I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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Long, but good read.
Heather Cox Richardson
8h ·September 7, 2020 (Monday)
I have been holding off for a calm news day to examine exactly what the fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan report on Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 election said, and why it is important. The report came out on August 18 and, in the storm of other news, has gotten less attention than it should have.
While Special Counsel Robert Mueller marshaled a team to look into potential crimes committed by members of the Trump campaign and by Russian actors in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee also conducted an investigation. The Senate committee was not limited, as Mueller was, by a directive from the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It looked more widely at the contacts between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Because Republicans control the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee is chaired by a Republican, first by Richard Burr (R-NC) and then, after Burr stepped down under allegations of insider trading, by Marco Rubio (R-FL).
The first volume of the committee's report established that Russians successfully breached U.S. election systems in 2016. According to the Intelligence Community, "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards," but the Department of Homeland Security "assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying." Interestingly, the section on Russian attacks on voting machines is almost entirely redacted.
The second volume explained that Russian operatives "sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin." It concluded that "in 2016, Russian operatives… used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government's covert support of Russia's favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election."
The third volume examined how the U.S. government responded to the Russian attacks. The fourth reviewed and defended the methods and findings of the Intelligence Community.
And, on August 18, the committee released the fifth volume. The committee reviewed about a million documents and interviewed more than 200 witnesses. Its 966 pages establish extensive connections between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials in 2016.
They established that Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely during the campaign with his longtime business associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a "Russian intelligence officer."
This means that, according to Republicans—as well as the Democrats on the committee—in 2016, Trump's campaign manager was actively working with a Russian intelligence officer.
Paul Manafort's backstory matters.
Manafort cut his political teeth in Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign, along with his friend Roger Stone, whom he had met in the Young Republicans organization, a social and political network of young professionals. Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. In 1980, he and Roger Stone were two of the three principals who formed a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., that brought under one roof lobbying and political consulting as well as public relations. Bundling these functions was groundbreaking: they would get their clients elected, and then help clients lobby them. One of their first clients was a friend of Stone's: Donald J. Trump.
Quickly, Manafort began to look to foreign countries for his clients. He took advantage of the anti-communist focus of foreign policy after Reagan, cleaning up shady clients to look good enough to U.S. lawmakers that they could get U.S. dollars to shore up their political interests. Touting his connections to the Reagan and Bush administrations, Manafort racked up clients. He backed so many dictatorial governments—Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others—that a 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity called his firm "The Torturers' Lobby."
In 1995, Manafort started his own firm and, a decade later, he began working for a young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were rising to replace the region's communist leaders and were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In 1991, Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR, and threats of Ukrainian freedom soon worried Deripaska, who had business interests there. In 2004, it appeared at first that a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected president of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on a political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Deripaska's friend Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of "mobsters and oligarchs" look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Deripaska. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych's ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine's Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump's floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary, but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him "How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?"
Manafort began as a campaign advisor in March 2016, and became the chairman in late June, after the June 9 meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort with a number of people, including a Russian lawyer associated with Putin's intelligence services, in Trump Tower. (Remember that Trump tried to explain away that meeting as being about "adoptions," because the Russian response to sanctions was to shut down American adoptions of Russian children.)
The fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Report establishes that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer," and that he acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump's campaign. On several occasions, Manafort passed the campaign's sensitive internal polling data to Kilimnik, although because their communications were encrypted, the committee could not determine what became of the information. (Such polling might well dovetail with the information in volume 2.)
The report says Kilimnik may have been directly involved in hacking Democratic National Committee emails and handing the stolen files to WikiLeaks. The committee found "significant evidence" that WikiLeaks was "knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials." The report also establishes that Trump repeatedly discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps with operative Roger Stone, then lied about those discussions with investigators.
The report says Manafort lied consistently about his interactions with Kilimnik, and has chosen to go to jail rather than change his story. It also notes that it is Kilimnik who launched the story that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the U.S. election.
According to the report: "Taken as a whole, Manafort's high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat."
The report also established that the White House "significantly hampered" the investigation.
The Manafort story is only one of the issues covered in Volume 5.
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The gal who fixed me and dh up over 30 years ago is a Trumper. Yes, she has redeeming qualities but after the last presidential election, I tossed her off my FB friends list along with many others. I am happy to talk to her when I occasionally run into her but she always tries to steer the conversation to politics. Once, it was at a funeral home. Totally inappropriate.
A couple week ago, she sent me a new FB friend request.
