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

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#RussiaLeaks Coming Soon :mjgrin:






This Time It’s Russia’s Emails Getting Leaked
​

thedailybeast.com
This Time It’s Russia’s Emails Getting Leaked
Kevin Poulsen01.24.19 1:45 AM ET
6-8 minutes
Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them later this week when a new leak site unleashes a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents. Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange’s aversion to posting Russian secrets.

The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web.

“Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine,” said Best, a national-security journalist and transparency activist. “Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs.”
Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS, is a volunteer effort that launched last month. Its objective is to provide researchers and journalists with a central repository where they can find the terabytes of hacked and leaked documents that are appearing on the internet with growing regularity. The site is a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars, housing such diverse artifacts as the files North Korea stole from Sony in 2014, and a leak from the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan.

The site’s Russia section already includes a leak from Russia’s Ministry of the Interior, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there. Though some material from that leak was published in 2014, about half of it wasn’t, and WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the files two years later, at a time when Julian Assange was focused on exposing Democratic Party documents passed to WikiLeaks by Kremlin hackers.

“A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that’s appeared elsewhere,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “They’ve never done that with anything out of Russia.”

There’s no shortage of information out there. While barely known in the West, hacker groups like Shaltai Boltai, Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta have been penetrating and exposing Russian secrets for years. Those leaks can be hard to find, though, particularly if you can’t read Russian.

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Last year, Best agreed to help another journalist locate a particular Shaltai Boltai leak, a hunt that sent her into the world of Russian hacktivism. “Later I’m talking to some hackers—this is after DDoS’ public launch—and they hooked me up with a few archives,” Best told The Daily Beast. “A couple gigabytes, something like that. I do some digging, ask around, and manage to stir up a good bit more.”

Once word got around that Best was collecting Russian hacks, the floodgates opened. In late December, the project was on the verge of publishing its Russia collection when “middle of the night, more files come in,” Best said. Then an organization with its own collection of Russia leaks opened its archives to Best and her colleagues.

The DDoS project compiled more than 200,000 emails into a spreadsheet for ease of searching. In all, its cache now contains 61 different leaks totaling 175 gigabytes, dwarfing, by quantity at least, Russia’s leaks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The collection includes files from Alexander Budberg, a Russian columnist married to Dmitry Medvedev’s press secretary; Kirill Frolov, vice-director of the Kremlin-backed Institute for CIS Countries; and Vladislav Surkov, a top aide to Vladimir Putin who was hacked by CyberHunta in October 2016. The Surkov files contained documentary evidence of the Kremlin’s covert coordination with pro-Russia separatists within Ukraine, and though the Kremlin denounced the leak as a fake, several independent forensics examiners agreed the emails were the real deal.

DDoS differs from WikiLeaks in that it doesn’t solicit direct leaks of unpublished data—its focus is on compiling, organizing, and curating leaks that have already appeared somewhere in public. “Emma Best, I think, is someone who will actually do a good job,” said Weaver, citing Best’s aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from recalcitrant U.S. agencies. “Things get so scattered that putting it all into one place is a huge benefit.”

In an age where leaks and counterleaks have become geopolitical blood sport, any secret-spilling organization has to weigh the risks of a hoax or a leak that’s been maliciously tampered with. DDoS mitigated that danger in its Russian email leaks using the same technique WikiLeaks employed to authenticate the DNC emails—verifying the cryptographic signatures added by the receiving mail server under a security standard called DKIM. “In order to fake that, post hoc, you need the mail server’s private key,” said Weaver. “So when you deal with mail dumps where you have DKIM signatures, tampering can only act to remove entries. You can’t add or modify.”

The DDoS project received some pushback ahead of its December launch over plans to include the 2015 Ashley Madison leak, which exposed thousands of users of the infidelity dating site. Best rethought the plan and now keeps that leak offline, along with other sensitive database breaches primarily affecting people who aren’t public figures.

Though the project is less than two months old, Best is already feeling the creeping paranoia that comes with publishing secrets. At one point, while compiling the Russia leaks, she and her colleagues thought they detected signs of potential “cyber shenanigans” aimed at interfering with the release. They reacted quickly.

