Russia

Follow The Money!

by Cheryl Rofer| January 16, 20204:26 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Rofer on International Relations, Russia, Trump Crime Cartel

Detective-looking guy following dollar signs embedded in pavement to St. Basil’s Cathedral, just across Red Square from the Kremlin

Following the money is difficult and tedious. Each story is detailed, and the stories appear at different times, later overshadowed by the next Trump scandal. In this post, I collect instances of Russian-associated money going into Republican coffers.

There aren’t enough instances to connect into a pattern beyond that theme, although some names occur in more than one example. I hope reporters will see this as a fertile path forward. Foreign money is prohibited in US political campaigns, but there are ways to get around that.

There are probably more – add them in the comments, preferably with a link, if you have them.

Rusal Aluminum Rolling Mill in Kentucky

Shortly after sanctions against Russia were lifted in early 2019, Rusal, a Russian metals company in which Oleg Deripaska has an interest, announced that it would participate in building an aluminum rolling mill in Ashland, Kentucky. Mitch McConnell, of course, is from Kentucky. (Washington Post, New York Times)

Dallas Morning News, Updated May 2018

Donations from several Russian-associated American citizens to campaigns of Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham are documented. The donors are Len Blavatnik, Andrew Intrater, Alexander Shustorovich, and Simon Kukes. There are connections among them and to Rusal, in which Blavatnik holds a 20.5% stake with Viktor Vekselberg. Blavatnik gave $6.35 million to GOP political action committees in 2015-2016, including $2 million from one of his companies to McConnell’s PAC.

Vekselberg is the president of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminum, energy, and other sectors. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova’s US investment arm.

Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250K in 2000 to support the Bush campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government. $1 million to Trump’s Inaugural Committee.

From 1998 to 2003, Kukes worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik. He contributed a total of $283K, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before that election.

Steven Mnuchin owned a Hollywood financing company with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump’s appointment as Treasury Secretary.

The Citizens United decision made these contributions legal.

A quote from the May 17, 2017, Washington Post:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy….

News had just broken the day before in The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, prompting McCarthy to shift the conversation from Russian meddling in Europe to events closer to home.

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”

Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman

Kevin McCarthy has said he will donate to charity funds totaling about $185,000 received from Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. His campaign organizations received the money just before McCarthy called for US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich to be removed from her job. Parnas and Fruman have received some of their money from Dmytro Firtash, who is in Austria, fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and has been a front man for the Kremlin in attempting to gain control of Ukrainian natural gas supplies. Giuliani, who Trump says is his lawyer, has accepted money from Parnas and Fruman. Investigation continues.

Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants Inc.

Columbus Nova, mentioned in the Dallas Morning News article, paid $500,000 to Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants Inc. That company was the vehicle for paying hush money to one of Donald Trump’s mistresses. Viktor Vekselberg and Andrew Intrater were involved. Cohen was the treasurer of the Republican Party, and this payment may have been made while he was in that post.

National Rifle Association (NRA)

The NRA has been closely associated with the Republican Party in fighting limitations on gun ownership. Maria Butina infiltrated the organization as a Russian agent, establishing “lines of communication to advance Russian interests.” An 18-month investigation by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA supported Butina’s activities and those of her supervisor, Alexander Torshin in setting up a trip for NRA executives to travel to Russia with the expectation of enhancing their personal business activities. Such use of a nonprofit’s funds is illegal.

Counterintelligence Investigation

A counterintelligence investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election preceded the Mueller investigation, was folded into it, and still continues. We need to hear more from that investigation. That investigation may have turned up the hacking of the Republican National Committee by Russians, from which no information has been leaked.

Hotel in Azerbaijan and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

This money in this story is not Russian, but rather from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Trump organization may have laundered money for the Revolutionary Guard through a hotel built in Baku, Azerbaijan. The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson did the investigation and has been trying to get the attention of other media on Twitter, given the current hostilities with Iran. Here’s one of his Twitter threads.

Not money, but it might be useful to cross-check the 16 times that Trump has spoken privately with Vladimir Putin.

Paul Manafort worked for Deripaska and owed him millions of dollars.

This may not be a full listing of Russian money going to Republican candidates and organizations. If you have other examples, add them in the comments, preferably with links.

Russia is not a friend of the United States, so one might ask a number of questions. Why are Republicans willing to accept Russian money? Is there similar evidence for Democrats? The account in the Dallas Morning News says that they are reporting on “99% Republican donations.” Does this money influence officeholders’ opinions and votes?

Seems important to me.

Image source

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

Follow The Money!Post + Comments (26)

The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible Interviewer

by Adam L Silverman| January 16, 202012:04 am| 49 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

I’ve watched the Rachel Maddow interview with Lev Parnas. I’m not impressed. I’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to do the substance before I get into format/process.

The information that Parnas presented was a mixture of accurate information, misinformation, and agitprop. For instance, we already know, from previous reporting that has been verified by subsequent reporting, that Giuliani had a strange fixation on the Ukrainian black ledger that implicated Manafort. So it isn’t surprising when Parnas presented that in one of his answers. Nor was it surprising when he made it very clear that it was never about corruption, it was just about Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, and getting dirt on them for political purposes in the 2020 election. This too has been reported on extensively and verified in subsequent reporting. As was the information about the quid pro quo given to Ukrainian President Zelensky And the information about trying to get a deal cut for Dmitro Firtash in exchange for his help. And I have no doubt, despite his attempt to get ahead of things on Fox News tonight, that Congressman Nunes is up to his eyeballs in this meshugas.

But there was also misinformation and agitprop. Let’s start with AG Barr. We know from reporting that Toensing and DiGenova met with AG Barr to try to get the charges dropped against Firtash. But we also know that Barr rebuffed them. However, we also know from the Memorandum of the Conversation for the second phone call in July 2019 between the President and Ukrainian President Zelensky that the President told President Zelensky that he would have AG Barr follow up. This prompted the Department of Justice spokesperson to issue a statement that AG Barr had no idea what this was about and was not involved. That said, we know from the Intelligence Community whistleblower’s complaint that the whistleblower asserted that AG Barr was involved. Whether this was in reference to the President’s statement that he’d have the Attorney General follow up in the July 2019 phone call or based on some other information the whistleblower has is unclear. So some of this is accurate and confirmable, some of it may be accurate, but is not currently confirmed, and some I’m not sure could ever be confirmed.

As for the answers regarding erstwhile Republican congressional candidate Rob Hyde, I find it hard to believe that Parnas was more concerned about him when he was drunk at the bar at a Trump property than when he was texting Parnas that he had a US ambassador under surveillance and wanted to know if money was available to move on her. I’m also not buying Hyde’s answers in his interview with Sinclair’s Eric Bolling this evening. He’s in a lot of trouble, has a history of making terroristic threats, and has something of a drinking problem.

The releases of the information that Parnas has turned over to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are all interesting. And like tonight’s interview some of that information is accurate and true, some is disinformation, and some is agitprop. The proof will be in the vetting of that documentary information, just as it will be in the vetting of the information Parnas provided this evening. It is important to remember that Parnas is alleged to be a low level member or associate of post-Soviet and Russian organized crime. He is only as credible as his statements and documentary evidence can be verified.

