What Did Putin Get For His Investment In The 2016 Election? How Much Did He Spend? And Is Trump A Full-Fledged Traitor?

 

How much did Putin spend to help get Trump elected? And what did he get for it? It was probably the greatest Russian foreign policy coup in history and didn't cost a great deal. Unfortunately, I doubt we're going to see Trump tried, let alone imprisoned or stood up before a wall and shot. But, it will certainly be interesting to see how history deals with the most peculiar-- and horrific-- episode in U.S. presidential history.

Reporting for the Washington Post over the weekend, Shane Harris took a look at what Putin got out of his interference in U.S. domestic politics. Short version: under Señor T, "the United States has abandoned international climate and nuclear arms agreements. It has announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, questioned the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and antagonized stalwart allies like Germany. America’s past presidents have long promoted democracy, human rights and the rule of law abroad, yet Trump instead has waged an assault on those values at home, where he has weakened institutions, shredded norms and declared without evidence that the upcoming election will be 'rigged.' America’s moral authority also has been undercut by the devastatingly high death toll and wrenching economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with the racial reckoning that has convulsed the country. These highlights from Trump’s nearly four years in office read like Vladimir Putin’s wish list. Few countries have benefited more geopolitically from Trump’s time in office than Russia.

Trump continues to argue he's been tougher on Russia than anyone but whatever aggressive measures his regime did take, he has opposed and has had to be cajoled and prodded into allowing.

In his two decades as Russia’s autocratic leader, Putin has systematically sought to grow his nation’s influence at America’s expense by breaking up its long-standing alliance structure and discrediting its democratic institutions and values.

Over the past four years, Putin has succeeded to a remarkable degree, aided by the credibility and support on the world stage that Trump has given him, according to national security and foreign policy experts, some of them Trump’s most strident critics.

“The more dysfunctional, polarized and erratic the United States seems at home, the more beset by domestic problems, the more ineffective in demonstrating leadership and dealing with them, especially during the pandemic, the better that is for Russia, because they benefit from a world in which the United States is seen as unreliable and unpredictable,” said William J. Burns, a former deputy secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush who now leads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

...More than 130 Republican former military, intelligence, diplomatic and other national security officials signed a joint statement in August endorsing Biden because they said Trump had “failed our country,” in part because of his handling of Russian interference and alignment with Putin and other strongmen.

Russia’s longtime aim has been to undermine trust in democratic systems of government around the world, and the United States with Trump at the helm has proved an ideal model to advance that goal.

“This president has been the most extraordinary gift to the Kremlin,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Across every field, in terms of America’s standing in the world, in terms of America’s cohesion at home, no president has done more to damage the United States or to advantage the Kremlin than Donald Trump. That will be his lasting legacy.”

Through his rhetorical attacks and norm-busting actions, Trump has eroded public faith in the Justice Department, the State Department and the intelligence community; demeaned the military leadership; threatened the freedom of the press; and challenged the courts.

Most recently, he has challenged elements of America’s democracy itself by questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming election and refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

“One of Putin’s primary objectives is to utterly discredit democracy as a model, and on that he’s getting an A-plus, because in Donald Trump you have a would-be authoritarian who is deliberately and overtly taking a wrecking ball to the underpinnings of our democracy,” said Susan E. Rice, a former ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser in the Obama administration.

Though Trump appears to have governed in this manner largely to protect and perpetuate his own political power, his objective dovetails neatly with Putin’s, according to longtime students of Russia.

“If you turn on state-controlled Russian language television in Russia, what they love talking about day in and day out is how much of a mess the United States is,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Russia has been a central player throughout Trump’s presidency-- from that country’s election interference in 2016 and again this year to Trump’s appeasement of Putin on matters both geopolitical and personal.

For the first half of his term, Trump was haunted by the wide-ranging criminal investigation into Russian election interference-- so much so that, for the president, simply repeating the country’s name (“Russia, Russia, Russia”) is shorthand for scandal.

A report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” in hopes of helping Trump. Mueller also laid out evidence of 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice by Trump but concluded it was not his role to determine whether Trump broke the law.

...Trump has not only played down the Russian threat, he has sought to exploit it. Last December, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani met with a Ukrainian lawmaker offering derogatory information about Biden, the former vice president, and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

The lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services,” the Treasury Department declared in September, sanctioning Derkach for his efforts to “undermine” the 2020 elections.

The previous month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out Derkach for his role in helping Russia “denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment’ ” in the United States. Current and former officials said that the false information he peddled to Giuliani, which Trump has spread, also has been picked up by U.S. lawmakers, who are effectively laundering Russian propaganda.

“Trump has embraced Russian assistance to destroy his own political enemies,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a career CIA officer who oversaw the agency’s operations in Russia and Eastern Europe.

At times, it’s difficult to tell whether Trump is parroting Russian propaganda or if the Kremlin is echoing Trump.

“We used to think that our elected officials and those up for elected office would be held to a higher standard about the information they consume and amplify. Instead, we’re seeing a degradation,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center and author of the book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.

In September, the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence bulletin to state and local law enforcement agencies that Russia seeks “to undermine public trust in the electoral process” by spreading false claims that mail-in ballots are riddled with fraud and susceptible to manipulation. The department said Russia spreads such claims through a network of state-controlled media, proxy websites and social media trolls.

...At the same time, Trump has assiduously sought to cultivate a friendship with Putin, through regular phone calls and private in-person huddles. He has publicly excused Putin’s transgressions and has steadfastly avoided denouncing or even lightly criticizing the Russian president.

Time after time, Trump has taken Putin at his word, to the consternation of Trump’s top national security advisers.

Putin appears to have fueled Trump’s long-standing conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election-- and that it did so to try to stop him from reaching the White House.

Putin seemed to relish the diversion. “Thank God no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine,” the Russian president said at a news conference last November. “Well, let them sort this out among themselves.”

In 2018, Trump traveled to Helsinki for a summit with Putin, where he said he took Putin at his word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, effectively rejecting the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had done so.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the summit “fabulous” and “better than super,” according to Russian news agencies.

Retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. permanent representative to NATO, said, “The last four years have been open-field running for Vladimir Putin because he hasn’t received a hard pushback.”

...[E]xperts questioned whether Trump’s pursuit of Putin’s affections has made Americans any safer or better positioned the United States in the world.

“I’m not against that in principle, but the objective always has to be, you’re doing this as a means to advance an American national interest,” said Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration.

“He’s done all these things to try to befriend Putin over four years,” McFaul said. “What has that accomplished for the United States of America? . . . What tangible, concrete agreement, policy, change in Putin’s behavior has all of this appeasement achieved? I would say it’s empty. It’s literally empty.”

National security experts believe Putin’s greatest triumph in the Trump years has been on the foreign policy front, and specifically the U.S. president’s methodical denigration of NATO.

NATO, which the United States helped establish after World War II as a bulwark against the then-Soviet Union, has been widely considered America’s most productive security alliance and the foundation of the Western-led liberal order.

