Monday, May 14, 2018 10:00:10 AM
Part 201, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from Saturday, 05/12/18, covering April
3, 2018, and headed, Media Giant Sinclair, Under Fire for Forcing Anchors to Read Trumpian Screed, Is Rapidly Expanding
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140743756
The twelfth
EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones' Ex-Wife Tells All, Conspiracies, Fake Supplements
Published on Apr 3, 2018 by David Pakman Show [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvixJtaXuNdMPUGdOPcY8Ag
/ https://www.youtube.com/user/MidweekPolitics , https://www.youtube.com/user/MidweekPolitics/videos ]
Kelly Jones, ex-wife of Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, joins David to discuss the truth about Alex
Jones, his snake oil supplements, conspiracy theories, the alleged brainwashing of their son, and much more.
https://custodywars.com/
Broadcast on April 3, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebByb9JJgJg [with (nearly 14,000) comments]
My add: Case closed? ... -
http://politics.blog.mystatesman.com/2017/07/20/case-closed-judge-naranjo-issues-final-orders-in-alexkelly-jones-child-custody-case/
Not nice to know the guy as well as i do. Nice to know Kelly Jones a little.
Twenty-eighth
Malcolm Nance: Trump is “gaslighting” public on Mueller probe
The Beat with Ari Melber
4/3/18
Bob Mueller hands down his first sentence in the Russia probe. Lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, who is tied to Trump
campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, has been sentenced to 30 days in jail. Intelligence Analyst
Malcolm Nance, Watergate Prosecutor Nick Akerman and CNBC Editor at Large John Harwood join The Beat.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/malcolm-nance-trump-is-gaslighting-public-on-mueller-probe-1201792067703 [a must-watch]
Thirty-three
What John Bolton's Past Tells Us About His Future As Trump's National Security Adviser (HBO)
Published on Apr 3, 2018 by VICE News
When John Bolton becomes Donald Trump’s national security advisor later this month,
he’ll assume more influence over U.S foreign policy than he’s ever had before.
That has a lot of people nervous: Bolton has rarely seen a military intervention he didn’t like — he supported
the war in Iraq (and still does), regime change in Iran, and a first strike against North Korea’s nuclear program.
But the last time Bolton was up for a big job — his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations — what tripped him up wasn’t his
policies; it was testimony about his penchant for berating subordinates, and a refusal to listen to information that countered his personal beliefs.
Carl Ford, Jr., was the director of the State Department bureau responsible for intelligence analysis in 2002, when Bolton was under secretary
of state for Arms Control. At the time, the Bush administration was building up evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq — wrongfully, as
it turned out — and Bolton was seeking to make the case that another country, Cuba, was working on its own biological weapons program. (It wasn't.)
Ford’s analysts disagreed, and Bolton, Ford says, didn’t want to hear it. He called the analyst into his office, and threatened to have him fired. Ford fought back.
“I was steaming,” Ford recalled. “I explained to him… ‘John, if you want to say this, that you
believe it — be our guest. But you cannot say that it's the intelligence community's view.”
The drama that ensued followed Bolton for years, and nearly kept him out of the UN job. He was later granted a recess
appointment by the president. But more than a decade later, former colleagues say it’s much more worrisome as a
sign of how Bolton might deal with intelligence that contradicts his views in his much more powerful position.
“It is the best evidence we have of how he will behave in the future,” said Greg Thielmann, another former State Department
intel analyst who worked with Bolton. “These things might be academic but this is how you build the case for war.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAPmggDDMzs [with comments]
Thirty-five and thirty-six
Trump under investigation but not criminal target: Report
All In with Chris Hayes
4/3/18
Special Counsel Robert Mueller told President Trump's attorneys last month that Trump is
still under investigation but is not currently a criminal target, reports the Washington Post.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/trump-under-investigation-but-not-criminal-target-report-1201841731737
*
First person receives jail time in Russia probe
All In with Chris Hayes
4/3/18
Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan was sentenced to 30 days in prison and a $20,000 fine, the
first person receiving jail time as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/first-person-receives-jail-time-in-russia-probe-1201839171925
Thirty-eight and nine
President Trump is under investigation, but not as a criminal target says Mueller
The Rachel Maddow Show
4/3/18
Rachel Maddow speaks with Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig who reports that Trump’s lawyers say
the special counsel is investigating the president but does not believe he is a criminal target at the moment.
From Special Counsel's filing in Manafort case.
Snip from page 42 pictured below; full document here:
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/USG-Govt-Opposition-to-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/981358587460153345 [with comments]
Special Counsel Office press office now confirms that the ‘senior assistant special counsel’ referenced on p.42 of today’s filing is indeed Andrew Weissmann.
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/981367485537705984 [with comments]
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/president-trump-is-under-investigation-but-not-as-a-criminal-target-says-mueller-1201923651792
*
Alex van der Zwaan is first person sentenced in Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation
The Rachel Maddow Show
4/3/18
Alex van der Zwaan is given a 30 day sentence and a $20,000 fine, becoming the first person sentenced as a result of the
Mueller investigation – penalties which shouldn’t be a problem given his close connection to Russian oligarch German Khan.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/alex-van-der-zwaan-is-first-person-sentenced-in-robert-mueller-s-special-counsel-investigation-1201935427554
The forty-first
Lawrence on Trump, Mueller and 'subject' v. 'target'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
4/3/18
Lawrence O'Donnell walks through new reporting that Robert Mueller has told Trump's lawyers the
president is a "subject" of the Russia investigation, but not currently a target and what it means.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-on-trump-mueller-and-subject-v-target-1201957443523 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFyyInrYpjQ [with comments]
Forty-four, five and six
WAPO: Trump remains under investigation by Mueller
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
The Washington Post reports that Special Counsel Mueller told Trump's attorneys in March that he is still investigating
the president but doesn't not count him as a criminal target in the investigation at this point. Our panel reacts.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/wapo-trump-remains-under-investigation-by-mueller-1202005059573 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKP2pO6wo5c [with comments]
There is a suggestion that Trump's attorneys believe, in Mueller's trying (since early March) to get an interview, may be playing rope-a-dope
with the president. Mueller is going to write the first of a number of reports for Congress. Word is he wants the interview to help him decide
on the level of intent the president may, or may not have had in regards to the question of obstruction of justice by the president. Or not.
*
Trump allies divided over report Mueller is investigating him
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
With The Washington Post reporting that Robert Mueller told Trump's legal team the president is a
subject, but not a criminal target, of his Russia probe, Trump's allies are reportedly split over the news.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-allies-divided-over-report-mueller-is-investigating-him-1202008131723
*
Trump says no one's tougher on Russia five times in 86 minutes
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
At multiple White House events on Tuesday, Trump repeatedly said no one has been tougher on Russia than he has. Our panel reacts.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-says-no-one-s-tougher-on-russia-five-times-in-86-minutes-1202009155972 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES5-i38ry2A [with comments]
A serious comedy section bit
Michael Wolff - Exposing the Trump White House in “Fire and Fury” | The Daily Show
Published on Apr 3, 2018
Michael Wolff discusses his book "Fire and Fury," which details President Trump's
child-like temperament as well as the dysfunction within his administration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx49vicqCRY [with comments]
One Wolff opinion - The greatest bunch of knuckleheads ever assembled in one place.