And that’s where I get to the format/process problem. I’ve conducted semi-structured interviews as part of my work for the US Army and I’ve trained Soldiers on how to do them to collect information and intelligence. I’ve mentioned before that over a four to five month period I interviewed around 50 sheikhs, imams, and other local elites and notables using a semi-structured format across central Iraq (Baghdad Province and parts of Anbar, Wassit, and Diyala Provinces). I’m a huge fan of putting the subject of the interview at ease and letting them tell you their story – the true parts, the false parts, and the parts that fall in between. But there is a difference between doing that, and being prepared to ask sound follow up questions rooted within the context of the answers and information you’re being provided, and credulously just eating it up while looking focused and concerned. And this means asking questions like: “how do you know?” and “can you provide verification for that?” or “do you have documents about that?” or “who else should we talk to in order to verify that?”. I’m not qualified to judge whether Maddow’s interviewing process made for compelling television, but from an information gathering standpoint it was a failure. Maddow was far too credulous and failed to ask the necessary follow on questions. I will make an important caveat: she may have been prevented from doing so by agreement with Parnas’s attorney about the format of the interview. But, if that was the case, then it should have been disclosed. I’ve seen Maddow do far more adversarial and far better interviews with friendly guests. This was not one of her best outings.

Open thread!

The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible InterviewerPost + Comments (49)

The Black PSYOP Part V: Russia Was, Apparently, Listening – Election 2020 Edition

by Adam L Silverman| January 13, 202010:45 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

I’ve written several posts about Black PSYOPs, which are attempts to launder misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop through legitimate sources to influence people’s, groups’, and governments’ attitudes and actions. I’ve specifically focused on attempts by Republican elected and appointed officials, as well as the President’s surrogates, to launder the debunked, factually inaccurate, lie that Vice President Biden knuckled the Ukrainian prosecutor back in 2014 and 2015 in order to protect his son Hunter Biden. The truth is that Vice President Biden, representing the official policy of the United States and working with US allies in Britain, the EU, and the IMF sought to force out a corrupt prosecutor who was covering up and slow walking investigations into corruption in the post-Maidan Ukraine.

Moreover, as I’ve repeatedly covered since September, the assertion that Hunter Biden did anything wrong is actually Russian created agitprop that was first put forward in Russian state backed news media in May 2014. It emerged because it was being reported at the time that Vice President Biden was considering running for president in 2016 and Putin was looking to dirty him up should he emerge as the Democratic nominee. It is the same reason that one of Secretary Kerry’s, who was also being reported in 2014 as considering another run for the presidency, step-sons was mentioned in the reporting by RIA-Novosti.

The New York Times is reporting that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, appears to have now hacked Burisma, which is the Ukrainian natural gas company that employed Hunter Biden.

The GRU attacks appear to be running parallel to an analog effort by Russian spies to dig up information that could embarrass the Bidens. Russian spies are trying to penetrate Burisma and working sources in the Ukrainian government in search of emails, financial records.
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) January 13, 2020

With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.
The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.
It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.
The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.
Then, as now, the Russian hackers from a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U., and to private researchers by the alias “Fancy Bear,” used so-called phishing emails that appear designed to steal usernames and passwords, according to Area 1, the Silicon Valley security firm that detected the hacking. In this instance, the hackers set up fake websites that mimicked sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries, and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.
The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.
“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers.
“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

The purpose of this hacking is not just to get access to emails and other documents, remove them, and either leak them through third parties to gullible members of the US news media who will be all to happy to publish them in a repeat of 2016 or to credulous surrogates of the President like his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. The purpose of hacking into these systems is also to be able to adjust actual emails and documents, as well as plant false ones, that can then be removed, leaked, and laundered through the news media with the real emails and documents as part of the ongoing Black PSYOP campaign. If there’s nothing actually incriminating in Burisma’s employees’ or board of directors member’s emails or the company’s documents about Hunter Biden, then the GRU will be happy to fabricate them (agitprop), embed them with the real information, and then ensure that all of that information – real and fabricated – makes its way to the information laundries of the US news media so it can be weaponized against Vice President Biden and on behalf of the President. They did this with the Clinton campaign and DNC emails in 2016 and they’ll do it again here too.

And the GRU’s, as well as other hostile state actors and, most likely, those of some partners who have a preference in the outcome of the 2020 elections efforts will not be confined to Vice President Biden. I guarantee that they have operations ready to go for any of the leading Democratic candidates contesting for the Democratic nomination. Some of these efforts will be easier than others. Attempts will be made to get to files, documents, and emails from Senator Warren’s time doing legal consulting. And you’ll see hacks attempting to bring to light that she got unfair treatment by falsely claiming to be Native American or lying about when she was pregnant. Four decades of speeches and public access show episodes and writings from Senator Sanders will be released in toto (the most controversial ones) or barbered and adjusted for maximum influence effect to make fairly banal left of center statements seem nefarious. Documents, emails, and records from Senator Klobuchar’s time as a local prosecutor will be combed through. And attempts will be made to get into McKinsey’s systems, as well as those of South Bend, Indiana looking for anything that can be used against Mayor Buttigieg. And if nothing really damaging can be found on any of these candidates, then it will be manufactured and that will be weaponized. Remember, part of what led FBI Director Comey to usurp the authority of the Attorney General in 2016, including not even just recommending that then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates take the lead regarding Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, was a false memo fabricated by the GRU, which they allowed US intelligence to collect. When even the most senior professionals with extensive experience can be manipulated to make terrible professional errors through agitprop, imagine what it is going to do to the Ken Vogels and Mike Allens of the world, let alone Rudy Giuliani, Jeanine Pirro, Seant Hannity, and Lou Dobbs? All of whom are just salivating for someone to hand them this type of information gift wrapped and ready to go regardless of who is providing it and whether or not it is accurate or even germane to the election.

As I wrote way back in March 2019, the 2020 elections are an information war. And that information war is wrapped within an undeclared interstate war between Russia and the US. And that is the reality that every Democratic campaign, up and down the ballot from municipal special districts to those seeking the presidency, America’s Intelligence Community, the National Security Directorate’s at the DOJ and FBI, and the news media, especially those covering politics, need to understand and prepare for. After the 2016 election and what has now been well documented as happening since as far back as 2014, there is no good excuse for refusing to learn from the past 5 and 1/2 years, for campaigns and the new media to not have counter-influence operations in place and operating, and for Americans not to be informed and realize that we are at war. The 2020 election is not just taking place while that war is ongoing; the 2020 election is actually one theater of operations in that war.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Open thread!

The Black PSYOP Part V: Russia Was, Apparently, Listening – Election 2020 EditionPost + Comments (63)

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And Ribbentrop

by Cheryl Rofer| December 31, 201912:51 pm| 154 Comments

This post is in: Rofer on International Relations, Russia

In 1939, the Soviet Union formally allied with Nazi Germany and agreed on how to split up the countries located between them. Immediately after, Germany invaded Poland. It is generally thought to be the beginning of World War II. Russia did not acknowledge the existence of the secret protocol on dividing Europe until 1989.

Cartoon by David Low in the *Evening Standard* depicting Hitler greeting Stalin after the invasion of Poland,

But that is not what Vladimir Putin wants you to believe. No, it was dastardly France, United Kingdom, the United States, and others who joined up with Hitler first at Munich, leaving the poor Soviet Union with no choice! Putin has mentioned this in several speeches, and in the last several weeks, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has joined in.

