. Sanctions placed on a few businessmen and politicians, designed to prevent them from using their American credit cards — how could that stop the tidal wave?

But they did. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was indeed curtailed, both by the sanctions and by the Ukrainian army. A Russian plan to divide Ukraine and create a Russian-speaking state in the east (“Novorossiya”) never came to fruition. The war goes on, but at least it is confined to the far eastern corner of the country. Instead of Novorossiya, the Russian invasion created an unattractive mini-state, a tiny thugocracy (the “Donetsk People’s Republic”) that is not going to attract imitators. Russian attempts to overturn the sanctions — to persuade Europeans to squabble among themselves and drop them — have so far failed. Even the Russian plan to get Donald Trump elected so that he could lift sanctions has backfired, at least for the moment: Russian participation in the U.S. election has so constrained the Trump administration that it has found it difficult to have any kind of Russia policy at all.

Inside Russia, the sanctions have created a good deal of elite anger, some directed at Europe, the United States and Browder, but some directed, quietly, at Putin himself. Even Russian businessmen not immediately affected by the sanctions say they are far more constrained now in what they can do — and they know whom to blame. The Canadian decision on Magnitsky sanctions will add to the conviction that this won’t end soon. The gloom is building, adding to a broader sense that Putin’s Ukraine policy was a mistake and has to be amended. And this, of course, was the point of the sanctions in the first place.

I still think we need a more profound change in our policy toward Russia, one that focuses far more broadly on protecting U.S. and European politics and business from Russian corruption and manipulation, and indeed from corruption and manipulation coming from other authoritarian states. But it’s a mistake to imagine that sanctions have no impact. It was foolish for the State Department, in an amateurish attempt at consolidation, to shut down its office on sanctions. This is a sophisticated policy tool, it has its place, and it’s having an effect. Russia’s spitting fury is the proof.

Read more from Anne Applebaum’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

Ruth Marcus: The deal Trump wanted with Russia


Anne Applebaum: The case for Trump-Russia collusion: We’re getting very, very close

Eugene Robinson: The bad news about ‘this Russia thing’ keeps pouring in for Trump

Anne Applebaum: This law might explain why a Russian lawyer wanted to meet with Trump





@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.

 

[Arithmetic]

Jr. has made millions in the last year outside of the family business.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

​

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Joy Reid accuses Trump of colluding with Fox News on bogus Clinton stories because he knew indictments were coming

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[dza]

#whitelivesmatter is trending

Those bots getting to work.

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

Remember in multiple occasions Trump has met with people before or immediately after they were interviewed by Mueller. The most recent reported case was him having dinner with Priebus the day before or after he met with Mueller's team to be interviewed. Trump also constantly dined with Comey to get a sense of what was going on.

Based on that I'd bet money that Trump called Rosenstein to the WH within the last few days and demanded to know who is being indicted; as acting AG for the investigation, Rosenstein certainly knows what's in the sealed indictments but is not allowed to tell anyone, including the president. So I'm going to assume he declined to tell Trump.

If it's true that Trump is raging right now he no doubt views Rosenstein as disloyal for not telling him. Which could be the spark to start the process of firing Mueller on Monday or before Thanksgiving. Fox News, a member of the WSJ editorial board and other conservatives are running with this "fire Mueller" bullshyt. I think he tries to do it fellas. It's the biggest play he has to change the media focus (which he's obsessed with). If people get arrested on Monday it's gonna be the main story for weeks. Unless Trump does something...

Too late charges filed, trump can’t fire Mueller.. Plus NYS AG waiting in the wings.. Mueller pretty much made this case pardon proof

 

[AZBeauty]

View media item 15265
Muller to America

 

[88m3]

#whitelivesmatter is trending

Those bots getting to work.

trolls are out in force the past week on the coli even

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Dont forget...the NYTimes knew they fukked up in January:​

Trump, Russia, and the News Story That Wasn’t
By LIZ SPAYD JAN. 20, 2017

In Danilovgrad, a town in Montenegro, Serbian supporters made their views known on a billboard in November. Savo Prelevic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
LATE September was a frantic period for New York Times reporters covering the country’s secretive national security apparatus. Working sources at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Capitol Hill and various intelligence agencies, the team chased several bizarre but provocative leads that, if true, could upend the presidential race. The most serious question raised by the material was this: Did a covert connection exist between Donald Trump and Russian officials trying to influence an American election?

