RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Jesus H. Christ
I died for your sins
cheetoh probably just answered every question writing "NO CALLUSHUN!" over and over again, holding the crayon in his little baby hand like:
"PS. STOP RUSHER WHITCH HUNT NOW!"
Not sure if you used a photo with a small hand on purpose
Wrong crayon color though.
Fixed
WaveMolecules
Superstar
How can questions be answered easily?
That doesn't make sense.
The word he should've used was truthfully.
Guy is guilty as fukk.
That doesn't make sense.
The word he should've used was truthfully.
Guy is guilty as fukk.
Cole Cash
They took a hammer and sickle to my back
He hated the right just as if not more viciously than the left. They would have hated him today , he was very much anti technology and he had some decent points, but him blowing up innocent people is never and would never be “right”. He legit distrusted media and tv, wouldn’t even turn the tv on on 9/11 cuz he thought they would be in some bullshyt.
PoorAndDangerous
Superstar
Bro Mary Wilson has me dying on ari melber 
i'm filingdamn, mueller got people like
paperwork on mueller if no charges next week. 
PoorAndDangerous
Superstar
Do the courts close on the weekend? No chance of weekend indictments?
BRUH.
PETER SMITH WAS UP TO HIS NECK IN THIS shyt!
House Democrats to Step Up Probe of Trump-Russia Ties
House Democrats to Step Up Probe of Trump-Russia Ties
Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) is expected to become the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and lead the panel’s investigation of any ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
WASHINGTON—House Democrats, poised to reactivate a probe of President Trump’s campaign ties to Russia, said this week that an investigatory priority is learning more about a Republican activist who sought 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and whether he served as a conduit between the Trump campaign and Russia-tied groups.
“That is an area of continuing interest for us,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), who is expected to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when Democrats regain control of the House in January, said in an interview. “In fact, that’s one of the areas that we’ve been able to make progress” on, despite Republican attempts to end the probe.
Mr. Schiff declined to detail what more the panel has learned. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the GOP activist, Peter W. Smith, who died in 2017, secretly raised $100,000 to secure emails deleted from Mrs. Clinton’s private computer server, and that he struck up a professional relationship with Mike Flynn, then a Trump aide, who later pleaded guilty in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Another priority Mr. Schiff identified is to determine any financial relationship between the Trump Organization and Russian entities or individuals. Mr. Trump, his company and the Kremlin all have denied collusion or other improper ties.
The House Intelligence Committee probe into Russia’s role in the election ground to a virtual halt last year. Majority Republicans tried to shift its focus from possible Trump-Russia collusion to what they said was a flawed and biased Justice Department probe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators are scrutinizing comments that Trump adviser Roger Stone made about WikiLeaks before the 2016 election. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday breaks down the timeline. Photo: Getty Images.
Mr. Schiff said the parameters of the panel’s work would be guided partly by the status in January of Mr. Mueller’s criminal investigation.
“But our intention would be to look at those areas that we were precluded from getting answers,” he said. “And there are entire investigative threads which the Republicans refused to pursue because they thought it too threatening to the president.”
Jack Langer, a spokesman for Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), current chairman of the House Intelligence panel, said Democrats “claimed nearly two years ago to have ‘more than circumstantial’ evidence of collusion. So instead of investigating new conspiracy theories, they should finally reveal the bombshell evidence they claim to already have.”
Democrats have said Republican lawmakers blocked the inquiry and cooperated with the White House to short-circuit the probe.
Another Democratic committee member, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, said in an interview that Mr. Smith’s activities are “very ripe” for investigation. The key question, he said, is whom, if anyone, Mr. Smith was communicating with in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
Mr. Trump this week resumed his attacks on Mr. Mueller, who many on Capitol Hill are anticipating soon will announce new indictments after a lull surrounding the midterm elections.
Mr. Smith, a Chicago businessman active in Republican politics, funded his effort to find Mrs. Clinton’s missing emails in the fall of 2016. Emails reviewed by the Journal show he raised money from associates and began making inquiries to experts about how to obtain the emails from the so-called dark web, which provides users with anonymity.
Mr. Smith died in a Minnesota hotel room in 2017 in what authorities ruled a suicide, weeks after telling friends that he believed he had obtained the missing emails, the Journal previously reported. He spoke to a Journal reporter shortly before his death, describing his quest to find Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
His activities also have been scrutinized by Mr. Mueller, according to witnesses in the probe.
Mr. Smith said that he met with hackers in suburban Washington, D.C., according to one of his former associates. “I was told by Smith that he met with several groups of hackers in a suburban Washington hotel on the weekend of August 27-8, 2016. I have no idea what he meant by ‘several’ nor did I ask him for clarification,” said John Szobocsan, a friend and business partner who worked closely with Mr. Smith during 2016.
Mr. Smith was in contact with powerful Republicans in Mr. Trump’s orbit into the final months of his life, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Mr. Flynn and others, according to interviews and the emails reviewed by the Journal.