The notorious August 23, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not what triggered World War II. The date for the attack on Poland on September 1 had been designated by Hitler in the Fall Weiss directive on April 10, 1939. pic.twitter.com/1a8lc51lzm
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

It was the Munich Betrayal that was a prelude to World War II. The Munich Agreement by Nazi Germany, the UK, France and Italy not only deformed the entire system of international relations, but marked the beginning of the invasion and re-division of Europe. pic.twitter.com/X40YsnDuiJ
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

On April 17, 1939 the Soviet Union once again proposed signing a comprehensive agreement with security guarantees – a proposal that was declined by its Western partners and rejected by the Baltic countries, which categorically refused to participate in any plans against Germany. pic.twitter.com/IAgRkLnW67
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

At the same time Hitler’s war machine was created with the assistance of leading American companies like #GeneralElectric, #GeneralMotors, #Ford and others. The pro-Nazi German American Bund promoted a view of Hitler without any obstacles in the US in the pre-war period. pic.twitter.com/uhSMCLj2Fj
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 30, 2019

And they’re dissing diplomats who disagree with them.

Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy? https://t.co/q6IQuwwX1Z
— Russian Embassy, PL (@rusemb_pl) December 30, 2019

The nations Russia has accused of starting World War II are pushing back.

Statement by the Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki. pic.twitter.com/l0Y2ApEhd9
— Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland (@PremierRP_en) December 29, 2019

❝This year, we will commemorate not only 1989, but also the 80 years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the organization of Nazi and Soviet occupations of Europe which occurred simultaneously and successively.❞

➖ @JY_LeDrian
— France Diplomacy🇫🇷 (@francediplo_EN) December 31, 2019

Even Germany…

German🇩🇪 Ambassador to Poland🇵🇱:

The position of Federal government is clear: Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact served to prepare the criminal war of aggression executed by national-socialist Germany against Poland. Jointly with Germany, USSR participated in forceful partition of Poland. https://t.co/yRDZmUQTOG
— LT MFA StratCom (@LT_MFA_Stratcom) December 31, 2019

And, of course, a lot more from amateur and professional historians on Twitter. If you ever wanted to learn more about the beginnings of World War II, this is your big chance.

It’s hard to know what is motivating this propaganda storm from Russia. Here’s a person I trust.

I presume this is largely for internal consumption. It is hard to believe that he expects to be taken seriously elsewhere. When Russia wants to use WW2 to gain friends tends to divert attention to its sacrifices post-Barbarossa and away from culpability for war's origins.
— Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF) December 31, 2019

That’s a little unclear, but I think the second sentence is intended to say that when Russia wants to use WW2 to gain friends, it usually talks about its sacrifices rather than the war’s origins.

There is speculation, as you see in the Dalsjö tweet, that it’s in preparation for some sort of military action from Russia. I tend to doubt that – Russia doesn’t need that kind of trouble right now. OTOH, Putin has been feeling cocky about his new weapons designed to deter the United States.

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And RibbentropPost + Comments (154)

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: “Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”

by Anne Laurie| December 31, 20194:35 am| 87 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Russia

Word of the Day: CAROL-EVEN (n.) the last night of the year
— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) December 31, 2019

Russian immigrant and cynic Slava Malamud is my new favorite twitter discovery. In the tradition of Damon Runyon, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles P. Pierce, he is by profession a sports writer, but both his tweetstream and his blog are broad-ranging. As in this explanation of the Russian winter holiday:

… [T]he only real holiday anyone knows or cares about in late December is the New Year. The secular, godless, multicultural, all-inclusive, gloriously drunk holiday when kids can stay up all night, presents are distributed, and citizens are allowed to harbor a fleeting hope that things might just change for the better with a flip of the calendar.
The New Year became Russia’s major holiday during Soviet times, when it was felt that completely depriving folks of reasons to celebrate was no longer prudent, and that the Soviet Constitution Day (December 30) just didn’t quite cut it as a merry enough occasion. The idea to celebrate the New Year instead of Christmas was such a smashing success that within a generation or two it was utterly ingrained in the Soviet psyche…
The Russian tradition of celebrating New Year with decorating a fir tree indoors dates back thousands of years, probably, and has been copied by other cultures and holidays. Sadly, this occurred shortly before Russians invented copyright laws, so now everyone does it. Wrongly.
Of course, in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, the tree was coopted by the dark forces of organized religion and mounted (exclusively in rich houses) on January 7, which is when the true Russian Jesus was born by his absolutely non-Jewish mother. But the glorious Communist Revolution had dispensed with all that nonsense, and the tree got itself outlawed for a while, until the wise proletarian government revived the tradition for the secular New Year.
Traditionally, the fir is decorated with glass baubles as well as electric lights in honor of Vladimir Lenin’s glorious invention of the light bulb. Prior to that, many Russians would mount actual lit candles on it, because any new year could be your last one so what the hell. “Fir tree, ignite yourself!”, children yell at New Year parties, quoting the visionary Russian poet Alexander Pushkin who ingeniously predicted the triumph of the Socialist Revolution with his immortal verse: “A flame shall be ignited from a spark!” Every year, several Russian homes majestically burn down on New Year’s Eve from people’s taking these words too literally.
The ornaments, known as “fir toys”, include both the glass globes and other such trinkets familiar in the West, but also cosmonauts, Sputniks, peasant women, revolutionary sailors, village huts, tractors, and, because, Russians are all about realism, squirrels…
Grandpa Frost, or Dedushka Moroz, is a mythical bearded giftman who makes his appearance on New Year’s Night, distributing presents to children who may or may not have studied the works of Vladimir Lenin with due diligence over the course of the year. Said diligence, as well as behavior appropriate to a fierce Russian patriot, are the determining factors in the children’s eligibility to receive free-of-charge presents from the terrible and magnanimous Grandpa. Other factors may involve school grades and manufacturing quotas…
Grandpa Frost wears a long fur-lined coat and a similarly manufactured hat. Unlike the sad American imitation Santa, who apparently has elves murder polar bears for the lining of his coat, Grandpa Frost does his animal-murdering himself, as attested by the club he also carries.
Children who haven’t behaved as becoming a Young Communist Pioneer over the course of the year are sometimes told that the club shall be used on them in lieu of the presents from Grandpa Frost’s bag. According to Grandpa himself, “whoever touches my staff, shall never wake up.”
Grandpa Frost’s preferred method of transportation is a decidedly ground-borne sleigh pulled by a team of three horses, though he isn’t above traveling on foot or by skis. He enters children’s homes proudly and directly, through a front door, occasionally bothering to knock.
Grandpa Frost’s facial expression is rarely jolly and usually conveys the message that Grandpa is not one to be screwed with. In almost all versions of the story his nose is pronouncedly red, which is attributed to both cold weather and habitual drinking…
In Russia, the holiday season lasts between December 31 and January 8, with the period between January 1 and January 8 known as The National Hangover, or Mother Russia Needs To Lay Down a Bit. Almost all businesses are closed, right down to newspapers, which don’t come out the whole week, because small letters make Russia’s head hurt this time of the year…

Many illustrations, mostly vintage, at the link. (Also not to be missed: Malamud’s descriptions of festive Russian cuisine, much of it — as with the centrality of alcohol — reminiscent for me of the mid-50s…)

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: <em>“Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”</em>Post + Comments (87)

Merry Impeachmas, From Donald & His Duma Buddies

by Anne Laurie| December 22, 201910:10 am| 107 Comments

This post is in: Impeachment Inquiry, Russia

Jeff Danziger via GoComics.com

“Russian attempts to interfere in the election were disclosed by Congress on Sep 22, 2016, confirmed by US intel agencies on Oct 7, and detailed by the Dir of National Intelligence office in Jan 2017. According to US intel, the operation was ordered directly by Putin.”🧙🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/0b93NKvBXg
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) December 21, 2019

