Tag: Russian collusion

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The Unwitting: Trump Supporters Refuse To Believe They Were Played By Russian Disruptors

In light of the facts laid out in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian activists meddling in the 2016 election, CNN went out to speak to Trump supporters whose Facebook pages actually interacted with identified Russian “fake Trump” social media accounts.

It will come as no surprise that no amount of evidence will convince these “geniuses” that they were played by the Russians.

From CNN:

Florine Gruen Goldfarb runs the Team Trump Broward County Facebook page, which posted numerous times about events that were promoted and encouraged by the Russians. Speaking to CNN on Sunday, she said she didn’t believe she was influenced by the Russians and said she thought that Friday’s indictment was a ploy to distract from the FBI’s mishandling of tip-offs it had received about the Parkland, Florida school shooter.

One reason Goldfarb was skeptical about the claim of Russian involvement goes back to the Russians’ tactics: They were not faking rallies or supporters, but trying to prompt real Americans who already backed a cause to turn out in support of it. Goldfarb attended the Fort Lauderdale “Florida Goes Trump” event. She told CNN that she knew all of the people there, “they were at my meetings. They’re all Trump supporters.”

Watch below as Goldfarb absolutely denies the possibility that she might have communicated via Facebook with Russian disruptors.

And yet – she did.

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller Indicts 13 Russian Nationals For Interfering In 2016 Presidential Election

At a press conference this morning, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities with “the stated goal of “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

The indictment says that the aim of the defendants was “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton.”

Operating under the name Internet Research Agency LLC, the defendants “sought, in part, to conduct what it called ‘information warfare against the United States of America’ through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media.”

The indictment lists, for example, Instagram accounts named “Woke Blacks,” “Blacktivists,” and “United Muslims of America” to discourage minorities from voting for Hillary Clinton or even voting at all.

More from Bloomberg:

In a Feb. 10, 2016, planning memo, the Russians were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).”

The operations also denigrated candidates including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Trump’s rivals in the 2016 Republican primary, the indictment said.

The efforts included contact with “unwitting” Trump campaign officials, with the goal of “impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful government functions” including the election.

The group bought advertisements on U.S. social media, created numerous Twitter accounts designed to appear as if they were U.S. groups or people, according to the indictment. One fake account, @TEN_GOP account, attracted more than 100,000 online followers.

The Russians tracked the metrics of their effort in reports and budgeted for their efforts. Some traveled to the U.S. to gather intelligence for the surreptitious campaign, according to the indictment. They used stolen U.S. identities, including fake driver’s licenses, and contacted news media outlets to promote their activities.

In September 2016, the group ordered one worker to “intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton” after a review found insufficient anti-Clinton activity.

Donald Trump, who has called the investigation into Russian meddling a hoax, was briefed on the indictments this morning.

You can read the full indictment here. I suggest you take a minute and do so. This is not a hoax.

Here’s Rosenstein announcing the indictments this morning.

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Trump Touts “Great Reviews,” Says He’s “Unlikely” To Grant Interview With Special Counsel Robert Mueller

Check out that body language

Donald Trump, who claims he has no time to watch cable TV, says he got rave reviews for his “performance” yesterday during the televised 54-minute meeting with Congressional leaders.

During the first cabinet meeting of 2018, Trump told the press the “reviews” were so good, he says he got “letters” from news anchors congratulating him on his “performance.”

Later, when asked about “letters” of praise, the White House released a list of links to video clips showing positive feedback on the bipartisan meeting.

By the way, I’ll mention that as I watched the televised meeting, I was completely aware that the reason Trump allowed the press to stay and view the meeting was specifically meant to GIVE a performance. After the new explosive expose by Michael Wolff where Trump’s mental faculties have been questioned, I had no doubt that the Donald was trying to show Americans how stable he can try to be.

Later, at a press event with the Prime Minister of Norway, Trump was asked if he would be willing to sit down with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for a face to face interview regarding the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Last June, Trump said he was “100 percent” willing to give testimony under oath. Additionally, his legal team has stressed that he would cooperate with the investigation.

Wellllll, it’s a New Year and the Trumpster doesn’t seem so inclined to sit down with Mueller now. In fact, he said it was “not likely” since there was “no collusion” with Russia.

