Why are Republicans so opposed to protecting November's election from Russian hackers?

By Joan McCarter

It's almost enough to make you think the Russian fix is already in with Republicans for November.

House Republicans have repeatedly resisted Democrats' efforts to fund election systems protection.

Russian asset Donald Trump spent less than half an hour with his national security team to discuss the issue, and now Senate Republicans are opposing the grants to states that the House Republicans blocked, as well.

Senate Democrats are trying to get $250 million in grants to states as soon as possible to upgrade their systems and make necessary fixes. Republicans say they've got enough money, ignoring the reports from the intelligence community that Russia is interfering right now. Ignoring the Russian hacker attack on Sen. Claire McCaskill's campaign. Ignoring the discovery by Facebook of a new "sophisticated" attack possible from Russia showing that they are at it again. That's not to mention the infrastructure hacking they've been doing.

That gives plenty of fodder for Democrats to turn this into a sustained floor fight, which is precisely what they intend to do.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) is sponsoring an amendment to a "minibus" spending bill the Senate is considering, a bunch of smaller, less controversial spending bills Congress hopes to dispense with before dealing with the remainder in a continuing resolution to keep government open past September 30. "The Trump budget would ZERO OUT election security funds,"  Leahy tweeted. "My Senate amendment, blocked by House GOP, would continue much-needed funding for election security grants. The Senate should be allowed to vote on it."

It's needed. A bipartisan group of 21 states attorneys general is pleading with Congress to pass this funding. "The integrity of the nation’s voting infrastructure is a bipartisan issue, and one that affects not only the national political landscape, but elections at the state, county, municipal, and local levels," they wrote in a letter to Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and Sen. Roy Blunt, Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairman.

The only reason Republicans could possibly have for opposing this is that they think they’ll need all the help they can get to win in November.

Note To Democrats: Fuck The White Working Class

Posted By Rude One

I'm a very white person. My background is so European, it's painful: Russian, Polish, Swedish, and, in the only nod to a smidge of color, Italian. And myfamily history is pure worker: My father was a trucker. Mom was a secretary. My grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother worked in a factory. I tell you this to prove my bona fides when I say, with no due respect, it's time for Democrats and the left to say, "Fuck the white working class."

That doesn't mean neglect white workers. As I said back in November (and repeated in December), "The only way to help the white working class is to abandon the white working class when it comes to trying to get votes." It means that we concentrate on uplifting all people in this country, no matter the skin color, and we stop this bullshit outreach to the very white people who don't understand that it's good for them, too.

It's just pathetic that this keeps coming up again and again, as if Trump voters and the white working class are the only goddamn prize in the electorate. Democrats, we're told, and liberals, especially, have to, got to, must try to get them on board or our victories are hollow and our policies are meaningless.

Thomas Frank, a progressive darling for his books, including What's the Matter with Kansas? (the answer he didn't get around to is the obvious one: racism), asked in his column this weekend for The Guardian, "Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class?" It offers the usual stuff we know, that Democrats should embrace a genuinely liberal platform, that they blew it by not punishing Wall Street back in 2009, and that they embrace the wealthy in ways that alienate the left.

But what's missing is a recognition that the non-white working class is firmly with the Democratic Party. In fact, it's the base that has sustained the Democrats for several elections, and if the policies of the party are accepted by the non-white working class, then you're either saying that non-whites don't know that Democrats are bad for them or you're just fucking privileging white workers as being the only representatives of a class.

Fucking hell, not a single goddamn factory worker voted for Trump because they were sad Barack Obama didn't lock up someone from Goldman Sachs. They voted for him because he was gonna chase out the Mexicans and Muslims and he was gonna teach that Hillary bitch a lesson. It's not that fucking complicated. And it's fucked up that someone as genuinely smart as Frank can't just accept that.

