Category Archives: Cyber

Hacks, Leaks, and Tweets: Everything We Now Know About the Attack on the 2016 Election

by LillaSchimmel Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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The drumbeat of revelations over the past several weeks has been overwhelming. So we’ve created this timeline—from the hacking of the Democratic National Committee through the aftermath of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey—to help you follow this scandal threatening the presidency.

April 2016: The Democratic National Committee contacts the FBI about suspicious computer activity and hires cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which ties the hacking to Russian intelligence.

June 15: Guccifer 2.0, a persona later connected to the Russians, takes credit for the DNC hack and begins posting documents.

Mary Altaffer/AP

July 5: FBI Director James Comey announces the bureau found no evidence to support criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. But he adds that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information. Donald Trump tweets, “No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem.”

July 22: Three days before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails. Some indicate that party officials favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigns as party chair. Spread in part by Twitter bots, the emails further pit Clinton and Sanders supporters against each other.

July 24: Trump’s future CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo, tweets, “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks.” (Pompeo later deletes the tweet.)

July 27: Trump calls for Russia to hack Clinton’s email: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Late July: The FBI begins to investigate contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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Aug 8: Longtime Trump confidant and political dirty trickster Roger Stone boasts to a GOP group in Florida about WikiLeaks’ founder: “I actually have communicated with Julian Assange…There’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”

Aug 21: Stone tweets about Clinton campaign CEO John Podesta: “Trust me, it will soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.”

#CrookedHillary #WikiLeaks #LockHerUp Seth Wenig/AP

Aug 27: After being briefed on classified information, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sends a letter to Comey urging an investigation: “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, WikiLeaks and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity.”

Sept 9: Guccifer 2.0 communicates online with Stone about voter turnout and Democratic strategy.

Sept 15: Guccifer 2.0 posts stolen Democratic Party documents strategizing about battleground states.

Sept 26: In the first presidential debate, Trump suggests the DNC hack could be the work of China or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

Oct 1: Stone tweets, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”

Oct 3: Stone tweets, “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”

Oct 7: US intelligence agencies announce they are “confident” the Russian government aimed to interfere in the election and collaborated in the DNC leaks. Later in the day, a 2005 Access Hollywood video emerges in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. Within an hour, WikiLeaks begins releasing several thousand emails stolen from Podesta.

Oct 10: “I love WikiLeaks!” Trump declares at a campaign rally.

Oct 11: The Obama White House announces it is considering retaliation against Russia for cyberattacks.

Oct 12: The Wall Street Journal reports the FBI suspects Russian intelligence hacked Podesta’s emails. Stone tells a Miami TV station that he has “back-channel communications” with Assange.

Oct 19: During the final debate, Clinton says Trump would be Putin’s “puppet” if elected and rebukes his call to hack her email. “You encouraged espionage against our people.”

Oct 28: Comey notifies Congress that the FBI is reopening the Clinton matter, after a criminal probe into disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner reveals his laptop contains emails between his wife, Huma Abedin, and Clinton, her boss.

Oct 31: At a campaign rally, Trump says, “It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made…where they’re trying to protect her from criminal prosecution…What he did was the right thing.”

Nov 8: Trump is elected president.

Nov 15: National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers remarks about Russia and WikiLeaks, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Jan 4: Trump tweets, “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

Jan 6: The CIA, the FBI, and the NSA concur Russia tried to help Trump win via hacking operations involving Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, and WikiLeaks.

Jan 10: At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Comey declines to say whether the FBI is investigating Trump campaign ties to Russia. He notes that Russian hackers also attacked the Republican National Committee but that none of that material was released.

Jan 11: Trump acknowledges the Russians hacked the DNC: “I think it was Russia.”

Jan 14: Rep. John Lewis tells NBC’s Chuck Todd that he does not consider Trump to be “a legitimate president,” and he says he won’t attend Trump’s inauguration: “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

Jan 15: Incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus says Trump has confidence in the FBI director: “We have had a great relationship with him over the last several weeks. He’s extremely competent.”

Jan 20: Trump is sworn in as president.

Jan 22: At a White House event, Trump greets Comey: “Oh, there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me.”

Andrew Harrer/CNP/ZUMA

Jan 24: The FBI interviews national security adviser Michael Flynn about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Jan 26: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warns the Trump White House that Flynn lied about his conversations with Kislyak and is vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin.

Jan 27: Trump and Comey have a one-on-one dinner at the White House, where, it is later reported, Trump asks Comey to swear his political loyalty. Comey declines.

Jan 30: Trump fires Yates after she refuses on constitutional grounds to defend his travel ban targeting seven majority-Muslim countries.

Feb 13: After the Washington Post reveals Flynn lied about his conversations with Kislyak, Flynn resigns.

