Politics Mueller indicts 13 Russian nationals for US election meddling

Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/n...-enthusiastic-coverage-russian-sponsored-anti

CNN and MSNBC Helped Russia Sow Discord by Promoting Fake Anti-Trump Rally

One of the revelations in Friday’s indictment handed down by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was that alleged Russian attempts to sow disunity in 2016 included the organization of both pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City on the Saturday after Election Day.

A check of their November 12 coverage showed both CNN and MSNBC gave enthusiastic coverage to the Russian-organized anti-Trump rally that day, with live reports every hour. Correspondents celebrated the idea that it was “a love rally,” and repeated the marchers’ anti-Trump mantras, such as: “We reject the President-elect.”

While the two liberal anti-Trump networks offered heavy coverage of the anti-Trump rally throughout the day, a check of coverage between noon and 5:00 p.m. Eastern found that the Fox News Channel offered only a short re-cap (66 seconds) at the start of their 4:00 p.m. Eastern hour.

:lol:
 
http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/19/michael-moore-russian-anti-trump-rally/

Michael Moore Participated In Russia-Sponsored Anti-Trump Rally

Progressive director Michael Moore participated in an anti-Trump protest in New York that was organized by Russians, according to information released Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein announced indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller Friday against 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election, highlighting how the Russians used social media to stir up strife and anger on social media using memes and unwitting Americans to do their bidding. One Russia-sponsored event was a protest of then President-Elect Donald Trump on Nov. 12, 2016, called “Trump is NOT my President,” and it involved Moore.

:lol:
 
The smoking gun!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...wyer-is-charged-with-role-in-u-s-russia-probe


Mueller Charges Lawyer With Lying in Russia Probe
An attorney who worked for a prominent law firm was charged with making false statements to federal authorities as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

Alex Van Der Zwaan was charged Feb. 16 in federal court in Washington with lying to investigators about conversations related to a report he helped prepare on the trial of a Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. Van Der Zwaan was charged with a criminal information, which typically precedes a guilty plea.
 
The whole Russia thing ultimately is the establishment refusing to acknowledge their agenda was soundly rejected in a democratic (small d) election (and many elections, several different years).

"It wasn't really you, it was those clever Russians who duped everyone and forged all those e-mails that showed your candidate and party machine's true operation."
 
Denny Crane said:
http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/19/michael-moore-russian-anti-trump-rally/

Michael Moore Participated In Russia-Sponsored Anti-Trump Rally

Progressive director Michael Moore participated in an anti-Trump protest in New York that was organized by Russians, according to information released Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein announced indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller Friday against 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election, highlighting how the Russians used social media to stir up strife and anger on social media using memes and unwitting Americans to do their bidding. One Russia-sponsored event was a protest of then President-Elect Donald Trump on Nov. 12, 2016, called “Trump is NOT my President,” and it involved Moore.

:lol:
Click to expand...

Oh man! If this whole thing resulted in the indictment of Michael Moore, all could be forgiven of the assistant AG! Or at least over looked here.
He,he!:party:
 
Denny Crane said:
The smoking gun!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...wyer-is-charged-with-role-in-u-s-russia-probe


Mueller Charges Lawyer With Lying in Russia Probe
An attorney who worked for a prominent law firm was charged with making false statements to federal authorities as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

Alex Van Der Zwaan was charged Feb. 16 in federal court in Washington with lying to investigators about conversations related to a report he helped prepare on the trial of a Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. Van Der Zwaan was charged with a criminal information, which typically precedes a guilty plea.
Click to expand...

Actually this is a pretty fascinating indictment & backstory.

barfo
 
MarAzul said:
Oh man! If this whole thing resulted in the indictment of Michael Moore, all could be forgiven of the assistant AG! Or at least over looked here.
He,he!:party:
Click to expand...

Moore participated in an anti-Trump rally created by these Russians. But wait, these Russians were pro-Trump.

Kinda blows holes in the Trump/Russia/Collusion conspiracy theory.
 