“Trump is doing to NATO what Russia has long wanted to do, which is to separate the U.S. from our European allies and to decrease NATO’s ability to pose a coherent counterweight to Russia,” Lute said. “This lack of cohesion and absence of U.S. leadership are gifts to Russia.”

Rice said Putin’s ambition has been to undermine U.S. alliance relationships, which she argued have been America’s greatest global asset and source of power.

“In Trump, he’s found somebody who wants to degrade our alliance structure and has called into question the very concept of NATO,” Rice said. “What better red carpet for Vladimir Putin?”

Trump has publicly toyed with the idea of withdrawing from NATO, has questioned the value to the United States of the alliance, and has repeatedly assailed NATO allies. In one particularly vituperative outburst at a 2018 NATO summit, he said Germany was “a captive of Russia,” because Germany imports large amounts of natural gas from Russia.

Trump also has withdrawn the United States from a number of trade agreements, as well as the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has praised far-right, pro-Russian leaders in Europe-- a U.S. embrace that is seen as a threat to some in the NATO alliance. In May 2019, he welcomed to the White House Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, whom Western leaders have criticized for his hard-line immigration policies and authoritarian maneuvers. In their Oval Office meeting, Trump remarked, “I know he’s a tough man but he’s a respected man. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s okay.”

In a further break with Western allies, Trump has repeatedly called for Russia to be added back to the Group of Seven, after it was expelled in 2014 in response to invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

“He doesn’t think of a promotion of freedom, human rights and rule of law as a foreign policy objective,” McFaul said. “That, I think, has let the creepy crawlers of the world advance their interests all over the place, and Russia’s at the top of the list.”

McFaul recalled a recent interview he had with a Moscow radio station. “They were like, ‘Man, what’s happened to you guys? It feels like you completely forgot about who you once were.

We All Have All The Information We Need To Decide Who To Not Vote For In November

In a "sermon" a couple of years ago, God Has Nothing to Do With Trump Being President, John Pavlovitz reached out directly to evangelicals to remind them that spiritualizing the Trump presidency is "sinful, blasphemous, lousy evangelism and just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the past 8 years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as deal breakers-- Evangelicals are now perfectly fine with Trump’s rotted forest of Redwoods. In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of God’s hand in it all. So Trump’s multiple marriages, his porn star affairs, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for rule of law, his compulsive lying, his clear racism, his unrelenting attacks on marginalized communities (things these Christians would have figuratively and almost literally crucified Obama for) are now unmistakable signs that God is using this President. This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try and draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Donald of New York, is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance... We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire, when it’s clear whose hand is in it all. This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny, racism, Nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry-- all released by people who want God to consent to it all so they don’t have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance."

Fast forward to... tomorrow. Michael Cohen's book will be officially out and available... a longer and more detailed and less religiously-oriented version of Pavlovitz's 2018 sermon: Disloyal: A Memoir. I have a feeling this may be the most talked about-- if not read-- book out of the dozens of Trump exposés by people once close to him that have come out in the last 4 years. Cohen makes the case that Trump is a criminal, a mentally ill sex psycho and an obsessed racist.

Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Rosalind Helderman got their hands on an advance copy and wrote up a preview over the weekend, noting that Cohen "Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer... alleges in a new book that Trump made 'overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.' ... Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself 'one of Trump’s bad guys.' He describes the president, meanwhile, as 'a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.' The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his 'hatred and contempt' of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president." I hate the way Parker and Helderman use the world "alleged" to describe characteristics that have been proven beyond any reasonable double over and over and over for decades and decades and decades.

On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money-- and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.”

Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company-- like the Trump Organization, in fact.”

Cohen also reveals new alleged details about the convoluted effort behind a National Enquirer report smearing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cohen says that Trump signed off on the baseless report to damage Cruz, one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primary.

“It’s not real, right?” Trump allegedly asked after being shown a photograph, which the magazine would claim depicted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Looks real to me!” Cohen responded, according to the book, prompting Trump to laugh as he demanded that the story be run on the tabloid’s front page.

“To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another politician, ever, who would stoop this low?” Cohen writes.

...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.

“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election-- a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.

Cohen’s book, however, does not reveal much in the way of new details surrounding the investigations by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

...Cohen asserts that another reason that Trump consistently praised Putin was to fulfill his long-held desire to slap his name on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.

Cohen says the Trump Tower plans called for a 120-story building in Red Square, including 30 floors devoted to a five-star hotel with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants, and 230 high-end condominiums for Russian oligarchs and leaders.

The plan, Cohen adds, was to give the penthouse apartment to the Russian president for free, in part “as a way to suck up to Putin.”

“The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,” Cohen writes. “Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.”

Trump would later publicly insist that he had no business dealings with Russia. But Cohen writes extensively of his own efforts beginning in the fall of 2015-- several months after Trump had declared his candidacy-- to make the Moscow project a reality.

The project fell to Cohen, he writes, because Trump’s children all disliked Felix Sater, the colorful Russian American developer who served as the Trump Organization’s liaison with Russians interested in the project.

Nevertheless, Cohen says the whole family was aware of the project, even as candidate Trump publicly said he had no ties to Russia. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, who is now a senior White House adviser, even selected the proposed tower’s high-end finishes, Cohen writes.

Ivanka and her lawyers have previously described her involvement in the Russia project as minimal, noting that she never visited the prospective site.

Cohen also describes in detail the partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the chief executive of National Enquirer parent company American Media and a longtime Trump friend, which included Pecker allegedly sharing the Cruz attack with Trump ahead of publication.

While many of Trump’s critics would obsess over the possibility of Russian interference, Cohen writes, it was a purposeful “disinformation campaign” run by American citizens such as Pecker that was “by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle-- and the most threatening for 2020.”

Cohen notes that the grocery-store tabloid targeted each of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents in turn. He includes a document in the book, for instance, purporting to lay out the magazine’s plan to take down Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). [I hope it was all about Rubio's period as a gay prostitute.]

The National Enquirer came through for Trump again later in 2016, agreeing to pay former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, for her life story and then never running the story. Trump agreed to repay Pecker for the $150,000 fee but never did, Cohen writes.

In the case of Daniels, Cohen writes that after Trump agreed to pay her $130,000 for her silence, he strategized with Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on how she could be paid without attracting notice.

Weisselberg suggested finding a Trump friend to put up the money, in the guise of paying for a membership to a Trump golf course or the club Mar-a-Lago, according to the book. When Cohen countered that perhaps Weisselberg should lay out the money himself, “Weisselberg went white as a sheet-- like he’d seen a ghost,” he writes.

Ultimately, Cohen made the hush payment himself, taking out a personal home equity loan to come up with the cash, all the while assuming Trump would probably fail to repay him as agreed.

“Stuck with the tab for Trump’s sex romp in a hotel room in Utah a decade ago,” Cohen writes. “This was the job I loved?”

