Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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Apparently, Trump is getting nervous. And we thought he had nothing to hide, hahaha

Lawyers for President Trump wrote a federal judge on Sunday asking her to halt federal prosecutors from reviewing documents seized in Michael Cohen’s office and home, arguing that the Department of Justice cannot fairly evaluate the materials. A trio of lawyers for the president wrote to Judge Kimba Wood in the Southern District of New York to request Trump and Cohen be allowed to identify privileged communications prior to a fuller review. Trump’s lawyers – Joanna Hendon, Christopher Dysard and Reed Keefe – wrote that potentially privileged information was seized during the raid. They argue that Trump should be able to review those documents before a taint team made up of federal agents and prosecutors to ensure his right to attorney-client privilege.

Trump asks judge to block feds from reviewing documents seized in Cohen raid | TheHill

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It appears that President Trump just blocked his own administration’s plan to sanction Russia. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, announced Sunday that the Trump administration was going to hit Russia with new sanctions on Monday over its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program in the wake of the April 7 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, that killed dozens of people. The sanctions were explicitly focused on Russian companies that deal in equipment linked to Assad’s chemical weapons program.

But just a day later, the White House backtracked, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that the administration was merely “considering additional sanctions on Russia” and that “a decision will be made in the near future.” So why the awkward reversal? Apparently President Trump wasn’t on board with sanctioning Russia. According to the Washington Post, after Haley announced the sanctions on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, Trump told national security advisers he was “upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has seemed to be at odds with or out of touch with the way the rest of his administration is handling Russia policy. Trump was reportedly furious about the way his administration ended up expelling 60 Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal on British soil on March 4. Trump had apparently thought that the US was matching the number of diplomats that other US allies were expelling, but it turned out that the US’s expulsion dwarfed the numbers of any other country.

Trump blocked Russia sanctions after Nikki Haley announced them - Vox

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Prosecutors told a federal judge this week that they suspected Paul Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, of serving as a "back channel" between the campaign and Russia during the 2016 US election. The special counsel Robert Mueller's office has charged Manafort with 23 counts related to money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, tax evasion, bank fraud, and conspiracy against the US. Most of the charges so far center around Manafort's lobbying work for the Ukrainian government, the pro-Russian Party of Regions, and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Mueller: Paul Manafort may have been Trump campaign 'back channel' to Russia - Business Insider

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Former MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s dossier on Donald Trump was denounced by the US president and his supporters as fake. The ongoing investigation into the Donald Trump’s Russian connections, however, has shown much of it to be true. But two notable allegations have remained unproven.

Steele dossier: Donald Trump denounced the document as fake, but much of its contents have turned out to be true | The Independent

And on those two things which haven't been proven yet:

• Cohen's trip to Prague to meet Russian agents
  
• Trump's dirty Moscow hotel session
  

Well, there is progress of sort:

Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had vehemently denied the claim, made in the report, that he had met with Russians with ties to Vladimir Putin in Prague; insisting he had never even been to the Czech Republic. And then there was the lurid account of the US president using prostitutes while on a visit to Moscow, something which gained huge publicity and he has strongly denied. 

Mr Cohen had sued Fusion GPS, an investigative firm which had commissioned Mr Steele’s report, and a news website declaring in a tweet: “Enough is enough of the #fake #RussianDossier. Just filed a defamation action against @BuzzFeedNews for publishing the lie filled document on @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and me!" 

But Mr Cohen has now voluntarily dropped his legal action. It followed reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Mr Trump was the Muscovite Candidate in the Presidential election has found evidence that Mr Cohen had, indeed, made a trip to Prague. 

Steele dossier: Donald Trump denounced the document as fake, but much of its contents have turned out to be true | The Independent

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President Trump spent the night in Moscow the night before the Miss Universe contest in November 2013, contradicting what he told former FBI Director James Comey. Flight records of Trump’s trip to Russia obtained by Bloomberg confirm Trump’s overnight stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow. In the memos from Comey released last week, which the former FBI director kept during his time in office to document his interactions with the president, Comey writes that Trump twice told him that hadn't stayed the night in Russia during the trip. According to the flight records, a private jet owned by Trump's business partner flew to Moscow Thursday night, arriving in Moscow early in the morning on Friday, Nov. 8. and left the city early Sunday morning. The flight records do not say who was onboard the flight.

Flight records show Trump spent night in Russia, contradicting what he told Comey: report | TheHill

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Cohen is likely to flip..

