Making the Case: Without Russia, Trump Wouldn’t Have Won

A piece in the Washington Post makes an argument that might drive the malignant narcissist in the White House to have an aneurysm or heart attack were it to come to his attention (I won't speculate if that would be a good thing or a bad thing - readers can draw their own conclusions).  The thrust of the column?  The bottom line is that but for the actions of Russian hackers and Russian derived fake news, Donald Trump would not be in the White House. For an individual who can never admit his own failings and whose ego is insatiable, the premise of the article goes to his apparent core as an egomaniac and insufferable liar and braggart.  Yet, if you read the full piece it is hard to refute - notwithstanding GOP talking points, lies and attacks on "sour grapes" Democrats - that it is probably correct in its conclusion.  But for Putin/Russia, Clinton would now be in the White House and the ongoing national nightmare would not be happening.  Here are column highlights:

President Trump is willing, under duress, to briefly and begrudgingly admit that Russian “meddling” took place in 2016 before reverting to calling it a “big hoax.” But he always maintains that the plot against America had no impact; he describes it as a “Democrat excuse for losing the ’16 Election.” Faithfully echoing the president, other Republicans, such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), say it’s “clear” that the Russian interference “didn’t have a material effect on our elections.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even claims that the U.S. intelligence community reached that conclusion.

Not quite. Here is the intelligence community’s assessment, partially declassified in January 2017: “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.” When then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo claimed last fall that “the intelligence community's assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” his own agency rebuked him.

[O]utside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state. [W]e know its propaganda reached 126 million people via Facebook alone. A BuzzFeed analysis found that fake news stories on Facebook generated more social engagement in the last three months of the campaign than did legitimate articles: The “20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.” Almost all of this “fake news” was either started or spread by Russian bots, . . . Elsewhere on social media, tens of thousands of Russian bots spread pro-Trump messages on Twitter, which has already notified about 1.4 million users that they interacted with Russian accounts. The Russian disinformation, propagating hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison and #MAGA, reflected what the Trump campaign was saying. Russia also hacked voting systems in at least 39 states, and while there is no evidence that vote tallies were changed, Russians may have used the stolen data to target their social media or shared the results with the Trump campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that “in a small number of states” the Russians may have been able to “alter or delete voter registration data,” potentially disenfranchising Clinton voters. And then there was the crucial impact of the Russian hacks of Democratic documents disseminated primarily by WikiLeaks.

The first tranche of stolen documents — more than 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments — was strategically released on July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic convention. The second tranche of stolen documents was released on Oct. 7, just 29 minutes after The Post reported on the “Access Hollywood” videotape in which Trump is heard boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. A third release of stolen emails, on Oct. 11, revealed that Democratic operative Donna Brazile, while working at CNN, had provided debate questions to Clinton during the primaries and that senior Democratic operatives, who were themselves Catholics, had exchanged emails disparaging Republicans who cherry-picked their faith for political gain. This fueled Trump’s narrative that the election was “rigged” and that the “Clinton team” was, as he said, “viciously attacking Catholics and Evangelicals.” The latter charge, unfair as it was, proved especially important in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — swing states with lots of Catholic voters. Now, by contrast, Trump and his apologists pretend that the Russian intervention — including the WikiLeaks revelations — was no big deal. That beggars belief. Even if the Russians had failed, they still attacked our democracy. Yet they didn’t fail: Trump won. Watts concludes: “Without the Russian influence effort, I believe Trump would not have even been within striking distance of Clinton on Election Day.” That is the inconvenient truth the Putin Republicans won’t admit.

We are truly living a real life version of a spy thriller where the White House has been co-opted by a hostile foreign power.

Trump Campaign Company Contacted WikiLeaks for Documents Stolen by Russia

Yet another shoe seems to be dropped that further validates the allegations that the Trump/Pence campaign engaged in efforts to collude with Russia in order to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Naturally, as CNN and other real news outlets are reporting on Wikileak's confirmation that the Trump/Pence campaign made contact seeking documents stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, Der Trumpenführer is launching into full obfuscation mode and is being aided and abetted by the fake right wing "news" sites who are working desperately to concoct faux counter scandals against Hillary Clinton. It goes without saying that the Fox News viewing, racist and Christofascist base of Trump supporters are eating up the lies flowing from Breitbart and Fox News even as Fox News is ignoring damning new evidence against the Trump/Pence, et al.   It is sadly, all part of the right wing cover up effort for Der Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights on the real news from CNN:

The head of a data analytics company linked to the Trump campaign contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 regarding thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails kept on a private server while she was secretary of state, according to four sources familiar with the outreach.

Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to several people including top Donald Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, relaying that he had emailed Assange seeking access to emails from Clinton's private server to turn them into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee, two of the sources said.

Cambridge Analytica was hired in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation, which was led by Brad Parscale and overseen by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
 The attempt at collaboration raises fresh questions about the willingness of people associated with the Trump campaign to work with Wikileaks for political gain. The site, which publishes leaked documents, released hacked emails in July from the Democratic National Committee and in October from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. US intelligence has said the Podesta emails were stolen by Russia and handed over to WikiLeaks through an intermediary.

News of the email exchange comes amid federal investigations into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Parscale, the Trump campaign's digital director, was interviewed Tuesday by the House intelligence committee as part of that inquiry.

Assange confirmed the exchange in a post on Twitter Wednesday. "I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] . . . .

Nix and Cambridge Analytica, which is backed by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, did not respond to requests for comment. After the Daily Beast report published, the Trump campaign issued a statement by campaign executive director Michael S. Glassner: "Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics. Leading into the election, the RNC had invested in the most sophisticated data targeting program in modern American in history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. . . . . Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false."
 The statement does not address contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks. . . . . Parscale downplayed the campaign's connections to Cambridge Analytica, one of the sources said.

He began working for the Trump Organization's digital team in early 2015 before Trump officially announced his plan to run for office. Parscale and employees from his firm, Giles-Parscale, incorporated some staffers from Cambridge Analytica into their data operation.
 In July 2016, Trump called on Russia to find the emails. - "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next," Trump said in a news conference.

News of the outreach comes after an earlier disclosure that a Republican operative, Peter W. Smith, had been on the hunt for Clinton's missing emails during the campaign. Smith spoke to The Wall Street Journal in May, saying he and the colleagues he enlisted found five groups of hackers claiming to have 33,000 deleted emails from the private server Clinton used during her tenure as secretary of state. He [Smith] said that he determined two of the groups were Russian. "We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government," Smith told the Journal. Smith was found dead of an apparent suicide weeks after the interview. Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, was vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica until he stepped down to run the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to The New York Times. The Mercers are investors in Breitbart News, the far-right site where Bannon served as executive chairman before he ran Trump's campaign.

Political strategist Roger Stone, Trump's long-time confidant, had boasted during the campaign of knowledge about upcoming Wikileaks publication of damaging documents, at one point telling the Boston Herald Radio that he expected "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. 

Given that more than three  quarters of Trump's claims and statements have been documented to be untrue - lies in common parlance - I put little credence on anything Trump and his sycophants say to deflect attention from their underhanded dealings and possible treason.    

FBI, CIA and Homeland Security Investigating Russian Efforts Influence Election

Never in my lifetime, even growing up at the height of the Cold War, do I recall a time when Russian attempts to influence a U.S. presidential election was viewed as a possibility or a real fear.  Welcome to 2016 when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, despite disingenuous denials, seems set on working to either throw the November election to fellow authoritarian, Donald Trump, or to sow distrust in the election results.  The mere fact that Putin favors Trump ought to send sane Americans running into the waiting arms of Hillary Clinton. A piece n the Washington Post looks at the investigations underway to thwart Russian efforts.  Here are excerpts:

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said.

The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia’s ability to spread disinformation.

The effort to better understand Russia’s covert influence operations is being spearheaded by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. “This is something of concern for the DNI,” said Charles Allen, a former longtime CIA officer who has been briefed on some of these issues. “It is being addressed.”

A Russian influence operation in the United States “is something we’re looking very closely at,” said one senior intelligence official who, as others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Officials are also examining potential disruptions to the election process, and the FBI has alerted state and local officials to potential cyberthreats.

The official cautioned that the intelligence community is not saying it has “definitive proof” of such tampering, or any Russian plans to do so. “But even the hint of something impacting the security of our election system would be of significant concern,” the official said. “It’s the key to our democracy, that people have confidence in the election system.”

[T]he issue has “moved up as a priority” for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency.

After Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) ended a secure, 30-minute phone briefing by a top intelligence official recently, he was “deeply shaken,” according to an aide who was with Reid when he left the secure room at the FBI’s Las Vegas headquarters.