Ultimately, however, Trump did repay Cohen-- agreeing to reimburse him in $35,000 monthly installments after he had entered the White House as president, hiding the payments as fees for legal services and naming Cohen his personal attorney. Cohen asserts that Trump would get a tax break and legal services along with the money-- meaning he would actually come out financially ahead for paying off the adult-film star.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond for comment Saturday.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, as well as to violating campaign finance laws by paying Daniels to remain silent. Cohen told the court that he had been directed to make the payment to Daniels-- and later reimbursed for the money-- by Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to a financial institution, crimes that were unrelated to his work for Trump.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he had been serving at a federal facility in Otisville, N.Y., until he was allowed to leave prison and serve his sentence at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before he entered prison, he delivered dramatic public testimony to Congress, in which he apologized for his past lies and called Trump a “racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat.” Republicans mocked his self-professed turn to honesty, noting that he had previously defended Trump with similar gusto.

Beyond Russia’s role in the 2016 elections and the Daniels payment, Cohen seeds the rest of his book with snippets of gossip from his time in Trump’s orbit-- some of it new, some of it well-known and much of it familiar.

He describes Trump insulting and dismissing some of his children, including Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, and Tiffany, his youngest daughter.

Cohen writes that during the 2016 campaign, Trump was dismissive of minorities, describing them as “not my people.” “I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen recounts Trump claiming. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump.”

Cohen describes Trump’s obsessive hatred of Obama, including claiming that the only reason the former president got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School was because of “fucking affirmative action.” He also recounts Trump’s “low opinion of all black folks.” claiming that Trump once said while ranting about Obama, “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole. They are all complete fucking toilets.”

After South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, Trump said he did not think Mandela “was a real leader-- not the kind he respected,” Cohen writes.

Instead, Cohen writes that Trump praised the country’s apartheid-era White rule, saying: “Mandela fucked the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela. He was no leader.”

Cohen writes that before winning the presidency, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with prominent evangelical leaders, where they laid their hands on him in prayer. Afterward, Trump allegedly said: “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen writes. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”

Cohen also depicts Trump as being crude toward women, including inadvertently commenting on Cohen’s then-15-year-old daughter as she finished up a tennis lesson: “Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “I would love some of that.”

Cohen details a tawdry 2013 visit to a Las Vegas club, the Act, with Trump and Aras and Emin Agalarov-- a Russian father-and-son oligarch duo. Cohen asserts that the group watched a debauched strip show that included one performer who simulated urinating on another performer, who pretended to drink it.

Trump’s reaction to the show, Cohen writes, was “disbelief and delight.”

Cohen’s book ends with something of a plea-- though one that requires the reader to trust Cohen’s account of his time in the Trump orbit.

“You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November,” Cohen concludes.

The Heart Of Putin-Gate-- Russian Financial Leverage Over Trump-- Was Shut Down By Rod Rosenstein And Never Investigated

Peter Strzok, who led the FBI’s Russia investigation, was a long-time Trump target and, because he was an FBI agent, was unable to respond to Trump or the Trump goons who attacked him mercilessly. The day after tomorrow his book, Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump will be released... and he has a lot of responses to Señor Trumpanzee and his goon squad.

Ironically, Strzok didn't look at Trump's campaign as criminal as much as compromised. His initial goal was to find out who in the Trump campaign was working with the Russians to undermine the Clinton campaign. As the investigation got underway, top candidates were various combinations of Paul Manafort, Carter Page George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn. And if that set of names doesn't spell criminal, you shouldn't be in law enforcement.

Prohibited Acts by Nancy Ohanian

In the book, Strzok wrote that he "hadn’t wanted to investigate the president of the United States" but after Trump was elected the evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia was so massive that it was difficult to avoid not investigating him. With the approval of Andrew McCabe, the FBI's deputy director, Strzok opened a counterintelligence case against Trump, sealing his own fate (and that of McCabe's and much of the FBI leadership's).

Strzok felt then-- and still feels now-- that deep, hidden Russian financial leverage over Trump-- which Rod Rosenstein never allowed Mueller's team to wade into-- was the key to the whole case. Eventually Mueller took over the investigation and Strzok and his team came under his aegis.

AP's Eric Tucker reported that "Trump’s attacks have continued even as two inspector general reports found no evidence Strzok’s work in the investigations were tainted by political bias and multiple probes have affirmed the Russia probe’s validity... 'I deeply regret casually commenting about the things I observed in the headlines and behind the scenes, and I regret how effectively my words were weaponized to harm the Bureau and buttress absurd conspiracy theories about our vital work,' Strzok writes."

Strzok documents pivotal moments during the investigation, recounting for instance how then-national security adviser Michael Flynn “baldly lied” to him and another agent about his Russian contacts even though Flynn had not shown customary signs of deceit agents are trained to look for.

Though Trump supporters contend the interview was designed to get Flynn to lie, Strzok says the FBI actually gave him multiple prompts to refresh his memory. While Attorney General William Barr has said the interview was done without a legitimate purpose, Strzok says it was necessary to better understand the Trump orbit’s ties to Russia and Flynn’s own “hidden negotiation with a foreign power that had just attacked our elections.”

Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Barr’s request to dismiss the case is pending.

Like by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for Politico yesterday, Natasha Bertrand, who has read an advance copy of Strzok's book, reported that "After nearly two years, Mueller released his final report in April 2019. It outlined the Trump’s campaign’s extensive contacts with Kremlin-linked actors before, during, and after the election, and led to dozens of indictments and multiple guilty pleas and convictions, including of Manafort. But the report showed no signs of a holistic examination of Trump’s decades in the business world, including his company’s myriad real estate transactions with several Russians suspected of ties to organized crime and the many opaque deals, masked through shell companies, that helped Trump’s companies stay afloat throughout the years. 'I personally don't see how they could have done [the counterintelligence investigation] because I don't know how you do that without getting tax records, financial records, and doing things that would become public,' Strzok said of Mueller’s team. 'Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.'"

I sincerely doubt that a Biden Justice Department will consider reopening the case for more than 10 seconds-- even though American democracy absolutely requires it.

Trump Has Been Bragging About HIS Foreign Policy. Meanwhile America's Foreign Policy Is A Shambles

Last week, anyone who didn't think "foul play" by Putin after reading reports of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny falling into a coma is either terribly naïve or a Trumpist Republican. And sure enough, after he was rescued an flown to Berlin, he was diagnosed with having been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor, a family of central nervous system toxic agents.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released copies of Trump's pre-presidential love letters to Putin as part of their investigation into Trump's collaboration with Russia during the 2016 election.

Trump’s pandering to the Russian president was on full display in a 2007 letter congratulating Putin on being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The letter read, “Congratulations on being named Time’s magazine ‘Man of the Year’-- you definitely deserve it. As you probably heard, I am a big fan of yours!”

The phrase “I am big fan of yours” was emphasised by the now US President with a thick underline.

The praiseful content doesn’t end there, with a 2013 letter containing an attempt by Trump to persuade Putin into attending a Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, an event owned by Trump himself.

The letter asked Putin to be Trump’s date for the evening, reading, “I want to take this opportunity to personally invite you to be my guest of honor in Moscow on November 9th. I know you will have a great time.”

In an attempt to double down on the persuasion (in true all-caps Trump-style), an added hand-written message read, “THE WORLD”S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN!”

Putin did not attend the contest.

The letters are part of a more serious issue surrounding the 2016 election, with key findings from the Senate Select Committee revealing that Putin had weaponised the hacking of Democratic campaign emails, with Trump receiving assistance from various Russian pass-throughs.