And a quote - people around Trump would say, "This is an emperor with no clothes, here."
There's more. All well deserving of a Trum roll.
To "stashed April 3, 2018:"
Mueller Was Authorized to Investigate Paul Manafort’s Work for Ukraine
Court filings show that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave the special counsel authority to probe Ukraine-government dealings
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-was-authorized-to-investigate-paul-manaforts-work-for-ukraine-1522754850
Mueller authorized by DOJ to investigate alleged Manafort collusion with Russian government
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/mueller-manafort-rosenstein-memo/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dLhkQHzbv22LTiMmeFjokFJCPez_M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
From Thai Jail, Sex Coaches Say They Want to Trade U.S.-Russia Secrets for Safety
PATTAYA, Thailand — A pair of self-described sex instructors from Belarus have been stuck in a Thai detention center for weeks. They say that they have evidence demonstrating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States, and that they have offered it to the F.B.I. in exchange for a guarantee of their safety.
Their claim — that they are targets of a covert Russian operation to silence them because they know too much — might seem outlandish, but their case certainly includes some unusual circumstances.
They have influential enemies in Russia. They were arrested with the help of a “foreign spy,” according to the Thai police, and locked up on what is a fairly minor offense: working without a permit. And the F.B.I. says it tried to talk to the pair, suggesting that American investigators had not dismissed their account out of hand.
“They know we have more information,” one of the pair, Alexander Kirillov, 38, told The New York Times last month in an unauthorized phone call from the detention center, in Bangkok. Mr. Kirillov said his co-defendant, Anastasia Vashukevich, 27, had angered some powerful people. “They know she knows a lot,” he said. “And that’s why they made this case against us.”
Ms. Vashukevich certainly knows how to get attention. In February, a top critic of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, released a video that included footage she recorded during a brief affair she had with a Russian aluminum tycoon while working as an escort aboard his yacht in 2016. The evidence included photos she posted of the tycoon and his guest, Sergei E. Prikhodko, a deputy prime minister, and a recording of them talking about relations between the United States and Russia.
The aluminum tycoon, Oleg V. Deripaska, has close ties with Mr. Putin and with Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, who has been indicted on money laundering charges by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel looking into election interference.
The escort and her seduction coach have been held largely incommunicado since March 5, when reporters for The Times and other news media outlets were kicked out of the detention center for speaking to them. They now face deportation and fear what might happen to them if they are sent home to Russia, where they live, or Belarus, the former Soviet republic where they grew up, which remains firmly within Russia’s influence. (Mr. Kirillov was traveling on a Russian passport.)
Neither of them is accustomed to silence. They and their circle of friends say they make a habit of recording everything they do as they go about their campaign of teaching seduction techniques and trying their skills on strangers, sometimes in public.
The two were arrested along with eight others on Feb. 25 when dozens of plainclothes police officers raided a workshop they were conducting for Russian tourists at a hotel in Pattaya, about 70 miles south of Bangkok.
The seminar was aimed mainly at male Russian tourists and offered instruction in how to seduce women. It was not illegal.
The police arrest report says that a “foreign spy” infiltrated the Russian-language seminar and provided the Royal Thai Police with information about the training.
Cellphone messages show that the agent signaled the waiting officers when it was time to raid the Ibis Pattaya Hotel conference room.
The work permit charge is relatively minor, and Mr. Kirillov had been conducting training sessions in Pattaya for years. But high-level officials appeared to take an unusual interest in this case: Six police generals and two colonels had responsibility for the raid, according to the arrest report.
Since the arrests, the government has tried to keep a tight lid on information. Friends said they had not been allowed to visit Ms. Vashukevich and Mr. Kirillov for weeks.
A law enforcement official said the F.B.I. tried to speak with the two but was not successful.
A Thai police spokesman, Lt. Col. Krissana Pattanacharoen, would not comment on whether Russia was behind the arrests, but he said it was not unusual for the police to use foreign operatives.
“Investigations are not one size fits all,” he said. “It depends entirely on the situation.”
Few other police officials have been willing to talk about the case. The American Embassy in Bangkok declined to comment. The Russian Embassy asked that questions be submitted in writing, but did not answer them.
After the pair’s arrest, Mr. Kirillov sent a handwritten letter to the American Embassy in Bangkok asking for asylum for all 10 detainees. (At the time, Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, dismissed the case as “a pretty bizarre story” and indicated that the embassy had no plans to talk with them.)
Financial records show that companies controlled by Mr. Manafort owed millions of dollars to Mr. Deripaska, the aluminum tycoon. During the 2016 race, Mr. Manafort offered to give him private briefings about the campaign, though there is no indication that the tycoon took him up on the offer.
Ms. Vashukevich, who goes by the name Nastya Rybka online and recounts her story in a book, “Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire,” became an escort under the guidance of Mr. Kirillov, better known as Alex Lesley, who has gained popularity in Russia for his advocacy of sexual freedom.
At the time of the yacht visit, Ms. Vashukevich had shaved six years off her age to pose as 19. She was sent by a Moscow modeling agency to a yacht off Norway along with six other escorts, according to her account.
She said she followed Mr. Kirillov’s instruction to record all her interactions with her target, the yacht’s owner, who turned out to be Mr. Deripaska.
Ms. Vashukevich told The Times in a brief interview last month at the detention center that she had more than 16 hours of recordings from the yacht, including conversations with three visitors who she believes were Americans.
She has called herself the “missing link” in the Russia investigation.
Her posts from 2016 came to prominence only after Aleksei A. Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, included them in a video in early February that made accusations about official corruption. Mr. Navalny also charged that Mr. Deripaska had delivered Mr. Manafort’s campaign reports to the Kremlin.
“Deripaska simply transmits this information to Putin,” Mr. Navalny said. “He’s very close to Putin after all.”
Before traveling to Thailand, Mr. Kirillov grew worried about repercussions from the exposé and asked a childhood friend, Eliot Cooper, to contact United States authorities on his behalf, Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Cooper, who lives in Canada, said in a telephone interview that he called an F.B.I. hotline in February and proposed trading the recordings for the pair’s safety.
He said he had told the hotline agent about one recorded conversation in which Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Prikhodko discussed wanting Mr. Trump to win.
“I explained all of that to the F.B.I.,” he said. “They should have a transcript of everything and a recording of my voice.”
Mr. Cooper said he had never heard back from the agency. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Mr. Cooper said that Mr. Kirillov had hidden copies and instructed associates to release them if he or Ms. Vashukevich were killed or went missing.
“There is no investigation,” Mr. Cooper said. “The Americans are not interested. They want them to disappear, and Nastya in particular, because she is a living witness.”
By the standards of Pattaya, a city notorious for its adult entertainment, the sex seminar for about 30 Russian tourists was tame.