Me: “Delete”.
I know she’s just wanting to stir up shit. Not happening
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What's News
VOTERS ARE VOTING. Voters are voting in two states today. In both New Hampshire and Rhode Island, polls close at 8 p.m.
TRUMP: President Trump "has discussed spending as much as $100 million of his own money on his re-election campaign … [He] has talked about the idea with multiple people, though he hasn't yet committed to any self-funding, according to people briefed on internal deliberations." (Bloomberg) Trump "is going off Arizona airwaves after the Labor Day holiday, and may not resume television advertising in the Grand Canyon State until early voting begins in early October. On Thursday, records filed with the FCC by Phoenix-area television stations showed that the Trump campaign cancelled all of its ads between Sept. 8 and Sept. 14." (AZ Mirror)
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I doubt that Trump has 100 million of his own money. I think he's almost broke.
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I only have a few who would like to cause issues -- but the thing is -- I think they are so deeply invested in being good Reps. that they just won't allow themselves to look too close and to deeply consider what the U.S. and in some cases the world might be like if Trump were to get back into office. They won't go there. I think in a corner of their mind they know to follow the instinct that says just hold onto being A Rep. and let things sort out on their own afterward. They realize if they REALLY looked it would likely cause reactions that would just beg for a more studious approach to their voting patterns this time. Well, while I might question some of the reasoning, there are a pretty lg. swath of Reps. ( mostly conservative ) who are willing to extrapolate and easily see that Trump is ruining things for them.
Amid all that are some, as of late, articles that have said basically Brad Pascale spent all the campaign monies Trump had quite foolishly and lavishly and now Trump is campaign broke. It is what I was thinking about when I dropped in the above piece. Just guessing but if Trump is talking about using his own money it may be with the hope that he can get some of the high rollers of yore ( 2016 ) to cough up some good sized funds for him. They are not going to waste lg. sums of cash on Trump if they suspect he is heading for a wash-out.
Again, things are so different in so many ways now that Trump is incumbent. He is horrified, terrified, and totally rattled about what to do next. Nothing is sticking and he isn't denting Biden much at all. I think in a couple of the polls they are within margins but as long as Trump senses he isn't getting his credit -- the lies will become flamboyant and easily translucent and will turn off even more people. I would hate to be calling his days mine these last few weeks.
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Trump would never admit ANYONE, anywhere, is smarter than he is.
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Love these and he is on every last one of my nerves as well. I doubt he has $100 million dollars unless it is Monopoly money and he has pissed off some of his wealthy contributors with his attitude. So will he try to mortgage the WH to get the money he needs since I am sure everything else is mortgaged to the hilt? Plus holding political events from the WH costs him nothing!
His lies are coming back to haunt him as are the crude things he has said about the military, the disabled, the disenfranchised and anyone else I have forgotten that he has disparaged.
Have these Trumpers thought about his plans to defund SS and Medicare as well as to kick those with underlying health issues off insurance plans? His friends in the medical insurance business and big pharma would love to unload most of us because we cost too much in spite of the hefty premiums most of us pay. Do they plan on spending their retirement savings on their health or do they have enough to live on if they do not have SS income? Many labor unions defunded their retirement funding as well. How about their children or grandchildren who might have pre-existing health issues? Do they have adequate savings to help them out? There no longer is a safety net if these plans disappear. My Dad paid into his retirement fund and when he was finally eligible he was told they were bankrupt and received nothing.
I know that my insurance plan paid less than $20,000 for my health care the year before I was diagnosed (what they charged to plan, not what the plan paid). The year I was diagnosed and treated the charges submitted for surgery, radiation, surgeon, mammos, CT scans, RO and MO, etc. were in excess of $250,000. That was just for BC care and not inclusive of other medical care I needed and received. Without the insurance coverage we had, we would have gone broke.
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Now he says he spent campaign $ on fighting Covid, and if it needs $ he will put it up.
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If you believe that he will cough up personal money for his campaign or that he actually used his money for Covid, I have a wall being erected between the US and Mexico that I'd like to sell you! It's the one that Mexico will pay for, LOL. We know how that turned out and what was built/replaced fell down.
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The article also said that getting the $$ in 16 was like pulling your own teeth. And with his past shady deals on real estate he personally probably is broke. I’d like to give him $50, turn him loose in any grocery tell him to feed a family of 4 for a month with it.