Further findings reveal that former campaign chair Paul Manafort was deemed a threat to US intelligence due to his contacts with Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik.

The report essentially confirmed that the president had lied in a written testimony about not remembering a conversation with Roger Stone, who utilised his Julian Assange WikiLeaks back-channel to access Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

While Trump’s unwavering love of Putin was put on full display, the report all but confirmed something more serious. Trump and his officials sought out and accepted Russian interference during the election.

Last week Juan Cole had a typically Trump-era headline at Informed Comment: Trump Walks Alone: Former U.S. Allies Britain, France, Germany Join Russia And China in Forcefully Rejecting Trump Iran Sanctions. The European countries hit Trump with a strong rebuke, thoroughly sick and tired of Trump's dysfunctional policies, and they sound more like Russia and China. Trump and Pompeo are now running around screeching that they're going to sanction the rest of the world. Trump should be dragged out of the White House and put in an insane asylum.

How Specifically Unfit Is Trump To Be Sitting In The Oval Office?

Former Department of Homeland Security executive director, Miles Taylor, was the focus of a stunning anti-Trump ad Monday. The video above is a followup, honing in on the threat from Russia-- whether with Trump's connivance or not-- to election integrity in our country. At the bottom of the page there's a clip of Taylor talking with Jake Tapper yesterday about an entirely different matter: Trump's inability to focus on deadly threats to Americans.

But this clip is a report from CBS News on the 1,000 page account (Volume V) of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee's 3 year long investigation into Russia's efforts to "compromise" the 2016 presidential election. This is the final volume and these are the key takeaways:

1- a glaring link between Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who the committee labeled "a grave counterintelligence threat," and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer (a spy)

2- a network between Roger Stone, wikileaks and the Trump campaign. Trump lied boy his knowledge of this to the Mueller Investigation, a crime that should land him in prison after January, 2021. The report specifies that "Despite Trump's recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone's access (to the group) on multiple occasions."

3- Trump, Jr. could get the cell next door at least in part because of the meeting he set up with Russian spy Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower (a meeting Kushner also participated in): "it was the intent of the campaign participants in the meeting, particularly Donald Trump Jr., to receive derogatory information that would be of benefit to the campaign from a source known... to have connections to the Russian government." The Committee found that the offer of information was part of a "broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part, with elements of the Russian government."

A trio of reporters from the Washington Post wrote that "The long-awaited report from the Senate Intelligence Committee contains dozens of new findings that appear to show more direct links between Trump associates and Russian intelligence, and it pierces the president’s long-standing attempts to dismiss the Kremlin’s intervention on his behalf as a hoax... At one point, the document concludes that members of Trump’s transition team probably fell prey to Russian manipulation that they were too callow to recognize. Kremlin operatives 'were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,' the report said. 'Based on the available information, it is possible-- and even likely-- that they did so.' ... The committee determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed the hack-and-leak campaign.

The document describes Trump and associates of his campaign as often incapable of candor. It offers new proof that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, raises troubling questions about Manafort’s decision to squander a plea agreement with prosecutors by lying to Mueller’s team, and accuses Blackwater founder Erik Prince of “deceptive” accounts of his meetings with a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles weeks before Trump was sworn into office.

The overall portrait that emerges from the report’s 966 pages is of repeated collisions between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, but no formal collusion. The two sides shared the same objective-- the defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton-- and basked in one another’s admiration. But more because of ineptitude than any principled commitment to the sanctity of American democracy, the partnership was never consummated, the committee determined.

The report is the last of five installments in the Senate probe that confirm the broad outlines presented in 2017 by U.S. intelligence agencies: that Russia waged a massive campaign of cyber-intrusions and social media disinformation at first to disrupt the 2016 election, then to try to sway its outcome.

The document would read more like a harrowing historical account were it not for mounting evidence that many of the same forces of disruption are lining up again for the 2020 election. The top U.S. counterintelligence official recently warned that Russia is again waging a far-reaching interference campaign and favors Trump in the upcoming election.

The United States has taken some steps to thwart Moscow’s efforts, including a reported effort by the State Department to flood Russian citizens’ cellphones with offers of reward money for information on the Kremlin’s operations.

But Trump continues to amplify many of Russia’s divisive messages. Attorney General William P. Barr has intervened in criminal cases against Trump allies Stone and Manafort. And Trump supporters on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), have reportedly accepted material from Russian-tied sources to discredit Trump’s opponent in November, former vice president Joe Biden.

...The Intelligence Committee’s report notes that it had made referrals to the Justice Department “for potential criminal activity” suspected during the course of its investigation. As The Washington Post reported late last week, Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort were among those flagged to federal prosecutors because the committee believed that their testimony was contradicted by information unearthed by Mueller.

Vicente Fox, respected and personable former President of Mexico, knows exactly how unfit Trump is for public office and he put out a brilliant and hilarious spoof ad yesterday that I just could not resist including. I think you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did. Share it with your friends.

Did Trump Offer To Pardon Julian Assange In Return For Covering Up For Russia

It was big news-- or should have been-- the other day when Julian Assange's attorney, testifying at an extradition hearing in London, said that Trump offered him a pardon, through then-Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) for reporting that Russia didn't give him the stolen DNC documents that were subsequently published by Wikileaks. Yesterday, Rohrabacher, in an interview with Yahoo News, gave his version of what happened, which was slightly different from Assange's testimony.

Rohrabacher confirmed that he did offer Assange the pardon but said the offer hadn't come from Trump, just that he could talk Trump into it. Rohrabacher confirmed that during his 2017 three-hour meeting with Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy, he told him he "would get" Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks. Rohrabacher was trying to prove the source of the documents was murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, not Russia, a long debunked conspiracy theory on the far right.

Assange contends that Trump sent Rohrabacher to offer the pardon. Rohrabacher says he was acting on his own and that he never spoke with Señor Trumpanzee about Assange and only told Assange he would "petition" Trump for the pardon. He says he spoke with then-chief of staff John Kelly about Assange's willingness to cooperate but never heard back from the White House. Assange implied that in asking him to "play ball," the White House was asking him to lie, although Assange, a useful idiot, has said he didn't get the materials from Russia. Rohrabacher says he didn't want any lies, just the truth. Rohrabacher's official story is now: "When speaking with Julian Assange, I told him that if he could provide me information and evidence about who actually gave him the DNC emails, I would then call on President Trump to pardon him. At no time did I offer a deal made by the President, nor did I say I was representing the President."

Rohrabacher, who lost his reelection bid to ex-Republican New Dem Harley Rouda in the traditionally Republican district (PVI is R+4, although it performed as a D+7 district in the reelection contest), 157,837 (53.6%) to 136,899 (46.4%), in part because many voters believed Rohrabacher was a Russian agent. Rohrabacher now works as a consultant to the cannabis industry.