Then, today, in the New York Times (motto: "We will keep publishing dumb shit until someone from West Virginia subscribes"), in one of the most tragically stupid columns I've ever fucking seen (and I've been reading this shit for years), ostensibly liberal writer Margaret Renkl offers advice on "How to Talk to a Racist," subtitled, "White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong." You might look at that and think, "Oh, c'mon. That's gotta be a joke."

Nope. Renkl wants us to reason with the unreasonable: "Somehow you need to find enough common ground for a real conversation about race. Very few people are stupid or irredeemably mean. They’ll listen to what you have to say if they trust you’ll listen to what they have to say back." Look at that shit. It's like she's talking about racists like they're particularly dumb dogs, not adult humans who could, if they wanted, try to find common ground with liberals.

It gets worse. You should, she says, stop and take a breath "when you encounter a person who believes he’s merely honoring his ancestors by driving a car with an image of the Confederate battle flag on the tag [or] when a Facebook friend announces that it’s disrespectful to take a knee during the national anthem." I'll take a breath if the exhale is me saying, "Racist asshole."

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Why is it just up to liberals? Unlike writers like Renkl, I'm not gonna act like racists are children. I'm gonna treat them like fuckin' grown-ups and not fuckin' patronize them and speak gently so they don't roll on the ground in a tantrum. I'm gonna tell 'em they're fuckin' racist and that racism is objectively wrong and they should be ashamed of their ignorant selves. And if they don't like being made to feel bad for being racist, don't fucking be racist. Now, tell me whatever stupid shit you wanna say about how you have black friends.

Democrats and the left need to get over this obsession with making the white working class happy. Reaching out to them only makes them hate us more. Why do we need them all? There is already a good percentage of them that do vote Democratic because they're also not all racist morons. Those white working class members are pretty sick of the idiots in their demographic, too.

Besides, it ain't like the white working class has a monopoly on rage or morality. Holy Republicans may hammer the Bible like it's their mistress's ass, but your evangelicals haven't got shit on the black church or the enormous growth of Hispanics as part of church congregations. Go get your voters there.

And the rise of women candidates, both non-white and white, as well as LGBT candidates, demonstrates that the future sure as hell ain't the white men that still make up the vast majority of Republican elected officials. The awesome thing about these new candidates is they are coming up with ways to present that liberal, pro-worker agenda as something that is simply common sense. That goes across the board, from Beto O'Rourke in Texas, a white Congressman who is uniting constituencies (mostly not white) in a real shot to take down Ted Cruz, to Jeannine Lee Lake in Indiana, a black woman who won the Democratic nomination in a district that once had Mike Pence representing it. The DNC and the DCCC better get the fuck on board or the party is gonna leave their old asses behind.

Just think: non-white Americans, with an assist from some white Americans, could end up being responsible for changing things to actually make shit better for the white working class. That many of them won't understand it, as they didn't when Barack Obama was getting them health care, is the triumph of the GOP politics of hate and fear and ignorance.

[Note: Yes, in very white places like West Virginia, where Democrats still have a chance, you might have to pander a bit, but the basic message doesn't need to change.]

Goofball And Galahad

Donald Trump is not a traitor. It's much worse than that

By Aldous J Pennyfarthing

The Surrender Summit ended nearly two weeks ago, but something about the post-capitulation rhetoric still doesn’t sit right with me.

This notion that Donald Trump is a traitor to his country is flat-out wrong.

Treasonous? Hell, yeah. In thrall to a brutal foreign adversary? Of course.

But he’s not a traitor.

To be a traitor, one has to have been loyal to something or someone (aside from oneself) at least once, and Trump clearly doesn’t qualify. Trump is loyal to precisely two things: his rapacious id and his ravenous ego.

Apart from those cherished jewels of the Trumpian dunce cap, our resident cares about nothing and no one.

Was he loyal to our country when he failed to pay his income taxes?

Was he loyal when he took $150,000 in federal money earmarked for small businesses impacted by 9/11?

Was he loyal when he bragged, just hours after the World Trade Center towers came down, that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan?

Was he loyal when he bone spurred his way out of the military?

