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Trump and Putin, behind the scenes
Quote:In his memo to MPs, Steele also argues that Russia under Putin has become a “powerful rogue state”. A lack of pushback from the UK and others has emboldened its bad behaviour, he writes. This trajectory was not inevitable and, he says, has been driven by a “corrupt political elite” fearful of regime change and seeking to protect its “ill-gotten” wealth.

He cites seven “paradigm shift” moments that have surprised and wrong-footed successive western governments. They include the breakup of the oil company Yukos, the poisonings of Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. He also mentions Russian election meddling, in particular during the 2016 US presidential vote. In each case the west’s response was limited. Moscow perceives this as “weakness”, he writes.

According to Steele, Putin and his associates have a particular “love-hate” obsession with Britain. Vast amounts of “illegitimate” wealth is hidden in the UK; at the same time London is home to an influential émigré community, which the Kremlin views with suspicion. Putin wanted to embarrass and humiliate the UK in order to “cow” other countries and to further his corrupt and amoral agenda, the ISC was told.

Over the years, Russia’s elite has established a powerful presence in London, the committee heard, thanks to lavish expenditure and investment. Lawyers, accountants, estate agents and lobbyists have all helped oligarchs penetrate “British political and business life”. Not all of these London firms are “bad actors”, Steele says, but many are party to “corrupt and destabilising forces” emanating from the Kremlin. “This gradual and more subtle erosion of our norms and politics, including our political parties, poses a significant threat,” he told the MPs..
Johnson and May ignored claims Russia had 'likely hold' over Trump, ex-spy alleges | World news | The Guardian
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Quote:Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee reportedly told federal prosecutors last year that they believed President Trump’s family and associates may have presented misleading testimony during the panel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 electionAmong those suspected of presenting misleading information are the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, unidentified sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. Trump Jr.'s and Kushner's accounts of a meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign reportedly conflicted with the testimony of former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates

The committee also reportedly accused the president’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, former campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis and private security contractor Erik Prince of lying to Congress, which potentially carries a felony charge. The concerns were detailed in a letter sent by the committee in June 2019 to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., according to a copy obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Senate intel leaders said Trump associates may have presented misleading testimony during Russia probe: report | TheHill
  • Surprise, surprise..
  • Then there are the likes of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who kept quiet and lied in order to cover up what was really going on and in the hope of a Presidential pardon (which Stone already received, sort off).
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Quote:The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the fifth and final volume of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which details "counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities."
Why it matters: The Republican endorsed, 996-page report goes farther than the Mueller report in showing the extent of Russia's connections to members of the Trump campaign, and how the Kremlin was able to take advantage of the transition team's inexperience to gain access to sensitive information..
Senate report finds Manafort passed campaign data to Russian intelligence officer - Axios
  • A must read article for everybody still thinking the whole Mueller thing was a hoax..
  • Point by point overview of the main issues.
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Quote:The department’s leaders declined to publish a memo describing Russian attempts to question Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s health, prompting new scrutiny of political influence at the departmentRussian state media agencies were posting “allegations about the poor mental health” of Joseph R. Biden Jr., a July 9 intelligence bulletin warned.
Homeland Security Blocked Warnings of Russian Campaign Against Joe Biden - The New York Times
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Quote:for example; 
  • why did he not take stronger action against the Russians for placing bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan? 
  • Why has he, for no apparent reason, moved 11,000 American troops out of Germany? 
  • Or here’s an obscure one: Why did he parrot Russian propaganda and call Montenegro a “very aggressive” nation when that country had just joined NATO? Everybody knows damn well that Donald Trump couldn’t find Montenegro on a map. Who’s putting these ideas in his head? 
  • Or why doesn’t he speak out against the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny
  • or why hasn’t he spoken up for the democracy movement in Belarus?
Anne Applebaum Interviews Peter Strzok - The Atlantic
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Quote:“Mueller was focusing on violations of the law,” he said, “and the standard to be able to establish in a courtroom that something occurred is very, very different from the standard that a counterintelligence expert or an intelligence person would look at and judge whether or not that caused them concern. “When I read the Mueller report, and certainly when I looked at the recent bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report, almost 1,000 pages, laying out all of these areas of intelligence connections between Trump and his administration [and] his campaign and Russia, that’s extraordinarily concerning from a counterintelligence perspective.” Trump, Strzok said, is “surrounded by people who have a pervasive pattern of contact with the Russians, and not only contact, but contact that they’re hiding..
Trump ‘compromised by the Russians’, says former member of Mueller’s team | US news | The Guardian
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Quote:A top-secret Central Intelligence Agency assessment, reported in the opinion section of The Washington Post, claims Mr Putin is likely directing Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach in disseminating disparaging information about Mr Biden through lobbyists, Congress, the media and contacts close to Donald Trump“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior-most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former US vice president, supporting the US president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,” the document says, according to two sources with knowledge of the report quoted by the Post’s global opinions section columnist Josh Rogin.