A hotel spokeswoman, Joyce Ong, said the workshop was run like a “normal corporate seminar,” and she denied earlier reports that the staff had called the police.
None of those arrested were charged with sexual misconduct. Ms. Vashukevich was both Mr. Kirillov’s star pupil and one of the instructors at the seminars.
The chief of Thailand’s Immigration Bureau, Suttipong Wongpin, said his department had restricted the pair’s visitors because letting them talk freely could harm Thailand’s relations with the United States and Russia.
“The detainees,” he said, “will just say whatever they want.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/asia/nastya-russia-trump-election.html
A Meeting With Putin, If It Happened Soon, Would Involve A Different Trump
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598929093/a-meeting-with-putin-if-it-happened-soon-would-involve-a-different-trump
Trump's telephone diplomacy sends the wrong message to Putin
It appears the president's aides and key State Department officials were blindsided by Trump's suggestion he and Putin possibly meet at the White House.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-telephone-diplomacy-sends-wrong-message-putin-n862161
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/djc7MK8JH3VBe8MGGPYJHQlCaO9wM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Russia Presses Trump for White House Meeting With Putin
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/europe/trump-putin-white-house-meeting.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d14kGOCNwu-dJJMH0Zs_Ykr1IMuEM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Stormy Daniels Case Should Be Resolved Privately, Trump’s Lawyers Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/politics/stormy-daniels-trump-arbitration.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dDgMTYcpANcHi4M9PD3Uu5gjM5hDM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Jill McCabe: The president attacked my reputation. It’s time to set the record straight.
By Jill McCabe
Jill McCabe, an emergency room pediatrician, is married to former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jill-mccabe-the-president-attacked-my-reputation-its-time-to-set-the-record-straight/2018/04/02/e6bbcf66-366b-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dbuYVkc8rCFy8AMksz8Tc9S9bBUYM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Sinclair Chairman Claims Entire Print Media Has ‘No Credibility’
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/sinclair-chairman-entire-print-media-has-no-credibility.html
Sinclair chairman: Print media 'so left wing' it's ‘meaningless dribble’
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/381379-sinclair-chairman-print-media-is-meaningless-dribble-with-no-credibility
Report: Sinclair Chairman Believes Print Media Has “No Credibility”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/sinclair-defends-itself-against-reports-chairman-comments-print-media.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sinclair+chairman+claims
For Russia, Trump Was a Vehicle, Not a Target
By Clint Watts
Mr. Watts testified on March 30, 2017, at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing and presented a statement, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns [ https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-cwatts-033017.pdf ].”
Last week, in a sentencing memorandum for the lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, the special counsel’s office noted that Rick Gates and “Person A” — an unnamed figure who has ties to a “Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016” — “were directly communicating in September and October 2016.”
What coverage there was of this staggering claim — evidence of a direct link between a member of Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence — and the Van Der Zwaan filing was quickly overtaken by controversy over the president’s relationship with an adult film star.
It’s been a year since I testified to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016. The revelations from Robert Mueller’s indictments since then have provided so much clarity on how Russia interfered in our democracy — yet Americans seem more confused about the question of possible collusion with Russia.
That is, in a way, by design — Russia’s design. Its infiltration and influence on America is difficult to understand, even with vastly more detail about Russia’s influence efforts.
A lot of the focus on the Mueller investigation has fallen on Donald Trump: Did he obstruct the investigation? Was he a “Manchurian Candidate” or just a Russian ally, by ideology or business interests?
In my view, as a former F.B.I. special agent who has watched the Kremlin’s infiltration of America since 2014, the answer may be neither. A standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.
Russian intelligence develops options and pathways over many years; as objectives arise — like the election of Mr. Trump — they focus and engage all available touch points.
The revelation last week about Mr. Gates’s connection is another piece of evidence to support that view. Russia’s efforts to influence, known by the Kremlin moniker Active Measures, did not seek a single pathway into the Trump team. Instead, they targeted a wide spectrum of influential Americans to subtly nudge their preferred policy into the mainstream and sideline foreign opponents. Russian intelligence services establish campaign objectives and compromise foreign targets through espionage, but their principal focus is to recruit agents of influence.
Typically, the Kremlin deploys layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives. When called upon by the Kremlin, oligarchs, contractors, criminals and spies (current or former) all provide levers for advancing President Vladimir Putin’s assault on democracies.
In Trump and his campaign, Mr. Putin spotted a golden opportunity — an easily ingratiated celebrity motivated by fame and fortune, a foreign policy novice surrounded by unscreened opportunists open to manipulation and unaware of Russia’s long run game of subversion.
Mr. Putin has succeeded where his Soviet forefathers failed by leveraging money and cyberspace to subtly infiltrate and influence Americans while maintaining plausible deniability of their efforts. And the Kremlin’s ground game “cut outs” — intermediaries who facilitate communication between agents — conducted a more complex game.
Each Mueller indictment and investigative lead illuminates more Kremlin influence avenues into President Trump’s inner circle. Mr. Van Der Zwaan, whose father-in-law is the Russian oligarch German Khan, lied to investigators about his conversations with Mr. Gates, the Trump deputy campaign manager, and a Person A, whom the F.B.I. assessed as a Russian intelligence agent and many believe to be Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of both Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort, a Trump campaign manager.
Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?
Trump campaign members certainly colluded with Russian influence efforts, some willingly, some possibly knowingly. The president denies the Kremlin’s hand, either still unaware or in denial of being manipulated by Mr. Putin’s minions. For Mr. Putin, it’s likely everything he hoped for — America riddled with political infighting and mired in investigations, a weakened NATO alliance vulnerable to aggression and a United States president seeking his adoration, obstinate and ignorant of the great caper the Kremlin just orchestrated.
The problem for the president is that ignorance is not immunity. The problem for America is that ignorance of Russian interference is vulnerability.
Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) is the Robert A. Fox fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a former F.B.I. special agent and author of the forthcoming book “Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News [ https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062795984/messing-with-the-enemy ].”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/trump-russia-mueller-election.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=for+russia+trump+was+a+vehicle
A new study suggests fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election
President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn't matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcement communities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the “fake news” it promoted would undermine the legitimacy of his election win.
Trump won't like this new study one bit.
The study [full text https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4429952-Fake-News-May-Have-Contributed-to-Trump-s-2016.html ] from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.
Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study's authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).
Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
1.Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
2.Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
3.Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)
Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.
This alone does not prove that fake news made a difference, of course. A recent Princeton-led study of fake news consumption during the 2016 campaign found that false articles made up 2.6 percent of all hard-news articles late in the 2016 campaign, with the stories most often reaching intense partisans who probably were not persuadable. And it wouldn't be surprising if Obama voters who weren't reliable Democratic supporters were more apt to believe fake news stories that affirmed their decision not to vote for Clinton.