Was he loyal when he did business in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in defiance of strict American trade bans?

Was he loyal when he failed to learn the words to “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

Was he loyal when he failed to donate — until he was caught red-handed — the $1 million he’d promised to veterans charities?

Was he loyal when he savagely mocked a sitting senator and war hero, as well as a Gold Star family?

Was he loyal when he approved his son’s rendezvous with Russian agents in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton?

Was he loyal when he encouraged the rat fucking of our election by Russia and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks?

Was he loyal when he promoted a scam university in order to fleece his fellow citizens out of their retirement money?

And what about his loyalty to his family and employees?

Was he loyal to any of his wives?

Was he loyal to his current wife when he cheated on her with a porn star and a Playboy model?

Was he loyal to his family when he cut off his gravely ill nephew’s health insurance out of spite?

Was he loyal when he stiffed hundreds of real estate contractors, many of whom were struggling small business owners?

Was he loyal when he left investors in his public casino company in the lurch while personally making out like a bandit?

Was he loyal (you might want to grab an air-sickness bag for this one) when he blamed two former employees who had died in a helicopter crash for his own ongoing failures in the casino business?

Of course he wasn’t. Because he’s never been loyal to anyone, ever. Michael Cohen, et al., are learning that right now.

No, Donald Trump isn’t a traitor. It’s much more banal — and frightening — than that.

He’s just an evil asshole.

Donald Trump: Resident For Life

By Louis C

Oh, silly me, did I say "resident for Life". I'm sorry, I meant "Life for resident". Life in prison, that is.

Donald Trump has said 2083 false things as U.S. resident

The Toronto Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. resident Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected. And we think the sheer frequency of Trump’s inaccuracy is a central story of his residency.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/

Trump accused of making hush payments to 3 more women

By Joe Tacopino

Could be more stormy weather ahead.

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels, said on Thursday night that he is representing three more women who claim to have been paid hush money by President Trump or his associates.

“Three additional women. All paid hush money through various means,” Avenatti tweeted late Thursday, after discussing the new clients with an audience at a public event in California.

“Time for Michael Cohen and Donald Trump to come 100 percent clean with the American people. All the documents, all the tapes, NOW. No more lies or lip service. #Basta.”

Daniels says she was paid $130,000 by Trump lawyer Cohen to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged 2006 affair with Trump just a month before the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.

Avenatti said the three women claimed they were paid to keep quiet by Trump, Cohen or the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.

He did not explicitly say that the women had affairs with the resident.

Avenatti also told the audience at the event in West Hollywood that “at least one of those women claimed to be pregnant at the time” the agreement was signed.

Sean Spicer Wrote A Book. The Reviews Are Not Kind

Sean Spicer left his role as resident Trump's first press secretary one year ago, and to mark the occasion, he's releasing a book called "The Briefing" about his experience with the Trump campaign and administration. It is, according to the early reviews, not good.

In perhaps the harshest review of them all, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl (writing in the Wall Street Journal) says "The Briefing" is "littered with inaccuracies," is "light on insider detail" and "annihilates strawmen."

Mr. Spicer's book is much like his tenure as press secretary: short, littered with inaccuracies and offering up one consistent theme: Mr. Trump can do no wrong. Mr. Spicer has not been well served by the book's fact checkers and copy editors. He refers to the author of the infamous Trump dossier as "Michael Steele," who is in truth the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, not the British ex-spy Christopher Steele. He recounts a reporter asking Mr. Obama a question at a White House press conference in 1999, a decade before Mr. Obama was elected.

[Wall Street Journal] 

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple has little good to say about the book, and is struck by how weak Spicer's attempt to come to terms with his actions as press secretary:

Even a half-witted political memoir would grapple with such a disconnect — perhaps by acknowledging some fault in the boss, or perhaps by comparing his low points with those of other presidents. Yet "The Briefing" isn't a political memoir, nor is it a work of recent history, nor a tell-all, or tell-anything. Rather, it is a bumbling effort at gas-lighting Americans into doubting what they have seen with their own eyes as far back as June 2015... To hear Spicer lecture about errors, one might suppose he'd show some concern about the false and misleading tweets that Trump blasts daily to his 53 million followers.