The Russian government hack of the Democratic National Committee,disclosed by the DNC in June but not yet officially ascribed by the U.S. government to Russia, and the subsequent release of 20,000 hacked DNC emails by WikiLeaks, shocked officials. Cyber-analysts traced its digital markings to known Russian government hacking groups.

Members of both parties are urging the president to take the Russians to task publicly.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in a statement urged President Obama to publicly name Russia as responsible for the DNC hack and apparent meddling in the electoral process. “Free and legitimate elections are non-negotiable. It’s clear that Russia thinks the reward outweighs any consequences,” he wrote. “That calculation must be changed. . . . This is going to take a cross-domain response — diplomatic, political and economic — that turns the screws on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and his cronies.”

The Department of Homeland Security has offered local and state election officials help to prevent or deal with Election Day cyber-disruptions, including vulnerability scans, regular actionable information and alerts, and access to other tools for improving cybersecurity at the local level. It will also have a cyber-team ready at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center to alert jurisdictions if attacks are detected.

Russia has been in the vanguard of a growing global movement to use propaganda on the Internet to influence people and political events, especially since the political revolt in Ukraine, the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the imposition of sanctions on Russia by the United States and the European Union.

The Baltic states, Georgia and Ukraine have been subject to Russian cyberattacks and other hidden influence operations meant to disrupt those countries, officials said.

Putin and Russia - Wilileaks' Main Beneficiary

With Russian hackers attacking news outlets, the Democrat party and perhaps now American voting systems, one seeming ally is Wikileaks and its egotistical founder Julian Assange who remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London as he avoids possible prosecution for rape in Sweden.  A length pieces in the New York Times looks at Assange and his apparent alliance with Russia and Vladimir Putin and a mutual goal of harming America and western democracies in general.  The hypocrisy of Assange displayed by his actions and those of Wikileaks versus his supposed goals is stunning, especially in the way Assange ignores the murder of Putin's political opponents.  Any respect I might have had for Wikileaks is gone and I now view Assange as a dangerous, dangerous and perhaps delusional individual.  Here are some story highlights:

From the cramped confines of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum four years ago amid a legal imbroglio, Mr. Assange proffered a vision of America as superbully: a nation that has achieved imperial power by proclaiming allegiance to principles of human rights while deploying its military-intelligence apparatus in “pincer” formation to “push” countries into doing its bidding, and punishing people like him who dare to speak the truth.

Notably absent from Mr. Assange’s analysis, however, was criticism of another world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly lived up to WikiLeaks’ ideal of transparency. Mr. Putin’s government has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control over the news media and internet. If Mr. Assange appreciated the irony of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today, the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not readily apparent.
Now, Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.

In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to undermine her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Assange — who has been openly critical of Mrs. Clinton — has promised further disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a “pristine” set of cyberspying codes.

That raises a question: Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what precisely is the relationship between Mr. Assange and Mr. Putin’s Kremlin?

Those questions are made all the more pointed by Russia’s prominent place in the American presidential election campaign. Mr. Putin, who clashed repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, has publicly praised Mr. Trump, who has returned the compliment, calling for closer ties to Russia and speaking favorably of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

Mr. Assange said he was motivated by a desire to use “cryptography to protect human rights,” and would focus on authoritarian governments like Russia’s.  But a New York Times examination of WikiLeaks’ activities during Mr. Assange’s years in exile found a different pattern: Whether by conviction, convenience or coincidence, WikiLeaks’ document releases, along with many of Mr. Assange’s statements, have often benefited Russia, at the expense of the West.

To Gavin MacFadyen, a WikiLeaks supporter who runs the Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of London, the question for Mr. Assange is not where the material comes from, but whether it is true and in the public interest. He noted that intelligence services had a long history of using news organizations to plant stories, and that Western news outlets often published “material that comes from the C.I.A. uncritically.”

Recent events, though, have left some transparency advocates wondering if WikiLeaks has lost its way. There is a big difference between publishing materials from a whistle-blower like Chelsea Manning — the soldier who gave WikiLeaks its war log and diplomatic cable scoops — and accepting information, even indirectly, from a foreign intelligence service seeking to advance its own powerful interests, said John Wonderlich, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group devoted to government transparency.

Others see Mr. Assange assuming an increasingly blinkered approach to the world that, coupled with his own secrecy, has left them disillusioned.

