The Russians

[SecretSapphic]

Well, this is because Impeached Trump is a functioning espionage asset of Russia. Apparently some need to be hit in the head with a sledgehammer to see what's happening in the open, though.

And not just Trump. A whole army of Republicans are abandoning America and fighting for Russian interests.

Former GOP lawmaker David Jolly charged that Republicans in Congress today are essentially "being used by Russia" because they don't want to acknowledge the truth.

"It's dangerous, it's gravely dangerous," Jolly told host Ali Velshi Monday night during MSNBC's The Last Word. Jolly served as the representative for Florida's 13th congressional district from 2014 to 2017.

"Through their own ignorance, negligence or maleficence, they are being used by Russia," Jolly said. "Republican senators and Republican members of Congress tonight are being used by Russia because they are unwilling to look at the truth."

https://www.newsweek.com/former-gop-congressman-says-republicans-being-used-russia-1474125

 

[bodysong]

What is Russia's Putin up to?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51120167


Russian government resigns as Vladimir Putin plans future

15 January 2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51120166

'A Bloodless Revolution.'

Putin’s Plan to Rewrite Russia’s Constitution Could Allow Him
to Lead for Years to Come

https://time.com/5765534/vladimir-putin-russia-constitution-medvedev/


Russia's Government Resigns As Putin Moves To Change The Constitution


https://www.npr.org/2020/01/15/7965...gns-as-putin-moves-to-change-the-constitution

20 years is not enough, for Putin

 

[LincolnDuncan]

I haven't seen any pictures of convicted Russian spy Maria Butina with anyone but Republicans

 

[KeithD]

I haven't seen any pictures of convicted Russian spy Maria Butina with anyone but Republicans

Well, there's the one of her receiving a heroine's welcome when she returned to Moscow.

 

[JackLuis]

Putin’s goal is to show how ‘democracy is a kind of a sham’: ‘Citizen K’ Documentary maker Alex Gibney

Ever since his breakthrough documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” in 2005, Alex Gibney has displayed a remarkable ability to pull scandals from headline news and turn them into gripping cinematic experiences. He dramatizes, in the sense that he often tells his stories with the pacing and structure of a thriller or a mystery. And believe me, “Citizen K,” his new film about the unlikely trajectory of the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is highly effective in that mode.

Before we wrap, talk about the title a little bit. Of course it refers to Orson Welles’ great film, “Citizen Kane.” But it also refers to something else.

Joseph K., from Kafka’s “The Trial.” I think one of the things that Khodorkovsky discovers, when he’s caught in the machinery of the Russian judicial system, is that it’s basically a maze. And it’s a maze that has no rules, except for power. And if you’re K., you’re lost.

Particularly in his second trial, he began to understand that he was caught in an absurdist drama. And the only way to fight back was to be able to laugh at the people who, as he says, “were pretending to be judges, were pretending to be prosecutors, were pretending to bring a judicial case against me.” He was trapped in a surreal system that could only be described as Kafkaesque.

An interesting article, backgounding the rise of Putin.

 

[Leather_Lesbian]

The intelligence community's top election security official delivered a briefing to lawmakers last week warning them that the intelligence community believes Russia is already taking steps to interfere in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump win, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Last week's briefing, led by election security official Shelby Pierson and first reported by The New York Times, addressed the overall picture of Russia's efforts, including hacking, weaponizing social media and attacks on election infrastructure, one of the sources said.

The briefers said Russia does favor Trump, but that helping Trump wasn't the only thing they were trying to do as it was also designed to raise questions about the integrity of the elections process, the source added.

https://www.kitv.com/story/41756559...ials-say-russia-trying-to-get-trump-reelected

 

[bodysong]

The United Nations is warning of an unfolding humanitarian
catastrophe in Syria’s Idlib province as hundreds of thousands
of people fleeing a Russian-backed Syrian offensive are being
forced into an ever-shrinking area near the Turkish border.
On Wednesday, U.N. humanitarian affairs chief Mark Lowcock
pleaded to the U.N. Security Council for an immediate ceasefire.

Mark Lowcock:
“But in Idlib, nowhere is safe. Almost 50,000 are sheltering
under trees or in other open spaces. I am getting daily reports
of babies and other young children dying in the cold.