Every single time I think, "Naw, Trump wouldn't be *that* brazen, would he?" he does something even more brazen than I could have imagined. Here's the president of the United States, telling us that his impeachment is unfair because… Vladimir Putin says so. https://t.co/9sgJ13jGMi
— Rosa Brooks (@brooks_rosa) December 22, 2019

Who needs the Washington Post and anonymous administration sourcesX when you can get the information straight from President’s mouth: Putin told me! pic.twitter.com/H3ZdAHpaT9
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) December 21, 2019

Furthermore…

And here is your bureaucracy version of a literally smoking gun:
Newly released #UkraineDocs show that a mere 90 minutes after Trump's phone call, the White House ordered the military aid to be put on hold, but to be "closely held" infohttps://t.co/IqT70JkWBH
HT @Zeddary pic.twitter.com/H9eeHuOlo4
— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) December 21, 2019

🚨This is breaking news and it’s important. New documents show:
1. Ukraine aid was held just hours after the Trump/Zelensky “do us a favor” call
2. Internal notes show Trump’s direct involvement
3. Staff knew it was wrong, kept it secrethttps://t.co/KHhS99oP0h
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 21, 2019

This is how it always goes. He's always lying, it's always Russia, it's always worse than it first appears. It takes a long time for evidence to come out, which is a sign that he's been getting away with a lot we don't know about at all. https://t.co/nYxvaq12xv
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) December 22, 2019

Merry Impeachmas, From Donald & His Duma BuddiesPost + Comments (107)

Russiagate Open Thread: Another Day, Another ‘Snow’ Storm…

by Anne Laurie| December 10, 20197:50 am| 64 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Russia, Trump Crime Cartel, All Too Normal

(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)

NEW: Democrats expected to unveil articles of impeachment against Trump Tuesday, focusing on abuse of power, obstruction of Congress @rachaelmbade @mikedebonis @eliseviebeck @ToluseO https://t.co/8BZML3Gwr0
— Emily Guskin (@EmGusk) December 10, 2019

Notably, Trump is meeting Russia’s foreign minister tomorrow. https://t.co/I64KHWvCjl
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) December 10, 2019

Trump/Lavrov meeting in the Oval office will be “closed press” pic.twitter.com/ryOfpou1Rj
— Jérôme Cartillier (@jcartillier) December 10, 2019

show full post on front page

Russiagate Open Thread: Another Day, Another ‘Snow’ Storm…Post + Comments (64)

The DOJ Inspector General’s Report on the Origin of the DOJ’s & FBI’s Investigation of the President’s 2016 Campaign Has Been Released

by Adam L Silverman| December 9, 20191:46 pm| 170 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security

Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General, has released his long awaited report into the origins of the DOJ’s and FBI’s investigation into the President’s 2016 campaign. The report can be found here and I’m uploading it below.

DOJ_IG_Investigation_DEC_2019

The bottom line up front: the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the four related investigations, including those into Carter Page and George Papadapolous, were properly predicated and there was no political bias. So no bias and no corruption. No coup, no deep state conspiracy. Nothing, nada, bupkis.

Here’s the key findings from the Executive Summary (emphasis mine):

In Full Investigations such as Crossfire Hurricane, all lawful investigative methods are allowed. In Preliminary Investigations, all lawful investigative methods (including the use of CHSs and UCEs) are permitted except for mail opening, physical searches requiring a search warrant, electronic surveillance requiring a judicial order or warrant (Title III wiretap or a FISA order), or requests under Title VII of FISA. An investigation opened as a Preliminary Investigation may be converted subsequently to a Full Investigation if information becomes available that meets the predication standard. As we describe in the report, all of the investigative actions taken by the Crossfire Hurricane team, from the date the case was opened on July 31 until October 21 (the date of the first FISA order) would have been permitted whether the case was opened as a Preliminary or Full Investigation.
The AG Guidelines and the DIOG do not provide heightened predication standards for sensitive matters, or allegations potentially impacting constitutionally protected activity, such as First Amendment rights. Rather, the approval and notification requirements contained in the AG Guidelines and the DIOG are, in part, intended to provide the means by which such concerns can be considered by senior officials. However, we were concerned to find that neither the AG Guidelines nor the DIOG contain a provision requiring Department consultation before opening an investigation such as the one here involving the alleged conduct of individuals associated with a major party presidential campaign.
Crossfire Hurricane was opened as a Full Investigation and all of the senior FBI officials who participated in discussions about whether to open acase told us the information warranted opening it. For example, then Counterintelligence Division (CD) Assistant Director (AD) E.W. “Bill” Priestap, who approved the case opening, told us that the combination of the FFG information and the FBI’s ongoing cyber intrusion investigation of the July 2016 hacks of the Democratic Nat ional Committee’s (DNC) emails, created a count erintelligence concern that the FBI was “obligated” to investigate. Priestap stated that he considered whether the FBI should conduct defensive briefings for the Trump campaign but ultimately decided that providing such briefings created the risk that “if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely changehis/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover-up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth.” We did not identify any Department or FBI policy that applied to this decision and therefore determined that the decision was a judgment call that Department and FBI policy leaves to the discretion of FBI officials. We also concluded that, under the AG Guidelines and the DIOG, the FBI had an authorized purpose when it opened Crossfire Hurricane to obtain information about, or protect against, a national security threat or federal crime, even though the investigation also had the potential to impact constitutionally protected activity.
Additionally, given the low threshold for predication in the AG Guidelines and the DIOG, we concluded that the FFG information, provided by agovernment the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) deems trustworthy, and describing a first-hand account from an FFG employee of a conversation with Papadopoulos, was sufficient to predicate the investigation.This information provided the FBI with an articulable factual basis that, if true, reasonably indicated activity constituting either a federal crime or a threat to national security, or both, may have occurred or may be occurring. For similar reasons, as we detail in Chapter Three, we concluded that the quantum of information articulated by the FBI to open the individual investigations on Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, and Manafort in August 2016 was sufficient to satisfy the low threshold established by the Department and the FBI.
As part of our review, we also sought to determine whether there was evidence that political bias or other improper considerations affected decision making in Crossfire Hurricane,including the decision to open the investigation. We discussed the issue of political bias in a prior OIG report, Review of Various Actions in Advance of the 2016 Election, where we described text and instant messages between then Special Counsel to the Deputy Director Lisa Page and then Section Chief Peter Strzok, among others, that included statements of hostility toward then candidate Trump and statements of support for then candidate Hillary Clinton. In this review, we found that, while Lisa Page attended some of the discussions regarding the opening of the investigations, she did not play a role in the decision to open Crossfire Hurricane or the four individual cases. We further found that while Strzok was directly involved in the decisions to open Crossfire Hurricane and the four individual cases, he was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters. As noted above, then CD AD Priestap, Strzok’s supervisor, was the official who ultimately made the decision to open the investigation, and evidence reflected that this decision by Priestap was reached by consensus after multiple days of discussions and meetings that included Strzok and other leadership in CD, the FBI Deputy Director, the FBI General Counsel, and a FBI Deputy General Counsel. We concluded that Priestap’s exercise of discretion in opening the investigation was in compliance with Department and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision. We similarly found that, while the formal documentation opening each of the four individual investigations was approved by Strzok (as required by the DIOG), the decisions to do so were reached by a consensus among the Crossfire “Hurricane agents and analysts who identified individuals associated with the Trump campaign who had recently traveled to Russia or had other alleged ties to Russia. Priestap was involved in these decisions. We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations.