Another person who collaborated with WikiLeaks in the past added: “He views everything through the prism of how he’s treated. America and Hillary Clinton have caused him trouble, and Russia never has.”

The result has been a “one-dimensional confrontation with the U.S.A.,” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who before quitting WikiLeaks in 2010 was one of Mr. Assange’s closest partners, has said.

And the beneficiary of that confrontation, played out in a series of public statements by Mr. Assange and strategically timed document releases by WikiLeaks, has often been Mr. Putin.

Like Mr. Trump, who stood to gain from the Democratic Party leak, Mr. Assange supported Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and he has repeatedly gone after NATO — taking on two organizations that Mr. Putin would like nothing more than to defang or dismantle.

A Putin-Sponsored October Surprise?

The previous post looked at fears that Russian hackers might try to either steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump or at least try to seriously disrupt voting returns - Arizona is one state that they apparently have targeted.  The perhaps more serious concern is that bogus or re-written documents could be released - particularly with the help of pro-Putin Wikileaks - that would seek to damage Hillary Clinton and Democrats.  Russia has a track record of such activities in other countries, but never before in America.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the unsettling possibility that malicious efforts could strike American - and how the increasingly irresponsible media which seems to care only about sensationalism, could play right into Russia and Putin's hands. Here are column highlights:

The Russians have just given us an August glimpse of a potential October surprise.

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

Russian “dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case. But this type of cyberwar — email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a novel escalation. It’s tempting to wonder how differently the Cold War might have gone had there been cyber-hackers back then. 

But it’s clear that Russia’s disinformation wars are as active as ever. On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in 2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

So does this point to a Putin-sponsored October surprise?

Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

The hyper-competitive American media environment is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents, altering them, then releasing them as the original. If Putin’s hackers were to release such a doctored document smearing Clinton in, say, late October, it’s likely that competition would lead outlets to report on the hacked documents before they had a chance to see whether and how they were altered.

We don’t know what, if anything, Putin’s hackers have planned for this fall. But the doctored Soros documents could be a clue.

How the DNC Did Religious Liberty Right

One thing that became clear from the two national party conventions is that Democrats understand the concept of religious freedom envisioned by the Founders while in contrast the Republican view is more like one would have found under the Puritans in early Massachusetts or the Spanish Inquisition. Under the Republican view, only one religion is acceptable - i.e., conservative/fundamentalist Christianity - and it and its adherents should enjoy special rights.  Both parties' views were on open display at their respective conventions.  A piece in Slate looks at how the DNC got the concept right. Here are highlights:

Khizr Khan, a Muslim immigrant whose son was killed while serving in Iraq, brought the Democratic National Convention to tears and raucous applause on Thursday when he held up his pocket Constitution and admonished Donald Trump: “Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” Khan’s rebuke was, of course, a profoundly moving and very necessary rejoinder to Trump’s rampant Islamophobia. But that powerful moment, as well as Khan’s entire address, also revealed that after years of surrendering the issue to the GOP, Democrats have finally learned how to talk about and present a progressive vision of religious liberty.

Indeed, that very phrase—religious liberty—has become so freighted with discriminatory overtones that I hesitate to use it. The fight for “religious liberty” has come to dominate the Republican Party in recent years, through a series of campaigns that aim to promote prejudiced Christians’ freedom over everybody else’s. . . . We’ve even seen laws that, under the banner of religious freedom, give mental health counselors and medical doctors the right to refuse to treat gay and trans patients.

In a clever act of doublespeak, Republicans have branded these measures “religious liberty”—but, as a federal judge recently pointed out, they really amount of Christian supremacy. (Or, more accurately, conservative Christian supremacy.) This attempt to legally elevate certain Christian beliefs above all others flatly contradicts the spirit and letter of the First Amendment.

Khan’s address didn’t just throw this hypocrisy into stark relief; it demonstrated exactly how Democrats can seize true religious liberty as a winning issue for progressives. Consider Khan’s precise phrasing. “In this document,” he said, holding up his pocket Constitution, “look for the words liberty and equal protection of law.” Liberty and equality: Two constitutional guarantees that are intertwined and interdependent, each building on the other, each a critical component of freedom in a democracy. “Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?” Khan continued. “Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.”

An entire cemetery of soldiers—Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists—who devoted their lives to protecting a country that dispenses justice evenhandedly, with preference for none and tolerance for all. Khan might as well have been paraphrasing U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, who blocked Mississippi’s anti-LGBTQ “religious liberty” law on both Establishment Clause and Equal Protection grounds, holding that it violated both “the guarantee of religious neutrality and the promise of equal protection of the laws.” In America, Reeves explained, religious freedom does not, cannot mean limiting the freedom of those who don’t share your beliefs.