The emails show Mr. Smith brainstormed about business ventures involving Mr. Flynn and later went so far as to copy Mr. Flynn’s government-provided email account on a message to Mr. Trump’s incoming defense secretary, Mr. Mattis. In February 2016, Mr. Smith wrote to a friend to discuss “a possible way into cybersecurity to involve Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.”
An attorney for Mr. Flynn declined to comment. The Pentagon also declined to comment.
Other emails that Mr. Flynn is copied on show Mr. Smith either communicating directly with high-level Trump administration officials and allies or discussing such connections.
—Shelby Holliday contributed to this article.
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unnecessary gifs.
The one time you should have actually posted the full article, you didn't
It's under a paywall
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
unnecessary gifs.
When a Nap needs a nap.The one time you should have actually posted the full article, you didn't
It's under a paywall
This shyt getting spooky
How the Trump Administration Stepped Up Pursuit of WikiLeaks’s Assange
Nov. 16, 2018
National security officials have long viewed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with hostility and considered him a threat.Frank Augstein/Associated Press
National security officials have long viewed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with hostility and considered him a threat.Frank Augstein/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Soon after he took over as C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo privately told lawmakers about a new target for American spies: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Intent on finding out more about Mr. Assange’s dealings with Russian intelligence, the C.I.A. began last year to conduct traditional espionage against the organization, according to American officials. At the same time, federal law enforcement officials were reconsidering Mr. Assange’s designation as a journalist and debating whether to charge him with a crime.
Mr. Pompeo and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions unleashed an aggressive campaign against Mr. Assange, reversing an Obama-era view of WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity. For more than a year, the nation’s spies and investigators sought to learn about Mr. Assange and his ties to Russia as senior administration officials came to believe he was in league with Moscow.
Their work culminated in prosecutors secretly filing charges this summer against Mr. Assange, which were inadvertently revealed in an unrelated court filing and confirmed on Friday by a person familiar with the inquiry. Taken together, the C.I.A. spying and the Justice Department’s targeting of Mr. Assange represented a remarkable shift by both the American government and President Trump, who repeatedly lauded WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign for its releases of Democratic emails, stolen by Russian agents, that damaged his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
A prosecution of Mr. Assange could pit the interests of the administration against Mr. Trump’s. Mr. Assange could help answer the central question of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III: whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the presidential race. If the case against Mr. Assange includes charges that he acted as an agent of a foreign power, anyone who knowingly cooperated with him could be investigated as a co-conspirator, former senior law-enforcement officials said.
Justice Department officials did not disclose the charges against Mr. Assange on Friday, prompting speculation around Washington about their nature. The case might be tied to the hacked Democratic emails, which are part of Mr. Mueller’s evidence of the wide-ranging election interference personally ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The charges could also be related to WikiLeaks’s publication last year of C.I.A. tools to penetrate computers and mobile devices, the so-called Vault 7 disclosures.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Mike Pompeo said in his first speech as C.I.A. director.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Mike Pompeo said in his first speech as C.I.A. director.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
National security officials have long viewed Mr. Assange with hostility and considered him a threat. “He was a loathed figure inside the government,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia under the director of national intelligence until May.
This account is drawn from current and former officials familiar with the government’s effort to step up scrutiny of Mr. Assange.
He first raised the ire of the American government in 2010 when Chelsea Manning, then known as Army Specialist Bradley Manning, began feeding classified documents from military computers in Iraq to WikiLeaks.
American law enforcement officials began seriously investigating the ties between WikiLeaks and Russia after Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who revealed closely held intelligence secrets, escaped to Russia in June 2013. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks editor and one of Mr. Assange’s close advisers, accompanied Mr. Snowden to Moscow. Law enforcement officials wanted to know what role the group played in brokering Mr. Snowden’s asylum in Russia.
A year later, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials began arguing internally that Mr. Assange was an information broker, not a journalist, former officials said. At one point, they pushed for a meeting with President Barack Obama to make the case that he was not a journalist, according to people briefed on the talks. The meeting never occurred.
Inside the Justice Department under Mr. Obama, some officials expressed reluctance to pursue Mr. Assange because he could be construed as part of the news media. Obama administration officials were hesitant to wage a high-profile fight with Mr. Assange after being criticized heavily by the news media for obtaining records of journalists through court subpoenas in pursuit of leakers. The step is considered an intrusion on press freedoms.
American officials began seriously investigating the ties between WikiLeaks and Russia after Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, escaped to Russia in 2013.K
American officials began seriously investigating the ties between WikiLeaks and Russia after Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, escaped to Russia in 2013.
Mr. Assange seemed to have crossed into uncharted ground by 2016 with the publication of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s servers and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, former F.B.I. officials said. He was deliberately attacking Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Trump and coordinating with Russian intelligence operatives, wittingly or not, to maximize the damage to her campaign.