[Washington Post] 

NPR's Annalisa Quinn notes that "The Briefing" has some merits, including his discussion of Washington's conservative circles and the interplay between the media and social media, but gets hung up on Spicer's continued lies: 

Spicer leaves out important context and doubles down on some of the lies he became famous for as press secretary, including his absurd claims about crowd size at Trump's inauguration. Spicer's transparency on some points also makes his moral double standards more disappointing. For instance, he denigrates Hillary Clinton for being married to Bill Clinton, who has been accused of sexual misconduct. "Many people had to ask themselves: if what those women said is true, what kind of a woman would stand by a man who did such things?" Probably the same kind of person who would stand by a president who bragged about sexually assaulting women. Or who would praise former congressman Mark Foley as "smart and ambitious... and fun to be around" — without mentioning that he solicited nude photos and sex from teenage boys employed as congressional pages.

[NPR]

In a one-star (out of five) review, The Telegraph's Harriet Alexander found "The Briefing" a major disappointment:

Entitled The Briefing, it is Spicer's attempt to clear his name. His first press briefing, when he berated the bemused reporters for downplaying the size of Mr Trump's inauguration crowd, set the tone for his seven month tenure at the White House. At times hostile, at times hilarious, his briefings got higher ratings than the actual soap operas airing at the same time. So how has he managed to make his account of the time so dull?

[The Telegraph] 

While The Guardian calls it an "an essential narrative by a non-family member who once possessed Oval Office walk-in privileges," it also notes how Spicer massively undercuts Trump's current line that Paul Manafort wasn't deeply involved with his campaign:

Inexplicably, Spicer does his best to undercut his own and his ex-boss’s credibility. When it comes to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, Spicer’s story appears to have evolved. For three consecutive pages, The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President graphically details how Manafort beat back the efforts of Never Trump Republicans to steal the presidential nomination. Spicer gushes: "How Manafort and company did this was a scene out of 1950's politics – alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat."

[The Guardian]

https://digg.com/2018/sean-spicer-book-briefing-is-it-good 

A Startling Admission

Republicans Won't Save Us Because Their Voters Don't Want To Be Saved: A Farce In Six Acts

Posted by Rude One

1. In another of its ongoing series "Do the Editors of the New York Times Really Think the Yokels Will Ever Love Them?" reporters interviewed an assortment of the aforementioned yokels, along with a scattering of rubes and yahoos, all who voted for Donald Trump, to find out what they think of the resident in the wake of his bowing down to Vladimir Putin. And, surprise, surprise, the yokels, rubes, and yahoos are almost all still on board.

One dumbass in Indiana said, "It is strictly a witch hunt" against Trump, while a shit-for-brains in Louisiana proclaimed, "They’re just trying to make Trump’s election look fraudulent" and some fucking moron in Arizona said that Trump is a strategic master because "No one really thinks it’s a true friendship" with Putin.

2. National Public Radio did the same kind of thing, talking with Trump voters who barely blinked about his weird damn support for Russia. They talked to stupid assholes in Central Bumfuck, Texas, who said things like, "[Trump's] smart. He knows how to negotiate" and that Trump has "done a lot of things that other presidents haven't had the guts to do."

3. When Harley-Davidson said it had to shift some of its operations overseas because of the tariffs that Trump has imposed, NPR went to an actual Harley plant in Wisconsin that might lay off workers because of the shift. Even these workers who may lose their jobs as a direct result of Trump's policies are standing by their Orange God. One really said, "I mean, he wouldn't do it for no reason. I look at him as a very smart businessman. And, I mean, if he feels that's what he needed to do, that's what he needed to do."