Imagine the grief of a parent who escaped a warzone with
their child, only to watch that child freeze to death.”

The U.N.'s warning came as Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan threatened to launch his own military offensive in
Idlib by the end of the month unless Syrian troops withdraw
behind a line of Turkish observation posts.

Erdogan's warning drew a sharp rebuke from Russia’s government,
which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2...ding_humanitarian_catastrophe_in_syrias_idlib

 

[Ireadforpleasure]

The United States is under attack.

Russia is aiding Trump is the 2020 election, intelligence officials told lawmakers. Trump's immediate concern is not that the United States is under attack. No, Trump's immediate concern is that Democrats might exploit the news that he's being aided by a hostile foreign government.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Losers.

You are a bunch of whiny losers.

Who cares - f*'ng 'Russians' or not Russians.

What a joke.

 

[markspa901]

6,000 dollars in ads. Yep, really helped out in the election in 2016.

 

[KeithD]

Make America Non-Russian Again.

 

[allison22]

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said President Trump is complicit in an attack on the United States of America.
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt blasted President Donald Trump on Thursday for his response to learning about an intelligence briefing delivered to the House Intelligence Committee last week, saying that Trump is again “abusing his power.”

Trump reportedly was furious upon hearing that the committee — particularly Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) — was told that Russia is looking to interfere in the 2020 election to help keep Trump in office.

Afterward, he removed acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, whose office gave the briefing, and replaced him with a new acting director who has displayed greater loyalty to the president but has absolutely no intelligence experience.

https://mavenroundtable.io/theintel...inst-the-united-states-mMkRIQhM8k2vEXU57bvDiw

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

He didn't 'remove' Maguire. Maguire retired on time as expected. And the new guy - note, KeithD... - IS GAY!

How 'bout that.

Trump wins again: he shoots, he scores. So much winning. Amazing. Doesn't even fly in stupid RUSSIAN-SOUNDING helicopters in low cloud and fog around Cali. Nope, no Russians there EITHER.

Even gay people will vote for Trump now.

 

[allison22]

Mr. Trump’s effort to pack the administration with political loyalists has gained momentum since the Senate acquitted him on impeachment charges earlier this month. In recent weeks, the president has removed multiple officials with connections to impeachment, including top National Security Council and Pentagon officials.

The purge is expected to continue, with anyone suspected of insufficient loyalty at risk.

Presidents have tended to shy away from politicizing national intelligence — or at least tried to avoid the perception of such politicization. But Mr. Trump has made clear that he will not tolerate any discussion of Russia’s meddling in American politics, no matter how compelling the evidence. He is sending a very public message: In this White House, protecting Donald Trump’s interests is what matters.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/...sEvFSwTfmCdaHoInR0XsW4Va1Ka53KJv4R75ma1NCszaI

 

[Schlank]

White House cybersecurity chief quits, says leadership is inviting an attack



Trump keeps purging the federal government of cybersecurity professionals, leaving America vulnerable to cyber attacks by hostile foreign governments. If any other American president had willfully and repeatedly sabotaged America's defenses like this, they'd be accused of treason.

https://thenextweb.com/politics/201...-quits-says-leadership-is-inviting-an-attack/

 

[Ireadforpleasure]

“The Russian Government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” the Mueller report concluded. As spelled out in a detailed federal indictment of the Internet Research Agency, Russian agents employed by a Putin associate began in 2014 to sow inflammatory lies and truly fake news on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Their strategy was simple enough: Find divisive wedge issues and try to hammer the wedge deeper.

Russian trolls and computer “bots” spread phony reports of a Muslim terrorist attack in Louisiana. They stoked racial tensions after controversial police shootings. They touted a nonexistent outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta and fanned baseless rumors of Ku Klux Klansmen loose on a Missouri college campus. Such seemingly scattershot efforts in fact were aimed precisely: anything likely to divide Americans from each other, or divide Americans from the world, was a candidate for amplification. Shake, stir and repeat.