So the researchers sought to control for other factors such as gender, race, age, education, political leaning and even personal feelings about Clinton and Trump using multiple regression analysis, a method to measure the relative impact of multiple independent variables. According to the researchers, all of these factors combined to explain 38 percent of the defection of Obama voters from Clinton, but belief in fake news explained an additional 11 percent.
For those defecting from Clinton, believing fake news had a greater effect than anything except being a Republican or personally disliking Clinton. Obama voters who believed one of these fake news stories “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors,” the researchers write.
“We cannot prove that belief in fake news caused these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016,” they write. “These data strongly suggest, however, that exposure to fake news did have a significant impact on voting decisions.”
Exactly how that translates into raw votes and whether it swung the election is the big question — and the one that seems to preoccupy Trump. It's difficult to know how fake news played specifically in the three states that delivered him the presidency: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the fact that Clinton lost each of these divisive states by less than one percentage point means that even a slight impact by Russia and/or fake news — or even then-FBI Director James B. Comey's announcement about Clinton's emails or some other factor — could logically have changed the result.
But we can use this study to glean clues and even rerun a hypothetical 2016 election. The Washington Post's polling director, Scott Clement, ran a predictive probability analysis using the OSU team's data and compared the existing 2016 election to a hypothetical election in which these fake news stories didn't exist. The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama's votes in the race with fake news vs. the hypothetical race without it.
If we multiply that 4.2 percent drop-off by Obama's 2012 vote share in the three key states that delivered the presidency to Trump, it suggests that fake news cost Clinton about 2.2 or 2.3 points apiece in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Clinton lost Michigan by just 0.2 points and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.72 and 0.76 points, respectively.
These are rough estimates, to be clear. But notably, Clinton's estimated drop-off in each state would be about three times bigger — or more — than the study's impact of fake news. That would mean that, for fake news not to have made the difference (according to these data), Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have had to be uniquely impervious to the effects of fake news, compared with the rest of the country.
The survey also notably doesn't measure what effect fake news might have had on increasing Trump's support, instead only focusing on how it depressed Clinton's. That could increase the shift. But even with this limited purview, it suggests it made a significant difference.
And it suggests it may well have cost Clinton the presidency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/03/a-new-study-suggests-fake-news-might-have-won-donald-trump-the-2016-election/
A White House spouse who can’t be forced to shut up
The Trump administration has found its Martha Mitchell. His name is George Conway.
Mitchell, for those too young to remember the darkest days of Watergate, was the outspoken Arkansas-born wife of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 campaign manager and former attorney general John Mitchell. Known as “the mouth of the South,” she became known for her late-night calls to reporters, in which she said that the Nixon White House was trying to make her husband a scapegoat for its own nefarious acts. There was more than a little truth to her claims, and her husband did indeed go to prison. But at the time, the president's men dismissed her as an alcoholic, and crazy to boot.
No one would say that about Conway, a lawyer of sterling conservative credentials who early on in the Trump administration took himself out of consideration for a top Justice Department job. He is also the husband of Trump counselor and cable news warrior Kellyanne Conway, whom he married in 2001. Their love story began when he asked a friend, the arch-right pundit Ann Coulter, to arrange an introduction with the Republican pollster he had seen on TV. He dialed back his own career with a top New York law firm to move their family down to Washington, so she could pursue hers.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-white-house-spouse-who-cant-be-forced-to-shut-up/2018/04/03/7aa7d9fc-3759-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
Trump’s lawyer is in legal peril - Michael Cohen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-lawyer-is-in-legal-peril/2018/04/03/7155f348-36aa-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
First sentence handed down in Mueller probe
A London-based lawyer was ordered to serve 30 days in prison [and $20k fine] after a federal judge Tuesday handed down the first sentence in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Alex van der Zwaan, 33, a son-in-law of a prominent Russian-based banker, pleaded guilty Feb. 20 to lying to the FBI about his contacts in September and October of 2016 with a business associate of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and with Manafort’s deputy, former Trump aide Rick Gates. Prosecutors said van der Zwaan also destroyed emails the special counsel had requested.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/first-sentence-handed-down-in-mueller-special-counsel-probe/2018/04/03/23e9b21e-3693-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
Mueller authorized by DOJ to investigate alleged Manafort collusion with Russian government
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/mueller-manafort-rosenstein-memo/index.html
Mueller told Trump’s attorneys the president remains under investigation ["subject"] but is not currently a criminal target
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-told-trumps-attorneys-the-president-remains-under-investigation-but-is-not-currently-a-criminal-target/2018/04/03/d7832cf0-36c1-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
Robert Mueller just provided a real window into the Russia investigation. Here are 4 key takeaways.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/03/robert-mueller-just-provided-a-real-window-into-the-russia-investigation-here-are-3-key-takeaways/
In a footnote, Mueller sends a warning shot to Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/04/03/in-a-footnote-mueller-sends-a-warning-shot-to-trump/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dcXIffm4pGpoavMBb33245zYTIdJM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Facebook is banning hundreds more accounts run by Russian trolls
This time, Facebook found and booted 270 IRA [Internet Research Agency] accounts.
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17194430/facebook-banning-ira-russian-troll-accounts-internet-research-agency
Facebook’s Russia problem won’t go away. Hundreds more accounts purged on the social network.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebook-says-there-were-more-russian-accounts-than-previously-acknowledged/2018/04/03/f26462f5-5715-4769-b887-29f80817f236_story.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d0oh6rkIgHIr2jMITUwSVkuzfWFpM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
AP FACT CHECK: Trump assails Mexico, Amazon, twisting facts
https://www.apnews.com/c7eb758f9f244e7b9ad459f8565d18b2/AP-FACT-CHECK:-Trump-assails-Mexico,-Amazon,-twisting-facts
Mueller Reportedly Is Making A List Of All The Stuff Trump Has Done In Office
The special counsel has also told the president’s lawyers that Trump is not a criminal target [is a "subject"] at this point.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mueller-trump-report_us_5ac42c87e4b063ce2e56fd13
CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin Has An Ominous New Warning For Trump
Jeffrey Toobin said new revelations spell bad news for the president.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeffrey-toobin-donald-trump-robert-mueller_us_5ac431aae4b0ac473edb285b
A Third Woman Is Suing To Break A Trump-Related Nondisclosure Agreement
Jessica Denson says she experienced sexual harassment while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jessica-denson-is-suing-to-break-a-trump-related-nda_us_5ac3873ae4b04646b6465f8a
Sinclair Journalists Worry They’re Being Watched: ‘There’s A Lot Held Over Us’
The Sinclair Broadcast Group handbook warns employees to have no expectation of privacy in their communications.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sinclair-journalists-worry-theyre-being-watched-theres-a-lot-held-over-us_us_5ac3c46be4b09712fec5477f
Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-weiss-sinclair-television-propaganda_us_5ac2c6d4e4b09712fec38b95
George Clooney’s Ex-Anchorman Dad Isn’t Having It With Sinclair
Nick Clooney’s old TV station is now owned by the right-wing media giant — and he’s not happy about it.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/george-clooney-nick-clooney-sinclair-news-station_us_5ac36f1ae4b00fa46f862dbc
3, 2018, and headed, Media Giant Sinclair, Under Fire for Forcing Anchors to Read Trumpian Screed, Is Rapidly Expanding
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140743756
The twelfth
EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones' Ex-Wife Tells All, Conspiracies, Fake Supplements
Published on Apr 3, 2018 by David Pakman Show [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvixJtaXuNdMPUGdOPcY8Ag
/ https://www.youtube.com/user/MidweekPolitics , https://www.youtube.com/user/MidweekPolitics/videos ]
Kelly Jones, ex-wife of Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, joins David to discuss the truth about Alex
Jones, his snake oil supplements, conspiracy theories, the alleged brainwashing of their son, and much more.
