The Muscovite Candidate

[Lord Jim]

This is the first of three fairly long posts:

Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."

Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tru ... ly-a-thing

[Lord Jim]

Here's more detail on the quid:

Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump was in his element, mingling with beauty pageant contestants and business tycoons as he brought his Miss Universe pageant to Russia for a much-anticipated Moscow debut. Nonetheless, Trump was especially eager for the presence of another honored guest: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump tweeted Putin a personal invitation to attend the pageant, and a one-on-one meeting between the New York businessman and the Russian leader was scheduled for the day before the show.

Putin canceled at the last minute, but he sent a decorative lacquered box, a traditional Russian gift, and a warm note, according to Aras Agalarov, a Moscow billionaire who served as a liaison between Trump and the Russian leader.

Still, the weekend was fruitful for Trump. He received a portion of the $14 million paid by Agalarov and other investors to bring the pageant to Moscow. Agalarov said he and Trump signed an agreement to build a Trump Tower in the heart of Moscow — at least Trump’s fifth attempt at such a venture. And Trump seemed energized by his interactions with Russia’s financial elite at the pageant and a glitzy after-party in a Moscow nightclub.

Trump’s relationship with Putin and his warm views toward Russia, which began in the 1980s when the country was still part of the Soviet Union, have emerged as one of the more curious aspects of his presidential campaign.

The overwhelming consensus among American political and national security leaders has held that Putin is a pariah who disregards human rights and has violated international norms in seeking to regain influence and territory in the former Soviet bloc. In 2012, one year before Trump brought his beauty pageant to Moscow, then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ top geopolitical threat — an assessment that has only gained currency since then.

Trump has conveyed a different view, informed in part through his business ambitions. Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The dynamic illustrates the extent to which Trump’s worldview has been formed through the lens of commerce rather than the think tanks, government deliberations and international diplomatic conferences that typically shape the foreign policy positions of presidential candidates.

It also reflects Trump’s willingness to see world leaders through his own personal connections. In a Republican Party in which an ability to stand up to Putin has been seen as a test of toughness, Trump’s relationship with the Russian leader is instead one of mutual flattery. Putin said in December that Trump was a “colorful and talented” person, a compliment that Trump said at the time was an “honor.”

“Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump bragged to Real Estate Weekly upon returning home.

The back-and-forth has continued. In a mid-June rally, Trump cited those comments as the reason he will not reject the Russian leader. “A guy calls me a genius, and I’m going to renounce?” Trump said. “I’m not going to renounce him.” The next day in St. Petersburg, Putin again called Trump a “colorful person” and said he welcomed Trump’s proposal for a “full-scale resumption” of U.S.-Russia ties.

On the campaign trail, Trump has called for a new partnership with Moscow, overhauling NATO, the allied military force seen as the chief protector of pro-Western nations near Russia. And Trump has surrounded himself with a team of advisers who have had financial ties to Russia.

This account of Trump’s 30-year history of business with Russia — and that of his advisers — is based on interviews as well as a review of deposition transcripts and other court records in which Trump and his associates have discussed their overseas work. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, as did top campaign aides and most members of his foreign policy team. The Kremlin also declined to comment about Trump’s visit to Moscow.

The coming together of Trump’s business and political agendas was evident during his 2013 Moscow trip, in which he was seeking deals at the same time he was starting to ponder a presidential run.

Agalarov and his son, Russian pop musician Emin Agalarov, told The Washington Post that they befriended Trump after the pageant and listened as he described his views of U.S.-Russia relations.

“He kept saying, ‘Every time there is friction between United States and Russia, it’s bad for both countries. For the people to benefit, this should be fixed. We should be friends,’ ” Emin Agalarov recalled.

Russia has signaled a deep interest in the U.S. election and in Trump, in particular. The Russian ambassador to the United States, breaking from a tradition in which diplomats steer clear of domestic politics, attended Trump’s April foreign policy speech in which he called for ending “this horrible cycle of hostility” between the two nations.

And in the past week, The Post reported that hackers tied to the Russian government had gained access to the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research file on Trump.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy said that Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak’s attendance at the Trump speech should not be considered an indication that Russia is partial to Trump. “There is no preference,” the spokesman said.

Still, the relationship is setting off alarms in pro-Western capitals — and in the U.S. foreign policy community.

Trump’s campaign rhetoric is the “biggest dream of everyone in the Kremlin,” Tina Khidasheli, defense minister of Georgia, a U.S. ally, told The Post. “It’s scary, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible.”

Her view is shared in the United States by leading Russia experts from both political parties.

Michael McFaul, who stepped down in 2014 as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said Trump’s stance toward Russia “makes everyone I talk to around the world nervous — and it makes me nervous.”