IG Horowitz did, as is the case in almost every IG investigation, found some low level wrongdoing and other minor errors. There are always decisions made or actions taken that, in hindsight, should have been made differently or not taken at all. Had IG Horowitz found nothing at all, then things would have looked as hinky as if he’d found the whole thing to be unpredicated and biased.

Attorney General Barr, however, is not happy with these conclusions. And he is once again, as he did with the Mueller Report, trying to place both hands on the scale to justify his ideologically driven priors.

Barr again in statement defending Trump: “It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.”
— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) December 9, 2019

Given that AG Barr isn’t going to let this go, because it interferes in his career long mission to establish the presidency as an unelected king who is free from all constitutional and statutory constraints, despite Inspector General Horowitz’s findings, AG Barr and his surrogates, as well as the President and his, will continue to try to undermine the findings, as well as the actual reasons for the investigation into the President’s 2016 campaign. It is important to remember that during AG Barr’s first appointment as the Attorney General he created a factually dubious predicate that was used to create the inquiry that would eventually become the Whitewater investigation into the Clintons. This was done while then Governor Clinton was running for president against President Bush (41), who was Barr’s boss and shortly after he advised President Bush (41) to pardon all of the Iran-Contra conspirators, which would make it impossible to actually ascertain how much or how little President Bush (41) was involved in that criminal conspiracy to subvert American foreign and national security policy. Barr is an old hand at fixing investigations as attorney general. Either to make them go away or to create them. And both for political benefit. Despite IG Horowitz’s findings, this is not over. And it is not over because Attorney General Barr doesn’t want it to be over. And he will only want it to be over when he is able to arrange the conclusions in line with his preferences.

Open thread!

The DOJ Inspector General’s Report on the Origin of the DOJ’s & FBI’s Investigation of the President’s 2016 Campaign Has Been ReleasedPost + Comments (170)

Black PSYOP Part IV: Rudy Giuliani’s European OANN Adventure is the Black PSYOP’s Sixth Line of Operation

by Adam L Silverman| December 4, 20196:53 pm| 126 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Information Warfare, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security, War

Ken Vogel at The New York Times has reported that Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, is in Kyiv via Budapest. Vogel’s reporting clarifies Giuliani’s tweet from yesterday about a collaboration he is working on with One America News Network (OANN), which is a niche, far right news outlet.

Working on an important project with @OANN, intended to bring before the American people information Schiff (recently disclosed investor in Franklin Templton) “Star chamber” proceedings have covered up. Stay tuned.
— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) December 3, 2019

From The New York Times:

Even as Democrats intensified their scrutiny this week of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s role in the pressure campaign against the Ukrainian government that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, Mr. Giuliani has been in Europe continuing his efforts to shift the focus to purported wrongdoing by President Trump’s political rivals.
Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, met in Budapest on Tuesday with a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who has become a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. He then traveled to Kyiv on Wednesday seeking to meet with other former Ukrainian prosecutors whose claims have been embraced by Republicans, including Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, according to people familiar with the effort.
The former prosecutors, who have faced allegations of corruption, all played some role in promoting claims about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a former United States ambassador to Ukraine and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in 2016.
Mr. Giuliani is using the trip, which has not been previously reported, to help prepare more episodes of a documentary series for a conservative television outlet promoting his pro-Trump, anti-impeachment narrative. His latest moves to advance the theories propounded by the prosecutors amount to an audacious effort to give the president’s supporters new material to undercut the House impeachment proceedings and an eventual Senate trial.
The European trip was organized around the filming of a multipart television series featuring Mr. Giuliani that is being produced and aired by a conservative cable channel, One America News, or OAN.

OANN has very little actual platform presence. It is not carried by most of the major cable providers and Nielsen doesn’t provide ratings for it. But that’s not the point of making and airing this documentary. The actual purpose of the documentary is to get it made so that it can be aired, in its entirety or in snippets, on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. This is the sixth line of operation in the domestic Black PSYOP to launder misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop about what actually happened with Russia’s act of war against the US by interfering in the 2016 presidential election in order to blame Ukraine for conspiring with Secretary Clinton, her campaign, as well as the Director of the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Democratic National Committee, Vice President Biden, the mainstream media, and Alexandria Chalupa to steal the election from the President and to frame Russia for doing so. This is, of course, a lie. It is factually inaccurate. And it has been debunked repeatedly.

43% of Americans get their news from Facebook, 21% from YouTube, and 12% from Twitter. And 61% of those who get their news from Facebook are women and 62% of those who get their news from Facebook are white. That’s the primary target for the Black PSYOP’s sixth line of operation. The secondary targets are everyone they share it with and everyone who sees it once it is picked up and covered by mainstream news media outlets. Once OANN makes and broadcasts the video, the video in its entirety, as well as the soundbites edited for the most informational influence and effect, will be weaponized through Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to promote this misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop.

The real problem in trying to deal with this evolving Black PSYOP is that everyone keeps responding as if Walter Cronkite was still anchoring the nightly news. So the Black PSYOP is being conducted without actually discussing and understanding how information, especially news as a type of information, is experienced by Americans in 2019 as opposed to 1974! The news media, the candidates, and their campaigns need to get their heads around this reality. And they need to come up with strategies for dealing with it, as well as with the Black PSYOP campaign and its various lines of operations that are exploiting it so that Americans aren’t so misinformed that they cannot determine what is and is not true, factual, and real.

Open thread!

* I have chosen this image because it is an inversion of the actual Psychological Operations Regimental Crest – the knight is facing the wrong way and the colors are black. I have done so to symbolize the inversion and misuse of psychological operations against Americans. Propagandizing American citizens by members of the government is illegal under The 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act.

The actual crest for the US Army Psychological Operations Regiment is a golden knight rampant to dexter (in profile and facing left) with two golden thunderbolt bladed swords crossed behind it surrounded by a laurel wreath. The motto is “Persuade, Change, Influence”. The crest is described as:

The laurel wreath symbolizes honor and achievement. The center device is adapted from the Psychological Operations collar insignia. The chess knight represents the ability to act obliquely and influence all types of warfare. The lightning bolt swords denote speed and the ability to strike anywhere. The silver gray, white and black represent the three types of Psychological Operations. White represents the overt processes, black is for the covert and gray for the hidden. The Insignia was authorized November 18, 1998.

Black PSYOP Part IV: Rudy Giuliani’s European OANN Adventure is the Black PSYOP’s Sixth Line of OperationPost + Comments (126)

Meanwhile in Ukraine

by Adam L Silverman| December 3, 20199:41 pm| 68 Comments

This post is in: America, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security, War

While everyone is focused on all the President’s, his political appointees’, his personal attorney’s, and the variety of post-Soviet state oligarchs’/post-Soviet state mobsters’, and various other riffraffs’ ongoing attempts to screw around with and screw over Ukraine until President Zelensky announces an investigation into the Bidens, which he’s not going to do, and Guiliani and the various post-Soviet state oligarchs/post-Soviet state mobsters he’s working with to shake down the Ukrainian natural gas industry, life actually goes on in Ukraine. And that life is one where part of Ukraine has been scarfed up by Vladimir Putin and another part has been invaded by Putin. And, as a result, Ukraine is at war with Russia in order to preserve its territorial integrity.