Let's get the hell out of this damn Republican nightmare! This hits us in the heart. Our minds say "Compassion" This is what Bernie has and that all the other candidates lack. Now listen to Lia Rose covering the Francine Jarry song. We are the ones we've been waiting for!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Pay no attention to the arrow in the middle of the meme visual; the person who made the meme obviously liked the visual and went with it. What too many Americans aren't paying attention to is the treason and moral corruption of Moscow Mitch McTraitor and his Russo-Republican fellow travelers in the U.S. $enate, the "best" $enators rubles can buy.

Here we are. It's January 18, 2020. The so-called impeachment trial of the worst president in our history is due to begin in just a few days. McTraitor, the $enate Majority Leader has already famously stated that he refuses to be impartial and that he's all in for Putin's boy Trump; oath to the U.S. Constitution be damned. Trump's pet doggie, Lindsey Graham is right there with him and only fools think that the rest of the Republican $enators aren't right there with Moscow Mitch too. Try finding one that hasn't drunk at the campaign cash trough that Moscow Mitch's Russian oligarch owners have been providing. The jury tampering is done. Susan Collins will be honest and keep an open mind? That's hilarious. Remember the integrity she showed in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing? Of course you don't. It was never there. What about Psycho Mitt "Free Stuff" Romney? Ditto. Integrity and loyalty to America is not only unknown to these lowlifes, it is resented. It would be up to them and their ilk to prove us wrong but the odds of that would be like America buying a Powerball ticket and actually winning.

If this country actually had a legal system that wasn't a total bullshit joke and Washington had even one ounce of integrity, Moscow Mitch would already be stripped of his assets, tried for obstruction, and thrown into a dungeon where he'd find Nixon's bones plus multi-legged roaches and rats instead of the two-legged kind that he's more used to, but then, those in the Putin-Trump White House who refused to testify before the House during the impeachment hearings would also already be hearing the scurrying of vermin in the darkness. To date, democrats Schiff and Nadler have let them off the hook. Like I say, Washington takes care of its own. It's a game played with a smirk. In this particular impeachment game, anything less than life imprisonment in some hellhole is a sellout of justice and a sentence of life imprison is itself a compromise.

So, Washington, go ahead, make my day. Surprise me. surprise me with something new, something refreshingly like justice, something a lot like Nuremberg.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

And Washington shirks and shrugs. Oaths mean nothing in the face of cash.

Even Many Of His Own Delusional Supporters, Know Trump Is A Disgusting Excuse For A Human Being— And That Putin Helped Put Him Into The White House

A couple of new YouGov polls were just released that tell us something about what to expect moving forward. These were the results of a survey of German voters when they were asked to name the most dangerous world leader:

• Señor Trumpanzee (The Confederacy)- 41%
• Kim Jong Un (North Korea)- 17%
• Vladimir Putin (Russian)- 8%
• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Iran)- 8%
• Xi Jinping (China)- 7%

That goes to show the degree to which trust in U.S. leadership has eroded under Trump, and I suspect it would be even worse among other traditional U.S. allies. Which is exactly what Putin wanted when he backed Trump!

The second poll was even worse news— for Trump, not necessarily for Americans. There were some non-horse race questions about Trump. When asked about how much Trump has accomplished, most Americans have not been taking in my the constant bragging and gas lighting:

More than I expected- 33%
About what I expected- 27%
Less than I expected- 26%
Not sure- 14%

And then the big one: As a president, how do you think Trump will go down in history?

• Outstanding- 28%
• Above Average- 12%
• Average- 9%
• Below Average- 40%
• Poor- 10%

Maybe this helps explain it:

A few more questions we should look at, All about foreign interference in the 2016 election and what’s about to hit us again:
1- How much does it matter to you if a foreign country interferes in U.S. elections?

• A lot- 63%
• Some- 24%
• Doesn’t matter at all- 13%

2- Do you believe that Russian interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

• Yes- 51%
• No- 30%
• Not sure- 19%

3- Do you believe that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

• Yes- 19%
• No- 51%
• Not sure- 29%

4- Do you think Donald Trump purposefully withheld military aid to Ukraine in order to get the President of Ukraine to investigate allegations of corruption against the Biden family?

• Yes- 46%
• No- 35%
• Not sure- 18%

Before we get back to Putin’s role in stealing the 2016 election for Trump, let me mention that the survey found that 49% of Americans approved of Congress impeaching Trump and that 41% no do approve; and that 44% say he should be removed from office and 41% say he should not be removed. And how Americans see Trump the person:

I doubt we’ll ever know for sure how seriously the Russians actually hacked the U.S. elections on behalf of Trump. My gut has always told me that they hacked the election far beyond the Facebook bullshit and that they did go right into voting machines-- and will again. Yesterday, Kim Zetter took a closer look for Politico at the Russian hacking monkey-business, primarily in Florida. Better, though, began in Durham, North Carolina, where votes were tampered with electronically. North Carolina was a swing state that Obama had won once and lost once. Trump beat Hillary in 2016, but the targeting of Durham County makes that win very suspect. Hillary won Durham County 118,783 to 27,879. Turnout should have been much higher. That’s where the hacking came in. They were able to hack into the machines to electronically suppress the vote in black precincts by, among other things causing “extensive delays at some precincts, leading an unknown number of frustrated voters to leave without casting ballots.” It’s worth noting that the Russians may actually control VR Systems through the British expats who own it and run it. The Russians have been far more audacious in their use of British spies in the past.

Zetter: “To this day, no one knows definitively what happened with Durham’s poll books. And one important fact about the incident still worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier.

[S]ignificant questions remain about what happened in Durham and just how close the Russians actually came to hacking the 2016 election. North Carolina state election officials say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive, and they cannot say with certainty that the problems were due to human error. Indeed, there’s no indication the investigators looked for malware or even contemplated the possibility of foul play. And VR Systems bases its assertion that it was not hacked on a forensic investigation of its computers that was done by a third-party security firm nearly a year after the Russian phishing campaign-- plenty of time for any Russian hackers to have erased their tracks in the meantime. There are also questions about the thoroughness of that investigation. VR Systems spoke to Politico about the investigation but wouldn’t answer detailed questions about it or provide a copy of the forensic report that it says proves it wasn’t hacked.

Public confidence in the integrity of the 2016 election outcome rests largely on the belief that the Russian hackers-- who did, in fact, attempt to meddle in the election, according to the U.S. intelligence community-- were blocked before they could alter votes or have a direct effect on the results by manipulating voter records. It has been publicly reported, for example, that those hackers superficially probed election-related websites in 21 states and breached a few voter-registration databases, but did not alter or delete voter records. And accounts of the Russian interference laid out in a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report and in Robert Mueller’s lengthy investigative summary released earlier this year assert that there’s no evidence the Russian actors altered vote tallies or even attempted to do so.

But the government has also suggested in one report and asserted outright in others--among them a 2017 National Security Agency document leaked to the press, a 2018 indictment of Russian intelligence officers, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report and Mueller report-- that the hackers successfully breached (or very likely breached) at least one company that makes software for managing voter rolls, and installed malware on that company’s network. Furthermore, an October 2016 email obtained recently by Politico, sent by the head of the National Association of Secretaries of State to its members around the country two weeks before the election, states that the Department of Homeland Security “confirmed” to NASS at the time that a “third-party vendor” in Florida that worked with local jurisdictions on their voter registration systems “experienced a breach.”

