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

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Mueller said quit yanking my chain, bytch :robertmuelllerumad:



:FBIMuellerLaugh:​

@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. @GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy! @Cali_livin

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[WaveMolecules]

We eating good on this rainy Sunday night

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

We eating good on this rainy Sunday night

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

:ALERTRED:

Start the clock on the missing professor. They might murk this dude




:weebaynanimated:​

:PutinCmonSon:​

@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. @GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy! @Cali_livin

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[88m3]

nbd

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

\

 

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Revealed: how Russia invaded the heart of British power


The Kremlin’s manipulation of the American election began with Brexit. Andrew Gilligan unravels the connections between Team Trump, the referendum vote and Moscow​

The Sunday Times, November 5 2017, 12:01am

Three days ago, in a Russian government building in Kensington, west London, a group of Russia’s closest British friends gathered for an event. The speaker was interesting: Neil Kent, a Cambridge professor who co-convened a prestigious intelligence seminar at the university, regularly attended by some of the biggest names in the spy world — until he resigned last year over accusations that the seminar was linked to the Kremlin.

The group holding Thursday’s event was even more interesting: the Westminster Russia Forum, which calls itself “the United Kingdom’s premier exponent of neutral and positive relations between the UK and Russia”. The forum is the successor to the Conservative Friends of Russia, which had to disband in 2012 after a number of MPs resigned from its board amid allegations that it amounted to “Tories for Putin”.

The forum’s world view is perhaps best summed up by its deputy chairman, John Bonar, who speaks in its official video of his admiration for the “tremendous achievements that are being made now, reasserting Russia’s might as a world power”.

There are no MPs on the board of the Westminster Russia Forum, but what there are is even more intriguing: several senior figures from the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.

The forum’s director of membership and chairman of its campaign committee is Andrew Barrand, former deputy campaign director of Vote Leave, former election agent for the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and now a staff member for a Tory MP. The forum’s political director, Morgan Brobyn, was deputy director of Vote Leave in Wales.

Nigel Sussman, the forum’s commercial director, is a member of Ukip’s national executive and a former parliamentary candidate for the party. In March, Sussman took an official trip to Russian-annexed Crimea, coming back with a glowing report of how its takeover by the Kremlin was justified and its people had “always considered Russia as their motherland”. Russia, he said, is a “democratic country” that is being “demonised”.

With the plea agreement made in America last Monday, in which Donald Trump’s former aide George Papadopoulos admitted his contacts with Russia during the Trump presidential election campaign, it was the week when the possible connections between Moscow and the unexpected political earthquakes of the past 18 months — Trump, Brexit — suddenly came into sharp focus. And a striking number of the strands in the web run through Britain.

The meeting at which Papadopoulos said he was offered “thousands of emails” of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton by a man with “high-level Russian government” contacts took place in April 2016 in a London hotel. The ”professor” said to have made the offer, Joseph Mifsud, is a globetrotting Maltese academic at the University of Stirling in Scotland. (Mifsud denies Papadopoulos’s claims).

Another source of dirt on Clinton, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, is based in London too. In the run-up to the presidential election, WikiLeaks published thousands of damaging emails hacked from Clinton staffers’ accounts, in what US intelligence says was part of a Russian plot to promote Trump’s victory. The CIA director, Mike Pompeo, said WikiLeaks was a “hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”.

The Trump campaign was in touch with Assange through intermediaries. Last month it emerged that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm that worked for Trump, had approached Assange during the campaign seeking the release of further Clinton emails, which Assange says he turned down.

Curiously, Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, visited Assange’s bolthole in March (he was with a producer for LBC radio and insists it was a journalistic mission, although no journalism seems to have resulted from the visit).

Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to construct a precise “psychographic profile” of individuals from their social media posts, Facebook likes and internet use and says it was “instrumental” in Trump’s victory, “identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters and driving turnout to the polls”. It, too, is based in London; its chief executive, Alexander Nix, is an Old Etonian. Its vice-president was Steve Bannon, godfather of the “alt-right”, Trump’s campaign director and former White House chief strategist. It is largely owned and funded by Robert Mercer, a key Trump donor who introduced Bannon to Trump.

Alexander Nix heads data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which ‘teamed up with’ the Leave.EU campaignBRYAN BEDDER
Members of the US House of Representatives intelligence committee, which last week grilled Facebook about the impact of fake Russian messages on the US election, are also investigating whether Cambridge Analytica played any part in disseminating or promoting them. Its inquiries, according to a committee source, have proved “fruitful”.

In February 2016 Nix wrote that Cambridge Analytica had “teamed up with” Leave.EU, the Ukip-linked Brexit campaign, and had “already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign”. A Cambridge Analytica executive, Brittany Kaiser, was on the panel at Leave.EU’s press launch in October 2015. Leave.EU’s communications director, Andy Wigmore, said Cambridge Analytica had been “happy to help” Leave.EU.

The Brexit referendum was the “petri dish” for the Trump campaign, Wigmore added: “We shared a lot of information because what they were trying to do and what we were trying to do had massive parallels.”

Both Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU have since changed their stories. The company now insists it has “never been retained by Leave.EU or provided any services, paid or unpaid, to Leave.EU or any other of the [Brexit] campaigns”.

The Electoral Commission in Britain is investigating whether Leave.EU accepted “impermissible donations, including of services”, saying there are “reasonable grounds to suspect that potential offences under the law have occurred”.

