Russian Collusion – Bark Bark Woof Woof
The Blog of Mustang Bobby
Thu, 20 Aug 2020 11:23:07 +0000
en-US
hourly
1
They Knew But Did Nothing
/2020/08/they-knew-but-did-nothing/
Thu, 20 Aug 2020 09:18:05 +0000
/?p=58332
From Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice on the collusion of Senate Republicans to acquit Trump.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released the fifth and final volume of their multipart report on Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference in the 2016 presidential election yesterday. You can find the first four volumes at this link.
This fifth volume is entitled Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities and despite that title it really ties together all the pieces from the previous four reports.
[…]
To tie everything together neatly, despite knowing everything that the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, and his transition officials had done to coordinate with, conspire with, facilitate, aid, and assist the Russians directly or indirectly in conducting their active measures campaign during the 2016 presidential election, which is a hostile attack on the United States, as well as everything the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, his transition officials, his administration officials, and his personal attorneys had done to obstruct their investigation and Robert Mueller’s investigation, they still voted to not hold a proper trial in the Senate. They did so knowing his defense was rooted in and making wide use of a Russian intelligence created conspiracy theory to shift the blame off of both Russia and the President, which was why the President had tried to squeeze Ukraine’s president for dirt on the Bidens in order to both validate the conspiracy theory and use it to damage VP Biden’s campaign, and they allowed that defense to be presented without so much as a peep of objection. And then, knowing all of this, they voted to acquit him. In doing so Senators Burr, Rubio, Risch, Collins, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, and Sasse betrayed their oaths of office and actively aided and abetted the President and Vladimir Putin’s attempts to cover up Putin’s war against the United States. A war that is ongoing. A war that the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, and his transition officials were all actively involved in; involvement they, as well as a number of administration officials and the President’s private attorneys, have all actively tried to cover up.
]]>
Of Course They Colluded
/2020/08/of-course-they-colluded/
Wed, 19 Aug 2020 10:20:44 +0000
/?p=58321
Via the New York Times:
A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services.
The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.
It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.
The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was stocked with businessmen with no government experience, advisers working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment and other friends and associates Mr. Trump had accumulated over the years. Campaign figures, the report said, “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
Like the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”
But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
The Senate report was the first time the government has identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer — Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence. Most of the details about his intelligence background were blacked out in the Senate report.
Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the report said.
It also included a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations, conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.
With any other president at any other time, this would be huge headline material in the same way that a memo from the FBI created havoc for Hillary Clinton four years ago. But now the news that the Russians actively interfered with the election in collusion with a Trump campaign manager barely makes it above the fold at the New York Times and doesn’t rate the front page of the Washington Post.
This changes nothing. Republicans will continue to spout the Trump line that it’s all a hoax and the 1,000 pages doesn’t say what it says. Trump lied to the FBI and the committee, which is a felony. I can predict with confidence that this won’t even be remembered by October, and even if it is, it will be shrugged off; “So what else you got?”
I wish I was wrong.
]]>
Setting The Barr
/2019/04/setting-the-barr/
Thu, 11 Apr 2019 07:31:24 +0000
/?p=54474
I’m not at all surprised that Attorney General William Barr told the Senate that there may have been some “spying” during the 2016 campaign. After all, he was hired by Trump to follow up on the right-wing nutsery claims about the Democrats doing it, and although he has no offer of proof, he basically echoed what Trump as been screaming about all along.
The fact that the FBI and other intelligence agencies may have had legitimate reasons to investigate the glaring clues that a foreign hostile power was trying to interfere with the electoral process doesn’t matter. All these conspiracy whacks hear is “spying” and they’re over the moon. Now the emboldened GOP will say “There should never have been an investigation of anybody at all!” That’s tantamount to saying, “Yeah, it was fine with me if the Russians wanted to put Trump in office.”
Trump got the attorney general he really wanted in William Barr: a yes-man who does his bidding.
]]>
Tell Them Lies
/2019/01/tell-them-lies/
/2019/01/tell-them-lies/#comments
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 11:07:31 +0000
/?p=53839
Buzzfeed breaks major news.
President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.
Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.
And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”
Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.
It’s going to interesting to hear what Mr. Cohen has to tell Congress when he testifies next month.
And yes, telling someone to lie to Congress is obstruction of justice. It’s what the House drafted articles of impeachment on for Richard Nixon.
]]>
/2019/01/tell-them-lies/feed/
1
No Confidence
/2019/01/no-confidence/
/2019/01/no-confidence/#comments
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:42:34 +0000
/?p=53827
It sounds like the British government is facing a rather sticky wicket.
Theresa May’s government faces a vote of no confidence later after MPs rejected the PM’s Brexit deal.
Labour launched the bid to trigger a general election after the deal setting out the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU was rejected by 230 votes.
However, one senior party figure has suggested it is unlikely to succeed, with Northern Ireland’s DUP and Tory rebels saying they will back the PM.