4. At a nail factory in Missouri that has already laid off 60 workers due to the steel tariffs, workers couldn't turn against Trump. "I understand why he's doing it," one pathetically mewled to MSNBC, while another still has faith in the man: "I want him to fix it so it’s better." The slobbering support for Trump goes on unabated as workers are let go. Said one, "I support him 100%. In fact, I’d like to shake his hand. He’s doing a great job.” And asked directly if she'd change her mind on Trump if she lost her job, a worker replied, "Overall, he’s done good. I’m not going to be selfish just because of me.”

(Just to get this right: President Obama asked everyone to get into the health care system in order to make insurance affordable for all, and that was the worst thing anyone could do because fuck those takers. But you're willing to sacrifice your job because you have to keep supporting the man who made you lose it? That's some Jedi-fuckin' mind trick right there with a heavy dose of racism.)

5. Soybean farmers who are expecting to see massive losses as a result of the trade war with China believe that this is all a part of Trump's genius at work. One delusional Arkansas farmer said, "resident Trump is a businessman. He’s making a high-risk business decision that probably should have been made a long time ago. But it’s definitely a risk." Another utter imbecile, who is going to lose half his farm revenue this year, praised Trump with, "The one thing I admire about the guy is that he’s fulfilled or tried to fulfill" his campaign promises.

6. On C-SPAN Monday, an awful caller from Connecticut said, awfully, "I’ll try not to sound too awful, but I want to thank the Russians for interfering with our election to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president."

And you can fucking well bet that that's what many of Trump's idiot horde are saying. Because of that, Republicans are going to walk the fuck away from the whole Trump and Russia issue because Trump might be a motherfucking traitor, but that motherfucking traitor is the only thing holding the Republican Party together.

From the Start, Trump Has Muddied A Clear Message: Putin Interfered

By David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

On Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.

On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different question.)

Hours later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, but only indirectly, for the election interference by Russia, “because he’s in charge of the country.”

In the run-up to this week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his residency.

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

resident-elect Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, the day he was briefed on cyberattacks designed to sway the 2016 American election.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.

Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.

The same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

They had aggressively fought the N.S.A. against being ejected from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later called “hand-to-hand combat” to dig in.

The pattern of the D.N.C. hacks, and the theft of emails from John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, fit the same pattern.

After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.

Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very aggressive.”

For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.

Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new resident soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election.

Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election interference.

Only Admiral Rogers, who retired this past May, was extended in office by Mr. Trump. (He, too, told Congress that he thought the evidence of Russian interference was incontrovertible.)

resident Trump, meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday, said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

And the evidence suggests Russia continues to be very aggressive in its meddling.

In March, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Russia was targeting the American electric power grid, continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to manipulate or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials have described it to Congress as a chief threat to American security.

Just last week, Mr. Coats said that current cyberthreats were “blinking red” and called Russia the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question.”

“And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy,” he said.

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, also stood firm.

“The intelligence community’s assessment has not changed,” Mr. Wray said on Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum. “My view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”

The Russian efforts are “aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this country,” he continued. “We haven’t yet seen an effort to target specific election infrastructure this time. We could be just a moment away from the next level.”

“It’s a threat we need to take extremely seriously and respond to with fierce determination and focus.”

Almost as soon as he took office, Mr. Trump began casting doubts on the intelligence on Russia’s election interference, though never taking issue with its specifics.

He dismissed it broadly as a fabrication by Democrats and part of a “witch hunt” against him. He raised unrelated issues, including the state of investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s home computer server, to distract attention from the central question of Russia’s role — and who, if anyone, in Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit may have worked with them.

In July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time, Mr. Trump told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had made a persuasive case that Moscow’s cyber-skills were so good that the government’s hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russia must not have been responsible.

Since then, Mr. Trump has routinely disparaged the intelligence about the Russian election interference. Under public pressure — as he was after his statements in Helsinki on Monday — he has periodically retreated. But even then, he has expressed confidence in his intelligence briefers, not in the content of their findings.

That is what happened again this week, twice.