At the same time, Putin went to work on other vulnerable pieces of the Western alliance. By enabling Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal tactics, he helped to send millions of refugees fleeing to Europe. When xenophobic nationalist movements flared up in reaction, the Russians poured on the gas via social media. Russia’s unseen hand wasn’t the only factor in the European backlash. But now the European Union may be coming apart.

These efforts would have been toxic even if Clinton had made a better case to voters around the Great Lakes and won the election in 2016. But the fact that Putin’s hackers went all-in for Trump, who won the electoral college with just 46 percent of the vote, turned a Russian win into a rout. The election itself became a cause of further division. Russia’s role became a new wedge issue, the doubt that keeps on festering.

Whether he planned it or just got lucky, the gambler Putin is on a winning streak. After the election, it appears that Putin’s pro-Trump propaganda (mixed with Trump’s misplaced admiration for Putin) inspired an institutional overreach by the FBI. That conclusion is hard to avoid in light of the report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The FBI investigation in turn created grist for the polarized media of the Internet age. Trump’s prickly response — firing the FBI director and boasting about it to the Russian ambassador — set the Mueller investigation rolling. And by the time Robert S. Mueller III reported his findings more than a year later, it was too late to cool the inflamed constituencies of both parties. The Ukraine coda, with Trump’s cockeyed conspiracy theory playing in one corner and the siren song of impeachment in the other, suggests that the hack of our common trust is now on autoplay.

It’s fitting that Putin’s battlefield of choice is the Internet. In geopolitics, as in business, digital communications have upended the distribution of power. When everyone is a potential broadcaster and information spreads instantly, it’s much easier to tear stuff down than to build it up. Putin is a disrupter; he seeks to break the West’s monopoly. His approach to weakening the United States and its alliances could be borrowed from the young Mark Zuckerberg, whose motto — in his hoodie-wearing days when Facebook was open about its disruptive ambitions — was “Move fast and break things.” Like Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley swashbucklers, Putin understands that freedom has a pirate streak, while well-ordered institutions can be slow to defend themselves.

The possibility that Putin might have gained an advantage on the United States 20 years after his assumption of power — that the United States and its allies might be too slow and too brittle and too rules-based to take up arms against a fast-moving vandal — was heavy on the mind of the aging Mueller when he testified about his findings to Congress. The decorated Marine, former U.S. attorney and FBI director sought to warn the country of this clear and present danger in what might have been one of his last public statements. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy,” he said. “The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.” What’s more, the hack continues. “They’re doing it as we sit here,” he warned the House Intelligence Committee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...adimir-putin-turn-america-itself/?arc404=true

 

[Fuzzy1975]

“The Russian Government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” the Mueller report concluded. As spelled out in a detailed federal indictment of the Internet Research Agency, Russian agents employed by a Putin associate began in 2014 to sow inflammatory lies and truly fake news on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Their strategy was simple enough: Find divisive wedge issues and try to hammer the wedge deeper.

Russian trolls and computer “bots” spread phony reports of a Muslim terrorist attack in Louisiana. They stoked racial tensions after controversial police shootings. They touted a nonexistent outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta and fanned baseless rumors of Ku Klux Klansmen loose on a Missouri college campus. Such seemingly scattershot efforts in fact were aimed precisely: anything likely to divide Americans from each other, or divide Americans from the world, was a candidate for amplification. Shake, stir and repeat.

At the same time, Putin went to work on other vulnerable pieces of the Western alliance. By enabling Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal tactics, he helped to send millions of refugees fleeing to Europe. When xenophobic nationalist movements flared up in reaction, the Russians poured on the gas via social media. Russia’s unseen hand wasn’t the only factor in the European backlash. But now the European Union may be coming apart.

These efforts would have been toxic even if Clinton had made a better case to voters around the Great Lakes and won the election in 2016. But the fact that Putin’s hackers went all-in for Trump, who won the electoral college with just 46 percent of the vote, turned a Russian win into a rout. The election itself became a cause of further division. Russia’s role became a new wedge issue, the doubt that keeps on festering.