David J. Kramer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state dealing with Russia during the George W. Bush administration, said he was “appalled” by Trump’s approach.

Trump’s spokeswoman did not respond to detailed written questions.[there's a shockaroo]

One of his foreign policy advisers, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, said Trump would be “exceedingly stronger” than Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who he said was an “utter failure” in her goal as secretary of state to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations.

Trump has long aspired to build a Trump Tower in Russia — a market that first gained his attention in the 1980s as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet Union began to open more to outsiders.

“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” Trump said in a 2007 deposition. “We will be in Moscow at some point,” he promised.

Part of the allure was what Trump and his associates saw as a huge opportunity — the chance to market American-style luxury apartments to the wealthy elite in a place that still mostly offered utilitarian Soviet-style construction.

The Russian market had “natural strength, especially in the high-end sector,” said Donald Trump Jr. in his 2008 real estate conference speech. Moscow held special appeal because wealthy people throughout the region wanted to own real estate in the capital city, he said.

Carter Page, also a Trump foreign policy adviser, once ran the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch, including advising the Russian energy giant Gazprom, according to his biography posted on his employer’s website.

Page did not respond to questions from The Post. In an interview this year with Bloomberg News, he hinted that Trump’s election could be a boost for some of his Russian associates who have been hurt by U.S. sanctions imposed after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation,” Page told the news service.

The Agalarovs, too, expressed enthusiasm for what Trump has told them.

“He keeps underlining that he thinks President Putin is a strong leader,” Emin Agalarov said. “This could be an amazing breakthrough. If [Trump] becomes president and actually becomes friends with Putin, we would avoid 10 wars every year at least.”

More here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

Additional articles:

[Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[Former Russian Mafia-linked figure describes association with Trump]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... gton-post/

[Lord Jim]

And here's an example of the pro quo:

Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine

The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.

Still, Republican delegates at last week’s national security committee platform meeting in Cleveland were surprised when the Trump campaign orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.

Inside the meeting, Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas who was a Ted Cruz supporter, proposed a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian military.

“Today, the post-Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine,” the amendment read. “The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle.”

Trump staffers in the room, who are not delegates but are there to oversee the process, intervened. By working with pro-Trump delegates, they were able to get the issue tabled while they devised a method to roll back the language.

On the sideline, Denman tried to persuade the Trump staffers not to change the language, but failed. “I was troubled when they put aside my amendment and then watered it down,” Denman told me. “I said, ‘What is your problem with a country that wants to remain free?’ It seems like a simple thing.”

Finally, Trump staffers wrote an amendment to Denman’s amendment that stripped out the platform’s call for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replaced it with softer language calling for “appropriate assistance.”

That amendment was voted on and passed. When the Republican Party releases its platform Monday, the official Republican party position on arms for Ukraine will be at odds with almost all the party’s national security leaders.

“This is another example of Trump being out of step with GOP leadership and the mainstream in a way that shows he would be dangerous for America and the world,” said Rachel Hoff, another platform committee member who was in the room.

For Trump, the biggest threat to Europe is not Russia, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believes the United States should focus on helping Europe fight Islamist terrorism and open borders, not confronting Putin. He has called for a reduction of the U.S. commitment to NATO. He simply doesn’t see Russia as a dangerous threat.


For Denman, the Trump campaign’s actions betrayed the U.S. commitment to supporting struggling democracies around the world, which she considers a core Republican value.

“The Ukrainian people are trying to come out of the past and stay free. We owe to those who are fighting for freedom still to give them a helping hand,” she said.

“I’m very passionate and supportive of the Reagan foreign policy of peace through strength.”

Trump too often invokes Ronald Reagan when talking about America’s role in the world. But although Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union, he also stood up to Russian aggression in Europe and defended democratic principles abroad.

When the platform comes out, Republicans will see how far from the Reagan doctrine their party has drifted, thanks to Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

[Burning Petard]

But all the polls show the Donald is so much more trustworthy than Clinton. That is what matters. The minister of information (propaganda) has no need to rely on reality.

snailgate

[Scooter]

[Guinevere]

Now see, the head Trumpanzee doesn't have his eyes closed during the kiss, meaning he doesn't really trust Putin. So it will all be ok....

[Lord Jim]

Until I really started looking into this, I had assumed that Trumpov's affinity for Putin was just based on his admiration for authoritarian thugs in general...

Obviously it runs a lot deeper then that...

It's probably better to have a President who takes money from Wall Street bankers then one who takes money from Russian oligarchs...

[Lord Jim]

As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue

By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTHJULY 24, 2016

WASHINGTON — An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?

Until Friday, that charge, with its eerie suggestion of a Kremlin conspiracy to aid Donald J. Trump, has been only whispered.