“We moved things up and sent copies to several servers and arranged for some secure offline storage by third parties,” she said. It may have been nothing, Best added. “We opted for caution.
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full
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Damn. Scaramucci is just as racist as the rest of them

and he mocks Hannity :mjlol:



:SadScaramucci:





https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...s-dikk-joke-scenes-from-a-wh-insider?ref=wrap
​

thedailybeast.com
Trump’s Disney Robot Obsession and The Mooch’s dikk Joke: Scenes From a White House Insider
Asawin Suebsaeng, Lachlan Markay01.24.19 2:11 PM ET
8-10 minutes
Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, a Disney crew was dispatched to the White House to record the new president’s voice, which would be played through an animatron at Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. It was a typical right of passage for a new president. But Trump was thrilled by the idea. He also had an odd request.

Trump wanted his robotic likeness to tell Disney-goers that Americans had invented the skyscraper and to remind them of his own career in real estate.

“Then I could add a little, ‘Which, of course, I know a thing or two about,’ right?” Trump suggested his robot say, according to an account of his remarks in a new book, Team of Vipers, by former senior White House aide Cliff Sims.

Disney brass objected to the request, saying that Americans hadn’t actually invented the concept of a skyscraper—it’s “just a taller building,” one protested—and Sims agreed to strike the line from the pre-recorded Disney speech. But the anecdote illustrated one of the major themes that has defined the Trump era: The president, and many of his top aides, have had immense difficulty grasping the enormous duties of their office.

“This,” Sims wrote of the Disney encounter, “was a presidential duty that filled the President with unusual boyish excitement.”

Sims’ book, which the Daily Beast obtained in advance of its release next week, portrays a group of amateurs and self-promoters, handed the keys to the federal government with little idea of how it functions and less interest in finding out. Most of the staffers, advisers, and hangers-on with which the president surrounded himself appear motivated by petty grievances, triviality, and self-aggrandizement.

And that tone was set at the top.

Related in Politics
Trump, Sims intimates, was as obsessed with his particular style of opulent presentation as he was with his actual legislative accomplishments

When Congress approved the Republican tax bill in late 2017, the president was elated at a New York Times front page story on the achievement. “We need to get this framed. Put it in a nice gold one,” he instructed staff. “In fact, any good articles you see—on anything, not just the taxes, on anything—go ahead and get them framed and we’ll put them here and there. People like that.”

Trump’s natural inclination towards public messaging as an end in itself colored his policy proposals on some of the most serious issues facing the country. To combat the opioid epidemic, for instance, Trump’s go-to solution was a violent, graphic ad campaign to scare kids away from drugs.

“We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies,” he instructed Sims. “Do it like they did with cigarettes. They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.”

That over the top communications style was echoed by many of the people who went to work for Trump, and none more so than Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House comms director whose tenure lasted a tumultuous ten days (or eleven, depending who you ask).

In Sims’ book, “The Mooch” is portrayed as part court jester, part tabloid celeb, and, ultimately, part tragicomedy. Scaramucci, Sims writes, was a minor celebrity even among the White House press corps, generally accustomed to being surrounded by famous and powerful people. And Scaramucci indulged their fascination, resulting, on one occasion, in a memorable exchange about the size of his dikk.

Scaramucci had just finished up an interview on the White House’s north lawn, Sims recalls, when he “was approached by several cameramen from one of the networks, each of whom wanted to take a photo with him.” As he snapped selfies, Scaramucci “put both hands on his belt buckle, leaned in close to the cameramen—each of whom happened to be African American—and said, ‘Can I tell you guys something? We’ve already hit it off, and I think I know one of the reasons why.’ Mooch paused for a few moments to build the anticipation. ‘It’s ’cause I’m black from the waist down.’”

The cameramen, according to Sims’s account, laughed “hysterically,” with one playfully exclaiming, “He’s crazy!” as Scaramucci waltzed away beaming.

Asked on Thursday if he’d like to comment about the moment, Scaramucci texted The Daily Beast: “Nah thanks though.”