None of the public versions of the government reports, nor the NASS email, identify the hacked company by name. But based on details describing the affected firm in some of the documents, they appear to be referencing VR Systems. VR Systems itself has acknowledged that it appears to be the company mentioned in the government reports but says the FBI has never told it that it was breached by the Russians, which the bureau would be expected to do as part of the victim notification process if VR Systems had been hacked. (The FBI won’t discuss VR Systems, saying any interactions between it and the bureau are part of an ongoing investigation into the Russian election interference efforts.)

But lack of notification isn’t proof that VR Systems wasn’t hacked. The government has been lax in sharing information in a timely way with other targets of the Russian operation, and sometimes has been wrong or misleading about what occurred. Georgia, for example, learned that two county websites in that state had been visited by the Russians only when the 2018 indictment was published-- two years after the fact. And in August 2018, when then-Senator Bill Nelson told a Florida newspaper that the Russians had successfully penetrated systems in some Florida counties in 2016, the FBI and DHS publicly denied his claim, though he later was proved correct.

Why does what happened to a small Florida company and a few electronic poll books in a single North Carolina county matter to the integrity of the national election? The story of Election Day in Durham-- and what we still don’t know about it-- is a window into the complex, and often fragile, infrastructure that governs American voting. In some respects, elections are tightly regulated. A web of federal and state laws prescribes how they are conducted. But these laws often say very little about how elections should be secured. The infrastructures around voting itself-- from the voter registration databases and electronic poll books that serve as gatekeepers for determining who gets to cast a ballot to the back-end county systems that tally and communicate election results-- are provided by a patchwork of firms selling proprietary systems, many of them small private companies like VR Systems. But there are no federal laws, and in most cases no state laws either, requiring these companies to be transparent or publicly accountable about their security measures or to report when they've been breached. They’re not even required to conduct a forensic investigation when they've experienced anomalies that suggest they might have been breached or targeted in an attack.

And yet a successful hack of any of these companies-- even a small firm-- could have far-flung implications. In the case of VR Systems, more than 14,000 of the company’s electronic poll books were used in the 2016 elections-- in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia and other states. The company’s poll book software-- known as EViD, short for Electronic Voter Identification-- was used in 23 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and in 64 of Florida’s 67 counties. The latter include Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county.

But VR Systems doesn’t just make poll book software. It also makes voter-registration software, which, in addition to processing and managing new and existing voter records, helps direct voters to their proper precinct and do other tasks. And it hosts websites for counties to post their election results. VR Systems software is so instrumental to elections in some counties that a former Florida election official said that 90 percent of what his staff did on a daily basis to manage voters and voter data was done through VR Systems software.

“You’re using VR Systems from the moment you get to work until the moment you get home,” Ion Sancho, former supervisor of elections in Florida’s Leon County, told me. “New voter registrations, voter moves and address transfers, name updates … everything that you’re doing to that voter or could do, you’re doing through VR Systems.”

The company’s expansive reach into so many aspects of election administration and into so many states-- and its use of remote access to gain entry into customer computers for troubleshooting-- raises a number of troubling questions about the potential for damage if the Russians (or any other hackers) got into VR Systems’ network-- either in 2016, or at any other time. Could they, for example, alter the company’s poll book software to cause the devices to malfunction and create long delays at the polls? Or tamper with the voter records downloaded to poll books to make it difficult for voters to cast ballots-- by erroneously indicating, for example, that a voter had already cast a ballot, as voters in Durham experienced? Could they change results posted to county websites to cause the media to miscall election outcomes and create confusion? Cybersecurity experts say yes. In the case of the latter scenario, Russian hackers proved their ability to do precisely this in Ukraine’s results system in 2014.

An incident in Florida in 2016 shows what this kind of Election Day confusion might look like in the U.S. During the Florida state primary in August 2016-- just six days after the Russians targeted VR Systems in their phishing operation-- the results webpage VR Systems hosted for Broward County, a Democratic stronghold, began displaying election results a half hour before the polls closed, in violation of state law. This triggered a cascade of problems that prevented several other Florida counties from displaying their results in a timely manner once the election ended. VR Systems cited employee error for the problem, but election security experts see a potential vulnerability in a reporting system that is centrally managed by a small, third-party company for multiple election districts. Mark Earley, the current elections supervisor for Leon County in Florida, acknowledged that if hackers were to obtain log-in credentials for the VR Systems administrators, or for county election officials, they could “potentially do some damage” and change results. No one is suggesting this is what occurred in Broward, but the risk existed.

“I think it's a travesty that the citizens of Florida don’t have the information necessary to know if our election systems are safe,” said Sancho. “We don’t have any data to know what occurred in 2016, so we don’t know what will occur in 2020.”

No one has attempted to pull together, in public view, all the available information about what happened with VR Systems during the 2016 election cycle until now. Based on interviews with the company and with county and state election officials; analysis of government reports and documents obtained through public records requests; and a timeline of known events, the following represents as complete a narrative as currently possible about the events around VR Systems and the 2016 elections-- and raises many questions not only about America’s ability to secure the national elections less than a year away but the country’s ability to have trust in their integrity.

…At the time VR Systems remotely accessed Durham’s computer in the run-up to the November 2016 elections, the company already knew that it and its customers were in the sights of Russian hackers bent on influencing the presidential election.

Months earlier, on August 24, 2016, in the wake of already successful hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Illinois’ voter registration database, a set of emails hit seven VR Systems employee addresses. The phishing emails came from noreplyautomaticservice@gmail.com-- a detail that suggests the attackers knew VR Systems used Google for its company email. Two of the targeted addresses were nonworking accounts.

The emails informed recipients that their Google email account storage was full and provided a link to obtain additional storage. The link, however, went to a fake Google webpage, where the users would be prompted to enter their email account username and password. The attackers likely wanted to take over the accounts to send malicious emails to VR Systems’ election customers and make it look as if they were coming from legitimate VR Systems employees.

At the time the phishing campaign occurred, officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were scrambling to determine the extent of Moscow’s hacking operations against state boards of election and voter registration databases across the country, but were still unaware that the Russian hackers had also turned their attention to the private company in Florida.

The company’s account of the order of events after it received the phishing emails has varied over time, making it difficult to establish a clear timeline of events. Earlier this spring, for example, VR Systems assured North Carolina State Board of Elections officials, in a letter the company provided to me, that the emails were caught by its automated email filters and quarantined as suspicious before any employees could open them. It implied that the company discovered these rogue emails immediately when they arrived in August and reported them to the FBI.

…On October 31, the Russians created a fake VR Systems gmail account-- vrelections@gmail.com--and used it to send malicious emails to more than 100 customers of VR Systems in Florida. The emails came with a Microsoft Word attachment purporting to be a new user guide for VR Systems’ electronic poll book software, according to the NSA document leaked to the media in 2017. VR Systems had in fact sent a legitimate email to its North Carolina customers a month earlier announcing a new user guide available as a PDF or a Word document, according to a document I obtained. It’s not clear if the company sent the same email to its Florida customers. But it suggests the hackers had a good understanding of how to craft their malicious email to match the nature and timing of legitimate correspondence from the company. If a user clicked on the email sent by the Russian hackers to the Florida election officials, the attachment would load code onto the victim’s system that opened a back door to the hackers. Two Florida counties apparently clicked on the deceptive emails, according to recent news reports indicating that Washington County and another, unknown county were breached in this way.