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Now he's saying that the military brass are in cahoots with the defense industry (he's railing against the "miltary-industrial complex" that helped fund him in 2016) but that the rank & file still love him. He did an about-face and signed an EO for a moratorium on offshore drilling so he could boast about being an "environmentalist."
But what is beginning to scare me is that he has a larger share of the Latino vote in FL than he did against Clinton in 2016--mostly by pushing the Cuban-American community's buttons about the "socialism" their parents & grandparents emigrated to escape. Only, a plurality if not a majority of Cuban-immigrant elders (not that many of them remain) moved from Cuba to escape not Castro's socialism, but Batista & his corruption (especially Mafia affiliation). Still others didn't think Castro went far enough to reverse Batista's corruption, and escaped while they still could. (Bob's ex-medical partner's family were among the latter, especially because at first, Castro was too closely aligned with the Catholic church). I only hope there were enough Puerto Ricans who moved to FL after Hurricane Maria to offset the right-wing Cuban-Americans.
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The Cuban Americans are mostly in Miami. The Orlando area has a LOT of ppl from Pureto Rico, A large majority of them worked at the big attractions. Which aren't fully opened because of Covid. So they are unemployed, and our orange gov screwed with unemployment aid. I hope they remember how he threw paper towels at them after Maria wiped out the islands. The vote outreach ppl have been active in the Spanish speaking community to get them registered The I4 corridor between Orlando and Tampa is critical here. The Villages is a R stronghold, just a few miles north. He's somewhere here today, spewing more lies.
Glennie, help me out with this.
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Fuck Elle magazine!
And tax $$$$ go to paying for this ?????? What the-----?
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More and more as Trump's administration goes on I've been wondering if these United States ARE or HAVE EVER BEEN united.......maybe we need to break up into separate countries.....California would be its own, as would the South. We are such an area-wise big country but also the most diverse of the larger countries on the planet--how can we ever really be united in our hearts with such as Trump and Co and his followers out there? Racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, narrow, rigid, ultra-right---those folks aren't ever gonna line up with their opposites.....we fought this issue in 1861...and maybe that war isn't over....it's been subterranean...at least up until now...
I have a friend and a few relatives who are Trumpers (we don't talk about it) and I think they're racist....would never let on I think this any more than they'd let on they are--but I think they are.....
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I also think we will never really be of one mind, but in part that is why we have more than one party and off-shoots of those. I'm not so sure breaking up would be a good thing. Sadly, technology and other things have made gaps in our lives harder to bear. Still, I think if we could get more equality -- in race, and in equal rights ( thinking here more of men and women being paid etc. ) and equitable Ins. so no one has to go broke paying for health care etc. we might be able to have some semblance of unity way more than we do now. It is an interesting concept, but I don't think we could make it work.
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Rachel Maddow show had her whole show based on Michael Cohen's book which was out today. I actually saw it in our local Walmart store. It was tempting but their was no price on it. Inside cover was I think about $30.00 U. S. I was tempted but just decided to wait a bit. I did find some of the things they talked about VERY interesting. M. Cohen reiterated something we have all heard from long ago. Trump never ran because he wanted to be president. He was instead going to increase ( biggest infomercial possible ) his brand world-wide. Certainly with the intention of getting into Russia. The inference was that it is why Putin gets the red carpet treatment always.
I had heard before that in reality Putin is not much interested in Trump having a Russian Trump Hotel and has always put the skids on, but opened up a bit when he saw that he could manipulate Trump so as to keep Clinton from being elected. Trump has been Putin's dream come true. Cohen seemed to feel that Trump still has his eye on ( should he not be president ) being able to do things in Russia.
The one thing I found scary is the fact that ( I think it was Joy Reid who was on Lawrence O'Donnell right after Rachel ) Joy Reid said that Trump never really had any power before. He was just a real estate type person who actually had a lot of failure along with it. Having accidentally through the Electoral College, won the presidency he has been able to attain what he always wanted -- power. So now he doesn't like the idea that it might slip through his fingers. That is why he doesn't care what he does to maintain the power. Another fear I feel is how many enablers seem almost too eager to help him out on this front.
There are a couple other books that may be out soon ( this wk. too maybe ) so we will see. There is a lot of chipping going on. To date though, it does not seem that what Trump has done has changed any of his numbers much. That is something of a relief. Hard to believe the election that once seemed so far away is now only two months away. It will be interesting to see just what does make the most difference. I think covid is going to have a huge impact.
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Just by looking at her, you know she already drank the bleach!
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Ruth - yes.
and yes to this one too.
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LMAO
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