A year ago, when The Daily Beast had first heard that Scaramucci had a habit of cracking this particularly joke, he had feigned ignorance, suggesting the joke “sounds racist.” When asked if that was a denial, he would only say, “I have no further comments. Ask your editor if he thinks that is a good idea to write that.” The Daily Beast ultimately didn’t run the story on grounds that the former White House comms director’s endowment didn’t have an obvious news hook)

Sims felt no such hesitation. Team of Vipers is packed with similarly outlandish moments with Trump during and after the 2016 presidential race—including details that are bound to make some of his former administration compatriots uncomfortable.

During his time in the White House, Sims—a former Christian-rock touring musician turned journalist turned Trump administration official—found himself at the center of all the drama, backstabbing, and antics familiar to any dweller of Trumpworld. A 2016 campaign veteran, he had enjoyed special access to the president Trump, who affectionately called him “my Cliff,” according to a source familiar with the relationship.

And with that access came stories to tell. On Wednesday night, Vanity Fair published an excerpt of Sims’s “tell-all,” in which the author offered a firsthand account of watching the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway leaking against fellow senior officials such as Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus—and even Donald Trump himself. :ohhh: (White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Conway did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Thursday afternoon.)

When it first became clear that Sims was writing his book, President Trump took notice, fearing that the memoir could make him look bad. As The Daily Beast reported, Trump began quizzing close associates in November if “we lost Cliff?” according to two people with knowledge of these conversations.

As excerpts of the book have trickled into public view over the past week, Trump allies have sought to discredit Sims’ account by describing him as a mid-level staffer with little internal influence or access to the president. The White House still has not addressed the book on the record. But on Thursday, shortly after the Daily Beast put in a comment request, a “source familiar” did call to discuss the matter—and dub Sims an untrustworthy leaker who “was very intimidated by women of power.”

In his book, Sims does not paint the president in a strictly positive or negative light. Instead, it serves to further illuminate and underscore—from first-person experience—aspects about the Trump presidency that have been breathlessly reported on by the political press. Chief among those aspects are the president’s obsessions with the media.

In Team of Vipers, Sims recounts Trump lavishing praise upon Fox Business host Lou Dobbs—at the mild expense of Sean Hannity, another Fox host and top Trump confidant.

“Lou, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I really think you might be the best,” the president told “Lou,” according to Vipers. “I’m serious. Honest to God, Lou, I think you’re the best who’s ever done it. You’ve got a certain way that you do things. Now you know Hannity—Sean is wonderful, so good. But I honestly think you may be better. And you know why? It’s not just information, Lou. It’s great information but it’s more than that; it’s entertainment.”

As The Daily Beast previously reported, the president’s affection for Dobbs is so complete that he has even patched the TV anchor in on speaker phone during high-level Oval Office meetings. Trump has also repeatedly mocked Hannity’s interviewing style, decrying it as lazy, boring, “dumb,” and too suck-up-y, three people with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast in November. :dead:

“It’s like he’s not even trying,” Trump said, one source recalled, just before the president launched into a rough Hannity impersonation, and complaining that host’s questions about how “great I am” give him nothing to work with. :mjlol:
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levitate said:
So my boo Kelly Ann was the one leaking to the press all this time...



RAW.
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Dameon Farrow said:
Link?
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Former Trump Aide Identifies One of the Worst Leakers in the West Wing
vanityfair.com
Former Trump Aide Identifies One of the Worst Leakers in the West Wing
Cliff Sims
11-14 minutes
The inner circle of Trumpworld was not always a pretty picture. Too often, it was a portrait of venality, stubbornness, and selfishness. We leaked. We schemed. We backstabbed. Some of us told ourselves it was all done in the service of a higher calling—to protect the president, to deliver for the people. But usually it was for ourselves. Most of us came to Washington convinced of the justice of our cause and the righteousness of our principles, certain that our moral compasses were true. But proximity to power changes that. Donald Trump changes that. The once-clear lines—between right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness—were eroded, until only a faint wrinkle remained.

