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.

A Spy Named McTurtle? Do We Need-- God Forbid-- Another HUAC Now?

Undoubtably one of the worst chapters in American history revolved around a House committee established in 1938-- HUAC: the House Un-American Activities Committee. Late in its existence it worked in tandem with Wisconsin's deranged fascist Senator Joseph McCarthy. But when HUAC was established Congress was firmly controlled by the Democrats, who were eager to investigate "disloyalty and subversive activities" by private citizens, public employees, and organizations suspected of having ties to the Russians. It wasn't formally abolished until 1975. The roots of HUAC were actually honorable-- Democrats John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein investigating fascist plots against America, including the plans for a Wall Street/DuPont coup (Smedley Butler) against FDR. When it morphed into HUAC, the first chairman was a Texas Democrat and with deep Nazi sympathies and rabid hatred for communists, Martin Dies. At first, HUAC was commonly known as the Dies Committee and was more a laughing stock than a genuine threat. Joe Starnes of Alabama ranted and raved about Greek playwright, "Mr. Euripedes" preaching class warfare and asked the head of the head of the Federal Theater Project (a part of the New Deal) if Christopher Marlowe had been a commie.

HUAC stopped being a joke when it put together plans to round up Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps. When it was later suggested that the HUAC would be of more service to the country if it investigated the KKK, that was voted down and one white supremicist who was clearly ahead of his time and would probably be in Trump's cabinet today, Mississippi Democrat John Rankin noted admiringly that "The KKK is an old American tradition." Two decades later, in 1965, HUAC, finally took a few moments out of railing against commies to focus on the KKK. When HUAC became a permanent committee, the first chair was Edward Hart (D-NJ) and it was full steam ahead as an anti-Russian/anti-Communist vehicle.

It has been suggested that in light of the Republican Party pandering to Putin and the Russians, perhaps House Dems need to bring back HUAC and give it the mandate to look into the connects between McConnell's-- Moscow Mitch as Joe Scarborough has dubbed him-- and Trump's refusal to protect American elections from the Russians. One DWT corespondent suggested that he is "wondering if we are witnessing a latter-day Cambridge Five with Mitch McConnell declining to protect our electoral system from foreign hacking." Further, he thinks it significant that McConnell like Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Donald MacLean is a closeted gay man vulnerable to exposure. "McConnell is hiding a damaging [for him] sexual history. Is this a sell-out because of kompromat, or is this simply GOP politics? In either case, why are the Democrats not taking a page from the standard GOP playbook" to show how the Republicans are working with the Russians to undermine America? He wondered if the House should consider an actual resurrection of the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate Republican connections to past and current election tampering in advance of the 2020 elections?




When I told my correspondent that just the thought of HUAC makes me shudder with horror, he later wrote that "Of course you are right. My impulse was irony that is expressing a frustration with what Teresa Tomlinson diagnosed so convincingly this morning on your site: the Dems don’t have balls. They need to learn some lessons from the GOP and do some forceful grandstanding that captures the nation’s attention. Unfortunately, as you point out consistently well, many don’t have any convictions to rally around. Alas. Willing to share the name of the hotel in Yangon that you referred to on Feldman’s show?" [The hotel is The Strand for anyone else wondering.]

Chip Proser, HUAC artist

In his New York Magazine column today, Andrew Sullivan wrote about why Mueller's testimony didn't shake the country up the way it certainly should have. (Keep in mind that when Sullivan uses the words "we" and "us" he always means elites and insiders.) "The Mueller hearings," he wrote, "told us almost nothing that we didn’t know already. We knew that the president welcomed assistance from a foreign power in order to win an election, and has fawned over his political patron in this endeavor, Vladimir Putin, since he became president. We knew that though he was not competent enough to construct a conspiracy, he was eager to collude with a foreign foe to defeat his domestic one. And we knew that he then lied about it as baldly as he lies about almost everything, and tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into the affair. His attorney general then blatantly lied about the key conclusions of the Mueller report, distorting the public debate for weeks as he kept the contents under wraps, and then bet that Americans, with our gnat-like attention spans, would simply move on. We also knew that in contemporary America, none of these facts matter in the slightest. The notion that the average citizen should care deeply about the rule of law and constitutional norms-- and even actively defend them-- has become terribly passé. Now, all that truly matters is whether we are entertained by someone who can command televisual excitement the way Trump does on a daily, hourly basis. If he can’t, whatever the underlying facts, no one gives a damn. American political elites are no better. The president’s assault on the Constitution has merely revealed the Democratic Party as the lame farce we knew it was. Its ancient, pusillanimous congressional leadership was never going to do what duty, rather than politics, requires."