Whether he planned it or just got lucky, the gambler Putin is on a winning streak. After the election, it appears that Putin’s pro-Trump propaganda (mixed with Trump’s misplaced admiration for Putin) inspired an institutional overreach by the FBI. That conclusion is hard to avoid in light of the report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The FBI investigation in turn created grist for the polarized media of the Internet age. Trump’s prickly response — firing the FBI director and boasting about it to the Russian ambassador — set the Mueller investigation rolling. And by the time Robert S. Mueller III reported his findings more than a year later, it was too late to cool the inflamed constituencies of both parties. The Ukraine coda, with Trump’s cockeyed conspiracy theory playing in one corner and the siren song of impeachment in the other, suggests that the hack of our common trust is now on autoplay.

It’s fitting that Putin’s battlefield of choice is the Internet. In geopolitics, as in business, digital communications have upended the distribution of power. When everyone is a potential broadcaster and information spreads instantly, it’s much easier to tear stuff down than to build it up. Putin is a disrupter; he seeks to break the West’s monopoly. His approach to weakening the United States and its alliances could be borrowed from the young Mark Zuckerberg, whose motto — in his hoodie-wearing days when Facebook was open about its disruptive ambitions — was “Move fast and break things.” Like Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley swashbucklers, Putin understands that freedom has a pirate streak, while well-ordered institutions can be slow to defend themselves.

The possibility that Putin might have gained an advantage on the United States 20 years after his assumption of power — that the United States and its allies might be too slow and too brittle and too rules-based to take up arms against a fast-moving vandal — was heavy on the mind of the aging Mueller when he testified about his findings to Congress. The decorated Marine, former U.S. attorney and FBI director sought to warn the country of this clear and present danger in what might have been one of his last public statements. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy,” he said. “The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.” What’s more, the hack continues. “They’re doing it as we sit here,” he warned the House Intelligence Committee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...adimir-putin-turn-america-itself/?arc404=true

but but but it was Ukraine

 

[SecretSapphic]

The Russian trolls are back -- and once again trying to poison the political atmosphere in the United States ahead of this year's elections. But this time they are better disguised and more targeted, harder to identify and track. And they have found an unlikely home, far from Russia itself.

In 2016, much of the trolling aimed at the US election operated from an office block in St. Petersburg, Russia. A months-long CNN investigation has discovered that, in this election cycle, at least part of the campaign has been outsourced -- to trolls in the west African nations of Ghana and Nigeria.
They have focused almost exclusively on racial issues in the US, promoting black empowerment and often displaying anger towards white Americans. The goal, according to experts who follow Russian disinformation campaigns, is to inflame divisions among Americans and provoke social unrest.
The language and images used in the posts -- on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- are sometimes graphic.

Facebook and Twitter had already been looking into some of the troll accounts when CNN notified the two companies of our investigation. In a statement Thursday, Facebook said that its "subsequent assessment benefited from our collaboration with a team of journalists at CNN" and it had "removed 49 Facebook accounts, 69 Pages and 85 Instagram accounts for engaging in foreign interference."
Facebook said: "This network was in early stages of audience building and was operated by local nationals -- witting and unwitting -- in Ghana and Nigeria on behalf of individuals in Russia. It targeted primarily the United States."
Facebook says that about 13,200 Facebook accounts followed one or more of the Ghana accounts and around 263,200 people followed one or more of Instagram accounts, about 65% of whom were in the US.

Twitter told CNN that it had removed 71 accounts that had 68,000 followers. "Most were tweeting in English and presented themselves as based in the United States," it said in a statement. "The accounts -- operating out of Ghana and Nigeria and which we can reliably associate with Russia -- attempted to sow discord by engaging in conversations about social issues, like race and civil rights."
The activity uncovered by CNN had striking similarities to the Russian troll campaign of 2016, which created hundreds of accounts designed to pass as American. @africamustwake, for example, which described itself as a "Platform For #BLM #Racism #PoliceBrutality," claimed to be in Florida.
Other accounts, for example, claimed to be in Brooklyn or New Orleans.
Another also implied they were in the US, tweeting in February: "Just experienced blatant #racism in Downton (sic) Huntsville, Alabama ... Three of my black male friends were turned away because they were 'out of dress code.'"

There was a concerted effort to agitate in the US. One of the trolls -- Black People Trendz -- posted to the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter in Cincinnati. Another -- @The_black_secret -- was devoted to police shootings of African Americans. It also posted a video of a racial incident with the comment "Blacks have a right to defend themselves against Racism" that drew more than 5,000 reactions and more than 2,000 shares.