One vein of reporting centered on a possible channel of communication between a Trump organization computer server and a Russian bank with ties to Vladimir Putin. Another source was offering The Times salacious material describing an odd cross-continental dance between Trump and Moscow. The most damning claim was that Trump was aware of Russia’s efforts to hack Democratic computers, an allegation with implications of treason. Reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers led the effort, aided by others.

Conversations over what to publish were prolonged and lively, involving Washington and New York, and often including the executive editor, Dean Baquet. If the allegations were true, it was a huge story. If false, they could damage The Times’s reputation. With doubts about the material and with the F.B.I. discouraging publication, editors decided to hold their fire.

But was that the right decision? Was there a way to write about some of these allegations using sound journalistic principles but still surfacing the investigation and important leads? Eventually, The Times did just that, but only after other news outlets had gone first.

I have spoken privately with several journalists involved in the reporting last fall, and I believe a strong case can be made that The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had.

I appreciate the majority view that there wasn’t enough proof of a link between Trump and the Kremlin to write a hard-hitting story. But The Times knew several critical facts: the F.B.I. had a sophisticated investigation underway on Trump’s organization, possibly including FISA warrants. (Some news outlets now report that the F.B.I. did indeed have such warrants, an indication of probable cause.) Investigators had identified a mysterious communication channel, partly through a lead from anti-Trump operatives

At one point, the F.B.I. was so serious about its investigation into the server that it asked The Times to delay publication. Meanwhile, reporters had met with a former British intelligence officer who was building the dossier. While his findings were difficult to confirm, Times reporting bore out that he was respected in his craft. And of his material that was checkable, no significant red flags emerged. What’s more, said one journalist frustrated with the process, a covert link seemed like a plausible explanation for the strange bromance between Trump and Putin.

There were disagreements about whether to hold back. There was even an actual draft of a story. But it never saw daylight. The deciding vote was Baquet’s, who was adamant, then and now, that they made the right call.

“We heard about the back-channel communications between the Russians and Trump,” he said. “We reported it, and found no evidence that it was true. We wrote everything we knew — and we wrote a lot. Anybody that thinks we sat on stuff is outrageous. It’s just false.”

I don’t believe anyone suppressed information for ignoble reasons, and indeed The Times produced strong work on former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But the idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct.

If you know the F.B.I. is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write. Not a “gotcha” story that asserts unsubstantiated facts. But a piece that describes the nature of the investigations, the unexplained but damning leads, with emphasis on what is known and what isn’t.

Running every detail of the dossier, as BuzzFeed did, would have been irresponsible. Writing about a significant investigation would not. Weeks after The Times had the goods, Franklin Foer of Slate and David Corn of Mother Jones each took a turn at such pre-election articles. Their stories may not have been precisely what The Times would have done, but they offered a model.

If The Times didn’t write about ongoing investigations, it wouldn’t have produced the excellent scoop on Trump associates and Russia that broke Thursday night. Nor would it have so relentlessly documented the F.B.I.’s pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s emails until all facts were resolved. That investigation was fair game, and so was Trump’s.

A wave of readers over the past week have challenged The Times’s decision to sit on its reporting about the dossier. Among them was Michael Russo of Brooklyn, who had this to say:

I can appreciate that journalistic diligence requires your paper to describe these memos as “unsubstantiated.” But the “unsubstantiated” allegations described in this article have been circulating for months. While your editors made a value judgment about the veracity of these claims, American intelligence agencies apparently took the memos seriously enough to open their own investigations. How is this not newsworthy in its own right?​

There is an unsettling theme that runs through The Times’s publishing decisions. In each instance, it was the actions of government officials that triggered newsroom decisions — not additional reporting or insight that journalists gained. On the server, once the F.B.I. signaled it had grown wary of its importance — without giving conclusive evidence as to why — the paper backed off. Weeks later, the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, publicly admonished the F.B.I. for being secretive about its probe of Trump. That gave The Times cover to write what it knew about the bureau’s investigation into the bank server.