At Least Biden's Lackadasically-Planned Kick-Off Rally In Pittsburgh Monday Won't Be As Fake As Trump's Was

Writing for the Payday Report yesterday, union activist Mike Elk mentioned that, after a fat-cat Philly fundraiser-in-a-mansion con-sponsored by superrich union buster attorney Steven Cozen to kick off his campaign on Thursday, Status Quo Joe is going to demonstrate how down with the Rust Belt's white working class he is by showing up at a quasi-Potemkin Village version of a rally in Pittsburgh.

In October of 2016 there was a different kind of rally for white working class guys in Pittsburgh-- and that was no "quasi" about the Potemkin-ness of it! A few days ago, Mark Gruenberg had an interesting tidbit from the Mueller report to share: a fake "Miners For Trump" rally in Pittsburgh... organized by Kremlin-paid election saboteurs.

From the redacted Mueller Report

“MINERS FOR TRUMP” it read in green capital letters. “BRING BACK OUR JOBS” it added in white capitals. After some printing that’s illegible, it declared “Help Mr. Trump fix it!” and ended with “#TrumpPence2016.”

The message was a fake, and there are no details on how many people showed up for the rally.

But that Russian fake, and others, may have helped GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump win the electoral votes of the key states-- Pennsylvania among them-- that swung the 2016 election.

The accompanying text in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Trump, the Russians, and the 2016 campaign disruption says the rally in Steel Plaza in Pittsburgh and another in “Marcony Plaza” in Philadelphia were two of three Pennsylvania events Russian internet operatives staged for Trump in the closing days of the drive. There were three others in New York and “a series in Florida,” including one in Miami that drew the campaign’s attention.

All were arranged by Russian agents rather than by any actual Trump-supporting miners, according to the redacted copy of Mueller’s report on the Trump campaign, the Russians, and the ties-- or lack of them, the report says-- between the two.

By the way, the face of the miner wasn't a Russian. The St. Petersburg troll farm run by the Internet Research Agency somehow wound up with a photo of Lee Hipshire, an American coal miner who can't complain-- because he died of black lung disease. His son, Ronnie Hipshire, a retired coal miner in West Virginia, did complain... to NPR. "What I didn't like about seeing this on the Mueller report is them stealing my dad's picture and putting it on a Trump campaign rally," Hipshire said in his interview with All Things Considered. "My dad was one of the most staunch Democrats that you'll ever see in your life, and he never would have even thought about putting his face on something like that. It just was beyond me to see it."

Stealing intellectual property-- photographer Earl Dotter owns the rights to that image of Lee Hipshire-- is a hallmark of Republican Party election campaigns. I guess Russian ones too-- or at least the Russian election campaigns they do in the U.S.

I Hope Keeping The Russians Out Of The 2020 Elections Isn't Part Of Kushner-In-law's Portfolio

An editorial in the Washington Post stirred up a little brouhaha this morning because an International Women of Courage Award for Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro was rescinded by the State Department after it was discovered that Aro is a Trump-hater. Lost in the kerfuffle was that it was Aro who helped expose the Internet Research Agency, as the preeminent Russian troll factory that spreads propaganda online and helped steal the 2016 election for Señor Trumpanzee. Speaking of which... also this morning: Alyza Sebenius reported that the U.S. election experts at the Internet Research Agency are shifting their strategy to steal 2020 for Trump again. Will Trump's Justice Department prevent Russian infiltrators from stealing the election for Trump? Exciting!

Sebenius wrote that "Russian internet trolls appear to be shifting strategy in their efforts to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections, promoting politically divisive messages through phony social media accounts instead of creating propaganda themselves, cybersecurity experts say." Remember, the vast majority of Trump supporters have significantly lower IQs than average Americans and are easy prey for this kind of Russian propaganda. Normal people tend to shrug it off as silly, manipulative and far-fetched. Sadly, your typical Trump supporter will eat it up and swear by it, especially if it's reinforced by fascist mass media (Limbaugh, Fox, Sinclair, etc).

“Instead of creating content themselves, we see them amplifying content,” said John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at FireEye Inc. “Then it’s not necessarily inauthentic, and that creates an opportunity for them to hide behind somebody else.”

Other hackers are breaking into computing devices and using them to open large numbers of social media accounts, according to Candid Wueest, a senior threat researcher at Symantec Corp. The hacked devices are used to create many legitimate-looking users as well as believable followers and likes for those fake users.

While covert efforts to amplify divisive content originated by others isn’t a new technique, hackers and trolls seem to be embracing it heavily in advance of the next U.S. presidential election.