As a result of all of this, President Zelensky has learned some hard lessons in his short time in office. His views below are just one of those lessons.

I don’t trust anyone at all. I’ll tell you honestly. Politics is not an exact science. That’s why in school I loved mathematics. Everything in mathematics was clear to me. You can solve an equation with a variable, with one variable. But here it’s only variables, including the politicians in our country. I don’t know these people. I can’t understand what dough they’re made of. That’s why I think nobody can have any trust. Everybody just has their interests.

He also knows that at least for right now, he’s largely on his own despite the US’s international agreement obligation to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

“If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” he said. “I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo.”

Ukraine has just reached an unfortunate milestone, for lack of a better term.

Since the beginning of the fighting in the Donbass, human casualties from explosive objects amount to more than a thousand people. Mine killed 300 civilians, including 27 children. About it reports ArmyInform with reference to management of ecological safety and mine action of the Ministry of Defense.
According to preliminary estimates, the area of areas contaminated with mines and explosive objects is about 7 thousand square meters. km controlled areas and approximately 9 thousand square meters. km of occupied territories.
Infrastructures are in a critical condition because sometimes they cannot be accessed through shells and improvised explosives.

This is a humanitarian nightmare and is going to take decades to fix even if a ceasefire was put in place immediately and was quickly followed by the withdrawal of Russian and Russian proxy forces and the reestablishment of Ukrainian sovereignty over the occupied territories in Donbass.

This is the actual effects on the Ukrainian citizenry not only of the occupation and the war, but the mine fields:

Baba Masha’s neighbors say that because of the danger of entering the village of Opytne at night (it sits on Ukraine’s front line and is accessible only by a dirt road through a mined field) fire trucks were unable to respond. Her house is still smoldering as I type this.
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) December 1, 2019

Here’s more from Christopher Miller at Buzzfeed (emphasis mine):

When he’s not engaged in gun battles with Russian-led forces on Ukraine’s eastern front line, Stas, a scruffy 26-year-old soldier, likes to cozy up in his bunker and brush up on his English skills by watching Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He cracks up at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of President Donald Trump.
Watching political satire on American TV — when he’s able to get a strong enough signal on the battlefield to access YouTube — is also how Stas learned that Trump had frozen $391 million in US security aid meant for the Ukrainian armed forces over the summer. The news made him angry. The fighting was hot at the time, and he and his fellow soldiers were stuck with mostly crappy, old gear.
“Look at this. It’s old and falling apart,” he complained of his Ukrainian government–issued bulletproof vest in accented English. It was barely stitched together and slouching on one side. “It’s a piece of shit.”
There’s one thing Stas and the soldiers in Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade positioned in the village of Novooleksandrivka do have, which they say has helped them spot enemy soldiers who creep within grenade-throwing range of their trenches at night: a pair of US-made night vision sights.
The only problem? They don’t fit on the Ukrainian rifles.
He explained that “they would definitely be more effective if we had them on our rifles,” which is impossible without a special adapter. He demonstrated how he has to hold the sight in one hand, pick a target, lower the device from his eye, and try to remember where he was looking as he aims and fires his weapon. Despite all this, an extra pair or two would be good, he said.
He wondered: Would his brigade have gotten at least another sight if the security aid hadn’t been held up? If only Americans knew how much the equipment would help…
“Nobody in your country knows what’s happening here,” Stas continued, waving his arms in frustration. “They don’t know how we are fighting for our lives with almost nothing.”
Fought for more than five years in trenches cut through some of Europe’s most fertile farmland, Russia’s war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas has killed around 14,000 people and brought under its control a chunk of a territory larger than the state of New Jersey. Yet — despite it being fought with $1.6 billion of US help in the form of military aid and training since 2014 — the war had largely been forgotten before it was catapulted into the headlines amid the House impeachment inquiry against Trump.
“While they were playing with our aid, I wonder, did they know we were dying out here?” asked Oleksandr, a sergeant in the 14th Mechanized Brigade who goes by the call sign “kuvyrok,” or “somersault.” As we crept through trenches outside the village of Krymske, 40 miles northwest of Stas’s position, careful to keep our heads down and out of Russian snipers’ sights, Oleksandr said at least two soldiers were killed at the position over the summer.
According to statistics from the Ukrainian military, at least 46 soldiers have been killed since July 18, when word spread throughout the Trump administration that the president had secretly frozen aid for Ukraine. Around 19 of those deaths came during the window of time in which the aid was delayed. While there’s no way of tying those deaths directly to the lack of new US aid at the front line, more than two dozen Ukrainian soldiers — located at four fighting positions, a tank base, and a military hospital — told me they were disappointed by the news. Their morale suffered, and they felt vulnerable and abandoned by their biggest supporter.
The soldiers, whom I met over the course of a week this month while traveling along the snaking 250-mile front line in eastern Ukraine, painted a clear picture of just how important US military assistance is for Ukraine in its war against Russia. The soldiers spoke on the condition that their surnames not be used for security reasons. In what many described as a David-and-Goliath-like fight, they shared several stories about how the US aid has helped level the battlefield and stop the larger and more powerful Russia from grabbing more of their land.
They also said that any aid freeze — even a temporary one — jeopardizes not only themselves but perhaps the very future of Ukraine.

There is much more at the link.

14,000 Ukrainians – Soldier and civilian alike – have been killed in Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s incursion into Donbass. And to establish enough of a position of strength so that Ukrainian officials can negotiate a ceasefire and peace agreement that maintains Ukraine’s territorial integrity and gets Crimea back as well. That isn’t going to happen without the US backing it up. Which means it isn’t going to happen until, at least, January 2021 and despite the US’s international obligations to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity. What the US would need to do today is much harder than it would have been in 2014 and in 2021 any response will be that much harder than it would be today. And throughout it all Ukrainians are dying – Soldiers and civilians – because Putin has decided that he gets to draw the borders of eastern Europe wherever he likes. And that cannot be allowed to stand. However, because Ukraine has now been turned into another partisan issue, just as trade, Israel, healthcare, education, climate change, and so many other issues, as long as there is a Republican president and/or at least one chamber of Congress in Republican hands, stepping up and doing the right thing for Ukraine, as well as for the rest of our European and NATO partners is going to be a very heavy lift. Because it is going to be a partisan lift.

When you see the domestic news reporting on Ukraine, where Ukraine is simply a sort of funny sounding part of the horserace coverage of domestic American politics, keep in mind that the real focus here should be Ukraine; should be on the fact that Ukraine has been invaded and been occupied for going on five years; should be on the fact that the US has an actual international obligation to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial integrity; and that it isn’t just another partisan football so the talking heads on the news shows have something to stroke their chins about.

Open thread!

Meanwhile in UkrainePost + Comments (68)

House Intelligence Impeachment report is out

by David Anderson| December 3, 20192:17 pm| 93 Comments

This post is in: Impeachment Inquiry, Russia, Lock Him Up...Lock Them All Up

The House Intelligence Committee impeachment report just dropped with 300 pages of details:

The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election. As described in this executive summary and the report that follows, President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign. The President demanded that the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly announce investigations into a political rival that he apparently feared the most, former Vice President Joe Biden, and into a discredited theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. To compel the Ukrainian President to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.

That is the language of bribery.

