RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
AZBeauty
Stop lyin' nicca.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how complicit is Lindsey Graham?
I hope he had the look of disgust on his face when he said this. This is not only a grown ass 71 yr old man but the President.
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
Trump is the most fascinating, deplorable child like person I have ever seen. You can get him to do anything as long as you complement him
This is unbelievable
Mueller could ask Trump about the weather and he would perjure himself.Ty got jokes. Bill Clinton was a seasoned lawyer and got got, and Ken Starr isn’t in Mueller’s zip code. Dotard needs to resurrect Cochran to escape his fate.
And you know Johnny wouldn’t work for his racists ass anyway
“I have represent thieves, murderers and scumbags, but I draw the line at you Mr Trump”
The Russia scandal just got bigger. And Republicans are trying to prevent an accounting.
By Paul Waldman
January 18, 2018 at 1:44 PM
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
Aside from the president of the United States, almost no one denies that Russia mounted a serious and concerted effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Russians hacked into Democratic Party emails and gave what they obtained to Wikileaks, so it could be released publicly to maximize the political damage to Hillary Clinton. They used social media to spread fictional stories meant to do the same. They made repeated attempts to engage the Trump campaign in a cooperative effort to undermine Clinton and help Trump. They attempted to hack into state voting systems.
And today we learn, in this report from Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy, that they may have funneled money through the NRA to aid the Trump campaign.
This extraordinary possibility shows not just how comprehensive the Russian effort to get Trump elected was, but something else as well: the ways that Republicans have successfully changed our election laws in recent years have made us vulnerable to exactly this kind of foreign manipulation. And in their desire to protect the president, Republicans in Congress may prevent us from ever learning the full truth.
Here’s how the McClatchy report begins:
The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.
FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.
It may turn out that no money found its way from Russia to the campaign to elect Trump. But there are certainly a lot of suggestive things going on, including the fact that Torshin is a sketchy character with deep ties to the NRA, and the fact that the group dramatically increased its election spending in 2016. After spending $12.5 million to help Mitt Romney in 2012, it poured over $30 million into the effort to get Donald Trump elected, and perhaps much more, since certain kinds of campaign spending don’t need to be reported.
But this is significant because it highlights a potential path of foreign influence that we haven’t much talked about. And it was available to Russia because of the relentless GOP effort in recent years to make American campaign finance law simultaneously more open to the influence of big money and more opaque.
One way to understand what happened with regard to Russia is that because our political system is open and decentralized, we’re vulnerable to this kind of attack. But the possibility that Russia funneled money through a group like the NRA highlights another dimension of our vulnerability, which is that thanks to the conservative attack on campaign finance restrictions and disclosure rules, the system has become much less transparent, in ways that enable those with resources — including, perhaps, hostile foreign governments — to influence the elections while keeping their tracks covered.
Let me bring you back eight years to Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. “With all due deference to separation of powers,” Obama said, “last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” He was referring to the Citizens United decision that among other things removed virtually all limits on corporate spending to influence campaigns. When he said that, Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito mouthed the words “Not true,” and afterwards Republicans pretended to be outraged that Obama would be so terribly rude and uncouth as to to criticize a Supreme Court decision with members of the Court sitting right there.
There was some dispute about whether Obama was right — on one hand, foreign corporations were still barred from spending money in American campaigns, but on the other, they could do so through their American subsidiaries. Still, Citizens United did indeed open the floodgates of outside spending, one of the consequences of which was that corporations and individuals realized that 501(c)4 non-profit organizations are a great vehicle for influencing an election, for one important reason: they don’t have to disclose their donors.
For some donors that might not matter, and super PACs, which do have to disclose, have spent more money in the last couple of elections than (c)4s. But if you want to spend election money but you don’t want anyone to know that’s what you’re doing, a (c)4 is the way to do it. And no (c)4 spent more in 2016 than the NRA. Again, it may turn out that this is a big misunderstanding and the NRA didn’t get any Russian money that wound up being spent to help Donald Trump. But the Russia story is more complex now than it seemed before.
Indeed, there’s also this Buzzfeed story out today, which concerns an odd series of financial transactions involving the Russian ambassador, six-figure cash withdrawals, dozens of Russian embassy employees getting checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars paid to a “contractor” for “construction” that looks a lot like a money-laundering scheme.
All this raises an important question: Are we ever going to get to the bottom of this mess? If Republicans have their way, we most certainly aren’t. Not only are they (at least some of them) doing everything they can to limit and hinder the congressional investigations into the Russia scandal, they’re also trying to intimidate the FBI with charges of bias, and a few are even calling for special counsel Robert Mueller to be fired and his investigation shut down.
The more complicated this scandal gets, the more obvious it is that we need to understand everything that happened, so we can make sure it never happens again. You’d think Republicans would be patriotic enough to join in that effort, but the truth is that it may have to wait until Democrats control a house of Congress and have the power to do it themselves.
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Trump Ordered Bannon to Limit Testimony
The president relied on a key legal advisor, but his advice could have a downside
BY MURRAY WAAS | JANUARY 18, 2018, 12:41 PM
President Donald Trump personally made the decision to curtail the testimony of former chief White House political strategist Steve Bannon before the House Intelligence Committee, according to two people with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
Trump acted to limit Bannon’s testimony based on legal advice provided by Uttam Dhillon, a deputy White House counsel, who concluded that the administration might have legitimate executive privilege claims to restrict testimony by Bannon and other current and former aides to the president, according to these same sources.
But Dhillon has also concluded that Bannon and other current and former Trump administration officials do not have legitimate claims to executive privilege when it comes to providing information or testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller, according to the sources. Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Dhillon’s private and previously unreported legal advice to Trump could ultimately go against the president’s interest, however, by making it increasingly difficult for any administration official — or even a member of the president’s family who advises Trump — to refuse to provide information to Mueller.
Dhillon’s advice might prove to be a “Pyrrhic victory,” one senior administration official told Foreign Policy.
While the president might be able to “poke the Congress in the eye,” the same legal rationale undercuts any effort to restrict the special counsel’s right to interview current or former Trump aides, the official said.
Bannon infuriated both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee by refusing to answer questions this week regarding his role in the presidential transition and later as a White House advisor. Repeatedly during Bannon’s executive session testimony, he and his attorney took numerous breaks to confer via phone with the White House counsel’s office as to what questions he should answer and which ones he would not.
“We encourage the committees to work with us to find the appropriate accommodation in order to ensure Congress obtains all the information that they’re looking for,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
Bannon has reportedly agreed to be interviewed by Mueller after having been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. In exchange for voluntarily cooperating with prosecutors and FBI agents working for the special counsel, Bannon has apparently been able to avoid testifying before a grand jury — though he could be called upon later to do so.
Because Bannon refused to answer the House Intelligence Committee’s questions on Tuesday, the committee served him with a subpoena during a break in the proceedings.
Dhillon, who has provided legal advice about executive privilege to Trump, is both a deputy counsel and deputy assistant to the president. As a key aide to White House counsel Donald McGahn, Dhillon has played an increasing role in advising the president and others on his legal team about the Mueller investigation and related issues.
A former Justice Department official, Dhillon worked during the George W. Bush administration for now-fired FBI Director James Comey, who was deputy attorney general at the time. Dhillon later served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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