Mr. Pompeo, then a Republican congressman from Kansas, initially praised the WikiLeaks disclosures. But once he took over the C.I.A., his rhetoric hardened.
His first speech as director came a month after WikiLeaks published the archive of hacking tools stolen from the C.I.A., seriously eroding the agency’s ability to conduct electronic espionage.
Mr. Pompeo laid down a gauntlet. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” he said last April.
To support his assessment, Mr. Pompeo cited how the group had encouraged followers to join the C.I.A. and steal secrets, and how “it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries.”
After his speech, Mr. Pompeo headed to Congress to privately brief members conducting intelligence oversight on the C.I.A. efforts against WikiLeaks. Mr. Pompeo said the agency was conducting counterintelligence collection, which can include developing informants and penetrating computers overseas, officials said.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, announced in July that 12 Russians were charged with interfering in the 2016 election. The indictment included thinly veiled references to WikiLeaks.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, announced in July that 12 Russians were charged with interfering in the 2016 election. The indictment included thinly veiled references to WikiLeaks.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
Mr. Pompeo also seemed to hold open the possibility that the intelligence community could begin other, more aggressive efforts to try to disrupt WikiLeaks. Some lawmakers expressed discomfort, according to an American official.
The speech by Mr. Pompeo, who has since become secretary of state, and other efforts were intended in part to pressure the Justice Department to intensify its reassessment of Mr. Assange, an intelligence official said.
Law enforcement officials had been trying to learn more about Mr. Assange’s knowledge of WikiLeaks’s interactions with Russian intelligence officers and its other actions, and for a time seemed willing to offer him some form of immunity from prosecutions in exchange for his testimony, reaching out to his lawyers. But Mr. Assange’s release of the Vault 7 tools ended those negotiations.
Senior Justice Department officials pushed in 2017 to declare internally that WikiLeaks was not covered by special rules governing how investigators interact with journalists. The regulations require higher-level approval to obtain journalists’ records, like phone logs and emails, as part of investigations into leaks of classified information. By releasing hacking tools and playing a role in disrupting the election, Mr. Assange, the senior officials argued, was acting more like an agent of a foreign power than a journalist.
Mr. Assange may have begun working with Russian intelligence without knowing with whom he dealt, said Ms. Kendall-Taylor, now a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security. The intermediaries and cutouts sent by Russian intelligence to deal with Mr. Assange were supposed to give him plausible deniability.
“But as he spent more time, the relationship with the Russians grew closer,” she said. “I would expect that he knows what he is doing by the end of this.”
Supporters of Mr. Assange demonstrated in Quito, Ecuador. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Supporters of Mr. Assange demonstrated in Quito, Ecuador. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Federal prosecutors began working on a sealed criminal complaint this summer, a former law enforcement official said. It was not clear whether the Justice Department declared that Mr. Assange was not a journalist or whether prosecutors gathered sufficient evidence to charge him without resolving that issue.
Mr. Assange’s case also has implications for Mr. Mueller.
In July, the special counsel charged 12 Russian military intelligence operatives with interfering in the 2016 election. That indictment contained thinly veiled references to WikiLeaks, identifying it as “Organization 1.” Notably, the indictment did not identify the organization as a member of the news media, and it asserted that the Russian operatives transferred their stolen documents to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks encouraged “Guccifer 2.0,” the online persona of the Russian operatives, to provide it with the Democratic documents because it would “have a much higher impact,” according to court papers.
Whether anyone connected with the Trump campaign worked with Mr. Assange or others to carry out Russia’s scheme to interfere in the 2016 presidential race is at the heart of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry.
So far, no evidence has publicly emerged that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired with Moscow’s disruption, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied any “collusion” with Russia. But the special counsel’s office continues to summon witnesses before a federal grand jury, asking about interactions between allies of Mr. Trump and Mr. Assange through intermediaries or other means.
What has become abundantly clear since the election is that various associates of Mr. Trump’s tried their best to figure out what information Mr. Assange possessed, how it might harm the Clinton campaign and when he planned to release it.
About a month before the election, for instance, Donald Trump Jr., a key adviser to his father, sent WikiLeaks a private message on Twitter asking about speculation that Mr. Assange planned to soon release documents that would prove devastating to Mrs. Clinton. “What’s behind this Wed leak I keep reading about?” he asked. He has said he got no response and never corresponded with WikiLeaks again.
Charges against Mr. Assange would be a big step, said Joshua Geltzer, a former official in the Justice Department’s national security division. But, he added, the precise nature of the charges may not be known until Mr. Assange is in the custody of American officials. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, forced there as he sought refuge from Swedish prosecutors who pursued him on charges of sexual abuse.
“The government has certainly been concerned about and looking at Assange for a long time,” Mr. Geltzer said. “Ultimately, the stakes are high in this one, given the complexities of the case, and the government must be prepared for that going in.”
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