House Intelligence Impeachment report is outPost + Comments (93)

Black PSYOP Part III: The Fifth Domestic Line of Operation is Now Operational

by Adam L Silverman| December 1, 201910:13 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election Year, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security, War

On 25 October and 12 November I defined what a Black PSYOP is, how it differs from normal Psychological Operations, debunked the conspiracies, misinformation, and agitprop at the root of the Black PSYOP that the President and his surrogates are trying to perpetrate on the American people, and delineated the four lines of operations up to mid November. The President’s surrogates, specifically elected Republican officials like Senator Kennedy (R-LA), have now rolled out the fifth line of operation in this Black PSYOP.

This fifth line of operation is to launder the completely debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, through its elected and appointed officials, interfered in the 2016 US presidential election in the attempt to get Secretary Clinton elected by conspiring with Secretary Clinton, her campaign, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama administration, the DOJ’s National Security Division, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Director of the FBI, the Director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, MI6 and other elements of British Intelligence, other allied intelligence services, and Alexandra Chalupa to subvert the election and prevent the President from being elected. And that Russia had nothing to do with trying to subvert the 2016 presidential election. Or, if Russia did, it was ineffective and no one in the President’s campaign, his businesses, or among his surrogates and supporters was involved in whatever it was Russia might or might not have been doing in 2016.

We know that this conspiracy theory and misinformation is NOT TRUE! IT IS A LIE! A fabrication of Russia’s leadership and intelligence services put out in an attempt to muddy the waters around what happened in the 2016 presidential election, further obscure Russia’s actions in and against Ukraine, make Ukraine the villain to justify the actions in and against Ukraine that Russia is trying to obscure, all so that Russia can get out from under the US sanctions against it. We know it’s a lie because last month US intelligence officials briefed members of the Senate and told them it was a lie and delineated its origins. We know it’s a lie because we have a transcript, posted by the Kremlin on the Kremlin’s outward facing English language website, of Putin making these claims in February 2017:

Second, as we all know, during the presidential campaign in the United States, the Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favour of one candidate. More than that, certain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, funded this candidate, or female candidate, to be more precise. Now they need to improve relations with the current administration, and using a conflict to do so is always a better, easier way to draw the incumbent administration into addressing Ukrainian problems and thus establish a dialogue.

We know it is a lie because of materials brought to light by Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation and the prosecutions that resulted from it, which clearly indicate that Paul Manafort was fed this information by his Russian handler, Konstantin Kilimnik, and was pushing it within the President’s campaign in 2016.

The fifth domestic line of operation of the Black PSYOP to remove the blame of interfering in the 2016 US presidential election from Russia and place it on Ukraine is to have presidential surrogates like Senator Kennedy (R-LA) go onto legitimate, mainstream news shows, such as the Sunday talk shows, and launder this misinformation and agitprop. The laundering of the information occurs once it’s been said on CNN, the three broadcast networks, and/or MSNBC. Then follow up reporting has been done on those networks about the claim, as well as in the major mainstream print and digital media. And even though this follow on reporting is all debunking, the misinformation and agitprop has been laundered through legitimate sources. Once that happens it is ready for weaponization on Facebook, Twitter, and the conservative digital and social media sites that Senator Kennedy and the other surrogates pushing the same conspiracy theory, misinformation, and agitprop were originally referencing as their sources. All that matters in this line of effort are the video clips of Senator Kennedy or other GOP elected and appointed officials above the CNN or MSNBC or broadcast network symbols looking into the camera and stating the agitprop. Once those exist they can and will be weaponized across social and digital media like Facebook and Twitter, as well as conservative social and digital media sites. And, of course, they’ll be picked up by Russia’s state media outlets like RT and Sputnik and spread to a whole different audience.

On average 2.3 million Americans watch the Sunday news talk shows on the three networks and Fox News Sunday. That’s not a lot. However, 43% of Americans get their news via Facebook. And among that 43%, 61% are women, and 62% are white. So if you can edit the footage of Senator Kennedy and other surrogates down to them just stating this conspiracy theory, misinformation, and agitprop on one of the Sunday news shows on NBC, ABC, CBS, and/or Fox News Sunday and put it out on Facebook, you’ve gone a long way to effectively weaponizing this misinformation and agitprop. From there it will get picked up and rebroadcast through a variety of different platforms and means. And, ultimately, the purpose isn’t to change anyone’s minds. It is to both reinforce the already held positions of the President’s supporters and to so confuse the actual, factual record of what happened in the 2016 presidential election that anyone who isn’t a political junkie or a committed political partisan just throws up their hands in disgust because it has been made impossible to tell the truth – that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect the President and ensure that Secretary Clinton would not and could not be elected – from the lie – that it was really Ukraine who interfered in the 2016 election by conspiring with Secretary Clinton and others to try to prevent the President from being elected. The point of this line of operation is to make it so that since nothing can be clearly demonstrated to be true, then anything and everything is possible.

It really doesn’t matter if Senator Kennedy (R-LA) believes the lies he’s peddling or if he knows that it is conspiracy theories, misinformation, and agitprop. I think he knows it is bullshit and the tell is his asserting that he never got the briefing that senior US intelligence officials provided to US senators last month. If he didn’t get the briefing then he really has no official information to rebut the less than reputable sources he’s citing. By being purposefully uninformed, by not taking the briefing, he’s able to say he doesn’t know which is true.

We have reached the point where elected US governmental officials are attempting to propagandize American citizens for partisan political purposes. It is illegal for government officials to propagandize Americans, though I highly doubt anything will be done and anyone will be held to account. But that is where we’re at. The real question has to be why Senator Kennedy has decided he needs to do this. Is it just fear of mean presidential tweet? Is it fear of being primaried or being voted out of office? Or is it fear of something else? Until or unless we get answers to those questions the only thing we can be certain of is that Senator Kennedy (R-LA) is promoting Russian misinformation and agitprop, which has been debunked by the US Intelligence Community.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread.

Black PSYOP Part III: The Fifth Domestic Line of Operation is Now OperationalPost + Comments (94)

A Thanksgiving Story

by Cheryl Rofer| November 28, 201910:42 am| 82 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Russia

Gorbachev offers a young girl a slice of pizza

You may be aware that Mikhail Gorbachev once did a Pizza Hut commercial. Here’s the whole story of how that came about.

Gorbachev is one of my heroes. He kept the breakup of the Soviet Union from becoming something much worse.

The decade described in that story is one of the best of my life. Being able to work with Estonians and Kazaks on some of the Soviet legacy was a great privilege.

The decade is being forgotten, though. We need to remember that we can all work together to make the world a better place.

Open thread!