The confidence vote is expected to be held at about 19:00 GMT.
Mrs May has told MPs she will return to the Commons with an alternative plan next week, provided she survives the confidence vote.
“The House has spoken and this government will listen,” she said on Tuesday night, offering cross-party talks to determine a way forward.
My knowledge of the inside workings and ramifications of British politics wouldn’t fill a teacup, but even to the casual observer the fall of a government over such a divisive issue as Brexit, along with the turmoil in the U.S. and the abrupt changes of course in the Middle East leads me to believe that the only possible beneficiary of this whole cock-up is Vladimir Putin.
Or, to put it another way, Russian collusion and interference didn’t start with the 2016 election in the United States and is still going on.
]]>
/2019/01/no-confidence/feed/
2
Why Is Anyone Surprised?
/2019/01/why-is-anyone-surprised/
Mon, 14 Jan 2019 08:51:33 +0000
/?p=53809
Reading the BREAKING NEWS banners on cable news and banner headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post that Trump is a Russian asset has been, at least for those of us following the news at all since 2016, a study in foregone conclusions.
For the benefit of those who don’t get the painfully obvious or you need a typewritten list, look at any number of people who have been patiently explaining the story since the beginning of the presidential campaign and even before that.
This also explains the long list of distractions, diversions, and various other attempts to misdirect our attention from the plain truth that Trump, either passively or purposefully, has been doing the bidding of the Kremlin. The current one is the mythical wall and the very real government shutdown. His minions have been landing on other non-stories like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s nickname or Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s use of an epithet as true scandals. People are dying at the border crossings but calling Trump a motherfucker is the real shame on America.
I suppose it’s in our nature to want to avoid the real hard and scary stories if we can be diverted by reality-TV-level fluff, but when the future of our democracy is at stake, I really don’t want the history books, assuming there will be any written, to say that our country went down because we were too easily distracted by YouTube videos.
]]>
There’s Your Collusion
/2019/01/theres-your-collusion/
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 09:18:59 +0000
/?p=53783
The New York Times:
As a top official in President Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort shared political polling data with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday. The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race.
Mr. Manafort’s lawyers made the disclosure by accident, through a formatting error in a document filed to respond to charges that he had lied to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after agreeing to cooperate with their investigation into Russian interference in the election.
The document also revealed that during the campaign, Mr. Manafort and his Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, discussed a plan for peace in Ukraine. Throughout the campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, Russia and its allies were pushing various plans for Ukraine in the hope of gaining relief from American-led sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Prosecutors and the news media have already documented a string of encounters between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates dating from the early months of Mr. Trump’s bid for the presidency, including the now-famous meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton. The accidental disclosure appeared to some experts to be perhaps most damning of all.
“This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the data-sharing. “The question now is, did the president know about it?”
The document gave no indication of whether Mr. Trump was aware of the data transfer or how Mr. Kilimnik might have used the information. But from March to August 2016, when Mr. Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.
Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.
Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt.
Why would both Manafort and Gates be giving the polling data to the Russians if it was just a casual conversation and there was no collusion going on?
Yeah, I think we’ve got ’em.
]]>
All In It Together
/2018/12/all-in-it-together/
/2018/12/all-in-it-together/#comments
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 08:49:07 +0000
/?p=53612
This blockbuster report in the New York Times pretty much confirms everything that Trump and his minions have been denying about Russian interference in the elections in the U.S.
The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.
“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Tex., along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.
The New Knowledge report is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and the other companies whose platforms were used.
Add to that the fact that the Republicans have been working quite openly to suppress minority voting for about fifty years, and … well, to quote that immortal sage Curly Joe, what a coinky-dink.
So either the Russians saw a massive opportunity to influence the election in 2016 because American voters are gullible and easy taken in by such simple tricks as well-engineered planted stories on social media — not a surprise given that millions of people will believe that Elvis is still alive and working at a Burger King in Grand Rapids if the National Enquirer says so — or a crafty election campaign just happened to bump into a bunch of Russian operatives who could pull an election win out of the trunk of their Buick.
Whether or not they actively sought each other out or just happened to be working for the same goal and found themselves along the same path, and whether or not that becomes a de facto conspiracy is a matter for the courts and a jury to decide. But the result was what both of them wanted: the installation of Trump in the White House and corrosion of the American electoral system to the point that it could be manipulated by an outside force.
]]>
/2018/12/all-in-it-together/feed/
1
It Cannot Stand
/2018/12/it-cannot-stand/
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 08:18:27 +0000
/?p=53569
The release of the sentencing memos by the Southern District of New York for Michael Cohen has launched a flurry of data and expectations about what could or will happen to the people who surround Trump, and inevitably, what will happen to Trump himself. Trying to summarize it all is very difficult, but I think Adam Davidson at The New Yorker has a pretty good handle on it.