CNN worked with two Clemson University professors -- Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren -- in tracking the Ghanaian operation. Linvill said the campaign was straight out of the Russian playbook, trying to mask its efforts among groups in the US.

"They were very closely engaged in the Black Lives Matter community," he said. "They talked almost exclusively about what was happening on the streets of the United States and not on the streets of Africa."

Kailee Scales, managing director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, said her organization was proactive when it came to protecting its voice online. "We are walking into the 2020 election cycle with eyes wide open to the fact that international and domestic actors are striving to undermine our organizing, and we are not going to let that happen," she told CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/world/russia-ghana-troll-farms-2020-ward/index.html

 

[JackLuis]

Putin backs amendment allowing him to remain in power

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday backed a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow him to seek re-election after his current term ends in 2024, ending uncertainty about his future.

Putin gave his support to the amendment put forward by lawmaker Valentina Tereshkova, who as a Soviet cosmonaut in 1963 became the first woman to fly to space. She proposed either scrapping Russian's two-term limit for presidents or resetting the clock so Putin's four terms wouldn't count.

Lawmakers in the Kremlin-controlled State Duma quickly endorsed Tereshkova's proposal, along with a sweeping set of constitutional changes proposed by Putin.

 

[Schlank]

William Barr moved to drop charges against two Russian shell companies that operated a sophisticated scheme to use social media to spread disinformation, exploit American social divisions and try to subvert the 2016 election.




https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/concord-case-russian-interference.html

 

[Stephen_Coyle]

What does Putin have on Trump?

Recently, Republicans and Democrats on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report totally supporting the findings by U.S. intelligence agencies that there was widespread Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Republican Senator Richard Burr, speaking for the full committee noted:

"One of the ICA’s (Intelligence Community Assessment) most important conclusions was that Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal.’ That warning has been borne out by the events of the last three years, as Russia and its imitators increasingly use information warfare to sow societal chaos and discord. With the 2020 presidential election approaching, it’s more important than ever that we remain vigilant against the threat of interference from hostile foreign actors."


The new report aims at explaining Trump’s continuing tirades against the “deep state” and his labeling of the U.S.’s national intelligence community as “scum.”

Until the arrival of Trump in the White House, such statements would have been considered as utterly unbecoming, if not implicitly treasonous, for any Republican president.


https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/what-does-putin-have-on-trump/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

[KeithD]

Putin has financial control over the Trumps, he has sex tapes, he has recordings of discussions with Trump that Trump wouldn't let anyone from the United States record. That's all been quite enough to completely control Trump as a Russian espionage asset.

 

[muycurioso]

Name 3 thing, hell name one

Putin's got himself a delivering asset in Donald Trump, and the Republicans in Congress, who can hardly not notice that everything Trump says and does is to the benefit of the Russians, are doing nothing about it.

Sounds like there are many. Did he give a 650,000 dollar speech in Moscow while his wife was Sec of State? You cheered. How about Obams and Biden giving that OIL company in Ukraine millions. So cute the media called it an energy company, that also paid Biden Hunter, the OIL expert 80,000 dollars a month. Yeah, they didnt want to say a million dollars a year. What did Hunters resume say? "My daddy is the VP"

 

[hogjack]

Sounds like there are many. Did he give a 650,000 dollar speech in Moscow while his wife was Sec of State? You cheered. How about Obams and Biden giving that OIL company in Ukraine millions. So cute the media called it an energy company, that also paid Biden Hunter, the OIL expert 80,000 dollars a month. Yeah, they didnt want to say a million dollars a year. What did Hunters resume say? "My daddy is the VP"

Though the long-time Democrat scum like the Bidens and Clintons are dirty politicians who would sell out the country for a blowjob (even Hillary), they do it not for themselves for for the children.

Their own children, but still.

 

[KeithD]

You cheered.

Umm. no. And with that lie you lose a read of any of the rest of it.

Trump is up to his chin in Russian ownership connections. Who do you think you're fooling? Perhaps you're a Russian asset posting here too.