A particular case in point involves Kellyanne Conway, who had the title of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. (Though it was really Jared Kushner, if anyone, who was actually in charge.) As counselor to the president, Kellyanne managed to land a job with no fixed responsibilities. “What exactly does Kellyanne do?” was a question people asked all the time. So she was able to continue being the president’s pit bull on TV—a job that never goes out of fashion in Trumpworld—and otherwise just dabble in areas that piqued her interest. She would later focus her efforts on the opioid crisis and veterans’ issues, but early on she was content—very content—to sit back, go on TV, and let rivals eat one another alive. And she was predictably resentful of both Ivanka and Jared’s immovable status in Trump’s orbit.

As I watched Kellyanne in operation over our time in the White House, my view of her sharpened. It became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life. Her agenda—which was her survival over all others, including the president—became more and more transparent. Once you figured that out, everything about her seemed so calculated; every statement, even a seemingly innocuous one, seemed poll-tested by a focus group that existed inside her mind. She seemed to be perennially cloaked in an invisible fur coat, casting an all-knowing smile, as if she’d collected 98 Dalmatians with only 3 more to go.

I’m not sure the president ever fully understood that about Kellyanne. But what he clearly shared with her was a love of media attention. Unlike most human beings, Trump’s greatest fear wasn’t death or failure or loss. It was obscurity. If he was noticed, he mattered. And he didn’t care much if the attention was good or bad, as long as it wasn’t indifferent. Mentions in the press had long been his oxygen. Another Page Six scoop, another breath. A Time magazine cover, a shot of adrenaline. He spent his adult life keeping the brand going, whatever it took. He couldn’t just own a nice hotel, but the most beautiful hotel ever built. He couldn’t just have a difficult divorce, but the most sensational ever to hit the tabloids. He couldn’t just have a popular TV show; it had to be the most highly rated in history. He couldn’t be a good president; he’d have to be as great—greater, even—than Lincoln.

Trump sincerely held most members of the media in low regard—that wasn’t just for show. But what he didn’t like to admit was that he also craved their approval. And nothing was more a focus of his attention in this regard than The New York Times. It was his hometown paper, after all. During a dinner with evangelical leaders in the Blue Room, Trump named the exact number of occasions he had been on the front page of the Times during his career as a businessman. It was only a handful. “Now, I’m on there almost every day,” he observed, though usually not in the way he would have liked. He added, with a mix of pride and irritation, that Ivanka, who was also in the room, still got better coverage in the Times than he did.

Like many presidents, he was obsessed with White House staffers who leaked against him—and was always on a quest to figure out a way to unmask them. On one memorable occasion, the president got a prominent White House reporter on the phone who had written a story that quoted anonymous staff members. “Who gave you this story?” Trump asked playfully. “I’d just be curious to know who told you this.”

The reporter laughed somewhat nervously, saying they obviously could not reveal their sources. Leaning over the phone in the Oval Office, arms crossed in front of him with his elbows sitting on the Resolute Desk, Trump tried to cut a deal. “Well, I guess that’s fine,” he replied. “But, of course, you know I could give you so much better stories—so much better.” After a little more unsuccessful coaxing, Trump relented. The reporter hung up without a hot scoop from “a source close to the president.”

His somewhat-playful attempted bribe was unsuccessful that day, but Trump never halted his effort to uncover the leakers in his midst. It was also a favorite parlor game among staff in the West Wing to guess who the unnamed White House officials were in various stories. But one day, by sheer accident, I didn’t have to guess anymore.

In May 2017, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe appeared on-air to accuse Kellyanne of being two-faced when it came to Donald Trump. Mika Brzezinski claimed that when Kellyanne came on their show during the campaign, she would lavish Trump with praise, and then “the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say, ‘Blech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much.” Joe Scarborough asserted that Kellyanne had only taken the Trump gig because it would pay off financially. And they both said they had decided to no longer book her on the show because she lacked credibility.

Kellyanne had developed pretty thick skin, and normally she would let this kind of stuff go. So I was a little surprised when she called me upstairs to her office to discuss issuing a response. I assumed this was because she feared Trump would believe the charges, which might threaten her plum White House position of doing whatever it was she wanted whenever she felt like it.