Mr. Trump’s statement in Helsinki led Mr. Coats to reaffirm, in a statement he deliberately did not get cleared at the White House, that American intelligence agencies had no doubt that Russia was behind the 2016 hack.

That contributed to Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to say that he had misspoken one word, and that he did believe Russia had interfered — although he also veered off script to declare: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there.”

Follow David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter: @SangerNYT and @AllMattNYT.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

 

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Start, Trump Has Muddied Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Random Observations On A Traitor

Posted by Rude One

1. I'm not gonna pretend to know the ins and outs of Russian/American relations in the Putin era. Yet, I know it ain't the Soviet Union, but many of the totalitarian impulses of the Soviet era continue on under the reign of Putin and the oligarchs. Now, during the end of the Cold War, when I became politically aware, I thought the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was just pathetic dick-measuring played out on a global scale, with proxy wars and constant threats of nuclear annihilation, not to mention endless espionage on both sides. I have done more than my share of research into the Communist witch hunt by the House Un-American Activities Committee, including the Hollywood Ten (check out John Howard Lawson, a badass motherfucker of a writer as there ever was in that time), as well as the other victims of Red Scares and anti-Communist hysteria.

So I can say without equivocation that, today, at his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump offered more aid and comfort to Russia than any victim of Joe McCarthy and HUAC ever did. When Trump blamed the United States for, in essence, not doing more to prevent Russia from hacking the DNC and electoral interference, when Trump declared the investigation into Russia's election fuckery a "disaster for our country" because "I think it's kept us apart, it's kept us separated," when Trump said of his own Director of National Intelligence, "My people came to me, Dan Coats, came to me and some others they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia," he did more to undermine the United States than all the poor saps that McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and Dick Nixon accused of being spies and traitors combined.

There is a lot of shit I might be naive about when it comes to the filthy world of politics, but I'm pretty sure the president doesn't get to trust a foreign country over the one he leads. Or, if a president thinks the intelligence agencies have gone rogue, he can fire people. Instead, he deflected to Hillary Clinton's emails, Peter Strzok, and every other dumbass conspiracy theory that Fox "news" fucked into his addled brain.

2. Republicans have put out mighty statements of outrage, but until GOP senators say, "Nope, fuck this shit. No more judges, nothing, until we can figure out, as the man himself said, what the hell is going on" and GOP representatives say, "Yeah, this fucking sucks. Time to get impeachy," then all their words are bullshit.

As was once explained to me by a Republican consultant, one big reason that they won't cross Trump is that they get pummeled with not just angry emails from his idiot hordes (which, to be completely fair, are all Republicans' idiot hordes until they turn against the orange god), but death threats and rape threats and threats to kill and rape their children, along with doxing of them. To be sure, as someone who gets the occasional death threat, almost every single one is completely fake and the motherfucking pieces of their whore mothers' twat scabs who send them aren't gonna do shit.

Except here's the fuckin' deal: Would you speak up if someone sent you your college-age daughter's dorm room address along with a rape threat?

And here's the flip side of that fuckin' deal: How many of those fuckin' trolls are Russian scumfuckers?

If Republicans have been cowed into silence, which is just a piece with their general state of being chicken shit, then perhaps if they came out as a group, a bunch of 'em, and said, "Yeah, there is some shit we will not eat. Let's shitcan this asshole president," well, it'd show the scribblers of murder notes that they have a fuck of a lot of work to do. And there is even the possibility that a few of the idiot horde might look up from hunching in a ditch and shoving dingleberries up their noses to let a rational thought pierce their thick, troglodyte skulls and think, "Huh, Congressman Cockknob has always been a stand-up guy. He hates queers and immigrants. Maybe I should listen if he's turned against Trump."

2a. At the very least, a couple of Republican senators should switch to caucusing with Democrats and have hearings that'll make the entire White House piss itself.

2b. Yeah, I think some of them are compromised. I think the rest are just opportunist pussies who wouldn't know the civic good if it bit them in the ass and screamed, "I'm the Civic Good."

