RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Holy shyt. Trump is literally running a Russian useful idiot operation
nytimes.com
Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says
By Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg
11-14 minutes
Moscow has run a yearslong operation to blame Ukraine for its own 2016 election interference. Republicans have used similar talking points to defend President Trump in impeachment proceedings.
President Vladmir V. Putin of Russia has been pushing false theories of Ukrainian interference since early 2017, according to American officials.Credit...Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, via Reuters
- Nov. 22, 2019, 1:34 p.m. ET
The Republican defense of Mr. Trump became central to the impeachment proceedings when Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating “a fictional narrative.” She said that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it.
In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill’s testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.
The revelations demonstrate Russia’s persistence in trying to sow discord among its adversaries — and show that the Kremlin apparently succeeded, as unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference seeped into Republican talking points. American intelligence agencies believe Moscow is likely to redouble its efforts as the 2020 presidential campaign intensifies. The classified briefing for senators also focused on Russia’s evolving influence tactics, including its growing ability to better disguise operations.
Russia has engaged in a “long pattern of deflection” to pin blame for its malevolent acts on other countries, Dr. Hill said, not least Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. Since Ukraine won independence in 1991, Russia has tried to reassert influence there, meddling in its politics, maligning pro-Western leaders and accusing Ukrainian critics of Moscow of fascist leanings.
“The Russians have a particular vested interest in putting Ukraine, Ukrainian leaders in a very bad light,” she told lawmakers.
But the campaign by Russian intelligence in recent years has been even more complex as Moscow tries not only to undermine the government in Kyiv but also to use a disinformation campaign there to influence the American political debate.
The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump’s candidacy in 2016. They were scattershot efforts that were far from a replica of Moscow’s interference, when President Vladimir V. Putin ordered military and intelligence operatives to mount a broad campaign to sabotage the American election. The Russians in 2016 conducted covert operations to hack Democratic computers and to use social media to exploit divisions among Americans.
This time, Russian intelligence operatives deployed a network of agents to blame Ukraine for its 2016 interference. Starting at least in 2017, the operatives peddled a mixture of now-debunked conspiracy theories along with established facts to leave an impression that the government in Kyiv, not Moscow, was responsible for the hackings of Democrats and its other interference efforts in 2016, senior intelligence officials said.
The Russian intelligence officers conveyed the information to prominent Russians and Ukrainians who then used a range of intermediaries, like oligarchs, businessmen and their associates, to pass the material to American political figures and even some journalists, who were likely unaware of its origin, the officials said.
That muddy brew worked its way into American information ecosystems, sloshing around until parts of it reached Mr. Trump, who has also spoken with Mr. Putin about allegations of Ukrainian interference. Mr. Trump also brought up the assertions of Ukrainian meddling in his July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry into whether he abused his power by asking for a public commitment to investigations he stood to gain from personally.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” said Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Trump referred elliptically to allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election and brought up a related conspiracy theory. Asking Mr. Zelensky to “do us a favor,” Mr. Trump added, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.”
Russia’s operation to blame Ukraine has become more relevant as Republicans have tried to focus public debate during the impeachment inquiry on any Ukrainian role in the 2016 campaign, American officials said.
Republicans have denounced any suggestion that their concerns about Ukrainian meddling are without merit or that they are ignoring Russia’s broader interference. “Not a single Republican member of this committee said Russia did not meddle in the 2016 elections,” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said Thursday.
Indeed, Ms. Stefanik and her Republican colleagues on the Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting the impeachment hearing, have also steered clear of the fringe notion that Mr. Trump mentioned to Mr. Zelensky, which is pushed by Russian intelligence: the so-called CrowdStrike server conspiracy theory, which falsely suggests Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the breach of Democratic operatives’ servers.
Mr. Trump repeated the baseless claim on Friday in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” laying out the narrative and doubling down after a host gently pressed him on whether he was sure of one aspect of the debunked theory, that the F.B.I. gave a Democratic server to what Mr. Trump had inaccurately described as a Ukrainian-owned company.
“That is what the word is,” Mr. Trump replied.