It was the same pattern on the dossier. Only after learning from CNN that Trump and President Obama had been briefed on the document did The Times publish what it had known for months. Its confidence in the material had not changed, nor did its editors know whether the top level briefing meant the government believed the information was true. But the briefing became justifiable cause to publish.

In this cat-and-mouse game between government and press, the government won.

After-action insights are easier than in-the-moment decisions. Back then, the media still thought Trump was a weak challenger to Clinton, a mind-set that might have made taking the risk of publishing explosive allegations all the more fraught.

But it’s hard not to wonder what impact such information might have had on voters still evaluating the candidates, an issue I chided The Times for not pursuing enough in an earlier column. Would more sources have come forward? Would we already know the essential facts?

If the new president was in fact colluding with a foreign adversary, journalists and investigators should feel enormous pressure to conclusively establish that fact. If it is not true, both Trump and the country deserve to have this issue put to rest.

Updated at 5:25 p.m., January 21, to include clarifying information on the Times investigation.

 

[Jean toomer]

Manafort had FISA warrants on him for years: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html

Best believe Manafort has been singing like the temptations. We are officially at defcon 2....

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[Arithmetic]

At the time, I argued that our sanctions on Russia were too little and had come too late. For a decade, the West turned a blind eye to Russian corruption and money-laundering in Europe and the United States, as well as to growing Russian attempts to manipulate politics. Sanctions placed on a few businessmen and politicians, designed to prevent them from using their American credit cards — how could that stop the tidal wave?

But they did. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was indeed curtailed, both by the sanctions and by the Ukrainian army. A Russian plan to divide Ukraine and create a Russian-speaking state in the east (“Novorossiya”) never came to fruition. The war goes on, but at least it is confined to the far eastern corner of the country. Instead of Novorossiya, the Russian invasion created an unattractive mini-state, a tiny thugocracy (the “Donetsk People’s Republic”) that is not going to attract imitators. Russian attempts to overturn the sanctions — to persuade Europeans to squabble among themselves and drop them — have so far failed. Even the Russian plan to get Donald Trump elected so that he could lift sanctions has backfired, at least for the moment: Russian participation in the U.S. election has so constrained the Trump administration that it has found it difficult to have any kind of Russia policy at all.

Inside Russia, the sanctions have created a good deal of elite anger, some directed at Europe, the United States and Browder, but some directed, quietly, at Putin himself. Even Russian businessmen not immediately affected by the sanctions say they are far more constrained now in what they can do — and they know whom to blame. The Canadian decision on Magnitsky sanctions will add to the conviction that this won’t end soon. The gloom is building, adding to a broader sense that Putin’s Ukraine policy was a mistake and has to be amended. And this, of course, was the point of the sanctions in the first place.

I still think we need a more profound change in our policy toward Russia, one that focuses far more broadly on protecting U.S. and European politics and business from Russian corruption and manipulation, and indeed from corruption and manipulation coming from other authoritarian states. But it’s a mistake to imagine that sanctions have no impact. It was foolish for the State Department, in an amateurish attempt at consolidation, to shut down its office on sanctions. This is a sophisticated policy tool, it has its place, and it’s having an effect. Russia’s spitting fury is the proof.

Browder went all out for his boy Magnitsky. Putin is in a bad spot. If Trump goes down, he will lose it.

 

[Arithmetic]

"The gloom is building, adding to a broader sense that Putin’s Ukraine policy was a mistake and has to be amended. And this, of course, was the point of the sanctions in the first place.

I still think we need a more profound change in our policy toward Russia, one that focuses far more broadly on protecting U.S. and European politics and business from Russian corruption and manipulation, and indeed from corruption and manipulation coming from other authoritarian states. But it’s a mistake to imagine that sanctions have no impact. It was foolish for the State Department, in an amateurish attempt at consolidation, to shut down its office on sanctions. This is a sophisticated policy tool, it has its place, and it’s having an effect. Russia’s spitting fury is the proof."