Even if we never learn another single fact about Trump, his business and campaign, and any collusion with Russia, it is now becoming clear that Trump’s bid for the Presidency was almost certainly designed, at least in part, to enrich Trump, and that he was willing to pursue the political interests of a hostile foreign power in order to make money. This scheme was executed ineptly and in ways that make it highly likely that the intelligence agencies of Russia, as well as several other nations, have been able to ferret out most of the details. This means that Trump and the people closest to him have been at enormous risk of compromise.
We will learn more facts, no doubt—many of them. Mueller has revealed only a few threads of the case. He has established that Cohen spent the months between September, 2015, and June, 2016, actively engaging the Russian government to exchange political favors for money, and that, throughout this period, Cohen routinely informed Trump of his efforts (and presumably, though it’s unstated, received Trump’s blessing). This was the precise period in which Trump’s candidacy shifted from humorous long shot to the nominee of the Republican Party. Mueller’s filing also contains suggestions that people connected to the White House, possibly including the President, knew of Michael Cohen’s lies to Congress and federal investigators, and, also, that White House officials stayed in contact with Manafort, who had been revealed to be in close touch with a known Russian intelligence asset.
This is a lot. But it’s not the complete narrative. It is not clear what happened after the notorious Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016. Cohen appears to have been pushed aside, and no longer to have played the role of intermediary. Does this mean that Trump insisted that his team shut off all contact with Russia? Or did he hand the portfolio over to a more trusted staffer?
[…]
Mueller’s filings do mark a different sort of end. We are at the end of reasonable debate about whether Trump is hopelessly compromised. As Mueller’s filings encircle the President, the special counsel surely knows he is at ever-greater risk of being fired. Presumably, he wouldn’t have released memorandums as damning as these if he weren’t prepared to make a fuller case. Each filing fills in the over-all picture in ever more granular detail. It seems reasonable to assume that we haven’t yet learned the most disturbing facts. But, even if we learn nothing more, we are already in an unbearable condition. The President of the United States knowingly and eagerly participated in a scheme with a hostile foreign leader who he knew was seeking to influence the Presidential election. Trump sought to profit politically and financially, many of his closest subordinates executed this effort, and he then was aware of and, it seems likely, encouraged an illegal effort to hide these facts. His reckless, unpatriotic actions have left him compromised by at least one but likely many foreign powers and have left his election open to reasonable questions about its legitimacy. And, every day, he sets policies and makes decisions that have an impact on the lives of all Americans and the fortunes of the very autocrats who hold sway over him. It cannot stand.
The scary part of all of this is that we as a nation haven’t faced this sort of threat to the very foundation of our democracy in our collective lifetimes. Watergate was big and dangerous, too, but at the least the central figure in it — Richard Nixon — still bore some allegiance to the system of our government and yielded to the rule of law, ultimately abiding by the rulings of the courts and the Supreme Court. And when he went, he went without threatening to hole up in his office, daring armed officers to drag him out by his heels.
We can’t be that assured about Trump. For one thing, he has an embedded media operation that will back him no matter what. Second, we’re seeing that his supporters at various state and local levels are willing to cheat — albeit clumsily — to win an election, and of course he had an entire foreign government at his disposal to win the last one.
So dreaming about the chances of Beto O’Rourke or debating the ages and merits of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are nothing compared to the fact that we are about to embark on a presidential campaign that has all the earmarks of one that kept Robert Mugabe in office for generations.
Which means that we need to win the next election or face the real possibility that it will be the last real one we have.
]]>
“Totally Legal”
/2018/08/totally-legal/
Mon, 06 Aug 2018 07:46:30 +0000
The Washington Post:
Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to “get information on an opponent,” defending the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”
So, if it was “totally legal,” why has he and his minions spent the last year making up fake news — and probably obstructing justice in the process — to cover up something that’s “done all the time in politics”?
Adam Davidson in The New Yorker:
The tweet contains several crucial pieces of information. First, it is a clear admission that Donald Trump, Jr.,’s original statement about the case was inaccurate enough to be considered a lie. He had said the meeting was with an unknown person who “might have information helpful to the campaign,” and that this person “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” This false statement was, according to his legal team, dictated by the President himself. There was good reason to mislead the American people about that meeting. Based on reporting—at the time and now—of the President’s admission, it was a conscious effort by the President’s son and two of his closest advisers to work with affiliates of the Russian government to obtain information that might sway the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. In short, it was, at minimum, a case of attempted collusion. The tweet indicates that Trump’s defense will continue to be that this attempt at collusion failed—“it went nowhere”—and that, even if it had succeeded, it would have been “totally legal and done all the time.” It is unclear why, if the meeting was entirely proper, it was important for the President to declare “I did not know about it!” or to tell the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now.”
The President’s Sunday-morning tweet should be seen as a turning point. It doesn’t teach us anything new—most students of the case already understand what Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner knew about that Trump Tower meeting. But it ends any possibility of an alternative explanation.
I’m not sure Mr. Mueller needs to interview Trump. All he needs to do is download his Twitter feed.
]]>