But the release on Friday of some 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, many of them embarrassing to Democratic leaders, has intensified discussion of the role of Russian intelligence agencies in disrupting the 2016 campaign.

The emails, released first by a supposed hacker and later by WikiLeaks, exposed the degree to which the Democratic apparatus favored Hillary Clinton over her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and triggered the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, on the eve of the convention’s first day.

Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers.

Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence. Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance.

It was a remarkable moment: Even at the height of the Cold War, it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, as part of an attempt to portray Mr. Trump not only as an isolationist, but also as one who would go soft on confronting Russia as it threatens nations that have shown too much independence from Moscow or, in the case of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, joined NATO.[sounds like a fair theme]

Mr. Trump has also said he would like to “get along with Russia” if he is elected, and complimented Mr. Putin, saying he is more of a leader than President Obama. Mr. Putin has in turn praised Mr. Trump. But Trump campaign officials on Sunday strongly rejected any connections between their candidate and efforts to undermine the Democrats.

“Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” George Stephanopoulos, of “This Week,” asked Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman.

“No, there are not,” Mr. Manafort shot back. “That’s absurd. And, you know, there’s no basis to it.”[at least the question is finally being asked]

One of Mr. Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., was more definitive, charging the Clinton camp with a smear campaign. “I can’t think of bigger lies,” he said on CNN. The younger Mr. Trump mockingly suggested that Mr. Mook’s “house cat at home once said this is what happened with the Russians.’’[ this would be the same Donald Trump Jr. who said: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” and “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”]

It may take months, or years, to figure out the motives of those who stole the emails, and more important, whether they were being commanded by Russian authorities, and specifically by Mr. Putin. But the theft from the national committee would be among the most important state-sponsored hacks yet of an American organization, rivaled only by the attacks on the Office of Personnel Management by state-sponsored Chinese hackers, and the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, which Mr. Obama blamed on North Korea. There, too, embarrassing emails were released, but they had no political significance.

The WikiLeaks release, however, has more of a tinge of Russian-style information war, in which the intent of the revelations is to alter political events. Exactly how, though, is a bit of a mystery, apart from embarrassing Democrats and further alienating Mr. Sanders’s supporters from Mrs. Clinton.

Evidence so far suggests that the attack was the work of at least two separate agencies, each apparently working without the knowledge that the other was inside the Democrats’ computers. It is unclear how WikiLeaks obtained the email trove. But the presumption is that the intelligence agencies turned it over, either directly or through an intermediary. Moreover, the timing of the release, between the end of the Republican convention and the beginning of the Democratic one, seems too well planned to be coincidental.

Mr. Trump himself leapt on the news after the WikiLeaks release on Saturday. In a Twitter message he wrote: “Leaked emails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders. Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from Wikileakes, really vicious. RIGGED.”

The experts cited by Mr. Mook include CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that was brought into the Democratic National Committee when officials there suspected they had been hacked.

In mid-June the company announced that the intruders appeared to include a group it had previously identified by the name “Cozy Bear” or “APT 29” and been inside the committee’s servers for a year. A second group, “Fancy Bear,” also called “APT 28,” came into the system in April. It appears to be operated by the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms. The first group is particularly well known to the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence unit, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies. It was identified by federal investigators as the likely culprit behind years of intrusions into the State Department and White House unclassified computer system.

Russian intelligence agencies went to great lengths to cover their tracks, investigators found, including meticulously deleting logs, and changing the time stamps of the stolen files.

Officials at several other firms that have examined the code for the malware used against the Democratic National Committee and the metadata of the stolen documents found evidence that the documents had been accessed by multiple computers, some with Russian language settings. Moscow has outsourced politically motivated hacking to outside groups in the past. A crippling attack on Estonia in 2007, for example, was attributed to the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth organization. Intelligence officials and security researchers believe this outsourcing is done, in part, to preserve a measure of plausible deniability.

Intrusions for intelligence collection are hardly unusual, and the United States often does the same, stealing emails and other secrets from intelligence services and even political parties. But the release to WikiLeaks adds another strange element, because it suggests that the intelligence findings are being “weaponized” — used to influence the election in some way. The story has another level of intrigue involving Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman.

Working through his lobbying firm, Mr. Manafort was one of several American advisers to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russian-backed leader of Ukraine until he was forced out of office two years ago. Mr. Yanukovych was a key Putin ally who is now in exile in Russia.

In April, asked on Fox News about his relationship with Mr. Yanukovych, Mr. Manafort said he was simply trying to help the Ukrainians build a democracy that could align more closely with the United States and its allies.[ that's a good one Paul...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/po ... .html?_r=0

[Econoline]

It's probably better to have a President who takes money from Wall Street bankers then one who takes money from Russian oligarchs...