Not to make it about Clinton, but about Ukraine. I've not been bashing Mueller are republicans do. If he is as honorable as I expect, he should be following the Ukrainian links as well.

BTW, what's up with Tony Podesta these days? Not a peep in the media about him since he resigned from his giant lobbying firm. He was buds with Manafort and involved in the very same deals.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-bl...lintons-ukrainian-connection-a-question-worth
Hillary Clinton's Ukrainian connection a question worth exploring

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/17/hillary-clinton-ukraine-collusion-story-in-fake-ne/
Beyond the fake news, a real scandal of Clinton collusion with Ukraine

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/16/ukraine-andrei-derkach-clinton-investigation-241704
Ukrainian MP seeks probe of Ukraine-Clinton ties
 
Liberals loved Judicial Watch when they went after W administration and Cheney's energy task force and then later went after Jack Abramoff.

Partisan driven viewpoint aside, these guys have a LOT of experience suing the government to get access to information the government would otherwise love to keep hidden.

http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/374675-what-is-the-fbi-hiding-in-its-war-to-protect-comey

What is the FBI hiding in its war to protect Comey?

As the James Comey saga continues to unfold, the James Comey legend continues to unravel. The more we learn about his involvement in the deep state’s illicit targeting of President Trump, the more reason the American people have to question both his motives and his management as director of the FBI, the now-disgraced agency he headed before Trump fired him on May 16, 2017. Comey has left a trail of suspicious activities in his wake.

Comey now looms large over a burgeoning constitutional crisis that could soon overshadow Watergate at its worst. To deepen the crisis even further, it now appears some of Comey’s former FBI and Justice Department colleagues continue to protect him from accountability.

Three suspicious activities stand out, all intertwined: The so-called Comey Memos, Comey’s controversial testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee and Comey’s book deal.

After Comey was fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, he arranged to give the New York Times a Feb. 14, 2017 memorandum he had written about a one-on-one conversation with Trump regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The New York Times published a report about the memo on May 16, 2017. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed the following day.
On June 8, 2017, Comey testified under oath before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where he stated he authored as many as nine such memos. Regarding the Flynn memo, Comey admitted: “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter [for The New York Times]. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”

Comey also testified about President Trump’s firing of him, and he detailed multiple conversations with President Trump, during which Comey confirmed he told President Trump three times that he was not a target of investigation. Judicial Watch is pursuing numerous FOIA lawsuits relating to Comey’s memoranda and FBI exit records as well a lawsuit for Justice Department communications about Comey’s Senate testimony. The American people deserve to know what, if any, complicity his former colleagues had in drafting that testimony and/or in engineering the appointment of Robert Mueller.

The day before Comey’s testimony, Fox News reported: “A source close to James Comey tells Fox News the former FBI director’s Senate testimony has been ‘closely coordinated’ with Robert Mueller…”. Comey may have violated the law in leaking his official FBI memos to the media, and it would be a scandal if Comey coordinated his Senate testimony with Mr. Mueller’s special counsel office.

That we have had to sue in federal court to discover the truth speaks volumes. The FBI has built a protective stonewall around Comey by refusing to release the Comey Memos and refusing to disclose records of communications between the FBI and Comey prior to and regarding Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intel Committee.

Since his forced departure from the FBI, Comey signed a book deal in August 2017, set for publication in April 2018, for which he reportedly received an advance in excess of $2 million. Given the fact that the FBI appears to be letting Comey get away with stealing and leaking official government documents and colluding with the special counsel to get Trump, even a trusting person must be suspicions about his book deal.

The FBI has fanned those suspicions by, you guessed it, adding a new layer to the protective stonewall around Comey. Again, Judicial Watch has been forced to sue a recalcitrant FBI for records, including but not limited to forms Comey was required to complete relating to prepublication review of the book by the FBI. Did Comey’s cronies give the fired FBI director a pass on this long-standing requirement? Is that why they are stonewalling the Judicial Watch FOIA?

Based upon Comey’s performance to date, this book likely will be an elaborate exercise in self-apotheosis. That’s why the American public deserves to know if Comey’s former colleagues — many of whom we now know aided in his exoneration of Hillary Clinton and have participated in the contrived investigation of Donald Trump – scrutinized his literary claims or simply green-lighted his every word.