3. Trump's obsession with the 2016 election is his biggest tell. He can't stop talking about. Multiple times in the past week, he's brought up his electoral vote victory. Today, with Putin smirking that fuckin' Ernst Blofeld/gargoyle smirk of his, Trump went on a couple of tears about 2016. Asked about whether Russia intervened in the election, he shimmied, "[I]t came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the electoral college is much more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the Electoral College by a lot. 306 to 223, I believe." He had announced his Electoral College total at his press conference after the NATO summit, too.

You know when you don't talk about how great it is you won? When you know you won legitimately. If there's something sketchy about how you won something, you can either shut the fuck up about it and hope no one notices. Or you can keep talking and hope you can create a story that people believe when the truth comes out. And you proclaim yourself the real victim of any chicanery.

So this motherfucker is so guilty, he's fuckin' oozing lies through his rosacea-lined skin.

4. Here's the kindest fucking spin I can put on this debacle, this plunge from incompetence and fealty into full-blown traitorous behavior. Trump is begging for Congress to end his residency. He's saying in so many words, "You have to stop me. You have to remove me from office. Putin won't let me resign. So you have to do it."

If that's not the message that Republicans got from that utter humiliation, that deranged babbling, that press conference from Hell, then we're well beyond fucked. We're being prepped for some kind of takeover.

America's Dumbest Congressman

Louie Gohmert Says Russian Interference Caused Truman’s 1948 Win

Election meddling has been going on for 70 years, Texas Republican says

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/louie-gohmert-says-russian-interference-caused-trumans-1948-win 

TREASONOUS TRAITOR

Donald Trump Is An Agent Of The Russian Government: Helsinki Edition

The evidence that Donald Trump is an agent of the Russian government is becoming all too obvious as we watch him carry water for Vladimir Putin and promote the agenda & interests of the hostile foreign power, Russia.

The Path To The Supreme Court

What Hold Does Putin Have on Trump? The Crisis Facing America

We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has upon resident Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.

Russia helped Donald Trump into the residency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating the Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees.

This is an unprecedented situation, but not an uncontemplated one. At the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the authors of the Constitution worried a great deal about foreign potentates corrupting the American presidency.

When Gouverneur Morris famously changed his mind in favor of an impeachment clause, he explained his new point of view by invoking a situation very like that now facing the United States:

Our Executive was not like a Magistrate having a life interest, much less like one having an hereditary interest in his office. He may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard [against] it by displacing him.

The United States was then a comparatively poor and vulnerable country, so the Founders imagined corruption taking the form of some princely emolument that would enable an ex-president to emigrate and—in the words of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—“live in greater splendor in another country than his own.” Yet they understood that even the most developed countries were not immune to the suborning of their leaders. As Morris said, "One would think the King of England well secured [against] bribery. … Yet Charles II was bribed by Louis XIV.”

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  Trump Sides With the Kremlin, Against the U.S. Government

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The reasons for Trump’s striking behavior—whether he was bribed or blackmailed or something else—remain to be ascertained. That he has publicly refused to defend his country’s independent electoral process—and did so jointly with the foreign dictator who perverted that process—is video-recorded fact.

And it’s a fact that has to be seen in the larger context of his actions in office: denouncing the EU as a “foe,” threatening to break up NATO, wrecking the U.S.-led world trading system, intervening in both U.K. and German politics in support of extremist and pro-Russian forces, and his continued refusal to act to protect the integrity of U.S. voting systems—it adds up to a political indictment whether or not it quite qualifies as a criminal one.

America is a very legalistic society, in which public discussion often deteriorates into lawyers arguing whether any statutes have been violated. But confronting the country in the wake of Helsinki is this question: Can it afford to wait to ascertain why Trump has subordinated himself to Putin after the president has so abjectly demonstrated that he has subordinated himself? Robert Mueller is leading a legal process. The United States faces a national-security emergency.