Word.

[Lord Jim]

Yeah, that's pretty much a no brainer...

[Lord Jim]

Exclusive: Suspected Russian hack of DNC widens — includes personal email of staffer researching Manafort

Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
July 25, 2016

Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she logged into her personal Yahoo email account.

“Important action required,” read a pop-up box from a Yahoo security team that is informally known as “the Paranoids.” “We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”

Chalupa — who had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s connection to pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine — quickly alerted top DNC officials. “Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily oc­­­­currence on my Yahoo account despite changing my p­­a­ssword often,” she wrote in a May 3 email to Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director, which included an attached screengrab of the image of the Yahoo security warning.

“I was freaked out,” Chalupa, who serves as director of “ethnic engagement” for the DNC, told Yahoo News in an interview, noting that she had been in close touch with sources in Kiev, Ukraine, including a number of investigative journalists, who had been providing her with information about Manafort’s political and business dealings in that country and Russia.

“This is really scary,” she said.

Chalupa’s message is among nearly 20,000 hacked internal DNC emails that were posted over the weekend by WikiLeaks as the Democratic Party gathered for its national convention in Philadelphia. Those emails have already provoked a convulsion in Democratic Party ranks, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the wake of posted messages in which she and other top DNC officials privately derided Bernie Sanders and plotted to undercut his insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton.

But Chalupa’s message, which had not been previously reported, stands out: It is the first indication that the reach of the hackers who penetrated the DNC has extended beyond the official email accounts of committee officials to include their private email and potentially the content on their smartphones.

After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. “That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” said a Democratic Party source who has knowledge of the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, “we told her to stop her research.”

A Yahoo spokesman said the pop-up warning to Chalupa “appears to be one of our notifications” and said it was consistent with a new policy announced by Yahoo on its Tumblr page last December to notify customers when it has strong evidence of “state sponsored” cyberattacks. “Rest assured we only send these notifications of suspected attacks by state-sponsored actors when we have a high degree of confidence,” wrote Bob Lord, the company’s Chief Information Security Officer, in the Tumblr post.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-ha ... 21061.html

[Long Run]

And, if they can hack Manafort's email, they would certainly have tried to hack Clinton's private email (as well as her official state email). The only question is whether they were successful. We may find out as the campaign season drags on.

[Lord Jim]

I don't know if they hacked Manafort's email, (I'm not sure why they would) but that's not what this article is saying...

This woman's email started getting hack attacks when she began looking into Manafort's connections to pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians...

[Long Run]

I got the names mixed up. I get the possible conspiracy going on from the Russian side to work to help Trump, which is scary to consider. I think it also highlights that if they are willing to hack into this researcher's email on a daily basis, then it follows, the Russians would also go after email accounts of more lucrative targets like Clinton and her direct aides.

[Scooter]

Not surprised in the slightest that you would attempt to twist potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign into an attack on Clinton.

Doesn't your tongue get brown from swirling it around in so much Republican ass?

[rubato]

If Manafort is working with them they are certainly hacking his email if they can.

Yrs
Rubato

[rubato]

I got the names mixed up. I get the possible conspiracy going on from the Russian side to work to help Trump, which is scary to consider. I think it also highlights that if they are willing to hack into this researcher's email on a daily basis, then it follows, the Russians would also go after email accounts of more lucrative targets like Clinton and her direct aides.

The Russians are presumed to be attacking all targets of interest at all times. Pointing out clinton's is of no value or interest.

Switching from a Government server which they certainly knew of to a private one would if anything be temporarily more secure.



Yes,
Rubato

[Econoline]

Plus (as has been pointed out) if they DID successfully hack Hillary's email server, and they wanted to discredit her, wouldn't they have leaked some of THOSE emails?

[rubato]

It's probably better to have a President who takes money from Wall Street bankers then one who takes money from Russian oligarchs...

Word.

Hillary was publicly paid a speaking fee, her actions show poor judgement ( just as Reagan showed poor judgement accepting a 1,000,000$ speaking fee shortly after leaving office) but it was not secret.


Yrs,
Rubato

[Long Run]

Plus (as has been pointed out) if they DID successfully hack Hillary's email server, and they wanted to discredit her, wouldn't they have leaked some of THOSE emails?

Maybe or maybe they would wait for a better time, later in the campaign. The current batch helped get the convention off to a rough start as the general media was focused on the Sanders-supporters grievances/behavior rather than the speaker podium (and reports have been that the speakers have been good overall). If there was a successful hack and they really want to hurt Clinton, they would have a series of leaks throughout the campaign. Didn't Assange already promise that there was more and more damning emails to come? Or, this may just be a minor tempest that will be long forgotten by November.