There is no doubt that the deep state is in deep cover-up mode. The FBI, Justice Department and the special counsel all are stonewalling our requests for Comey documents. The more they stonewall, the deeper the suspicions grow about Comey’s complicity in the entire attempt to use the bogus Trump dossier to prevent the election of Donald Trump, and then use it to undermine his presidency once he was elected to office. In my experience in Washington, when people refuse to come clean, it is usually because they are hiding dirty laundry.

Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) is the president of Judicial Watch.
 
Denny Crane said:
Three suspicious activities stand out, all intertwined: The so-called Comey Memos, Comey’s controversial testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee and Comey’s book deal.
Click to expand...

I'm no fan of Comey - I think he's screwed up on multiple fronts and deserved to be fired - but these three things don't seem all that suspicious.

Not releasing the memos makes some sense, as they are evidence in an ongoing investigation. I'm sure they will be released eventually.

Coordinating with Mueller's team on his Senate testimony would seem to make a lot of sense - Mueller would not want Comey to answer questions that damage his investigation. Not sure why that would be a 'scandal'.

And Comey's book is highly likely to be lacking in any bombshells or useful information, so I don't see why anyone should be worried about that. He's going to write "I always faithfully did my duty as I saw it, and the men and women of the FBI are of the finest quality and I'm sure they will always do their best" over and over until he reaches the required page count.

barfo
 
barfo said:
I'm no fan of Comey - I think he's screwed up on multiple fronts and deserved to be fired - but these three things don't seem all that suspicious.

Not releasing the memos makes some sense, as they are evidence in an ongoing investigation. I'm sure they will be released eventually.

Coordinating with Mueller's team on his Senate testimony would seem to make a lot of sense - Mueller would not want Comey to answer questions that damage his investigation. Not sure why that would be a 'scandal'.

And Comey's book is highly likely to be lacking in any bombshells or useful information, so I don't see why anyone should be worried about that. He's going to write "I always faithfully did my duty as I saw it, and the men and women of the FBI are of the finest quality and I'm sure they will always do their best" over and over until he reaches the required page count.

barfo
Click to expand...

You seem to be against the peoples' right to know.
 
Denny Crane said:
You seem to be against the peoples' right to know.
Click to expand...

Nope, I'm as eager to see the Comey memos as anyone else. I just think that the DOJ might be justified in withholding them at present.

barfo
 
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018...cmp=ob_article_sidebar_video&intcmp=obnetwork

In a recent tweet, President Trump asked: “Why didn’t Obama do something about the (Russian) meddling?” It’s a good question, especially since, as President Trump pointed out, “all of the Russian meddling took place during the Obama administration.”

The answer to President Trump’s question is that over the course of eight years the Obama administration neglected to take cybersecurity seriously, even though in 2013 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a “coming (cyber) Pearl Harbor.”

Despite repeated intrusions, and though independent agencies concluded that our defenses against hackers were woefully inadequate, the Obama White House made only cosmetic attempts to protect our vital agencies and infrastructure. When this lack of preparedness led to damaging virtual break-ins, President Obama declined to confront the bad actors trying to steal our secrets.

This came in spite of President Obama’s easy access to Silicon Valley. The only time the White House called in some help from tech titans was when the ObamaCare rollout crashed, embarrassing the president. Not when the Chinese invaded the White House computer network in 2012 or when North Korea penetrated Sony’s systems; the big guns were summoned only when the president’s legacy program teetered on the brink of collapse.

In 2014 then-Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who served on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, published a report on the dangerous lapses in the government’s cyber preparedness, based on 40 reports and audits, including from the Government Accountability Office.

Federal agencies, Coburn reported, had neglected to implement even the most basic safeguards, such as resetting passwords or downloading software updates.

The report contained details of a hack of our Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for instance, in which data on the country’s 85,000 dams was stolen from the unprotected computers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The information included estimates of the potential death counts that would result from the failures of individual dams.

The most significant intrusion during President Obama’s two terms was the 2015 penetration of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in which sensitive information (Social Security numbers, birth dates, health histories, fingerprints) on 22 million people – many with top security clearances – was stolen.

Not only did the White House allow the break-in to occur – officials there lied about the severity of the attack. OPM officials initially told the Wall Street Journal that no sensitive data had been stolen, though the FBI had informed them otherwise. The Journal reported that the day OPM made that dishonest claim, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano emailed to tell friends at the University of California that people who had gone through a security clearance were at risk. She had apparently received a heads-up.

That theft was said to have been the work of the Chinese.

The OPM breach was not unique. During the Obama years the Pentagon, the CIA, the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration were all hacked.

After the OPM attack, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a security conference: “Until such time as we can create both the substance and the psychology of deterrence, this is going to go on.” He argued that “unintended consequences and other related policy issues” made creating such deterrents difficult.

In other words, the Obama White House did nothing when China hacked the OPM, or when North Korea invaded Sony because there were overarching political considerations. Think climate accord and a nuclear stand-down.

But it was the White House’s tolerance of Russian intrusions that in retrospect was the most dangerous action. In 2013 Russia took advantage of a Microsoft glitch to hack into NATO’s computer systems, the new Ukrainian government and several European Union agencies. President Obama did nothing to respond to this aggression, emboldening Moscow.

Over the next two years Russian agents invaded the State Department and ultimately penetrated not only the White House but also the Pentagon. The thefts of data were not as public as the plundering of OPM by the Chinese; the Russians appeared to be accumulating virtual weapons.

In late 2015, the FBI warned the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that Russian hackers had breached its computers. A few months later the same group of Russians ensnared John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, harvesting his emails.

The Russians sat on their stolen material until a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention, when they then forwarded the hacked emails from the DNC to Wikileaks. The resulting uproar, which cost DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job, was only the beginning, as we now know.

Because President Obama was beholden to China for agreeing to join the Paris Climate Accord and because he needed both Russia and China to sign off on the Iran nuclear deal, he chose not to push back against their criminal invasions of our private and public institutions. As Luke Thompson has argued in the National Review, this lack of confrontation only encouraged more bad behavior.

Our country has been wracked by discord for more than a year, and the Trump presidency has been severely weakened by charges that his team colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. There has been no evidence of such behavior, but the investigation goes on, dividing the nation and undermining Americans’ confidence in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as our president.

The Justice Department has concluded that the Russians wanted to “sow discord” in the United States. This will be Obama’s legacy: he allowed them to do so.

Liz Peek is a writer who contributes frequently to FoxNews.com. She is a financial columnist who also writes for The Fiscal Times. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
 
MARIS61 said:
“Why didn’t Obama do something about the (Russian) meddling?”
Click to expand...
Obama did something about it...he directed the cyber department that isolated 7 hackers and closed a Russian compound....short term memory problems?
 
MARIS61 said:
dividing the nation and undermining Americans’ confidence in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as our president.
Click to expand...
well...it's the president who's actually done most of this....
 
MARIS61 said:
Obama knew 3 years ago, and did nothing.
Click to expand...
I've heard all the Fox Bill O'Reilly spin on this...it's an old story that I don't buy....and I don't trust WikiLeaks for anything.....they curiously are focused on a select market but we've had this argument before..
 
Congressional testimony confirmed several times over.
 
riverman said:
Obama did something about it...he directed the cyber department that isolated 7 hackers and closed a Russian compound....short term memory problems?
Click to expand...

After the fact. They allowed it to continue for years. Since 2014.
 
https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads/

HOW TRUMP CONQUERED FACEBOOK—WITHOUT RUSSIAN ADS
Why Russia’s Facebook ads were less important to Trump’s victory than his own Facebook ads.

From this worldview, it's still not clear how much influence the IRA had with its Facebook ads (which, as others have pointed out, is just one small part of the huge propaganda campaign that Mueller is currently investigating). But no matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.

Like many thingsat Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount.

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money.

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back
Top