But Cohen's loyalty is being tested ever since the FBI raided his office, home, and hotel room to obtain records and documents — including some that seem to be related to the Daniels payment. He's under investigation for possible bank fraud, and campaign finance violations, the Washington Post reported. Cohen hasn't been charged with any crimes, but the prison sentence for such allegations — if proven — could be substantial, and it's rare that people face such a prospect without seeking a way out, said Mitchell Epner, a former assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey... There are "very, very few stand up guys like that" when faced with possible prison time in excess of 20 years.

Trump lawyer Cohen will likely flip, former assistant US attorney says - Business Insider

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Deny, deny, even if there is objective proof..

President Donald Trump twice gave James Comey an alibi for why a salacious report about the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow couldn’t be true: He never even spent the night in Russia during that trip, Trump told the former FBI director, according to Comey’s memos about the conversations. Yet the broad timeline of Trump’s stay, stretching from Friday, Nov. 8, 2013, through the following Sunday morning, has been widely reported. And it’s substantiated by social media posts that show he slept in Moscow the night before the Miss Universe contest. Now, flight records obtained by Bloomberg provide fresh details. Combined with existing accounts and Trump’s own social-media posts, they capture two days that, nearly five years later, loom large in the controversy engulfing the White House and at the heart of the Comey memos, which the Justice Department turned over last week to Congress.

Flight Records Illuminate Mystery of Trump’s Moscow Nights - Bloomberg

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Adam Schiff on the Republican's conclusion of the House investigation:

“Throughout the investigation, Committee Republicans chose not to seriously investigate — or even see, when in plain sight — evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, instead adopting the role of defense counsel for key investigation witnesses," Schiff says. "The Trump campaign and Administration’s efforts to deny, conceal and, when discovered, misrepresent what took place in these interactions with the Russians is powerful evidence of a consciousness of wrongdoing," he added.

Schiff, who has been sharply critical of panel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and his handing of the probe, pointed to meetings between Kremlin-linked officials and former Trump associates including Paul Manafort, Richard Gates and George Papadopoulos as evidence of a broader scheme to collude with Russia's government. In the now-infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Donald Trump Jr., along with Manafort and Jared Kushner, met with a Russian lawyer they had been told could provide dirt on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. said in one email ahead of the meeting. 

"There is no denying the abundant evidence that the Trump campaign sought, and was eager to accept, the assistance of a hostile foreign power bent on interfering in our election," Schiff says. "It is also uncontroverted that the Russians assisted the Trump campaign through a surreptitious social media campaign, an overt paid media effort, an elaborate hacking and dumping operation targeting the [Democratic National Committee] and Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, and potentially through additional means still under investigation."

Schiff on Intel report: GOP 'chose not to seriously investigate' collusion | TheHill

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Hmm, the plot thickens..

According to the list, published this week by The New York Times, Mueller is interested in asking Trump about any efforts by the Trump campaign — including by his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort — to reach out to Russia for help ahead of the 2016 US election. Until now, news reports and testimony have indicated that any offers of assistance were on Russia's end. The question suggests Mueller has evidence that members of the campaign, particularly Manafort, reached out to Russia or Russia-linked actors.

Mueller, in Trump questions, reveals new info on collusion, Manafort - Business Insider

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Facebook’s failure to compel Cambridge Analytica to delete all traces of data from its servers – including any “derivatives” – enabled the company to retain predictive models derived from millions of social media profiles throughout the US presidential election, the Guardian can reveal. Leaked emails reveal that when Cambridge Analytica told Facebook almost a year before the election that it had deleted data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users, it stopped short of agreeing to also erase derivatives of the data. The correspondence, obtained by the Guardian, also raises questions about the accuracy of the testimony that Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to the US Congress last month. Derivatives of data, which can include predictive models, or clusters of populations in psychological groupings, can be highly valuable to companies involved in micro-targeting advertisements to voters. Data scientists say such models and analysis are often more valuable than underlying raw data.

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election | UK news | The Guardian

How do 87m records scraped from Facebook become an advertising campaign that could help swing an election? What does gathering that much data actually involve? And what does that data tell us about ourselves? The Cambridge Analytica scandal has raised question after question, but for many, the technological USP of the company, which announced last week that it was closing its operations, remains a mystery. For those 87 million people probably wondering what was actually done with their data, I went back to Christopher Wylie, the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the company’s problematic operations in the Observer. According to Wylie, all you need to know is a little bit about data science, a little bit about bored rich women, and a little bit about human psychology...

Cambridge Analytica: how did it turn clicks into votes? | News | The Guardian