VR Systems learned about the campaign against its Florida customers on November 1, just seven days before the election, when one recipient notified the company about the suspicious email. VR Systems sent an alert to all of its other customers to warn them about the email and also notified the FBI about this second phishing campaign. VR Systems did not tell customers in its alert to them that it too had been targeted by the Russians back in August.

Although VR Systems believed the August phishing campaign against its own employees had been unsuccessful, the FBI had warned participants on the September 30 conference call that Russian hackers were targeting election infrastructure. And VR Systems had already discovered suspicious traffic to its website from the IP addresses the FBI had shared on the September 30 call, according to the company’s letter to Wyden. Despite these heightened risks, the company remotely accessed Durham’s system the night before the critical November election.

Durham County election officials did not immediately connect the Russian hacking activity to the problems that occurred in Durham on Election Day, presumably because they weren't aware of that activity. It would be nearly a year before the public-- and VR Systems customers-- would learn that the company had been targeted in 2016.

On November 18, Durham County certified its election results. But the county still had questions about the way the VR Systems poll books had performed in the election, so it hired a cybersecurity company called Protus3 to investigate the poll book problems. After examining the activity logs on the poll books as well as the software, Protus3 determined that the devices and software had worked properly. But, according to a redacted report written by the company that December, Protus3 concluded that 17 of the county’s 227 laptops had not been properly cleaned of previous data before the November election-- meaning they had either an old version of the EViD software on them or old voter data from a previous election. Old software could have caused the problem in which the systems improperly indicated that voters needed to show ID. And old voter data from a previous election could have been the reason the machines indicated some voters had already cast ballots in the 2016 election, if the voters had cast ballots in that previous election. The Protus3 report also indicated that on several occasions in the 2016 election poll workers mistakenly tried to sign in the same voter more than once into a poll book, which also could have accounted for the system indicating that the voters had already cast a ballot.

But ultimately Protus3 couldn’t definitively account for the issues with all of the poll books. The report listed additional steps Protus3 needed to take to complete its investigation, but according to a document viewed by Politico, the company never completed those steps. There’s also no indication that anyone ever looked for malware on the poll books or on the county workstation that VR Systems remotely accessed, and no indication that Protus3 even considered the possibility of foul play.

In an email to me, the North Carolina State Board of Elections has acknowledged that the Protus3 report was incomplete and inconclusive; the elections board planned in 2017 to conduct its own separate forensic investigation after the public learned about the Russian targeting of VR Systems, but never followed through because it said it didn’t have the technical expertise. Instead, the board asked the Department of Homeland Security for assistance several times, according to someone familiar with the situation. DHS agreed to help the state only a few months ago, after the Mueller report was released and public pressure to resolve the outstanding questions around VR Systems grew. But given the amount of time that has passed since the incidents and the incomplete evidence preserved from the election, it’s not clear how comprehensive the DHS investigation could be at this point.

The public learned about the targeting of the VR Systems in June 2017, when The Intercept published the leaked NSA document. The document revealed that a company that makes voter registration software had been targeted in a Russian phishing campaign that was “likely” successful against at least one of the company’s employees. The document identified the target only as “U.S. COMPANY 1,” but the details describing it match VR Systems-- so closely that even VR Systems believed it was the company to which the document referred, causing it to reach out to the FBI to ask why the NSA document said it had been hacked.

The NSA document said that after the Russian attackers targeted U.S. Company 1, they launched a second phishing campaign against 122 election officials (all of them in Florida, a fact later revealed in the 2018 indictment of Russian intelligence officers), using an email address designed to look as though it came from the company. That email address-- vrelections@gmail.com-- wasn’t redacted in the document. VR Elections is another name VR Systems uses, leading many to believe that VR Systems was “U.S. COMPANY 1.”

The Justice Department’s 2018 indictment of 12 Russian military officers leaves little doubt that an election technology company fitting the description of VR Systems was compromised. The indictment says the co-conspirators “hacked into the computers of a U.S. vendor that supplied software used to verify voter registration information for the 2016 U.S. elections.” The co-conspirators also “used an email account designed to look like [the same vendor’s] email address” to send more than 100 phishing emails to “organizations and personnel” involved in administering elections in Florida counties. The phishing emails contained malware embedded in Word documents that bore the vendor’s logo. VR Systems isn’t mentioned in the indictment, just as the targeted company in the leaked NSA document wasn’t identified by name, but the details of the vendor incident match the details in the NSA document and what is known about the 2016 Russian targeting of VR Systems and its customers.

The Mueller report goes a step further. It says that not only did Russian hackers send phishing emails in August 2016 to employees of “a voting technology company that developed software used by numerous U.S. counties to manage voter rolls,” but the hackers succeeded in installing malware on the unidentified company’s network. The Mueller investigators write: “We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU [Russia’s military intelligence service] to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.” They include a caveat, however: “The Office [of the special counsel] did not independently verify that belief and, as explained above, did not undertake the investigative steps that would have been necessary to do so.” Since the Mueller report was published earlier this year, it has been confirmed that two Florida counties were hacked by the Russians after receiving phishing emails.

The release of the NSA document in 2017 was the first time VR Systems heard that it might have been hacked and not just phished. That report led VR Systems to hire the security firm FireEye to conduct a forensic investigation to determine whether the report was true. But a year had already passed since the Russian activity. Until then, VR Systems appears to have relied only on its own internal assessment in 2016 to determine if it had been breached. The company told Wyden that in addition to the 2017 FireEye investigation, DHS also conducted an assessment of VR Systems’ computers and network in 2018, two years after the phishing campaign. VR Systems told Sen. Wyden that the FireEye investigation determined that the company had not been hacked, and the DHS assessment found no malware on the company’s systems and network.

"[W]e engaged FireEye, a global cyber security firm, to consult, test and monitor VR’s systems and servers,” the company wrote Politico Magazine in an email. “Based on analysis by FireEye, there was never an intrusion in our EViD servers or network.”

Aside from the issue that so much time had passed before the FireEye investigation and DHS assessment occurred, there’s a question about the scope of these investigations. Companies that hire private security firms to conduct hacking investigations, or that bring in DHS to do an assessment, control what systems investigators examine. And the VR Systems statement about the FireEye investigation mentions only the company’s “EViD servers or network,” which pertain to its electronic poll books. Did the company limit FireEye to looking just at its EViD servers and the computers of employees who were targeted in the phishing campaign? Or did it open all of its systems to FireEye to search for intrusions that might have come through its website, or through remote connections the company made to customer systems, or through its web-hosting and election-night results servers? FireEye wouldn’t discuss the investigation with Politico, citing customer confidentiality.

The only information available about what might have happened to the company is contained in the government reports and the newly uncovered NASS email-- all of which suggest or assert that VR Systems or some other Florida elections company was indeed hacked.