Wueest said he observed a decrease in the creation of new content by fake accounts from 2017 to 2018 and a shift toward building massive followings that could be used as platforms for divisive messages in 2020.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, said social media remains a primary avenue for foreign actors to influence U.S. elections, and the bureau is working with companies on the problem.

“What has continued virtually unabated and just intensifies during the election cycles is this malign foreign influence campaign, especially using social media,” Wray said. “That continues, and we’re gearing up for it to continue and grow again for 2020.”

Apparently the U.S. was successful in keeping the Russians from interrupting the 2018 midterms. You knew that already, right? U.S. Cyber Command launched a cyberattack on the Russian troll farm, knocking out their internet access on election day, shutting them down for a few days.

The American military took down a Russian troll farm last Election Day in a cyberattack that continued for several days after the vote, part of what United States officials have said is a persistent campaign to block and deter interference in American democracy.

The operation was intended to prevent the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, Russia, from spreading propaganda or disinformation aimed at undermining confidence in the midterm vote or the results of the election, American officials said.

The operation was aimed at taking the Internet Research Agency off line for several days, from Election Day until the results were certified by local officials.

...Intelligence agencies had assessed that the Russian troll farms that create and spread disinformation in the United States and Europe were likely to step up their disinformation activity on the day of the vote and while votes were being counted.

Officials said the Election Day operations were part of a larger campaign led by United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency to secure the midterm vote. Those operations began with a campaign of direct messages sent to Russian operatives who had created disinformation and propaganda aimed at sowing dissent and undermining confidence in American voting systems. Those direct messages were aimed at deterring the creators of propaganda.

...After the election, under another White House executive order, the director of national intelligence conducted an analysis of foreign interference during the midterm election.

That report, which has not been made public, found that the Russians sought to interfere in the vote, not by trying to hack voting machines but by spreading disinformation. The report found that Russia used social media, fake personas and Moscow-controlled media to inflame opposite ideological sides with an aim of further polarizing the United States.

On Capitol Hill, intelligence committee officials declined to discuss the Election Day cyberoperation.

But after a hearing on the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, China and elsewhere, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said Russian efforts to interfere in elections were continuing.

“There is a prioritized part of the Russian agenda to not just interfere in our democracy but interfere in democracies in Europe,” Mr. Schiff said. “They are pushing their authoritarian model to undermine institutions that reinforce democracy.”

Which Trump Ally Is More Dangerous To America-- Vladimir Putin or Matt Bevin?

This is kind of a Part II of the Brexit post from earlier this evening. There are plenty of Democrats-- including many who I like and respect-- who don't believe that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was significant. I disagree, extremely so. I'm far from a Clinton supporter, but I feel absolutely certain that Trump would not be in the White House today had Putin not decided to make a big push to put him there. If you follow DWT, you probably know that I believe Russia did a lot more than fiddle around with social media to get Trump into office. But yesterday Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, penned an article for the WashingtonPost on a new report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, that shows the scale and sweep of the operation the Russians used to saddle the U.S. with the world's most incompetent and incapable leader. The Russians, the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee asserts, "used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests" to get the bad joke of a failed businessman and penny-ante entertainer into the Oval Office and the Russians have continued working as a divisive force backing Trump's worst tendencies to divide Americans and turn us against each other.

The report "offers new details of how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found."

The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November’s midterm elections.

“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party-- and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”

...The new report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House. Democrats and Republicans on the panel previously studied the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 finding that Moscow aimed to assist Trump, and in July, they said investigators had come to the correct conclusion. Despite their work, some Republicans on Capitol Hill continue to doubt the nature of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.

The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups-- Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans-- got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms-- Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest-- that have received relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.

The authors, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted the companies' “belated and uncoordinated response” to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, criticized the companies for not sharing more with investigators. The authors urged that in the future they provide data in “meaningful and constructive” ways.

Facebook, for example, provided the Senate with copies of posts from 81 Facebook pages and information on 76 accounts used to purchase ads, but it did not share posts from other user accounts run by the IRA, the report says. Twitter, meanwhile, has made it challenging for outside researchers to collect and analyze data on its platform through its public feed, the researchers said.

Google submitted information in an especially difficult way for the researchers to handle, providing content such as YouTube videos but not the related data that would have allowed a full analysis. The YouTube information was so hard for the researchers to study, they wrote, that they instead tracked the links to its videos from other sites in hopes of better understanding YouTube’s role in the Russian effort.