A Thanksgiving StoryPost + Comments (82)

Russiagate Open Thread: Twelve Monkeys Spies

by Anne Laurie| November 25, 201911:30 am| 111 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Russia, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Just Shut the Fuck Up, Our Failed Media Experiment

Twelve Russian military officers have been indicted for breaking into the Democratic Party's computers, stealing compromising information and selectively releasing it to undermine candidates https://t.co/I8toBG9Vcf
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 25, 2019

There was a lot of testimony during this past week’s impeachment inquiry about foreign interference in our 2016 election, including the president’s assertion that Ukraine was involved. But the president’s own intelligence agencies say it was the Russians who “hacked” the 2016 elections. Special counsel Robert Mueller spelled it out in his report.
Now the Justice Department has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for interfering with our presidential and congressional races, we decided to take a closer look at one of them – the case against 12 Russian military officers accused of breaking into the Democratic Party’s computers, stealing compromising information, and selectively releasing it to undermine Democratic candidates. There’s no evidence of similar operations against Republicans in 2016. With the 2020 election approaching, the story of “The Russian Hack.”
Robert Anderson: The Russians never left. I can guarantee you in 2016 after this all hit the news, they never left. They didn’t stop doing what they’re doing.
Bill Whitaker: This wasn’t just a one-time thing?
Robert Anderson: No way. Russia doesn’t do it that way.
Robert Anderson should know. He spent 21 years inside the cloak and dagger world of spies and hackers overseeing the FBI’s counterintelligence and cyber Divisions and tracking Moscow’s spy agencies, an alphabet of artifice, the FSB, SVR, and, especially, the GRU.
Robert Anderson: The GRU is military intelligence. So when we look at the attacks that happened during our presidential races in 2016 you had military organizations inside of Russia attacking our infrastructure…
These are the hacker-soldiers from GRU unit 26165 who, according to the Justice Department, were responsible for “breaking and entering” into the Democratic Party’s computers remotely, from Moscow. Their names, ranks and faces are now on the FBI’s most wanted list for stealing, among other things, the Democrats’ strategic plans, detailed targeting data, and internal polling. GRU Colonel Aleksandr Osadchuk commanded a separate unit, 74455. One of his officers was in charge of spreading the stolen material to political operatives, bloggers and the media. Another hacked state election boards.
show full post on front page

Bill Whitaker: It wasn’t some 400-pound guy in his parent’s basement?

Robert Anderson: No. This was a well-choreographed military operation with units that not only were set up specifically to hack in to obtain information, but other units that were used for psychological warfare were weaponizing that. This is not an operation that was just put together haphazardly…

Bill Whitaker: Do you ever expect to get the 12 Russian officials to trial?

John Demers: I would be surprised. But the purpose of the indictment isn’t just that, although that’s certainly one of the purposes. The purpose of this kind of indictment is even to educate the public.

For a legal document, the 29-page indictment is a page-turner. It details how U.S. intelligence agencies tracked each defendant’s actions, sometimes by the keystroke, revealing the fictitious names and phony emails used to infiltrate the Democrats’ computers, and tracing the stolen data on its circuitous route from Washington, D.C. to Moscow…

Much more, including video clips, at the link.

Trump's obsession with the Crowdstrike fever dream has the effect of directly undercutting the open federal case, brought by Trump's own justice department, against these 12 Russian spies, all of whom are considered fugitives. https://t.co/d3ofdkiRAB
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) November 25, 2019

Journalist defends reporting that used Russian-hacked documents https://t.co/Rng7cnxZFj
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 25, 2019

Star turn for Politico comer!

Marc Caputo: This is a state where elections are decided by a percentage point or so. A coin toss. Add the Russians onto that and you’re looking at a real problem.
Marc Caputo has covered Florida politics for 20 years. The senior writer for Politico was one of the reporters who received and wrote about the hacked documents.
Bill Whitaker: Not a lot of people know that the Russians interfered in five congressional races here in Florida. When did you first get wind of it?
Marc Caputo: Well, I’d been paying attention, like the rest of the press corps, that Russia had been hacking and Russia had been trying to interfere in our election system. And then out of the blue I got contacted by this blogger, Hello Florida…
Bill Whitaker: You played a role in disseminating this stolen information.
Marc Caputo: I have a role to play as a reporter covering campaigns. And sometimes that information comes to us from a variety of sources. And in this case, it came to us from a source right at the edge of being unusable. But ultimately we decided, “Well, this tells a legitimate story about how these campaigns view their own candidates.” And voters have a right to that information.
Robert Anderson: This operation was a huge success…

Reporters ask their subjects to own their mistakes all the timeI’m glad they hold the powerful accountable for their errors.But there probably would be a lot less cynicism towards the press in our country if they, as a group and individuals, turned their scrutinizing gaze inward https://t.co/p69CFAsaDE
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) November 25, 2019

Russiagate Open Thread: Twelve <del>Monkeys</del> SpiesPost + Comments (111)

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: I Learn Something New Every Day

by Anne Laurie| November 23, 20194:55 pm| 208 Comments

This post is in: Impeachment Inquiry, Repubs in Disarray!, Russia, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Sir, this is a Теремок. https://t.co/dkuLBCc5W4
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) November 23, 2019

Never even heard of the Teremok chain, and now I wanna visit one…

Elsewhere, per the Hill:

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani remarked Saturday that he has “insurance” if the president tries to turn on him while defending their relationship amid the ongoing House impeachment inquiry.
Giuliani in a wide-ranging interview on Fox News declined to say if he has spoken with Trump in recent days, saying, “You can assume that I talk to him early and often.”
He then touted what he called a “very, very good relationship” with Trump before knocking unspecified comments about him in the press, calling them “totally insulting.”
“I’ve seen things written like he’s going to throw me under the bus. When they say that, I say he isn’t, but I have insurance,” Giuliani told Fox News’s Ed Henry…
Trump on Friday defended his use of Giuliani despite scrutiny over his actions in Ukraine, calling the former New York City mayor “an iconic figure in this country” and “the greatest crime fighter probably in the last 50 years” based on his time as a federal prosecutor.
“He’s also a friend of mine. He’s a great person,” Trump added during an interview Friday on “Fox & Friends,” portraying the lawyer as focused on tackling corruption.

Pitch for the kind of “reality tv show” Trump so loves: Two former goodfellas share a cell! Wacky antics and non-stop backbiting! Which one will snap first?

Back in the USSR. pic.twitter.com/H47lEdWNjO
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) November 23, 2019

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: I Learn Something New Every DayPost + Comments (208)

donnah on All the President’s Henchmen (Jan 19, 2020 @ 8:56am)

Anne Laurie on Election Year Open Thread: What A Coincidence, Guys! (Jan 19, 2020 @ 8:52am)

zhena gogolia on All the President’s Henchmen (Jan 19, 2020 @ 8:52am)

WaterGirl on Sunday Morning Garden Chat: The Promise of Tulips (Jan 19, 2020 @ 8:52am)

geg6 on All the President’s Henchmen (Jan 19, 2020 @ 8:51am)

Wetsuit optional.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Too inconsequential to be sued

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Yes we did.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

This Blog Goes to 11…

Also, too.

I can see Russia from this blog!

We still have time to mess this up!

The Math Demands It!

Good luck with your asparagus.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

It’s a tarp!

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Just a few bad apples.

Follow The Money!

The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible Interviewer

The Black PSYOP Part V: Russia Was, Apparently, Listening – Election 2020 Edition

Moving Into The New Year With Molotov And Ribbentrop

New Year’s Eve Open Thread: “Please to Celebrate in Orderly Manner!”

Merry Impeachmas, From Donald & His Duma Buddies

Russiagate Open Thread: Another Day, Another ‘Snow’ Storm…

The DOJ Inspector General’s Report on the Origin of the DOJ’s & FBI’s Investigation of the President’s 2016 Campaign Has Been Released

Black PSYOP Part IV: Rudy Giuliani’s European OANN Adventure is the Black PSYOP’s Sixth Line of Operation

Meanwhile in Ukraine

House Intelligence Impeachment report is out

Black PSYOP Part III: The Fifth Domestic Line of Operation is Now Operational

A Thanksgiving Story

Russiagate Open Thread: Twelve Monkeys Spies

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: I Learn Something New Every Day