https://custodywars.com/
Broadcast on April 3, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebByb9JJgJg [with (nearly 14,000) comments]
My add: Case closed? ... -
http://politics.blog.mystatesman.com/2017/07/20/case-closed-judge-naranjo-issues-final-orders-in-alexkelly-jones-child-custody-case/
Not nice to know the guy as well as i do. Nice to know Kelly Jones a little.
Twenty-eighth
Malcolm Nance: Trump is “gaslighting” public on Mueller probe
The Beat with Ari Melber
4/3/18
Bob Mueller hands down his first sentence in the Russia probe. Lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, who is tied to Trump
campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, has been sentenced to 30 days in jail. Intelligence Analyst
Malcolm Nance, Watergate Prosecutor Nick Akerman and CNBC Editor at Large John Harwood join The Beat.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/malcolm-nance-trump-is-gaslighting-public-on-mueller-probe-1201792067703 [a must-watch]
Thirty-three
What John Bolton's Past Tells Us About His Future As Trump's National Security Adviser (HBO)
Published on Apr 3, 2018 by VICE News
When John Bolton becomes Donald Trump’s national security advisor later this month,
he’ll assume more influence over U.S foreign policy than he’s ever had before.
That has a lot of people nervous: Bolton has rarely seen a military intervention he didn’t like — he supported
the war in Iraq (and still does), regime change in Iran, and a first strike against North Korea’s nuclear program.
But the last time Bolton was up for a big job — his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations — what tripped him up wasn’t his
policies; it was testimony about his penchant for berating subordinates, and a refusal to listen to information that countered his personal beliefs.
Carl Ford, Jr., was the director of the State Department bureau responsible for intelligence analysis in 2002, when Bolton was under secretary
of state for Arms Control. At the time, the Bush administration was building up evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq — wrongfully, as
it turned out — and Bolton was seeking to make the case that another country, Cuba, was working on its own biological weapons program. (It wasn't.)
Ford’s analysts disagreed, and Bolton, Ford says, didn’t want to hear it. He called the analyst into his office, and threatened to have him fired. Ford fought back.
“I was steaming,” Ford recalled. “I explained to him… ‘John, if you want to say this, that you
believe it — be our guest. But you cannot say that it's the intelligence community's view.”
The drama that ensued followed Bolton for years, and nearly kept him out of the UN job. He was later granted a recess
appointment by the president. But more than a decade later, former colleagues say it’s much more worrisome as a
sign of how Bolton might deal with intelligence that contradicts his views in his much more powerful position.
“It is the best evidence we have of how he will behave in the future,” said Greg Thielmann, another former State Department
intel analyst who worked with Bolton. “These things might be academic but this is how you build the case for war.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAPmggDDMzs [with comments]
Thirty-five and thirty-six
Trump under investigation but not criminal target: Report
All In with Chris Hayes
4/3/18
Special Counsel Robert Mueller told President Trump's attorneys last month that Trump is
still under investigation but is not currently a criminal target, reports the Washington Post.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/trump-under-investigation-but-not-criminal-target-report-1201841731737
*
First person receives jail time in Russia probe
All In with Chris Hayes
4/3/18
Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan was sentenced to 30 days in prison and a $20,000 fine, the
first person receiving jail time as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/first-person-receives-jail-time-in-russia-probe-1201839171925
Thirty-eight and nine
President Trump is under investigation, but not as a criminal target says Mueller
The Rachel Maddow Show
4/3/18
Rachel Maddow speaks with Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig who reports that Trump’s lawyers say
the special counsel is investigating the president but does not believe he is a criminal target at the moment.
From Special Counsel's filing in Manafort case.
Snip from page 42 pictured below; full document here:
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/USG-Govt-Opposition-to-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/981358587460153345 [with comments]
Special Counsel Office press office now confirms that the ‘senior assistant special counsel’ referenced on p.42 of today’s filing is indeed Andrew Weissmann.
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/981367485537705984 [with comments]
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/president-trump-is-under-investigation-but-not-as-a-criminal-target-says-mueller-1201923651792
*
Alex van der Zwaan is first person sentenced in Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation
The Rachel Maddow Show
4/3/18
Alex van der Zwaan is given a 30 day sentence and a $20,000 fine, becoming the first person sentenced as a result of the
Mueller investigation – penalties which shouldn’t be a problem given his close connection to Russian oligarch German Khan.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/alex-van-der-zwaan-is-first-person-sentenced-in-robert-mueller-s-special-counsel-investigation-1201935427554
The forty-first
Lawrence on Trump, Mueller and 'subject' v. 'target'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
4/3/18
Lawrence O'Donnell walks through new reporting that Robert Mueller has told Trump's lawyers the
president is a "subject" of the Russia investigation, but not currently a target and what it means.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-on-trump-mueller-and-subject-v-target-1201957443523 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFyyInrYpjQ [with comments]
Forty-four, five and six
WAPO: Trump remains under investigation by Mueller
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
The Washington Post reports that Special Counsel Mueller told Trump's attorneys in March that he is still investigating
the president but doesn't not count him as a criminal target in the investigation at this point. Our panel reacts.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/wapo-trump-remains-under-investigation-by-mueller-1202005059573 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKP2pO6wo5c [with comments]
There is a suggestion that Trump's attorneys believe, in Mueller's trying (since early March) to get an interview, may be playing rope-a-dope
with the president. Mueller is going to write the first of a number of reports for Congress. Word is he wants the interview to help him decide
on the level of intent the president may, or may not have had in regards to the question of obstruction of justice by the president. Or not.
*
Trump allies divided over report Mueller is investigating him
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
With The Washington Post reporting that Robert Mueller told Trump's legal team the president is a
subject, but not a criminal target, of his Russia probe, Trump's allies are reportedly split over the news.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-allies-divided-over-report-mueller-is-investigating-him-1202008131723
*
Trump says no one's tougher on Russia five times in 86 minutes
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
4/4/18
At multiple White House events on Tuesday, Trump repeatedly said no one has been tougher on Russia than he has. Our panel reacts.
©2018 NBCNews.com
[originally aired April 3, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-says-no-one-s-tougher-on-russia-five-times-in-86-minutes-1202009155972 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES5-i38ry2A [with comments]
A serious comedy section bit
Michael Wolff - Exposing the Trump White House in “Fire and Fury” | The Daily Show
Published on Apr 3, 2018
Michael Wolff discusses his book "Fire and Fury," which details President Trump's
child-like temperament as well as the dysfunction within his administration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx49vicqCRY [with comments]
One Wolff opinion - The greatest bunch of knuckleheads ever assembled in one place.
And a quote - people around Trump would say, "This is an emperor with no clothes, here."
There's more. All well deserving of a Trum roll.
To "stashed April 3, 2018:"
Mueller Was Authorized to Investigate Paul Manafort’s Work for Ukraine
Court filings show that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave the special counsel authority to probe Ukraine-government dealings
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-was-authorized-to-investigate-paul-manaforts-work-for-ukraine-1522754850
Mueller authorized by DOJ to investigate alleged Manafort collusion with Russian government
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/mueller-manafort-rosenstein-memo/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dLhkQHzbv22LTiMmeFjokFJCPez_M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
From Thai Jail, Sex Coaches Say They Want to Trade U.S.-Russia Secrets for Safety
PATTAYA, Thailand — A pair of self-described sex instructors from Belarus have been stuck in a Thai detention center for weeks. They say that they have evidence demonstrating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States, and that they have offered it to the F.B.I. in exchange for a guarantee of their safety.
Their claim — that they are targets of a covert Russian operation to silence them because they know too much — might seem outlandish, but their case certainly includes some unusual circumstances.
They have influential enemies in Russia. They were arrested with the help of a “foreign spy,” according to the Thai police, and locked up on what is a fairly minor offense: working without a permit. And the F.B.I. says it tried to talk to the pair, suggesting that American investigators had not dismissed their account out of hand.
“They know we have more information,” one of the pair, Alexander Kirillov, 38, told The New York Times last month in an unauthorized phone call from the detention center, in Bangkok. Mr. Kirillov said his co-defendant, Anastasia Vashukevich, 27, had angered some powerful people. “They know she knows a lot,” he said. “And that’s why they made this case against us.”
Ms. Vashukevich certainly knows how to get attention. In February, a top critic of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, released a video that included footage she recorded during a brief affair she had with a Russian aluminum tycoon while working as an escort aboard his yacht in 2016. The evidence included photos she posted of the tycoon and his guest, Sergei E. Prikhodko, a deputy prime minister, and a recording of them talking about relations between the United States and Russia.
The aluminum tycoon, Oleg V. Deripaska, has close ties with Mr. Putin and with Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, who has been indicted on money laundering charges by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel looking into election interference.
The escort and her seduction coach have been held largely incommunicado since March 5, when reporters for The Times and other news media outlets were kicked out of the detention center for speaking to them. They now face deportation and fear what might happen to them if they are sent home to Russia, where they live, or Belarus, the former Soviet republic where they grew up, which remains firmly within Russia’s influence. (Mr. Kirillov was traveling on a Russian passport.)
Neither of them is accustomed to silence. They and their circle of friends say they make a habit of recording everything they do as they go about their campaign of teaching seduction techniques and trying their skills on strangers, sometimes in public.
The two were arrested along with eight others on Feb. 25 when dozens of plainclothes police officers raided a workshop they were conducting for Russian tourists at a hotel in Pattaya, about 70 miles south of Bangkok.
The seminar was aimed mainly at male Russian tourists and offered instruction in how to seduce women. It was not illegal.
The police arrest report says that a “foreign spy” infiltrated the Russian-language seminar and provided the Royal Thai Police with information about the training.
Cellphone messages show that the agent signaled the waiting officers when it was time to raid the Ibis Pattaya Hotel conference room.
The work permit charge is relatively minor, and Mr. Kirillov had been conducting training sessions in Pattaya for years. But high-level officials appeared to take an unusual interest in this case: Six police generals and two colonels had responsibility for the raid, according to the arrest report.
Since the arrests, the government has tried to keep a tight lid on information. Friends said they had not been allowed to visit Ms. Vashukevich and Mr. Kirillov for weeks.
A law enforcement official said the F.B.I. tried to speak with the two but was not successful.
A Thai police spokesman, Lt. Col. Krissana Pattanacharoen, would not comment on whether Russia was behind the arrests, but he said it was not unusual for the police to use foreign operatives.
“Investigations are not one size fits all,” he said. “It depends entirely on the situation.”
Few other police officials have been willing to talk about the case. The American Embassy in Bangkok declined to comment. The Russian Embassy asked that questions be submitted in writing, but did not answer them.
After the pair’s arrest, Mr. Kirillov sent a handwritten letter to the American Embassy in Bangkok asking for asylum for all 10 detainees. (At the time, Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, dismissed the case as “a pretty bizarre story” and indicated that the embassy had no plans to talk with them.)
Financial records show that companies controlled by Mr. Manafort owed millions of dollars to Mr. Deripaska, the aluminum tycoon. During the 2016 race, Mr. Manafort offered to give him private briefings about the campaign, though there is no indication that the tycoon took him up on the offer.
Ms. Vashukevich, who goes by the name Nastya Rybka online and recounts her story in a book, “Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire,” became an escort under the guidance of Mr. Kirillov, better known as Alex Lesley, who has gained popularity in Russia for his advocacy of sexual freedom.
At the time of the yacht visit, Ms. Vashukevich had shaved six years off her age to pose as 19. She was sent by a Moscow modeling agency to a yacht off Norway along with six other escorts, according to her account.
She said she followed Mr. Kirillov’s instruction to record all her interactions with her target, the yacht’s owner, who turned out to be Mr. Deripaska.
Ms. Vashukevich told The Times in a brief interview last month at the detention center that she had more than 16 hours of recordings from the yacht, including conversations with three visitors who she believes were Americans.
She has called herself the “missing link” in the Russia investigation.
Her posts from 2016 came to prominence only after Aleksei A. Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, included them in a video in early February that made accusations about official corruption. Mr. Navalny also charged that Mr. Deripaska had delivered Mr. Manafort’s campaign reports to the Kremlin.
“Deripaska simply transmits this information to Putin,” Mr. Navalny said. “He’s very close to Putin after all.”
Before traveling to Thailand, Mr. Kirillov grew worried about repercussions from the exposé and asked a childhood friend, Eliot Cooper, to contact United States authorities on his behalf, Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Cooper, who lives in Canada, said in a telephone interview that he called an F.B.I. hotline in February and proposed trading the recordings for the pair’s safety.
He said he had told the hotline agent about one recorded conversation in which Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Prikhodko discussed wanting Mr. Trump to win.
“I explained all of that to the F.B.I.,” he said. “They should have a transcript of everything and a recording of my voice.”
Mr. Cooper said he had never heard back from the agency. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Mr. Cooper said that Mr. Kirillov had hidden copies and instructed associates to release them if he or Ms. Vashukevich were killed or went missing.
“There is no investigation,” Mr. Cooper said. “The Americans are not interested. They want them to disappear, and Nastya in particular, because she is a living witness.”
By the standards of Pattaya, a city notorious for its adult entertainment, the sex seminar for about 30 Russian tourists was tame.