Some Republicans have also focused on Hunter Biden, raising questions about whether his hiring by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was corrupt. Burisma hired Mr. Biden while his father, former Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., a potential rival of Mr. Trump’s in the 2020 election, was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. On the July 25 call, Mr. Trump also demanded Mr. Zelensky investigate Burisma and Hunter Biden.
Moscow has long used its intelligence agencies and propaganda machine to muddy the waters of public debate, casting doubts over established facts. In her testimony, Dr. Hill noted Russia’s pattern of trying to blame other countries for its own actions, like the attempted poisoning last year of a former Russian intelligence officer or the downing of a passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014. Moscow’s goal is to cast doubt on established facts, said current and former officials.
“The strategy is simply to create the impression that it is not really possible to know who was really behind it,” said Laura Rosenberger, the director of the Alliance for Defending Democracy, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts.
Although American intelligence agencies have made no formal classified assessment about the Russian disinformation campaign against Ukraine, officials at several of the agencies have broadly agreed for some time that Russian intelligence services have embraced tactics to shift responsibility for the 2016 interference campaign away from themselves, officials said.
Russia has relentlessly tried to deflect attention since the allegations of its interference campaign in the 2016 election first surfaced, one official said.
Mr. Putin began publicly pushing false theories of Ukrainian interference in the early months of 2017 to deflect responsibility from Russia, said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who declined to answer questions about the briefing.
“These people are pros at this,” said Mr. King, who caucuses with the Democrats. “The Soviet Union used disinformation for 70 years. This is nothing new. Vladimir Putin is a former K.G.B. agent. He is trained in deception. This is his stock and trade and he is doing it well.”
During a news conference in February 2017, Mr. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of supporting Hillary Clinton during the previous American election and funding her candidacy with friendly oligarchs.
It is not clear when American intelligence agencies learned about Moscow’s campaign or when precisely it began.
Mr. Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Russian intelligence officers aimed part of their operation at prompting the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the allegations that people in Ukraine tried to tamper with the 2016 American election and to shut down inquiries into corruption by pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, according to a former official.
One target was the leak of a secret ledger disclosed by a Ukrainian law enforcement agency that appeared to show that Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, had taken illicit payments from Ukrainian politicians who were close to Moscow. He was forced to step down from the Trump campaign after the ledger became public in August 2016, and the Russians have since been eager to cast doubt on its authenticity, the former official said.
Intelligence officials believe that one of the people the Kremlin relied on to spread disinformation about Ukrainian interference was Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who had ties to Mr. Manafort. After his ouster from the campaign, Mr. Manafort told his former deputy later in 2016 that Ukrainians, not Russians, stole Democratic emails. Mr. Deripaska has broadly denied any role in election meddling.
“There is a long history of Russians putting out fake information,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior C.I.A. official. “Now they are trying to put out theories that they think are damaging to the United States.”
They are trying to get rid of the sanctions and using ukraine as the scapegoat could be leverage to lift those sanctions.
I am glad people are seeing through the bullshyt
I am glad people are seeing through the bullshyt
The full clip is 15 minutes of straight heat
How Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 election
How Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 election
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holy shyt.
holy shyt.
holy shyt.
The Russians tried to seed misinformation SEVERAL ways
nytimes.com
Opinion | Republicans’ Big Lie About Trump and Russia
By Michelle Goldberg
6-8 minutes
Collusion wasn’t a hoax and Trump wasn’t exonerated.
- Nov. 25, 2019
Peter Fritsch, left, and Glenn Simpson, the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that investigated Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.Credit...William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire, via Getty Images
There are two very big lies that Donald Trump and his sycophants have used, through aggressive, bombastic repetition, to shape the public debate about impeachment, and about Trump’s legitimacy more broadly.
The first big lie is that “the people” elected Trump, and that the constitutional provision of impeachment would invalidate their choice. In fact, Trump is president only because a constitutional provision invalidated the choice of the American people. Trump lost the popular vote and might have lost the Electoral College without Russian interference, and yet many Democrats and pundits have been bullied into accepting the fiction that he has democratic, and not just constitutional, legitimacy.