In fact, Trump completely dodged giving a direct answer instead repeating the phrase “no collusion” 8 times in the span of a minute and a half.

Watch the video below, and check out that body language with his arms crossed. Just saying…

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Trump Rants Over Legally Released Testimony Proving Russian Investigation Is Not A Hoax

Donald Trump is very, very mad that Sen. Dianne Feinstein chose to release the testimony of Glenn Simpson, Fusion GPS co-founder, to prove that the now-infamous “dossier” was NOT the political motivation behind the inquiry into Mr. Trump or his campaign.

For months, Republicans have pushed the theory that the dossier compiled by former intelligent agent Christopher Steele was the reason U.S. intelligence agencies began investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 campaign. In that there are some sections that have not been corroborated yet, Repubs say “See? Fake dossier – fake investigation!”

But, as Simpson’s testimony shows, U.S. intel had already been tipped to much of what was in the Steele report before it came to light and was already working on the case.

There goes the “fake investigation” theory.

Watch now as the GOP stamps its feet and whines.

To be clear: nothing Feinstein released was classified information. While Little Hands Donnie might try to spin to his base that she’s broken laws, ’tis not the case.

By the way, “Sneaky?”

That’s all you got, Donnie? “Sneaky?”

Only a year in and you’re out of clever nicknames? #Sad

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NYT: Drunken Bragging By Trump Adviser Sparked FBI’s Russian Investigation

George Papadopolous

The short version of the story: it was bragging by a Trump adviser – not the infamous “pee-pee” dossier – that launched the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.

From The New York Times:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

Donald Trump and Republicans have doggedly tried to assert the investigation began because of a dossier compiled by a former UK intelligence agent paid for by a rival campaign.

Now we know it was the bragging of a Trump camp 28 year-old idiot who then lied to the FBI leading to a plea deal and his cooperation in the ongoing Mueller investigation.

Trump Land folks have tried to discredit Papadopolous as a low-level “coffee boy,” but it turns out Mr. P was much more than that. According to Axios, he “helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and “continued for months” to set up a meeting with Russian representatives, ‘keeping senior campaign advisers abreast of his efforts.'”

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Trump On Flynn Plea Deal: “There’s Been No Collusion So We’re Very Happy”

Even as all of Washington, D.C. was agog at the news of former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and that he will be “fully cooperating” with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, the White House has tried to spin these events into “no news.”

This morning, speaking to reporters, Donald Trump made a point of repeating, “What has been shown is no collusion,” he said. “No collusion. There’s been absolutely no collusion so we’re very happy.”

But behind the scenes, Trump is not so confident. According to several sources close to Trump, he has been concerned for some time that “Flynn turned on me.”

From The Daily Beast:

For weeks, Trump has vented privately to advisers and confidants about his anxiety over signs that Flynn had flipped. He noted the possibility that Flynn had “turned on me,” three sources close to the president independently recall him saying. These sources had relayed details of these conversations to The Daily Beast over the course of the past week.

Trump’s fears came into sharp focus this past month, as several media outlets began to report that Flynn appeared to be cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The president—an avid and voracious consumer of Twitter and cable news—began privately fuming, according to an administration official and two outside allies of Trump. Two of the three sources noted that it sounded at times as if Trump felt personally hurt by the prospect that someone whom he admired professionally and liked personally had potentially turned.

Trump later tweeted that Flynn’s “actions during the transition were lawful.”

Because, folks always lie about “lawful” actions, right?

Watch the Donald address reporters below.

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Publicist Says He Used “Hot-Button Language” To “Puff Up” His Email Regarding Russian Lawyer Meeting To Trump Jr.

Donald Trump Jr.

Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who was instrumental in setting up the now infamous meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian government lawyer, now says he used “hot-button language” to “puff up” his email to Trump Jr. in order to get him to respond.

From The Hill:

“I should have listened to that little voice in my head. But I never thought in a million years that an email I wrote in about three minutes to Don Jr. would be examined by the world many times over. I just needed to get him to respond,” Goldstone told The Sunday Times in London.