We want to hear what you think. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

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Donald Trump, you are a Russian spy coward traitor who won't do what needs to be done when you meet your handler Putin in Helsinki

CLICK THIS LINK TO READ ABOUT THIS TRAITOR

Thanks To Robert Mueller, Trump And Putin Now Have A Summit Agenda

Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:

Thanks to Robert Mueller, Trump and Putin Now Have a Summit Agenda
Rosenstein dropped another astonishing revelation into his press conference: resident Trump had been aware all along about the charges against Russian actors, and had been briefed on them by the Justice Department even before he left for Europe. “The resident is fully aware of the department’s actions today,” Rosenstein told reporters as he announced the indictments, which lay out in methodical detail the ways in which agents of the Russian government systematically worked to infiltrate the Democrats’ 2016 campaign with the apparent goal of helping Trump win the American Presidency.
Trump knew the indictment was coming when he bragged about what an easy meeting he would have with Putin. He knew it was coming when he once again attacked the investigation by his own government as “rigged.” And he knew it was coming when he rambled on about an agenda for the Helsinki summit that would cover just about everything but the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Talk about brazen.

And by the way, everyone expects Americans to be the next indictment targets. Roger Stone? More?

Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

---

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, July 13, 2018

Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses Related to the 2016 Election

The Department of Justice today announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of  the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity.

“The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways,” said Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. “Together with our law enforcement partners, the Department of Justice is resolute in its commitment to locate, identify and seek to bring to justice anyone who interferes with American elections. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious, and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the shared values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”

According to the allegations in the indictment, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev,  Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev were officials in Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of the Russian government’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign’s chairman. Through that process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers. They also were able to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through these spearphishing techniques to steal emails and documents, covertly monitor the computer activity of dozens of employees, and implant hundreds of files of malicious computer code to steal passwords and maintain access to these networks.

The officials in Unit 26165 coordinated with officials in Unit 74455 to plan the release of the stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 presidential election. Defendants registered the domain DCLeaks.com and later staged the release of thousands of stolen emails and documents through that website. On the website, defendants claimed to be “American hacktivists” and used Facebook accounts with fictitious names and Twitter accounts to promote the website.  After public accusations that the Russian government was behind the hacking of DNC and DCCC computers, defendants created the fictitious persona Guccifer 2.0. On the evening of June 15, 2016 between 4:19PM and 4:56PM, defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for a series of English words and phrases that later appeared in Guccifer 2.0’s first blog post falsely claiming to be a lone Romanian hacker responsible for the hacks in the hopes of undermining the allegations of Russian involvement.

Members of Unit 74455 also conspired to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of elections to steal voter data stored on those computers.

To avoid detection, defendants used false identities while using a network of computers located around the world, including the United States, paid for with cryptocurrency through mining bitcoin and other means intended to obscure the origin of the funds. This funding structure supported their efforts to buy key accounts, servers, and domains. For example, the same bitcoin mining operation that funded the registration payment for DCLeaks.com also funded the servers and domains used in the spearphishing campaign.

The indictment includes 11 criminal counts:

• Count One alleges a criminal conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States through cyber operations by the GRU that involved the staged release of stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 president election;
• Counts Two through Nine charge aggravated identity theft for using identification belonging to eight victims to further their computer fraud scheme;
• Count Ten alleges a conspiracy to launder money in which the defendants laundered the equivalent of more than $95,000 by transferring the money that they used to purchase servers and to fund other costs related to their hacking activities through cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin; and
• Count Eleven charges conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States by attempting to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of elections.

There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. At trial, prosecutors must introduce credible evidence that is sufficient to prove each defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, to the unanimous satisfaction of a jury of twelve citizens.

This case was investigated with the help of the FBI’s cyber teams in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco and the National Security Division. The Special Counsel's investigation is ongoing. There will be no comments from the Special Counsel at this time.

Topic(s): 

National Security

Component(s): 

Office of the Deputy Attorney General

Press Release Number: 

18 - 923

Updated July 13, 2018

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