It’s interesting to note that a pair of news accounts published in the weeks before the 2016 election do appear to support the government assertion that a Florida elections company was indeed hacked. An ABC News report in October 2016, for example, mentioned the hack of such a company; like the NSA document, the story didn’t identify the company but did mention the September 30 conference call that the FBI’s local office in Jacksonville had convened with Florida election officials-- the same call VR Systems was on-- and described the hacked company as a contractor hired to handle voter information. It noted that, although the hackers had obtained access to voter data through the company, they did not change the data.

A CNN story published around the same time also mentioned the September 30 call and described the same incident-- but this one suggested the contractor was a company based in California that had a system with Florida voter data on it. A Miami Herald story, on the other hand, seemed to contradict the notion that a successful hack occurred at all: It reported that the FBI told participants on the September 30 call that no one had been hacked. Instead, a source told the news outlet, during the call the bureau mentioned only “a malicious act found” in a Florida jurisdiction and cautioned election officials to be wary. (It’s not clear what “malicious act” in Florida the FBI was referring to, but the call occurred after the August 26 phishing campaign against VR Systems and before the October phishing campaign against the 122 Florida election officials.)

It is possible that the reports from Mueller and the NSA are wrong, and that their authors-- with no firsthand knowledge of events and with limited details about what occurred-- mistakenly concluded that the phishing campaign against VR Systems was successful.

Neil Jenkins, who was a director in the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security in 2016, says he was the DHS official who told NASS that a Florida vendor had been breached. But he says that information came from the FBI, and when his staff tried to get more information from the bureau, such as the victim’s name, they were rebuffed.

“[W]e understood there was an actual breach, and we understood that while there was a breach FBI didn’t feel that it was big enough or important enough to let us in on what they had learned from it and they were handling it through their law enforcement channels,” he told me. He acknowledges the possibility that the FBI was wrong and that this incorrect information then got passed to reporters and other agencies and subsequently made it into the Mueller report, the DOJ indictment and the NSA document.

“There’s all sorts of opportunities for miscommunication. And that miscommunication could have been perpetuated over time,” he said.

It is also possible the reports confused an unsuccessful phishing campaign against VR Systems with a successful hack of a different Florida company involved in the elections business; there are at least two other companies that have contracts with Florida counties to handle voter registration data and therefore fit descriptions of the hacked company.

The description of the company in the ABC News story-- a contractor hired to handle voter data-- matches VR Systems. But the description also matches two other Florida companies, though no one has suggested either is the hacked company referenced in the Mueller report and NSA document. Tenex Software Solutions, based in Tampa, which supplies electronic poll books and voter registration management software in at least eight states and one Florida county, and LogicWorks Systems, a one-person consultancy based in West Palm Beach, have participated in regular election vendor calls with Florida’s Department of State and VR Systems in the past, according to documents Politico Magazine obtained. Tenex President Ravi Kallem wouldn’t answer questions from Politico about whether his firm participated in the September 30 call with the FBI and VR Systems, or whether Tenex had been targeted in a phishing campaign in 2016 or was otherwise hacked. Jon Winchester, who is president of LogicWorks, says he didn’t receive any phishing emails in 2016 and says he and his systems have never been hacked. “I don’t get viruses. I don’t click on stuff. I’m very careful about that. … I don’t think I have anything to be hacked,” Winchester told me.

VR Systems spokesman Ben Martin thinks there’s a different explanation for the assertions made in the Mueller report and NSA document. He believes that “U.S. COMPANY 1” in the NSA document does refer to his company, but he thinks the assertion that the company was hacked is based on a faulty assumption the FBI made that has never been corrected-- and that subsequently tainted the Mueller report and other government documents. He believes the FBI falsely assumed that the Russians were successful in hacking VR Systems based only on the subsequent phishing campaign in October 2016 that targeted the company’s clients in Florida. The government “supposed that since [the hackers] used the email addresses of our customers, they must have used our network to get that information,” he wrote in an email. “In fact, the email addresses of the Florida officials are easily available with a simple google search.”

Notably, VR Systems told North Carolina officials in their May phone call with those officials that the FBI never shared with the company the list of email addresses targeted in the October phishing campaign. But the company learned some of the addresses from customers who were targeted in the campaign, and the company told North Carolina officials that some of the addresses were not ones it had even possessed, suggesting the Russian hackers had obtained them elsewhere, possibly through a Florida state website that lists contact information for election officials across the state.

VR Systems also told the North Carolina officials that after the NSA document was leaked in 2017 and it contacted the FBI to complain that the document implied that the August 2016 phishing campaign against it was successful, it asked the FBI for a public correction to clear up suspicions that it had been hacked, according to a source with knowledge of the call between those officials and VR Systems. But the company described the FBI as unsympathetic to its request. Because the NSA document said only that it was “likely” the campaign had been successful and not that it actually was, there was nothing to clear up, the FBI told the company.

The fact that so many significant questions about VR Systems remain unanswered three years after the 2016 election undermines the government's assertions that it’s committed to providing election officials with all of the timely information they need to secure their systems in 2020. It also raises concerns that the public may never really know what occurred in 2016.

The Department of Homeland Security’s own investigation into the Durham County poll books began last spring. Nearly two dozen poll books were sent to DHS in June, along with mirror images of their hard drives taken some time after the 2016 election. The DHS review was expected to be completed in November, but neither DHS nor North Carolina officials would answer questions about it to Politico. In any case, it’s not clear how thorough the assessment could be at this point or whether it can answer all outstanding questions about what happened in 2016.

If DHS looked only at the Durham laptops and did not also have mirror images preserved in 2016 of VR Systems’ own computers and the Durham County workstation that experienced problems the days before that election, its investigation might resolve the questions about what occurred with Durham's laptops in 2016-- but not the question of whether VR Systems was hacked. Those questions could be resolved if the FBI and the intelligence community were to provide more transparency around the assertions made in the Mueller report, the Justice Department indictment and the NSA document. But three years after the fact, no one in government seems prepared or willing to provide that clarity.

“The FBI and DHS keep reassuring the public that they've ‘got this,’ but the lack of transparency and visibility into the investigations [of what occurred in 2016] doesn’t inspire confidence or provide assurance to the public that we can trust the process,” said Susan Greenhalgh, vice president of policy and programs for National Election Defense Coalition. “Elections demand transparency. Concealing the investigations and findings from the public directly undermines trust and confidence.”

Yesterday the Washington Post noted that "Military cyber officials are developing information warfare tactics that could be deployed against senior Russian officials and oligarchs if Moscow tries to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections through hacking election systems or sowing widespread discord. One option being explored by U.S. Cyber Command would target senior leadership and Russian elites, though probably not President Vladimir Putin, which would be considered too provocative, said the current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. The idea would be to show that the target’s sensitive personal data could be hit if the interference did not stop, though officials declined to be more specific."

Conclusion: not only is Trump the worst occupant of the White House in history, he's also an illegitimate "president" installed by the Russians-- with the after-the-fact connivance of Moscow Mitch and Paul Ryan-- for their own purposes. And they all got away with it. And-- one more thing-- Trump and the Republicans plan to do it again.