Pull Up the Roots
I have a good time when I go out of my mind..
Was this posted? This anger over something simple like EuroVision is telling.
RUSSIA 🇷🇺 Thread: Wikileaks=FSB front, UKRAINE?, SNOWED LIED; NATO Aggression; Trump = Putins B!tch
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Was this posted? This anger over something simple like EuroVision is telling.
Was this posted? This anger over something simple like EuroVision is telling.
yeah, I talked about this a while back...not sure if I posted it here.
Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITTJULY 26, 2016
Photo
Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Tuesday in Vientiane, Laos. CreditJorge Silva/Reuters
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.
But intelligence agencies have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.
The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service.
The assessment by the intelligence community of Russian involvement in the D.N.C. hack, which largely echoes the findings of private cybersecurity firms that have examined the electronic fingerprints left by the intruders, leaves President Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: Whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the hack.
Such a public accusation could result in a further deterioration of the already icy relationship between Washington and Moscow, at a moment when the administration is trying to reach an accord with Mr. Putin on a cease-fire in Syria and on other issues. It could also doom any effort to reach some kind of agreement about acceptable behavior in cyberspace, of the kind the United States has been discussing with China.
Stealing information about another country’s political infighting is hardly new, and the United States has conducted covert collection from allies like Germany and adversaries like Russia for decades. Publishing the documents — what some have called “weaponizing” them — is a different issue. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has suggested that Mr. Putin was trying to even the score after the former secretary of state denounced a 2011 Russian election as filled with fraud.
“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers,” Mr. Putin said at the time. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.”
Continue reading the main story
Democrats Allege D.N.C. Hack Is Part of Russian Effort to Elect Donald TrumpJULY 25, 2016
Campaign officials have also suggested that Mr. Putin could be trying to tilt the election to Donald J. Trump. But they acknowledge that they have no evidence.
Asked on Tuesday at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia whether “there’s more to the Trump/Russian relationship that hasn’t come out,” John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said, “Well he certainly has a bromance with Mr. Putin, so I don’t know.” Mr. Podesta said that while Russia has a “history” of interfering in democratic elections in Europe, it would be “unprecedented in the United States.”
The Republican platform, adopted last week in Cleveland, calls on the United States to “respond in kind and in greater magnitude” to cyberattacks, saying that “Russia and China see cyber operations as part of a warfare strategy during peacetime. Our response should be to cause diplomatic, financial and legal pain.”
But the Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction, meant to draw attention away from the content of nearly 20,000 emails and documents from the Democratic committee that were released by WikiLeaks starting on Friday. They showed efforts to impugn Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his effort to challenge Mrs. Clinton for the nomination.
Secretary of State John Kerry raised the attack on the D.N.C. with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Tuesday at a meeting of foreign ministers in Vientiane, Laos. Mr. Lavrov dismissed the idea that Russia was involved, telling reporters who asked about the charges: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”
Mr. Kerry made no accusations, saying that he had to allow the F.B.I. to “do its work” before he drew “any conclusions in terms of what happened or who’s behind it.”
The federal investigation, involving the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies, has been going on since the Democratic National Committee first called in a private cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, in April.
Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.
The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.
In an essay published on Lawfare, a blog that often deals with cyberissues, Susan Hennessey, previously a lawyer for the National Security Agency, called the published evidence about Russian involvement “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected when a sophisticated nation-state is involved.” Mr. Assange’s threat to release documents, she wrote, “means, put simply, that actors outside the U.S. are using criminal means to influence the outcome of a US election. That’s a problem.”
But American intelligence agencies have their doubts that the Russian intention, at least initially, was to sway the American election. The intrusion began just shortly after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. At the time, his chances looked minuscule. One senior official noted that while the cyberattack might have been intended to embarrass Mrs. Clinton, who was the presumptive nominee, it could not have been aimed at bolstering Mr. Trump.
It is far from clear that Mr. Obama or the F.B.I. director, James Comey, would ever name Russia as the origin of the hack. Mr. Obama has only once accused a country of attacking an American organization, when he said that North Korea was the source of the 2014 attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment. But the United States has no relationship with North Korea, and there was little to lose from identifying it.
In the case of Russia and China — countries with which the United States has complex relationships — Mr. Obama has in the past made the opposite decision. He never named the Russian intelligence agencies as the perpetrators of hacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems, or on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
While the administration has called out the People’s Liberation Army of China for stealing intellectual property, it never publicly accused the Chinese intelligence services of stealing the security-clearance files on more than 21 million Americans who held or applied for clearances.
By happenstance, the intelligence report on the D.N.C. hack was circulating here on the day that Mr. Obama issued a new policy, long in development, to organize the government’s response to major cyberattacks and to set up a six-point “grading system” to assess the severity of strikes against American companies, government agencies and organizations.
The action against the Democratic committee, they said, would qualify as a “significant cyber incident,” which was defined as one that causes “demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations or economy of the United States, or to the public confidence, civil liberties or public health and safety of the American people.”
Ranking the D.N.C. hack in the pantheon of other penetrated networks is difficult. The top ranking under Mr. Obama’s system would be reserved for an attack that disabled American power grids, for example, akin to the suspected Russian attack on Ukraine’s electrical system in December. The attack on the Office of Personnel Management and Sony, which destroyed 70 percent of the studio’s computers, would also rank above the “category 3” level, which defines a “significant” attack.
But the ranking system does not mandate what kind of response the president would authorize. And it was designed before many in Washington imagined the use of cyberattacks to release information in the midst of a dizzying, and volatile, presidential campaign.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Eric Schmitt from Colorado Springs. Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Philadelphia.
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Pull Up the Roots
I have a good time when I go out of my mind..
Scary. People are going to ignore this though.
this is the biggest story running right now IMO.
Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing
CBS
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedJULY 23, 2016, 4:15 PM EDT
Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.
Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.
Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.
I'll list off some facts.
1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.
2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,
"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."
Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."
Sounds completely legit.
Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.
Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.
4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.
5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.
6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.
7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.
This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.
Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.
There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.
To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.
There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Josh Marshall
Josh Marshall is editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com.
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I never thought being hawkish against Russia would be what the Democrats would do but it's now starting to happen. 
This is reaching Alex Jones status
If Wikileaks is a front for Russia why did Putin get caught up in their Panama Papers scandal? If your response is "false flag" you might as well slap yourself in the face
If Wikileaks is a front for Russia why did Putin get caught up in their Panama Papers scandal? If your response is "false flag" you might as well slap yourself in the face
Pull Up the Roots
I have a good time when I go out of my mind..
Wikileaks had nothing to do with the Panama Papers. They were left out and was pissed about it. They even called it a US-led attack on Tsar Putin.
Thats right, I forgot.
Wiki leaks didn't get the Panama papers silly.
ill
Superstar
Back to the good old days
Pull Up the Roots
I have a good time when I go out of my mind..
Not too long ago I was reading how Ed Schultz, one of the biggest liberal loud mouths who never met a Republican he liked (remember "The Ed Show" on MSNBC?), got hired as a talk show host on Russia Today and suddenly he's this huge Trump cheerleader.