Muslims’ best hope for liberty lies in this preservation of equality—the continued insistence that the government can neither discriminate against certain religions (as Trump would) nor license certain religions to discriminate against others (as Mississippi would). That is the Constitution’s vision of liberty as well, and it is precisely how Democrats should explain their own conception of religious freedom.

Trump’s Call for Russia to Hack the U.S. Might Be a Felony

If it wasn't clear before now, it should be obvious that Donald Trump thinks he is above the law and above the moral code that most Americans live by.  He lies incessantly, he cheats and screws people over in business, and now he thinks he can invite a foreign enemy to engage in cyber attacks on America, both to hurt his political rival and to keep himself in the news cycle - something his narcissism demands.  However, as a piece in The Daily Beast notes, Trump may have just committed a felony by inviting such a cyber attack.  The man is a menace and must be defeated in November. Here are article highlights:

Did Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump just call for a felony to be committed? On Wednesday, he urged a foreign government to hack an American citizen and release personal emails.

“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department, Trump said in a lengthy press conference in Doral, Fla. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next. Yes, sir.”

Trump himself has had financial interests in Russia.  He has also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and has said that if Russia were to invade NATO members, the United States might not come to their defense. 

Trump’s incendiary comments came on the heels of the theft and leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee, an operation that, as The Daily Beast first reported, U.S. official believe was carried out by the Russian government and may have been designed to help Trump in the polls.

Trump appeared to urge a U.S. adversary suspected of criminal activity essentially to go further and attack his opponent. The comments drew ire from  across the national security community.

Trump allies were at pains to explain the nominee’s plea for Russian intervention. Newt Gingrich said Trump had simply made a  “joke.”

A top Clinton adviser quickly condemned Trump’s comments. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” aide Jake Sullivan said in a statement. “That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, added that the call for illegal hacking “shows staggeringly poor judgment even for him.” 

“With so many unanswered questions about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin, it’s imperative that Trump immediately release his tax returns and disclose his financial ties to Russia,” Schiff added.

“It’s probably the most egregiously stupid thing I’ve ever heard a party nominee say ever,” said Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in national security law. 

Moss believes that there’s a legal case to charge Trump for his comments, because he was calling for Russia to take “imminent lawless action,” which is speech not covered by the First Amendment.

Moss added that Trump could theoretically be charged as a conspirator under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
“You could argue what Trump was urging Russia to do was hack Hillary’s server and release the contents to the media—conspiring with them to hack into a private server and release confidential information to the public,” Moss explained.

However, it’s unlikely, Moss continued, because the Department of Justice and FBI are unlikely to want to be “diving into a political nightmare.”

Now that Trump is the GOP presidential nominee, he will be eligible to receive classified intelligence briefings, something that top intelligence officials are sweating over, given Trump’s penchant for talking extemporaneously.

Not knowing his intent, such statements could limit the amount of classified information U.S. officials give to Trump, which he is entitled to as a presidential nominee, an official familiar with the process explained to The Daily Beast. Trump and Clinton will reportedly begin receiving classified briefings after this week’s convention.

As Trump called for Russia to infiltrate Clinton’s servers, some of his fellow Republicans were torching the Kremlin for the DNC hack.

"Every American, without regard to political party, must face this grim reality: While the Obama Administration idles with empty platitudes and fantasy resets, Mr. Putin’s Soviet-style aggression has escalated to levels that were unimaginable just a week ago,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said in a statement. “America is digitally exposed. The United States must take serious offensive and defensive actions now. Russia must face real consequences."

Trump’s cozyness with Putin and his advisers’ ties to Russia highlight a growing chasm within the Republican Party, which for the last 35 years has lionized Ronald Reagan’ as the ultimate cold warrior who stood up to Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Skepticism of authoritarian governments—and Putin in particular—has been a key feature among conservative foreign policy thinkers. Trump appears to be trying to drag the party toward Putin almost on his own, and traditional forces are pulling back.

The party of Lincoln and Reagan is dead.  Something nightmarish has replaced it.