Goldstone, a former tabloid journalist who is now living in Thailand, is the manager for Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian entertainment artist who has boasted of having a close relationship with President Trump.

“If I’m guilty of anything, and I hate the word guilty, it’s hyping the message and going the extra mile for my clients. Using hot-button language to puff up the information I had been given,” Goldstone said. “I didn’t make up the details, I just made them sound more interesting.”

Goldstone exchanged a series of emails with Trump Jr. in 2016 to set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. responded to Goldstone, regarding the meeting.

Goldstone, Trump Jr., White House adviser Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort all attended the meeting.

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Jared Kushner Failed To Disclose Contact With WikiLeaks & Russian Businessman

Jared Kushner

Over and over again the investigation into Russian interference keeps coming back to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Now, according to the Washington Post, Kushner has failed to include several emails which showed communications concerning WikiLeaks and a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite.”

President Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner received and forwarded emails about WikiLeaks and a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” that he kept from Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, according to panel leaders demanding that he produce the missing records.

Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell on Thursday charging that Kushner has failed to disclose several documents, records and transcripts in response to multiple inquiries from committee investigators.

In the letter, Grassley and Feinstein instruct Kushner’s team to turn over “several documents that are known to exist” because other witnesses in their probe already gave them to investigators. They include a series of “September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks,” which the committee leaders say Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official. Earlier this week, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. revealed that he had had direct communication with WikiLeaks over private Twitter messages during the campaign.

Committee leaders said Kushner also withheld from the committee “documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ ” that he had forwarded to other campaign officials. And they said Kushner had been made privy to “communications with Sergei Millian” — a Belarusan American businessman who claims close ties to the Trumps and was the source of salacious details in a dossier about the president’s 2013 trip to Moscow — but failed to turn those records over to investigators.

Remember when Team Trump was adamant that “no one in the campaign had ANY contact with ANYONE connected to Russia?”

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Bloomberg: Trump Jr. Hinted At Repealing Russian Sanctions “If We Come To Power”

Don Trump Jr. (L) Donald Trump (R)

Bloomberg reports that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian government lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last year, says Don Jr. indicated a Trump administration would be open to re-examining a law targeting Russia if they “came to power.”

Veselnitskaya said she went to the New York meeting to show Trump campaign officials that major Democratic donors had evaded U.S. taxes and to lobby against the so-called Magnitsky law that punishes Russian officials for the murder of a Russian tax accountant who accused the Kremlin of corruption.

“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Trump Jr. said of the 2012 law, she recalled. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it,” he added, according to her.

Veselnitskaya also said Trump Jr. requested financial documents showing that money that allegedly evaded U.S. taxes had gone to Clinton’s campaign. She didn’t have any and described the 20-minute meeting as a failure.

A lawyer for Trump Jr., Alan Futerfas, said the president’s son had no comment about the interview, the first time Veselnitskaya has offered details about what was discussed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. In the past, Trump Jr. has said that he had wasted his time seeing the lawyer because she provided no useful information.

You’ll recall Junior took the meeting having been told Veselnitskaya had dirt that would incriminate Clinton.

Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting saying, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

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Trump Tries To Deflect From More Bad News On Campaign/Russia Story

Stilling obsessing over his 2016 opponent, Donald Trump went on yet another wild Twitter rant this morning wondering why the FBI isn’t investigating a host of Hillary Clinton issues (#fakenews) as former Trump campaign officials are being indicted and charged for various alleged crimes.

Can you say “Change the subject?”

What Trump is really mad about is the revelation that he did know something about Russian connections during the 2016 campaign.

From this morning’s New York Times:

At a March 31, 2016, meeting between Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team, Mr. Papadopoulos introduced himself and said “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin,” according to court records.

“He went into the pitch right away,” said J. D. Gordon, a campaign adviser who attended the meeting. “He said he had a friend in London, the Russian ambassador, who could help set up a meeting with Putin.”

Mr. Trump listened with interest. Mr. Sessions vehemently opposed the idea, Mr. Gordon recalled. “And he said that no one should talk about it,” because Mr. Sessions thought it was a bad idea that he did not want associated with the campaign, he said.

And so, Trump takes to Twitter to deflect and obfuscate:

“Pocohontas,” also known as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, clapped back: