Reading the Mueller Indictment: A Russian-American Fraud In his first indictments for Russian interference in the 2016 election, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has revealed the inner workings of a shadow campaign—conceived in Moscow and deployed in the United States—that was far more disciplined than Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. Focussed, creative, and persuasive, the Russian operation was a campaign to envy. Mueller has also given the American public a cautionary tale of contemporary American democracy—a story of deception, influence, and technology. John Sipher, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, who retired in 2014 after twenty-eight years in the C.I.A., told me that the details in the indictment lay bare how audacious the Russian effort to get Trump elected President was in its brazen, repeated contact with American citizens. “You see a willingness to take risk that you hadn’t had before, because Putin was so hateful toward Hillary Clinton. They had a unity of effort, because they had one enemy: the United States. We’re focussed on China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan. I don’t think it was brilliantly thought out, but they put an army out there to do what they can.” Ordinarily, U.S. prosecutors are wary of releasing highly specific accounts involving foreign-intelligence targets, in order to protect the “sources and methods” that allow the government to pierce electronic communications and hidden dealings. But, Sipher said, this thirty-seven-page indictment suggests that Mueller’s team made a strategic decision to include a level of detail that will help it elicit relevant documents from businesses and banks. The indictments open the way for “discovery that otherwise may not be allowed or would be hard to do without a charging document,” he said. In its particulars, the indictment, which charged thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations with multiple conspiracies and frauds, fills in the details of an “active measures” campaign that had been described in general terms by analysts and journalists over the past year. It offers a playbook for manipulating American democracy using a mix of classic espionage, private-sector social-media tools, and partisan ideology. The operation, centered on the now infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, extended to scores of undercover staff and associates in multiple countries, including the United States, and deployed a range of political gambits. Among the details in the document, I was struck, in particular, by three themes—political weapons, in effect—that pose questions for technology companies, the intelligence community, and voters: The power of anonymity. ... The power of voter suppression. ... The power of news illiteracy. ... https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/reading-the-mueller-indictment-a-russian-american-fraud
Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion! https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964594780088033282
Russia-Trump inquiry: Russian foreign minister dismisses FBI charges Russia's foreign minister [Sergei Lavrov] has dismissed as "blather" the charges levelled by the FBI special counsel against 13 Russians for election meddling. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43095881
Mueller's latest move just dealt the White House a massive 'black eye' Special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment Friday of 13 Russian nationals and three organizations paints a stark picture of Russia's election interference. The indictment threw a wrench into President Donald Trump's claims that the Russia investigation is a "hoax" and a "witch hunt" with no justifiable basis. The charges will also force the White House to decide whether it will hold the Russian government accountable for its actions, experts said. http://www.businessinsider.com/mueller-indictment-undermines-trump-russia-hoax-theory-2018-2
Journalists slam Trump aide's 'repulsive' attack over Russia Journalists lashed out at a White House spokesman on Saturday after the aide to President Trump claimed that news media and Democrats have caused more "chaos" than Russia. White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley made the comments during an interview on Fox News while responding to special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election. "There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media,” Gidley asserted on Fox News. "[They] continued to push this lie on the American people for more than a year, and frankly Americans should be outraged by that." The remark was widely panned by journalists, with reporters from The Associated Press, CNN, The Washington Post, Politico and other outlets calling the remark false. [...] http://thehill.com/homenews/media/374382-journalists-slam-trump-aides-repulsive-attack-over-russia
ProPublica assembles list of 2,475 Trump appointees—and their conflicts of interest
By Hunter Saturday Mar 10, 2018 · 8:30 PM CST ProPublica went to the work of compiling a full list of Trump appointees and their industry or lobbying ties. "Trump Town Tracking White House Staffers, Cabinet Members and Political Appointees Across the Government" https://projects.propublica.org/trump-town/
Here’s what we found: At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp,” many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of. We’ve also discovered ethics waivers that allow Trump staffers to work on subjects in which they have financial conflicts of interest.
The term "ethics waiver" is an odd term, by the way. Getting a "waiver" from "ethics" is something only a government or a religion could think up. It also does nothing to waive the various federal laws that make self-serving in government office a crime, meaning it's the people who need "ethics waivers" who are most likely to come up in future corruption investigations.
We also found — for the first time — dozens of special-government employees, or SGEs, who work as paid consultants or experts for federal agencies while keeping their day jobs in the private sector. This rare government gig allows them to legally work for both industry and the Trump administration at the same time.
It also, coincidentally, gives people who could never slide by even a Republican-led vetting process a voice in top government policies.
Of particular note is the deep influence of the Koch network.
It's not just tax cuts that the Koch brothers and their partners have been getting from this new administration. Due to the fortuitous placement of allies, they have also been getting, well, whatever they want:
Just before Trump took office last January, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, one of the main conservative advocacy groups funded by the Koch Brothers, unveiled a deregulatory wish list. The action plan highlighted 19 Obama-era policies affecting the environment, labor and technology that Freedom Partners wanted gone. “This strategy can help to unravel eight years of regulatory overreach starting immediately,” the organization’s vice president, Andy Koenig, wrote in an accompanying press release.
A few weeks later, Koenig joined the White House as a policy assistant, putting him in a position to implement his former employer’s agenda. Sure enough, just over a year later, the administration has acted on 16 of the 19 suggestions that Freedom Partners listed.
So the ProPublica effort, titled Trump Town, is likely to be a very useful resource indeed during the next few years. At the very least, it will provide savvy gamblers with all the data they need to predict which Trump appointees are most likely to be led out of federal buildings in handcuffs before this is all over.