A hotel spokeswoman, Joyce Ong, said the workshop was run like a “normal corporate seminar,” and she denied earlier reports that the staff had called the police.
None of those arrested were charged with sexual misconduct. Ms. Vashukevich was both Mr. Kirillov’s star pupil and one of the instructors at the seminars.
The chief of Thailand’s Immigration Bureau, Suttipong Wongpin, said his department had restricted the pair’s visitors because letting them talk freely could harm Thailand’s relations with the United States and Russia.
“The detainees,” he said, “will just say whatever they want.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/asia/nastya-russia-trump-election.html
A Meeting With Putin, If It Happened Soon, Would Involve A Different Trump
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598929093/a-meeting-with-putin-if-it-happened-soon-would-involve-a-different-trump
Trump's telephone diplomacy sends the wrong message to Putin
It appears the president's aides and key State Department officials were blindsided by Trump's suggestion he and Putin possibly meet at the White House.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-telephone-diplomacy-sends-wrong-message-putin-n862161
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/djc7MK8JH3VBe8MGGPYJHQlCaO9wM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Russia Presses Trump for White House Meeting With Putin
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/europe/trump-putin-white-house-meeting.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d14kGOCNwu-dJJMH0Zs_Ykr1IMuEM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Stormy Daniels Case Should Be Resolved Privately, Trump’s Lawyers Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/politics/stormy-daniels-trump-arbitration.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dDgMTYcpANcHi4M9PD3Uu5gjM5hDM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Jill McCabe: The president attacked my reputation. It’s time to set the record straight.
By Jill McCabe
Jill McCabe, an emergency room pediatrician, is married to former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jill-mccabe-the-president-attacked-my-reputation-its-time-to-set-the-record-straight/2018/04/02/e6bbcf66-366b-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dbuYVkc8rCFy8AMksz8Tc9S9bBUYM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Sinclair Chairman Claims Entire Print Media Has ‘No Credibility’
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/sinclair-chairman-entire-print-media-has-no-credibility.html
Sinclair chairman: Print media 'so left wing' it's ‘meaningless dribble’
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/381379-sinclair-chairman-print-media-is-meaningless-dribble-with-no-credibility
Report: Sinclair Chairman Believes Print Media Has “No Credibility”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/sinclair-defends-itself-against-reports-chairman-comments-print-media.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sinclair+chairman+claims
For Russia, Trump Was a Vehicle, Not a Target
By Clint Watts
Mr. Watts testified on March 30, 2017, at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing and presented a statement, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns [ https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-cwatts-033017.pdf ].”
Last week, in a sentencing memorandum for the lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, the special counsel’s office noted that Rick Gates and “Person A” — an unnamed figure who has ties to a “Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016” — “were directly communicating in September and October 2016.”
What coverage there was of this staggering claim — evidence of a direct link between a member of Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence — and the Van Der Zwaan filing was quickly overtaken by controversy over the president’s relationship with an adult film star.
It’s been a year since I testified to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016. The revelations from Robert Mueller’s indictments since then have provided so much clarity on how Russia interfered in our democracy — yet Americans seem more confused about the question of possible collusion with Russia.
That is, in a way, by design — Russia’s design. Its infiltration and influence on America is difficult to understand, even with vastly more detail about Russia’s influence efforts.
A lot of the focus on the Mueller investigation has fallen on Donald Trump: Did he obstruct the investigation? Was he a “Manchurian Candidate” or just a Russian ally, by ideology or business interests?
In my view, as a former F.B.I. special agent who has watched the Kremlin’s infiltration of America since 2014, the answer may be neither. A standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.
Russian intelligence develops options and pathways over many years; as objectives arise — like the election of Mr. Trump — they focus and engage all available touch points.
The revelation last week about Mr. Gates’s connection is another piece of evidence to support that view. Russia’s efforts to influence, known by the Kremlin moniker Active Measures, did not seek a single pathway into the Trump team. Instead, they targeted a wide spectrum of influential Americans to subtly nudge their preferred policy into the mainstream and sideline foreign opponents. Russian intelligence services establish campaign objectives and compromise foreign targets through espionage, but their principal focus is to recruit agents of influence.
Typically, the Kremlin deploys layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives. When called upon by the Kremlin, oligarchs, contractors, criminals and spies (current or former) all provide levers for advancing President Vladimir Putin’s assault on democracies.
In Trump and his campaign, Mr. Putin spotted a golden opportunity — an easily ingratiated celebrity motivated by fame and fortune, a foreign policy novice surrounded by unscreened opportunists open to manipulation and unaware of Russia’s long run game of subversion.
Mr. Putin has succeeded where his Soviet forefathers failed by leveraging money and cyberspace to subtly infiltrate and influence Americans while maintaining plausible deniability of their efforts. And the Kremlin’s ground game “cut outs” — intermediaries who facilitate communication between agents — conducted a more complex game.
Each Mueller indictment and investigative lead illuminates more Kremlin influence avenues into President Trump’s inner circle. Mr. Van Der Zwaan, whose father-in-law is the Russian oligarch German Khan, lied to investigators about his conversations with Mr. Gates, the Trump deputy campaign manager, and a Person A, whom the F.B.I. assessed as a Russian intelligence agent and many believe to be Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of both Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort, a Trump campaign manager.
Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?
Trump campaign members certainly colluded with Russian influence efforts, some willingly, some possibly knowingly. The president denies the Kremlin’s hand, either still unaware or in denial of being manipulated by Mr. Putin’s minions. For Mr. Putin, it’s likely everything he hoped for — America riddled with political infighting and mired in investigations, a weakened NATO alliance vulnerable to aggression and a United States president seeking his adoration, obstinate and ignorant of the great caper the Kremlin just orchestrated.
The problem for the president is that ignorance is not immunity. The problem for America is that ignorance of Russian interference is vulnerability.
Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) is the Robert A. Fox fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a former F.B.I. special agent and author of the forthcoming book “Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News [ https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062795984/messing-with-the-enemy ].”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/trump-russia-mueller-election.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=for+russia+trump+was+a+vehicle
A new study suggests fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election
President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn't matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcement communities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the “fake news” it promoted would undermine the legitimacy of his election win.
Trump won't like this new study one bit.
The study [full text https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4429952-Fake-News-May-Have-Contributed-to-Trump-s-2016.html ] from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.
Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study's authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).
Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
1.Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
2.Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
3.Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)
Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.
This alone does not prove that fake news made a difference, of course. A recent Princeton-led study of fake news consumption during the 2016 campaign found that false articles made up 2.6 percent of all hard-news articles late in the 2016 campaign, with the stories most often reaching intense partisans who probably were not persuadable. And it wouldn't be surprising if Obama voters who weren't reliable Democratic supporters were more apt to believe fake news stories that affirmed their decision not to vote for Clinton.
So the researchers sought to control for other factors such as gender, race, age, education, political leaning and even personal feelings about Clinton and Trump using multiple regression analysis, a method to measure the relative impact of multiple independent variables. According to the researchers, all of these factors combined to explain 38 percent of the defection of Obama voters from Clinton, but belief in fake news explained an additional 11 percent.
