Category Archives: 2016 President Election

Hoping to have Trump cleared, legal team eases resistance to inquiry

The New York Times reports: White House officials once debated a scorched-earth strategy of publicly criticizing and undercutting Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s election. Now, President Trump’s lawyers are pursuing a different course: cooperating with the special counsel in the hope that Mr. Mueller will declare in the coming months that Mr. Trump is not a target of the Russia inquiry.

Mr. Trump has long sought such a public declaration. He fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in May after Mr. Comey refused to say openly that Mr. Trump was not under investigation.

The president’s legal team is working swiftly to respond to requests from Mr. Mueller for emails, documents and memos, and will make White House officials available for interviews. Once Mr. Mueller has combed through the evidence, Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to ask him to affirm that Mr. Trump is not under investigation, either for colluding with Russian operatives or for trying to obstruct justice.

More than a half dozen White House officials, witnesses and outside lawyers connected to the Russia inquiry have described the approach, which is as much a public relations strategy as a legal one. The president’s legal team aims to argue that the White House has nothing to hide, hoping to shift the burden to Mr. Mueller to move quickly to wrap up an investigation that has consumed the Trump administration’s first year. [Continue reading…]

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Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says

Craig Timberg writes: Facebook has said ads bought by Russian operatives reached 10 million of its users.

But does that include everyone reached by the information operation? Couldn’t the Russians also have created simple — and free — Facebook posts and hoped they went viral? And if so, how many times were these messages seen by Facebook’s massive user base?

The answers to those questions, which social media analyst Jonathan Albright studied for a research document he posted online Thursday, are: No. Yes. And hundreds of millions — perhaps many billions — of times.

“The primary push to influence wasn’t necessarily through paid advertising,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The best way to to understand this from a strategic perspective is organic reach.”

In other words, to understand Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election, the frame should not be the reach of the 3,000 ads that Facebook handed over to Congress and that were bought by a single Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency. Instead, the frame should be the reach of all the activity of the Russian-controlled accounts — each post, each “like,” each comment and also all of the ads. Looked at this way, the picture shifts dramatically. It is bigger — much bigger — but also somewhat different and more subtle than generally portrayed. [Continue reading…]

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Here’s how Breitbart and Milo smuggled Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream

BuzzFeed reports: In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right, he was merely referring to “computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.”

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream. [Continue reading…]

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The secrecy undermining the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe

Ryan Lizza writes: On Wednesday, Richard Burr and Mark Warner, the two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the body that is widely considered to be the most likely to produce a bipartisan report about Russia and Donald Trump, gave a press briefing on their work.

Their presentation made clear why many in Washington hold out some hope that the Senate Intelligence Committee will produce a report that will give a full picture of Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 Presidential election. In recent decades, there have been very few congressional investigations affecting a sitting President that don’t descend into partisan combat, with one side working as a defense lawyer for the President and the other acting as an overzealous prosecutor. That’s not to say that partisan investigations don’t ever uncover important facts—partisan investigations from Iran-Contra to Whitewater to Benghazi added crucial information to the public record—but, unlike in a courtroom, there’s no judge or jury to decide the case, and the public is often left confused about the over-all conclusions.

This was always one of the greatest dangers of leaving the Russia probe up to the current investigative machinery in Congress. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, which produced a well-respected consensus report, congressional committees often produce a majority report and a minority report that only serve as fodder for endless partisan debates. The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation succumbed to this dynamic earlier this year when it became clear in open hearings that some Republicans, including the chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes, only cared about protecting Donald Trump, while some Democrats, like Jackie Speier, were willing to publicize spurious conspiracy theories. [Continue reading…]

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Sally Yates, Preet Bharara stress high bar for criminal charges in Russia probe

The Wall Street Journal reports: Two of the most high-profile law-enforcement officials fired by President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces a high bar in proving criminal conduct in his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, addressing the possibility that he may not bring a case.

Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, and Preet Bharara, the former Manhattan U.S. attorney, both emphasized in a joint interview Wednesday at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit that Mr. Mueller’s task is challenging.

“I know a lot of people are sort of putting all their hopes into Bob Mueller. And I’ve got tremendous confidence in Bob Mueller,” said Ms. Yates, in one of the few public interviews she has given since she was fired in January after refusing to defend Mr. Trump’s original executive order that suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Mr. Trump said the order was needed to protect the U.S. from potential terrorism attacks.

“But the fact of the matter is, he’s going to determine whether there’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt that felonies were committed, that crimes were committed that can be used for prosecution or impeachment,“ she said of Mr. Mueller. That, she suggested, is but one standard by which to judge the president’s conduct, drawing a distinction between criminal behavior and otherwise objectionable conduct. Mr. Mueller “is not going to answer the question of whether anything bad happened here,” she said. [Continue reading…]

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Russia needed help targeting U.S. voters, two former CIA leaders say

Bloomberg reports: Two former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency said Russia probably didn’t have the ability to microtarget U.S. voters and districts in the 2016 presidential campaign on its own, meaning some sort of assistance would have been necessary.

“It is not intuitively obvious that they could have done this themselves,” former CIA director Michael Hayden said in an interview Wednesday in Washington.

Michael Morell, who spent his career at the CIA including a stint as acting director of the agency, said in a separate interview that Russia either needed someone to help give it information on microtargeting or stole the necessary information, such as through hacking.

“They do not have the analytic capability to do that themselves,” Morell said.

The two former directors said they based their comments on knowledge they have of Russia’s capabilities. [Continue reading…]

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Trump pushes for Senate intel panel probe of ‘Fake News Networks’ in U.S.

Politico reports: President Donald Trump urged Congress Thursday morning to launch an investigation of the news media, wondering online “why so much of our news is just made up.”

“Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!” the president wrote on Twitter Thursday morning. He did not single out a specific story or media outlet that he believed to be guilty of inaccurate reporting.

Trump’s “fake news” complaints have been a staple of his political rhetoric, a label he often applied to stories that feature negative reporting about him or his presidency. Most recently, Trump has railed against reports that have characterized his administration’s hurricane recovery efforts in Puerto Rico as inadequate, as well as against an NBC News report that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron” over the summer and nearly resigned.

Another frequent “fake news” target for Trump has been the multiple ongoing investigations into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, one of which is being conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The president often refers to those investigations collectively as a “hoax” or a “witch hunt.” [Continue reading…]

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Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin

CNN reports: A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said.

It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds. [Continue reading…]

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Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters

The Washington Post reports: Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation. [Continue reading…]

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Did Manafort use Trump to curry favor with a Putin ally?

Julia Ioffe and Franklin Foer write: On the evening of April 11, 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump hired the political consultant Paul Manafort to lead his campaign’s efforts to wrangle Republican delegates, Manafort emailed his old lieutenant Konstantin Kilimnik, who had worked for him for a decade in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

“I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort wrote.

“Absolutely,” Kilimnik responded a few hours later from Kiev. “Every article.”

“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asks. “Has OVD operation seen?”

According to a source close to Manafort, the initials “OVD” refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and one of Russia’s richest men. The source also confirmed that one of the individuals repeatedly mentioned in the email exchange as an intermediary to Deripaska is an aide to the oligarch.

The emails were provided to The Atlantic on condition of anonymity. They are part of a trove of documents turned over by lawyers for Trump’s presidential campaign to investigators looking into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. A source close to Manafort confirmed their authenticity. Excerpts from these emails were first reported by The Washington Post, but the full text of these exchanges, provided to The Atlantic, shows that Manafort attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Manafort was deeply in debt, and did not earn a salary from the Trump campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign

The Washington Post reports: Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. [Continue reading…]

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Officials expressed concerns White House Counsel would quit over Donald Trump-Jared Kushner meetings

The Wall Street Journal reports: White House Counsel Don McGahn this summer was so frustrated about the lack of protocols surrounding meetings between President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law whose activities are under scrutiny in the Russia probe, that West Wing officials expressed concerns the top lawyer would quit, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. McGahn expressed concern that meetings between Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump could be construed by investigators as an effort to coordinate their stories, three people familiar the matter said.

Two senior White House officials—then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former chief strategist Steve Bannon —urged Mr. McGahn not to resign, according to people familiar with the conversations. One person characterized Mr. McGahn’s frustration as, “Fine, you’re not taking my advice? Why stay?” [Continue reading…]

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Zuckerberg’s preposterous defense of Facebook

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Responding to President Trump’s tweet this week that “Facebook was always anti-Trump,” Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, defended the company by noting that Mr. Trump’s opponents also criticize it — as having aided Mr. Trump. If everyone is upset with you, Mr. Zuckerberg suggested, you must be doing something right.

“Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

This doesn’t hold water at all.

Are you bothered by fake news, systematic misinformation campaigns and Facebook “dark posts” — micro-targeted ads not visible to the public — aimed at African-Americans to discourage them from voting? You must be one of those people “upset about ideas” you disagree with.

Are you troubled when agents of a foreign power pose online as American Muslims and post incendiary content that right-wing commentators can cite as evidence that all American Muslims are sympathizers of terrorist groups like the Islamic State? Sounds like you can’t handle a healthy debate.

Does it bother you that Russian actors bought advertisements aimed at swing states to sow political discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, and that it took eight months after the election to uncover any of this? Well, the marketplace of ideas isn’t for everyone.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s preposterous defense of Facebook’s failure in the 2016 presidential campaign is a reminder of a structural asymmetry in American politics. It’s true that mainstream news outlets employ many liberals, and that this creates some systemic distortions in coverage (effects of trade policies on lower-income workers and the plight of rural America tend to be underreported, for example). But bias in the digital sphere is structurally different from that in mass media, and a lot more complicated than what programmers believe. [Continue reading…]

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Russian intelligence would have seen Paul Manafort as the perfect mark

Steven L. Hall writes: For 30 years, my job as a CIA officer was to try to figure out how Russian operatives were trying to attack the United States. I oversaw intelligence operations in the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact and worked on counterintelligence and cybersecurity at CIA headquarters. So when I read the recent reports that President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had offered to brief Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on the presidential election last year, I was alarmed.

Because to Russian intelligence in 2016, Manafort would have looked like the ideal spy. Someone like Deripaska is exactly how they would have gotten to him.

Deripaska, an aluminum magnate worth about $6.5 billion, is a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. Putin demands fealty and pretty much whatever else he wants from people like Deripaska, who understand that if they don’t live up to their end of the bargain, they could end up like another famous former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who displeased Putin and was sent to a tuberculosis-ridden prison for more than a dozen years. Although Deripaska has repeatedly denied any connection to Russian intelligence, these oligarchs understand that in addition to making money for themselves and Putin, they occasionally will be asked to be the Kremlin’s eyes and ears, and facilitators, if need be. Russia’s security services work closely with them; unlike in Western democracies, there’s no concept of a conflict of interest. Everyone has the same interests at heart: Putin’s. [Continue reading…]

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Senator berates Twitter over ‘inadequate’ inquiry into Russian meddling

The New York Times reports: A key senator investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election sharply criticized Twitter on Thursday for failing to aggressively investigate the Russian misuse of its platform after the company said it had largely limited its own inquiry to accounts linked to fraudulent profiles already identified by Facebook.

The senator, Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Twitter’s briefing for congressional investigators “very disappointing,” and accused company officials of ignoring extensive evidence of nefarious Russian activity.

The company’s presentation “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.” [Continue reading…]

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Kushner didn’t disclose personal email account to Senate intel committee

CNN reports: In his closed interview with the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner did not share the existence of his personal email account, which he has used for official business, CNN has learned.

CNN has also learned that the chair and vice chair of the committee were so unhappy that they learned about the existence of his personal email account via news reports that they wrote him a letter via his attorney Thursday instructing him to double-check that he has turned over every relevant document to the committee including those from his “‘personal email account’ described to the news media, as well as all other email accounts, messaging apps, or similar communications channels you may have used, or that may contain information relevant to our inquiry.”

The emphasis in the letter on “all other” personal accounts not known by the committee would seem to be a reflection of the frustration the committee leaders feel with that fact that Kushner was not up-front about the existence of his personal email account and their desire for him to cover the bases of all his possible communications avenues when responding to their letter. This issue could become more serious if there emerge any emails or communications related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election that Kushner has not turned over, and whether he did so with the express purpose of concealing information from the committee. [Continue reading…]

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The muted GOP response to Roy Moore’s anti-Muslim prejudice

Peter Beinart writes: Historians will record that for about half a decade, between the presidential campaigns of 2012 and 2016, Republicans tussled over whether to welcome anti-Muslim bigotry into their party. The response to Roy Moore’s nomination on Tuesday as the GOP’s Senate candidate in Alabama shows—even more clearly than Donald Trump’s election—that the fight is over. In today’s GOP, claiming that American Muslims don’t deserve equal rights has become so normal that prominent Republicans no longer object. They barely even notice.

To chart this moral descent, it’s worth starting in March 2011, when a reporter for ThinkProgress asked Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain: “Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim either in your Cabinet or as a federal judge?” Cain’s reply: “No, I will not. And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there’s this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.”

The response from GOP elites was scathing. “We recognize that people of all faiths are welcome in this country,” said presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney when asked about Cain’s comments. “Our nation was founded on a principle of religious tolerance.” When Cain showed up to a breakfast hosted by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, several participants chastised him. Soon, Cain was insisting he had been misconstrued. By the summer, he had publicly apologized. “I remain humble and contrite for any statements I have made that might have caused offense to Muslim Americans and their friends,” he declared. “I am truly sorry for any comments that may have betrayed my commitment to the U.S. Constitution and the freedom of religion guaranteed by it.” For good measure, he visited a mosque.

In 2012, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann made her own foray into Islamophobia by signing a letter, along with four House Republican colleagues, demanding an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide Huma Abedin. John McCain responded by going to the Senate Floor to declare that the assault on Abedin “is not only wrong; it is contrary to everything we hold dear as Americans.” House GOP leader John Boehner called the attacks “dangerous.” Ed Rollins, Bachmann’s own former campaign chairman wrote an oped on foxnews.com that concluded, “Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hard working, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges.” That was only five years ago.

Then it was Ben Carson’s turn. In September 2015, the surgeon turned presidential hopeful said, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation” because Islam was not “consistent with the Constitution.” The media responded by asking Carson’s rivals for comment, and most of them—even social conservative hardliners like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee—said they disagreed.

But then something interesting happened. Unlike Cain, Carson refused to apologize. Instead, he attacked the media and the left. Carson’s business manager, Armstrong Williams, declared on CNN’s morning show that his boss would continue “telling the truth, even if it makes CNN and others uncomfortable.” Carson’s campaign manager Barry Bennett crowed that, “While the left is huffing and puffing, the Republican primary voters are with us at least 80-20.” Donald Trump went even further. Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd whether “putting a Muslim in the White House” is okay, Trump responded that, “some people have said it already happened.” [Continue reading…]

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Twitter finds hundreds of accounts tied to Russian operatives

The Washington Post reports: Twitter said Thursday it had shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, but the effort frustrated lawmakers who said the problem is far broader than the company appeared to know.

The company said it also found three accounts from the news site RT — which Twitter linked to the Kremlin — that spent $274,100 in ads on its platform in 2016.

Despite the disclosures, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) questioned whether the company is doing enough to stop Russian operatives from using its platform to spread disinformation and division in American society.

Warner said Twitter’s presentation to a closed door meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers Thursday morning was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.” Twitter also made a presentation to House Intelligence Committee staffers in the afternoon. [Continue reading…]

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