Kellyanne’s office was one of the largest in the West Wing. On the top floor, above Steve Bannon and Kushner’s offices below, it was about twice as long as it was wide. On the south end of the room, where her desk sat, she had the most valuable commodity in the West Wing: two fairly large, square external windows. On the opposite end of the room, she had a small conference table that could comfortably seat six. In between, there was a sitting area with a couch and two chairs positioned on opposite sides of an oval coffee table. The office had been set up this same way when Valerie Jarrett occupied it during the Obama years. Just outside her door, in a tiny reception area, sat her executive assistant, who handled her calendar, and her body man, who shadowed her every move and catered to her needs.

I had not brought my work laptop upstairs with me when she called, so Kellyanne pointed over to her personal MacBook sitting on the conference table on the other side of the room. “Just use that and type something up for me,” she said.

I sat down and started slowly pecking out a statement. While working in the White House, I found that I’d grown so accustomed to writing in Trump’s voice that writing for other people had become somewhat harder than it normally would have been. I was already getting off to a slow start, but I was also getting distracted by the nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen. At that point, personal phones had not yet been banned in the West Wing, so Kellyanne was sitting at her desk texting away. And since her iMessage account was tied to both her phone and her laptop, which she must not have even considered, I could inadvertently see every conversation she was having.

Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing “fake news.” Journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, and Bloomberg were all popping up on the screen. And these weren’t policy conversations, or attempts to fend off attacks on the president. As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer, all by name. (“The real leakers, past and present, get much more positive press than I do. While it’s rare, I prefer to knife people from the front, so they see it coming,” Conway said in a statement shortly after publication. According to a source familiar with the situation, the statement was drafted in consultation with her husband, George Conway. Subsequently, George Conway has denied involvement with the statement on Twitter.)

She also recounted private conversations she’d had with the president, during which, at least in her telling, she’d convinced him to see things her way, which she said was a challenge when you’re dealing with someone so unpredictable and unrestrained. She wasn’t totally trashing the president, at least as the Morning Joe crew described it, but she definitely wasn’t painting him in the most favorable light. She was talking about him like a child she had to set straight. I was sitting there, watching this, totally bewildered. I was supposed to be writing a statement, defending her against accusations that she had done almost exactly what I was watching her do that very moment.

When Fox & Friends co-host Abby Huntsman later asked Kellyanne about allegations that she was the “No. 1 leaker” in the administration, she sidestepped the question, only saying that “leakers get great press,” and adding that “one day, Abby, I will have my say.”

From what I saw on her computer, she was having her say all day long. Kellyanne was playing a double game—putting a foot in both worlds—telling Trump and his supporters on Fox one thing, while bad-mouthing them to the “mainstream” media in private. It didn’t hurt matters with the latter group that her husband, George, was an increasingly frequent critic of the president on Twitter. If the Trump administration was the Titanic, as many outsiders routinely claimed, then Kellyanne seemed determined to play the role of the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She wasn’t going to go down with this ship.

I suspect that posterity will look back on this bizarre time in history as if we were living in the pages of a dikkens novel. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. Some of us on both sides of that blurry divide were young, wide-eyed, and seeing the real world for the first time. Others were battle-weary, watching with great cynicism the twisting of the American experiment. Those of us who were there were part of a unique moment in time when the greatest nation on earth wrestled with its better angels and its nagging demons. We will hold tight to the triumphs, lose sleep over the failures, and perhaps shed tears over what could have been. Some of us will be proud of what we did. Others will be ashamed and never speak of it again. Some will remember this as the best work we ever did. Others will wish it could all be deleted from the record.

Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.

This article is adapted from Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims. Copyright (c) 2019 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.

This article has been updated.
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re'up said:
"Trump wanted his robotic likeness to tell Disney-goers that Americans had invented the skyscraper and to remind them of his own career in real estate."

As bizarre as this sounds, I just don't think there's anyway this isn't true.
Click to expand...

trump: "Make sure that robo-trump has a huge dikk. I want everyone to see it under his pants, wait....does robo-trump need to wear pants?"
 
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