For those defecting from Clinton, believing fake news had a greater effect than anything except being a Republican or personally disliking Clinton. Obama voters who believed one of these fake news stories “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors,” the researchers write.
“We cannot prove that belief in fake news caused these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016,” they write. “These data strongly suggest, however, that exposure to fake news did have a significant impact on voting decisions.”
Exactly how that translates into raw votes and whether it swung the election is the big question — and the one that seems to preoccupy Trump. It's difficult to know how fake news played specifically in the three states that delivered him the presidency: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the fact that Clinton lost each of these divisive states by less than one percentage point means that even a slight impact by Russia and/or fake news — or even then-FBI Director James B. Comey's announcement about Clinton's emails or some other factor — could logically have changed the result.
But we can use this study to glean clues and even rerun a hypothetical 2016 election. The Washington Post's polling director, Scott Clement, ran a predictive probability analysis using the OSU team's data and compared the existing 2016 election to a hypothetical election in which these fake news stories didn't exist. The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama's votes in the race with fake news vs. the hypothetical race without it.
If we multiply that 4.2 percent drop-off by Obama's 2012 vote share in the three key states that delivered the presidency to Trump, it suggests that fake news cost Clinton about 2.2 or 2.3 points apiece in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Clinton lost Michigan by just 0.2 points and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.72 and 0.76 points, respectively.
These are rough estimates, to be clear. But notably, Clinton's estimated drop-off in each state would be about three times bigger — or more — than the study's impact of fake news. That would mean that, for fake news not to have made the difference (according to these data), Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have had to be uniquely impervious to the effects of fake news, compared with the rest of the country.
The survey also notably doesn't measure what effect fake news might have had on increasing Trump's support, instead only focusing on how it depressed Clinton's. That could increase the shift. But even with this limited purview, it suggests it made a significant difference.
And it suggests it may well have cost Clinton the presidency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/03/a-new-study-suggests-fake-news-might-have-won-donald-trump-the-2016-election/
A White House spouse who can’t be forced to shut up
The Trump administration has found its Martha Mitchell. His name is George Conway.
Mitchell, for those too young to remember the darkest days of Watergate, was the outspoken Arkansas-born wife of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 campaign manager and former attorney general John Mitchell. Known as “the mouth of the South,” she became known for her late-night calls to reporters, in which she said that the Nixon White House was trying to make her husband a scapegoat for its own nefarious acts. There was more than a little truth to her claims, and her husband did indeed go to prison. But at the time, the president's men dismissed her as an alcoholic, and crazy to boot.
No one would say that about Conway, a lawyer of sterling conservative credentials who early on in the Trump administration took himself out of consideration for a top Justice Department job. He is also the husband of Trump counselor and cable news warrior Kellyanne Conway, whom he married in 2001. Their love story began when he asked a friend, the arch-right pundit Ann Coulter, to arrange an introduction with the Republican pollster he had seen on TV. He dialed back his own career with a top New York law firm to move their family down to Washington, so she could pursue hers.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-white-house-spouse-who-cant-be-forced-to-shut-up/2018/04/03/7aa7d9fc-3759-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
Trump’s lawyer is in legal peril - Michael Cohen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-lawyer-is-in-legal-peril/2018/04/03/7155f348-36aa-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
First sentence handed down in Mueller probe
A London-based lawyer was ordered to serve 30 days in prison [and $20k fine] after a federal judge Tuesday handed down the first sentence in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Alex van der Zwaan, 33, a son-in-law of a prominent Russian-based banker, pleaded guilty Feb. 20 to lying to the FBI about his contacts in September and October of 2016 with a business associate of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and with Manafort’s deputy, former Trump aide Rick Gates. Prosecutors said van der Zwaan also destroyed emails the special counsel had requested.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/first-sentence-handed-down-in-mueller-special-counsel-probe/2018/04/03/23e9b21e-3693-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
Mueller authorized by DOJ to investigate alleged Manafort collusion with Russian government
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/mueller-manafort-rosenstein-memo/index.html
Mueller told Trump’s attorneys the president remains under investigation ["subject"] but is not currently a criminal target
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-told-trumps-attorneys-the-president-remains-under-investigation-but-is-not-currently-a-criminal-target/2018/04/03/d7832cf0-36c1-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html
Robert Mueller just provided a real window into the Russia investigation. Here are 4 key takeaways.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/03/robert-mueller-just-provided-a-real-window-into-the-russia-investigation-here-are-3-key-takeaways/
In a footnote, Mueller sends a warning shot to Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/04/03/in-a-footnote-mueller-sends-a-warning-shot-to-trump/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dcXIffm4pGpoavMBb33245zYTIdJM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Facebook is banning hundreds more accounts run by Russian trolls
This time, Facebook found and booted 270 IRA [Internet Research Agency] accounts.
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17194430/facebook-banning-ira-russian-troll-accounts-internet-research-agency
Facebook’s Russia problem won’t go away. Hundreds more accounts purged on the social network.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebook-says-there-were-more-russian-accounts-than-previously-acknowledged/2018/04/03/f26462f5-5715-4769-b887-29f80817f236_story.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d0oh6rkIgHIr2jMITUwSVkuzfWFpM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
AP FACT CHECK: Trump assails Mexico, Amazon, twisting facts
https://www.apnews.com/c7eb758f9f244e7b9ad459f8565d18b2/AP-FACT-CHECK:-Trump-assails-Mexico,-Amazon,-twisting-facts
Mueller Reportedly Is Making A List Of All The Stuff Trump Has Done In Office
The special counsel has also told the president’s lawyers that Trump is not a criminal target [is a "subject"] at this point.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mueller-trump-report_us_5ac42c87e4b063ce2e56fd13
CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin Has An Ominous New Warning For Trump
Jeffrey Toobin said new revelations spell bad news for the president.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeffrey-toobin-donald-trump-robert-mueller_us_5ac431aae4b0ac473edb285b
A Third Woman Is Suing To Break A Trump-Related Nondisclosure Agreement
Jessica Denson says she experienced sexual harassment while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jessica-denson-is-suing-to-break-a-trump-related-nda_us_5ac3873ae4b04646b6465f8a
Sinclair Journalists Worry They’re Being Watched: ‘There’s A Lot Held Over Us’
The Sinclair Broadcast Group handbook warns employees to have no expectation of privacy in their communications.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sinclair-journalists-worry-theyre-being-watched-theres-a-lot-held-over-us_us_5ac3c46be4b09712fec5477f
Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-weiss-sinclair-television-propaganda_us_5ac2c6d4e4b09712fec38b95
George Clooney’s Ex-Anchorman Dad Isn’t Having It With Sinclair
Nick Clooney’s old TV station is now owned by the right-wing media giant — and he’s not happy about it.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/george-clooney-nick-clooney-sinclair-news-station_us_5ac36f1ae4b00fa46f862dbc
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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