Intelligence Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked DNC

The consensus is growing that Russian government agencies were behind the hacking of the Democrat National Committee and that the Wilileaks motive for releasing the stolen e-mails and data was to harm Hillary Clinton's campaign and cause disarray among Democrats.  While officials, including President Obama are dancing around the issue and reluctant to call Russia and Vladimir Putin out, the evidence that the Russian military intelligence service was involved ought to be setting off alarm bells with every thinking American.  One outlet suggests that the hackers may even have re-written some of the leaked documents.  The obvious beneficiary: Donald Trump.  A man documented to have a dependence on Russian funding for his real estate empire and who has intimated that he believe NATO should be weakened or disbanded - a dream come true for Putin and his expansionist agenda.  Connect the dots and the possibilities are beyond disturbing.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times: 

American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service.

The assessment by the intelligence community of Russian involvement in the D.N.C. hacking, which largely echoes the findings of private cybersecurity firms that have examined the electronic fingerprints left by the intruders, leaves President Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the hacking.

Such a public accusation could result in a further deterioration of the already icy relationship between Washington and Moscow, at a moment when the administration is trying to reach an accord with Mr. Putin on a cease-fire in Syria and on other issues. It could also doom any effort to reach some kind of agreement about acceptable behavior in cyberspace, of the kind the United States has been discussing with China.

In an interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC News on Tuesday, President Obama stopped short of accusing the Russian agencies from seeking to manipulate the election but said, “Anything’s possible.”  He noted that “on a regular basis, they try to influence elections in Europe.”

Asked on Tuesday at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia whether “there’s more to the Trump/Russian relationship that hasn’t come out,” John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said, “Well, he certainly has a bromance with Mr. Putin, so I don’t know.”

Mr. Podesta said that while Russia had a “history” of interfering in democratic elections in Europe, it would be “unprecedented in the United States.”

Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.

The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.

In an essay published on Lawfare, a blog that often deals with cyberissues, Susan Hennessey, previously a lawyer for the National Security Agency, called the published evidence about Russian involvement “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected when a sophisticated nation-state is involved.”

Mr. Assange’s threat to release documents, she wrote, “means, put simply, that actors outside the U.S. are using criminal means to influence the outcome of a US election. That’s a problem.”

National Security Officers Are Worried About Trump's Ties to Russia

The 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, the goal being the overthrow of the United States' constitutional government.  Now, we find ourselves face with a presidential candidate with strong financial ties to Russian oligarchs and Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin who voluntarily may be willing to sabotage our government for personal enrichment and satisfaction of his insatiable ego.   As more news outlets fortunately are picking up on the Russian hacking of the DNC and Trump's dependence on Russian financing since he has been cutoff by American banks, some in the national intelligence community are fearful of Trump gaining access to intelligence materials, especially those relating to Russia and Putin's never ending machinations and intrigue.   Both Huffington Post and The Daily Beast looks at the issue and the FBI's view that Wikileaks effort was facilitated by Russia and may have been aimed at electing Donald Trump in November.  First these highlights from The Daily Beast:

The FBI suspects that Russian government hackers breached the networks of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were posted to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks on Friday. It’s an operation that several U.S. officials now suspect was a deliberate attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the breach.

The theory that Moscow orchestrated the leaks to help Trump, who has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and practically called for the end of NATO, is fast gaining currency within the Obama administration because of the timing of the leaks and Trump’s own connections to the Russian government, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and developing quickly.

Current and former U.S. officials drew analogies to so-called “active measures campaigns,” or state-sponsored operations designed for political effects.

“The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign,” David Shedd, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast. Shedd said that additional leaks were likely, echoing an opinion expressed by U.S. officials and experts who said that the release of emails on Friday may just be an opening salvo.

Officials also noted Trump’s own connections to the Russian government. . . . One of Trump’s top national security advisers, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, sat with Putin at a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kremlin-backed media network RT and was paid to give a speech at the event; Flynn later re-tweeted an anti-Semitic message that called into question any Kremlin-Trump link. Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, recently denounced America’s “often-hypocritical focus on democratization” while in Moscow. And last week, Trump said that he might not come to the aid of U.S. NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression unless they paid what he thinks they owe for Europe’s common defense.

Officials also thought it was telling that the emails were given to WikiLeaks, which is perceived as being hostile to the U.S. government. “This wasn’t surprising to us,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation. 

"If the hack is linked to Russian actors, it would not be the first time cyber intrusions linked to the Kremlin and its supporters have sought to influence the political process in other countries,” Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement. “Given Donald Trump’s well known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the DNC and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party." 