The head and chief funder of Leave.EU, the businessman Arron Banks, gave or lent more than £8m to the cause, but there have been persistent questions about where he gets his money from. In 2013, according to an investigation by Open Democracy, a left-wing campaign group, Banks was in financial “trouble” but “a year later these financial worries seem to have completely evaporated”.

The Labour MP Ben Bradshaw raised Banks’s wealth in parliament in the context of “widespread concern over foreign, and particularly Russian, interference in western democracies”. Banks’s wife, Katya, is Russian; her father is a Russian government official. Her first British husband, before Banks, was questioned by Special Branch.

Banks has dismissed the idea of a link between Russia and Brexit as “complete bollocks from beginning to end” and attacked Bradshaw, who is gay, as “Bent Ben”.

Last week the Electoral Commission announced a second investigation — this time into Banks and whether he was “the true source” of his donations and loans to Leave.EU.

“Dark money” — cash channelled to disguise its real origin — was a key funding stream for the “leave” campaign. A shadowy Glasgow-based group called the Constitutional Research Council (CRC) donated £425,000 to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which used much of it to buy “leave” advertising outside Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish political funding was not at the time subject to the same disclosure requirements as the rest of the UK.

The CRC has refused to say where the money came from but Scotland, with its independence movement, is a keen focus of Russian interest; the Kremlin’s Sputnik news agency has established its British headquarters in Edinburgh, not London.

Britain also appears to have seen some suspicious social media activity during the referendum, although the tech companies have so far been less forthcoming about the UK than about the US.

Researchers at City, University of London found that 13,500 fake Twitter accounts tweeted extensively about the referendum, largely in favour of “leave”, only to disappear just after the vote. A handful of the 2,700 fake accounts set up by a Russian “troll farm” to undermine the US election tweeted referendum- related content as well. Interestingly, Westminster Russia Forum’s deputy chairman and “technical director,” Slava Jefremov, works for Google, according to his LinkedIn page, and has his own data-mining consultancy, although that may be simple coincidence.

The two Electoral Commission investigations join two others — by the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee — into the use of data in politics and the broader phenomenon of “fake news”. But compared with the US they seem slow and feeble.

The Electoral Commission has taken almost 18 months to act. Only in the past two weeks have Facebook, Twitter and Google been officially asked whether they know of any Russian-linked attempts to influence UK politics through their platforms.

For some, that is because there is nothing to see. “People are trying to find excuses for why they lost, whether it’s the Russians or social media witchcraft,” said a leading “leave” campaigner. “There was no magic to it. Voters were hurting and the ‘remain’ case was badly made.”

Trump staffers say Cambridge Analytica has overhyped its role in the campaign, which they claim was minor. Some say there is relatively little evidence that psychographics even works and technically illiterate critics are bestowing on it a power it does not deserve.

Yet against that must be set Banks’s statement that “artificial intelligence won it for ‘leave’” and clear evidence of the impact on Brexit and the US election result of people who previously did not vote. Such voters are disproportionately influenced by the internet and social media, election studies have shown.

Whoever is signing the cheques, the explosion in paid political campaigning on Facebook, with its massive reach and non-UK base, has dramatically eroded the decades-old rules — such as constituency spending limits, donor declarations and the television advertising ban — designed to limit the power of money in British elections. And if London does turn out to be the centre of a Kremlin operation to harm the West, there is a reason. For years Britain has enjoyed taking Russian money too much to ask awkward questions.

“Russian money in Britain is notoriously bloody everywhere,” said Ben Nimmo, information defence fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. “When the British go to Ukraine or wherever and lecture them on money laundering, they just laugh. They say: you are the biggest money laundering place there is.”

Using leaked documents Bill Browder, a British-American financier and anti-corruption campaigner, has detailed how stolen Russian money has been laundered through a network of banks, companies and purchases in 12 countries, including Britain.

Eleven of those countries have begun criminal investigations and frozen the assets, Browder said. Only the UK has refused to act.

“Every single time we have filed a complaint, nobody has responded,” he said.

“They have always found excuses not to investigate. This country is levitating off the flow of dirty money. If that money was stopped, certain people would find themselves without businesses and I think those people have some political weight in this country.”

City of London police have now opened an investigation into another chunk of stolen money discovered by Browder.

The original source of some of Browder’s information, Alexander Perepilichnyy, was found dead near his Surrey home in 2012. Police still claim foul play was not involved despite an expert detecting signs of a poison in his stomach and intelligence agencies across the West concluding it was an assassination.

Perepilichnyy is one of 14 people connected with opposition to Putin to have died mysteriously in Britain in recent years. US intelligence sources told the BuzzFeed news website there is evidence that all the cases were assassinations by Russian state security or mafia groups. But none has been treated as murder by British police, to the anger of some of our allies.

A senior national security adviser to the British government told BuzzFeed that ministers were not prepared to take the “political risk of dealing firmly and effectively . . . with the activities of the Russian state and Russian-organised crime in the UK” because they were afraid. The Kremlin could, he said, inflict massive harm on Britain.

Maybe the investigations into Russian influence in British politics will end up in the same way. But Andrew Foxall, director of the Russia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society think tank, said it is “highly unlikely that something will not be discovered”. And the vigour of the US inquiry could put some backbone into the weedy Brits.

The Americans might even have a British Papadopoulos for us, a secondary figure to flush out the bigger fry. Earlier this year George Cottrell, a close aide to Farage during the referendum campaign, received a remarkably light sentence after being caught offering to launder drug money in the US.

Cottrell’s plea bargain shows he provided unspecified “information” to the authorities and suggests the possibility that “additional agreements” exist under seal. It might be nothing, but it could put a few names in the dock.