...Facebook, Google and Twitter first disclosed last year that they had identified Russian meddling on their sites. Critics previously said it took too long to come to an understanding of the disinformation campaign, and that Russian strategies have likely shifted since then. The companies have awakened to the threat-- Facebook, in particular, created a “war room” this fall to combat interference around elections-- but none has revealed interference around the midterm elections last month on the scale of what happened in 2016.

The report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses to political discourse within nations and among them, warning that companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and elsewhere are now threats to democracy.

“Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the report said.

Researchers also noted that the data includes evidence of sloppiness by the Russians that could have led to earlier detection, including the use of Russia’s currency, the ruble, to buy ads and Russian phone numbers for contact information. The operatives also left behind technical signatures in computerized logs, such as Internet addresses in St. Petersburg, where the IRA was based.

Many of the findings track, in general terms, work by other researchers and testimony previously provided by the companies to lawmakers investigating the Russian effort. But the fuller data available to the researchers offered new insights on many aspects of the Russian campaign.

The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 on Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.

The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube and Instagram before bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.

Facebook was particularly effective at targeting conservatives and African Americans, the report found. More than 99 percent of all engagement-- meaning likes, shares and other reactions-- came from 20 Facebook pages controlled by the IRA, including “Being Patriotic,” “Heart of Texas,” “Blacktivist” and “Army of Jesus.”

Together, the 20 most popular pages generated 39 million likes, 31 million shares, 5.4 million reactions and 3.4 million comments. Company officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million more on Instagram.

The Russians operated 133 accounts on Instagram, a photo-sharing subsidiary of Facebook, that focused mainly on race, ethnicity or other forms of personal identity. The most successful Instagram posts targeted African American cultural issues and black pride and were not explicitly political.

While the overall intensity of posting across platforms grew year by year-- with a particular spike during the six months after Election Day 2016-- this growth was particularly pronounced on Instagram, which went from roughly 2,600 posts a month in 2016 to nearly 6,000 in 2017, when the accounts were shut down. Across all three years covered by the report, Russian Instagram posts generated 185 million likes and 4 million user comments.

Even though the researchers struggled to interpret the YouTube data submitted by Google, they were able to track the links from other sites to YouTube, offering a “proxy” for understanding the role play by the video platform.

“The proxy is imperfect,” the researchers wrote, “but the IRA’s heavy use of links to YouTube videos leaves little doubt of the IRA’s interest in leveraging Google’s video platform to target and manipulate US audiences.”

The use of YouTube, like the other platforms, appears to have grown after Trump’s election. Twitter links to YouTube videos grew by 84 percent in the six months after the election, the data showed.

The Russians shrewdly worked across platforms as they refined their tactics aimed at particular groups, posting links across accounts and sites to bolster the influence operation’s success on each, the report shows.

“Black Matters US” had accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and PayPal, according to the researchers. By linking posts across these platforms, the Russian operatives were able to solicit donations, organize real-world protests and rallies, and direct online traffic to a website that the Russians controlled.

The researchers found that when Facebook shut down the page in August 2016, a new one called “BM” soon appeared with more cultural and fewer political posts. It tracked closely to the content on the @blackmatterus Instagram account.

The report found operatives also began buying Google ads to promote the “BlackMatters US” website with provocative messages such as, “Cops kill black kids. Are you sure that your son won’t be the next?” The related Twitter account, meanwhile, complained about the suspension of the Facebook page, accusing the tech company of “supporting white supremacy.”

Of course, you can argue that we hardly need Russians to sew discord when we have Republicans like Matt Bevin, the governor of Kentucky, eager to do it himself. Speaking at the extreme right Values Voter Summit in Washington Saturday, Bevin's extolled physical violence against liberals degrading society. He told a largely neo-fascist audience that "America is worth fighting for ideologically. I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically. But that may, in fact, be the case."

If you think lame duck governors in states like Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin are up to no good by shitting the beds in their states' governor's mansions before their Democratic successors moved in, Bevin went a step further-- urging far right Republicans like himself to be ready to shed blood if Democrats elect someone like Hillary. Insinuating that the neo-Nazi scum at the conference are patriots, he appropriated a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants... Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we, through our apathy and our indifference, have given away. Don’t let it happen." Matt's speech, in the original German:

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!
SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt.
Kam'raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen,
Marschier'n im Geist in unser'n Reihen mit.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen.
Die Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!
Es schau'n aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen.
Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an!

Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen!
Zum Kampfe steh'n wir alle schon bereit!
Schon flattern Hitlerfahnen über allen Straßen.
Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!
SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt.
Kam'raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen,
Marschier'n im Geist in unser'n Reihen mit.