Mr Derkach was sanctioned by the Treasury Department on 10 September for allegedly being an "active Russian agent for over a decade", with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saying in a statement that he was attempting to influence US elections, including through the release of leaked audiotapes to media.
Mr Derkash, who denies the allegations, was indirectly referenced by Federal Bureau of Investigations director Christopher Wray in last week's testimony to Congress, in which he said the agency was tracing active efforts to "sow divisiveness and discord" against what it sees as the anti-Russian establishment.

"And I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden,” Mr Wray said. That public assessment was a 7 August statement from Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that named Mr Derkach for spreading claims about corruption through tapes of leaked phone calls. The tapes are reported to show Mr Biden to link loan guarantees to the removal of the former Ukrainian prosecutor general in an attempt to protect his son. Senate Republicans are preparing to soon release the findings of their investigation into Hunter Biden's work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
CIA found Russia president Vladimir Putin ‘probably directing’ campaign against Biden, claims report | The Independent

A little summary:
  • Both the CIA and the FBI are arguing Russia is interfering in the US election
  • The CIA says that Putin is likely in charge and the operation moves at least in part through a Ukranian lawmaker, Mr Derkach and people close to the President. It's not hard to figure out who that person is: Rudi Giuliani.
  • Basically they are still at it
  • By the way, yes Biden wanted that Ukrainian prosecutor (Victor Shokin) out, but so did a couple of Republican Senators, the EU, the World Bank, the IMF and it happened to be official US policy. Basically it was because that former prosecutor was not doing much, if anything, to fight corruption in the Ukraine, this had nothing to do with Hunter Biden.
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Quote:Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated. Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:

Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”

Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend. Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape proving otherwise. - Vox
  • Rewriging history, arguing asking the Russians was a joke and the people on the campaign rally were all laughing and subsequent tapes have cut this off. 
  • But it was no joke, nobody was laughing, it wasn't said during a campaign rally, and the Russians took him seriously and went to work.
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Quote:The White House was warned by US intelligence agencies last year that Rudolph Giuliani was targetted by Russia to feed misinformation to Donald Trump. The Washington Post, based on information from four former officials familiar with the matter, says that the president’s personal lawyer interacted with individuals tied to Russian intelligence during his December 2019 visit to Ukraine. The warnings from the intelligence services to the White House led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump that information brought back from Ukraine by Mr Giuliani should be considered contaminated by Russia, according to one of the officials. Mr Giuliani visited Ukraine to gather information that he thought would implicate Joe Biden and his son Hunter in corrupt acts.

The Post reports one of the sources as saying that message back to the White House was: “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine." Officials wanted to protect the president at a time when he was facing impeachment over attempts to lean on Ukraine’s president to investigate the Bidens and the gas company Burisma. The president’s response to the warning was allegedly: “That’s Rudy.""
White House was told Russia targeted Giuliani to feed misinformation to Trump, report says | The Independent
  • If Giuliani was aware these were Russian assets he was talking to (which seems quite likely), it amounts to collusion
  • They're now pandering a story that some computer repair shop found Hunter's hard disk and somehow delivered this to Bannon and then Giuliani, and even that doesn't show Biden did anything wrong.
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Quote:A federal judge on Friday ordered prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case to swear under penalty of perjury to the accuracy of evidence they had filed after a former FBI agent accused prosecutors of altering documents. Judge Emmet Sullivan gave the Department of Justice (DOJ) until Monday to attest to the evidence, which includes handwritten notes from former FBI agent Peter Strzok. Strzok's attorney, Aitan Goelman, flagged the alterations in a letter to Sullivan late last month, saying that the DOJ had added dates to the documents and that at least one of them was inaccurate.
Judge orders DOJ to attest to Flynn evidence after former FBI agent accuses prosecutors of altering documents | TheHill
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