The second big lie is that Russia didn’t help elect Trump, and that the president has been absolved of collusion. It’s true that the report by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, did not find enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russian state actors. But the Mueller report found abundant evidence that the campaign sought Russian help, benefited from that help and obstructed the F.B.I. investigation into Russian actions. His investigation resulted in felony convictions for Trump’s former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, personal lawyer, first national security adviser, and longtime political adviser, among others.
Had public life in America not been completely deformed by blizzards of official lies, right-wing propaganda and the immovable wall of Republican bad faith, the Mueller report would have ended Trump’s minoritarian presidency. Instead, something utterly perverse happened. Democrats, deflated by the Mueller report’s anticlimactic rollout, decided to move on rather than keep the focus on Trump’s world-historic treachery. Republicans, meanwhile, started screaming about a “Russia hoax” ostensibly perpetrated on their dear leader. Among them was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who in 2016 was surreptitiously recorded telling his congressional colleagues that he thinks President Vladimir Putin of Russia pays Trump. “Swear to God,” he said at the time.
This brings us to where we are now. Democrats understand that the Ukraine scandal is an outgrowth of the Russia scandal — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last month, with Trump, “all roads seem to lead to Putin.” Yet they’ve made the political calculation that reopening the broader story of how Trump has been compromised by Russia is a political loser.
In her closed-door deposition last month, the former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill suggested that Putin may have targeted Trump well before he entered politics. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, tried to clarify: “Why do you believe that Putin was targeting Donald Trump from his days as a businessman?” Hill responded, “Because that’s exactly what President Putin and others were doing.” No one followed up on this when Hill testified publicly.
Rather, it’s Republicans, with their heroic capacity for shamelessness, who want to talk about Russia. They’ve set out to investigate the investigators, trying to make efforts to uncover the truth about Trump’s Russia connections, rather than the connections themselves, into a scandal. And now they’re trying to expand their big lie about Russia to cover Ukraine as well. The president, McCarthy said last month, “was trying to get to the bottom, just as every American would want to know, why did we have this Russia hoax that actually started within Ukraine.”
Because Republicans have been so successful in shrouding the origins of the Russia investigation in a miasma of misinformation, I hope some talented filmmaker makes a movie out of the new book by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.” Simpson and Fritsch are the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that investigated Trump during the 2016 campaign, first for the conservative Washington Free Beacon, and then for a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was Fusion GPS that hired the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to look into Trump’s Russia connections, and it sits at the center of countless pro-Trump conspiracy theories. When Republicans controlled the House, Fritsch told me on Monday, “The only bank records that were subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee were ours.”
“Crime in Progress” is the best procedural yet written about the discovery of Trump’s Russia ties. It demolishes a number of right-wing talking points, including the claim that the Steele dossier formed the basis of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence inquiry into Trump. (The Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation will reportedly disprove this canard once and for all.) But it also makes plain what many Republicans knew before the 2016 election, even if they’ve now pretended to forget it. For years, Trump was financially entangled with organized crime as well as with Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, and by keeping those entanglements secret, he gave Putin leverage over him from the moment he took office.
Write Simpson and Fritsch, “In the end, the Mueller probe sidestepped the question that so unnerved Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in the summer of 2016: Was the president of the United States under the influence of a foreign adversary?” Republicans have used all the power at their command to defame people who’ve asked this question. Perhaps that’s because otherwise they’d have to take seriously all the evidence that the answer is yes.
Yall gotta read this....
Fusion GPS has a LOT to share
They're standing 10 toes down on the dossier
THERE WERE SEVEN SOURCES FOR THE PEE TAPE 
oh shyt 
HOW DID WE MISS THIS
TAD DEVINE IS WORKING FOR ANDREW YANG??????
Andrew Yang Scoops Up Bernie Sanders’ Old Ad Man
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
HOW DID WE MISS THIS
TAD DEVINE IS WORKING FOR ANDREW YANG??????
Andrew Yang Scoops Up Bernie Sanders’ Old Ad Man
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes