https://www.axios.com/trump-russia-...fbi-93e5854b-d834-4910-a342-1d56efc803f1.html Former FBI advisor expected to plead guilty for falsifying email in Trump campaign probe Details: Clinesmith, who resigned last year, plans to plead guilty to altering an email from the CIA that investigators "relied on to seek renewed court permission in 2017 for a secret wiretap on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had at times provided information to the spy agency," the Times reports.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016-report.html The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed. “Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy. From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple. Who is Oleg Deripaska? What’s the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence — the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups — has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It’s no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago. A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Senate committee’s report isn’t telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp’s actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case. It’s also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that “Russiagate” is a “bogus” scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of “sabotaging the presidency.” That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation’s intelligence community, Mr. Mueller’s team, the Justice Department’s inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee. In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller’s investigation. For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president “did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.” The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military’s hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place. Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn’t already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: “This is what collusion looks like.” Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that “we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.” That is to insist that up is down. But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have. And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was “almost certainly” one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators’ report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik. There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations. Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country’s efforts to skew the election. On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president “showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.” He added, “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.” There’s no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re-elect a man who received a foreign government’s help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daniel...-believed-to-have-been-poisoned/#6a873ed14522 Navalny Is The Latest In A Grim Line Of Putin Opponents Believed To Have Been Poisoned TOPLINE Aleksei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who’s in dire condition after allegedly being poisoned, is only the latest Kremlin opponent who has fallen victim to what experts say has long been a favorite tool of Russian intelligence agencies. Alexei Navalny: Russian doctors agree to let Putin critic go to Germany Russian doctors treating Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who fell into a coma after being taken ill on a plane, have changed their minds and agreed to let him be flown to Germany.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say The former deputy attorney general maneuvered to keep investigators from completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat. WASHINGTON — The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia. The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry. But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere. A bipartisan report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released this month came the closest to an examination of the president’s links to Russia. Senators depicted extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia, identified a close associate of a former Trump campaign chairman as a Russian intelligence officer and outlined how allegations about Mr. Trump’s encounters with women during trips to Moscow could be used to compromise him. But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Mr. Trump’s finances. Now, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election, major questions about his approach to Russia remain unanswered. He has repeatedly shown an openness to Russia, an adversary that attacked American democracy in 2016, and refused to criticize or challenge the Kremlin’s increasing aggressions toward the West. The president has also rejected the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in 2016 to bolster his candidacy and the spy agencies’ assessment that Russia is trying to sabotage this year’s election again on his behalf. Mr. Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary. Mr. Rosenstein determined that the investigators were acting too hastily in response to the firing days earlier of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, and he suspected that the acting bureau director who approved the opening of the inquiry, Andrew G. McCabe, had conflicts of interest. Mr. Rosenstein never told Mr. McCabe about his decision, leaving the F.B.I. with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties. Mr. McCabe said in an interview that had he known Mr. Mueller would not continue the inquiry, he would have had the F.B.I. perform it. “We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” Mr. McCabe said. “I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.” Mr. Rosenstein declined to comment. The disclosure about the counterintelligence investigation is based on interviews with former Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Installing Mr. Mueller as special counsel in May 2017, Mr. Rosenstein ordered him to examine “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government” and the Trump campaign. Many Democrats embraced the appointment as a sign that law enforcement would complete a full accounting of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. But privately, Mr. Rosenstein instructed Mr. Mueller to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia’s 2016 election interference, former law enforcement officials said. “I love Ken Starr,” Mr. Rosenstein told Mr. Mueller, according to a new book by the journalist Jeffrey Toobin that first reported the conversation. “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.” If Mr. Mueller wanted to expand his investigation, Mr. Rosenstein told him, he should ask for additional authorities and resources. But the special counsel built a staff — some inherited from the Justice Department and F.B.I., some of whom he hired — to investigate crimes, not threats to national security, which is the purview of counterintelligence investigations. Simply investigating crimes, Mr. McCabe said, was a mismatched approach for a national security threat. “It was first and foremost a counterintelligence case,” Mr. McCabe said. “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?” Members of the special counsel team held early discussions led by the agent Peter Strzok about a counterintelligence investigation of the president. Those efforts fizzled when Mr. Strzok was removed from the inquiry three months later for sending text messages disparaging Mr. Trump. Questions about the president’s ties to Russia dated to his presidential campaign. Mr. Trump has sought to build a Trump Tower in Moscow for at least two decades, including during the campaign. His son Eric once said the Trump Organization relied on Russia for “all the funding we need” to purchase several golf courses in the United States. And the Senate report this month revealed the allegations of Mr. Trump’s potentially compromising encounters with women in Moscow in 1996 and 2013. The F.B.I.’s mounting concerns about Mr. Trump reached a crescendo in the days after he fired Mr. Comey. Officials questioned whether Russia had leverage over the president and had dismissed the F.B.I. director to thwart any investigation that might reveal more. Their suspicions prompted agents including Mr. Strzok to open the counterintelligence inquiry. The investigation was separate from the broader inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, that the bureau opened in the summer of 2016 to try to understand Russia’s operations to interfere in the election and whether Mr. Trump’s associates were conspiring with them. The president and his allies have ramped up their attacks on that inquiry, misleadingly casting it as an illegitimate attempt by Democrats to spy on his campaign; independent reviews have found that investigators had sufficient reason to open it. Mr. McCabe, convinced Mr. Trump would likely soon fire him, approved the opening of the inquiry into Mr. Trump, believing he was making it more difficult for anyone to interfere with or close the case without justifying doing so. Mr. McCabe pushed Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to conduct the investigation into Mr. Trump and the broader examination of Russia’s interference in the election. Two days later, Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller. “It was the most enormous exhale of my life,” Mr. McCabe said. “I had been holding my breath” since the night Mr. Comey was fired, he added. That day, Mr. Rosenstein joined Mr. McCabe while he briefed lawmakers about matters including the counterintelligence investigation and raised no objections. The following day, Mr. McCabe briefed Mr. Mueller and his top deputies on the investigation into the president. But Mr. McCabe did not know that Mr. Rosenstein also gave his instruction to Mr. Mueller around that time to focus on whether crimes were committed. Mr. Mueller later told Congress he did not conduct a counterintelligence investigation. The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, said in a memo released last week that he had reason to believe “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.” Mr. McCabe acknowledged that he underestimated Mr. Rosenstein’s willingness to conceal from him that he had curtailed the investigation. He remained at the F.B.I. for 10 months before being fired over displaying a lack of candor with internal watchdogs. As Mr. McCabe left the bureau, he still believed Mr. Mueller was investigating Mr. Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia.
Fat fuck Barr sad Better luck next time traitor https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/politics/michael-flynn-court-case/index.html Appeals court denies Michael Flynn and Justice Department's effort to end his case