If the worse suspicions prove true, the irony will be that Trump is playing right wing nutcases' xenophobia even as he may be preparing to sell out America and European allies.  Never forget that with Trump the ONLY thing that matters is himself and his ego and self-enrichment.  

Huffington Post has these additional highlights:

Members of the intelligence community are worried that Donald Trump ― who has deep ties to Russia and is apparently the preferred presidential candidate of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin ― could have access to highly classified national security briefings as early as Friday.

Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will begin receiving the briefings after the Democratic National Convention ends on Thursday, ABC News reported Monday. As the Republican nominee for president, Trump is now among a handful of people who do not hold a security clearance but have the potential to get these briefings. But he also has closer ties to a foreign government than perhaps any presidential candidate in recent history.

Trump has called for following Moscow’s lead on various global issues and questioned whether it’s necessary for the U.S. to always defend other members of NATO, the alliance created during the Cold War to protect American partners from an expansionist Soviet Union. His rhetoric about foreign policy neatly matches the message coming out of Moscow: that America has little need for its long-time partners in Europe ― particularly in NATO ― or elsewhere, and that the U.S. should have less influence internationally. Trump has extensive business and financial ties to Russia.

“Never have we had a candidate so tied to a foreign power, especially one that is so hostile to the U.S. in many ways, and one that is actively messing with our election,” said one former senior intelligence official. “Many [in the intelligence community] don’t care about U.S. politics and pride themselves on being nonpartisan, but the ties to Russia are deeply disturbing.”

“The notion that the Trump team could request intel briefings on Russia when they clearly have close ties is horrifying, especially after the DNC leak,” said the former intelligence official.

Be very, very afraid.

Is Russia Working to Elect Donald Trump?

READER WARNING:  This is a long but very important post.  The mainstream new media is jumping all over the release of hacked DNC e-mails that have caused a bit of a firestorm and lead to the resignation of the DNC Chairwoman, Debbie -Wasserman-Shultz.   What they have ignored for the most part is how the e-mails may have come to be released: by Russian hackers perhaps seeking to aid in electing Donald Trump in November.  Why?  Because Trump seemingly is pushing the GOP toward more pro-Russia stances and Trump has even suggested weakening NATO - a dream come true for Vladimir Putin.  Vanity Fair looks at the e-mail story.  Another story - in my view, a much more important story - from Talking Points Memo looks at Donald Trump's financial ties to Vladimir Putin's henchmen.  I strongly urge readers to read the full Talking Points Memo piece.  Here are excerpts that should be VERY disturbing to all Americans:

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

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

I'll list off some facts.

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

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

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

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

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan.  Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."  Sounds completely legit. 

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

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

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

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

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform.  . . . . Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence.

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

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

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

As for the e-mail release, here are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager thinks last week’s hack and subsequent document dump of Democratic National Committee e-mails is coming from a controversial source. Robby Mook told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he believes Russian hackers perpetrated the leak to help Donald Trump win the election in November.

WikiLeaks released some 19,252 e-mails and 8,034 attachments that were stolen from the D.N.C. Revealed in the cache: that some D.N.C. operatives mocked supporters of Clinton’s primary challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, that a Politico reporter sent a pre-publication draft of his article to the D.N.C. for review, and that Debbie Wasserman Schultz once asked for an inordinate number of tickets to the hit Broadway show Hamilton.

Mook’s claim that the hack was carried out by Russian operatives isn’t plucked out of thin air. The D.N.C. has had its files attacked by Russian hackers before. CNN reports that two “Russian intelligence-linked cyberattack groups” were in the D.N.C.’s networks. A Russian hacker who goes by the moniker “Guccifer 2.0” has claimed responsibility for the hack. Mook says this comes after the new Republican platform was announced, changes to which made it “more pro-Russian.”

Mook’s public stance, however, is an interesting move from the Clinton campaign. Painting the D.N.C. hack as a project of Vladimir Putin shifts the narrative away from the controversies contained within the hack itself. Instead of headlines about the suggestion that the D.N.C. was behind Clinton from the get-go, the story becomes about Republicans forming ties with an increasingly aggressive Russia.

Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, highlighted another troubling connection between Trump and the Kremlin. In a post on his editor’s blog, Marshall delineates the evidence that suggests Trump “appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin.” Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, also has ties to pro-Russian leaders. He lobbied for them. It’s quite damning, and worth a read.