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Feb 19: Following a meeting with Comey, the Senate Intelligence Committee sends letters to more than a dozen agencies, groups, and individuals asking them to preserve all communications related to Russia’s 2016 election interference.

March 2: In the wake of revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed during his confirmation hearings to disclose two conversations with Kislyak, Sessions announces, “I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.”

March 4: Based on no evidence, Trump tweets, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

March 7: In the wake of intense media coverage of Trump’s wiretapping claim, WikiLeaks releases more than 8,000 CIA files, code-named “Vault 7.”

March 8: Former NSA Director Michael Hayden says, “I’m now pretty close to the position that WikiLeaks is acting as…an agent of the Russian Federation.”

March 20: During a public hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee, Comey confirms the FBI is investigating possible “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. He debunks Trump’s claims of surveillance by Obama: “I have no information that supports those tweets.”

March 27: “Trump Russia story is a hoax,” Trump tweets.

April 12: Asked if it’s “too late” for him to request Comey’s resignation, Trump tells Fox Business, “No, it’s not too late, but you know, I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. You know, it’s going to be interesting.”

April 30: Trump again casts doubts on the election attack, telling CBS News’ John Dickerson, “Could’ve been China. Could’ve been a lot of different groups.”

May 2: Trump tweets Comey is “the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton” and the “Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election.”

May 3: Comey tells the Senate Judiciary Committee, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we may have had some impact on the election,” but says he reopened the Clinton probe because Abedin had forwarded “hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contain classified information.”

First week of May: Comey seeks more resources for the Trump-Russia investigation.

May 8: Trump tweets, “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper tells Congress that by sowing doubts, Trump “helps the Russians” damage the US political system.

May 9: The FBI corrects Comey’s testimony: Only “a small number” of Abedin emails were forwarded, few contained classified information, and none were new. The same day, Trump fires Comey via a letter delivered to FBI headquarters. Comey, in Los Angeles, learns of the news via a TV screen and initially thinks it’s a prank. Trump’s letter says he was prompted by Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a three-page memo critical of Comey’s handling of the Clinton probe. Trump’s letter also claims Comey personally absolved him on three separate occasions.

May 10: Trump unleashes a tweetstorm, including, “Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!”

Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/ZUMA

Meanwhile, at Putin’s request, Trump greets Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office, where a Russian state-sponsored photographer is the only media allowed in. Trump tells them Comey was “a real nut job” and that firing him took “great pressure” off Trump with regard to Russia.

May 11: Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies that, contra White House statements, the Russia probe is “highly significant” and “Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.” Trump tells NBC’s Lester Holt a new version of why he fired Comey: “I decided to just do it. I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'”

May 12: Trump tweets, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

May 15: The Post reports that Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence on ISIS to Lavrov and Kislyak during their Oval Office meeting. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker says the White House is “in a downward spiral” and “has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order.”

May 16: The Times reports that Comey kept detailed memos on his interactions with Trump—including when Trump pressured him at an Oval Office meeting in February to shut down the FBI investigation into Flynn. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump told Comey.

May 17: Amid rising turmoil on Capitol Hill, including talk of possible impeachment of Trump for obstruction of justice, the Senate Intelligence Committee seeks Comey’s memos and invites him to testify. Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel overseeing the continuing FBI investigation.

See our entire updated Trump-Russia timeline dating back to the 1980s.

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Hacks, Leaks, and Tweets: Everything We Now Know About the Attack on the 2016 Election

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How the Trump White House Has Tried to Interfere With the Russia Investigations

by awfegcimo Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

The pattern is increasingly clear: As investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties to and possible collusion with Russia have intensified, so too have efforts by the president and his staff to quash those probes or put pressure on US officials to publicly deny the validity of the swirling allegations.

For his part, President Donald Trump has long insisted there is nothing to the investigations: “The entire thing has been a witch hunt,” he said during a recent press conference at the White House. “There’s no collusion between, certainly, myself and my campaign—but I can only speak for myself—and the Russians. Zero.”

But behind the scenes, Trump and his team appear to have worked assiduously to get FBI investigators to either stop their digging, or to lean on congressional and intelligence officials to get them to back Trump by saying there is nothing there. Here are the US officials who have reportedly been the subject of White House pressure:

Daniel Coats and Admiral Michael Rogers: The Washington Post reported on Monday that Trump asked each of these two top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against the FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and Russia. Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, refused to comply with the requests, which they believed were inappropriate, according to the Post. In congressional testimony Tuesday, Coats declined to discuss whether the president leaned on him.

James Comey: As the New York Times reported in mid-May, Trump asked the FBI director during an Oval Office meeting in February to shut down the federal investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “I hope you can let this go,” the president told Comey, according to a contemporaneous memo Comey wrote. Trump fired Comey on May 9, giving conflicting reasons for his action. Trump has since denied that he asked Comey to stop his investigation of Flynn, responding to a question at a news conference by cutting off the reporter and saying only, “No, no—next question.”

Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Devin Nunes: In February, the Post reported that the White House asked senior members of Congress to contact news organizations to try to counter news stories about the growing Russia scandal, including Burr and Nunes—the two Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees investigating Trump. A spokesman for Nunes confirmed that he spoke to reporters and delivered the requested message. In an interview, Burr acknowledged that he had conversations about Russia-related news reports with the White House and engaged with news organizations to dispute articles by the New York Times and CNN that alleged repeated contact between Trump campaign members and Russian intelligence operatives. Nunes later stepped down from the House investigation, after revelations about him working closely with the White House to instead focus attention on alleged surveillance activities by the Obama administration.

Andrew McCabe: Also in February, according to the Guardian, Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, asked the FBI to deny media reports that campaign advisers were frequently in touch with Russians during the election. Priebus’ reported discussion with McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director—who took over as acting director after Comey was fired—prompted sharp criticism from Democrats, who said Priebus violated policies intended to insulate FBI investigations from politics.

These are the examples known so far, but other instances of White House pressure or meddling in the investigations may well come to light: As the Post also reported this week with its scoop on Coats and Rogers, Trump White House officials “sounded out” with other “top intelligence officials” the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop the investigation into Flynn.

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How the Trump White House Has Tried to Interfere With the Russia Investigations

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The Michael Flynn Scandal Descends on Trump’s DC Hotel

by JoeannSloan Posted on May 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Ekim Alptekin, a well-connected Turkish businessman at the center of one of the many scandals swirling around President Donald Trump and his White House, stood before a crowd of several hundred people in downtown Washington and sought to clear up a few things. “There’s been a lot of media attention on it,” he later told a reporter, “so I just wanted to address the issue.”

The “issue” in question was no small matter. Last year, Alptekin paid $530,000 to retired Lt. General Michael Flynn to lobby on behalf of Turkish interests. At the time, Flynn was a top adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, and after Trump’s shock victory, the president-elect rewarded Flynn with the job of national security adviser. But it later emerged that Flynn had failed to register as a foreign lobbyist for this work, as required by law, and that he was under federal investigation for his secret lobbying for Alptekin. (Flynn was fired in February, after only 22 days on the job, amid reports that he had communicated with the Russian ambassador and lied about it.)

So it was a bit awkward when Alptekin appeared in Washington this week for the 36th Annual Conference on US-Turkey Relations. (He chairs one of the conference’s two main organizers, the Turkey-US Business Council.) In a speech on Monday, Alptekin addressed the Flynn controversy directly. “As many of you have read in the media,” he said, “I hired the Flynn Intel Group in 2016 before the election with a mandate to help me understand where the Turkish-American relationship is and where it’s going and what the obstacles are to the relationship.” His willingness to confront such a thorny issue—legally and politically—caught some in attendance by surprise. Yet there was also a surreal quality to Alptekin’s remarks, if only for this reason: He delivered them at the Trump International Hotel, owned by the president himself.

International intrigue notwithstanding, the 36th Annual Conference on US-Turkey Relations was typical of the glitzy conventions and forums hosted in Washington. There were panels on e-commerce, NATO, and cybersecurity, all with the theme of encouraging greater cooperation between the governments and industries of the United States and Turkey. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and now a Zelig of Washington’s paid-speaking and overseas-junket circuit, spoke at a luncheon sponsored by several major Turkish conglomerates, where he poked fun at the president and plugged his forthcoming book, Understanding Trump.

For his part, Alptekin pointed out that the venue had been chosen well before Trump was elected president. In October 2016, the American-Turkish Council, a group devoted to building up business connections between the two countries (and the conference’s other organizer), booked the Trump hotel in downtown DC, a short walk from the White House. According to Alptekin, the Turkish interest groups had first toured the hotel even earlier, in 2015, before Trump had declared his candidacy. Howard Beasey, president of the American-Turkish Council, told NPR, “Unfortunately, in our contract with the hotel, there is no I-became-president-so-you-get-to-break-your-contract-with-us clause.”

And so it was that Alptekin, whose hiring of Flynn helped plunge the Trump White House into turmoil, spent several days this week roaming the marble lobbies and conference rooms of Trump’s DC hotel. He schmoozed with attendees, posed for photos, and sat for interviews with largely international news outlets, all the while surrounded by the name TRUMP.

Aside from his opening remarks, however, Alptekin had little to say about Flynn. He denied to ABC News that he and his company had represented the government of Turkey. (In his retroactive filing, Flynn noted that his work for Alptekin “could be construed to have principally benefitted the Republic of Turkey.”) Alptekin blamed the “highly politicized situation” in the United States for the “misunderstanding and misperceptions” around his company and hiring of Flynn.

There are many lingering questions about Alptekin’s role in the Flynn controversy: Why did Alptekin hire Flynn in the first place? Did Flynn tell Alptekin he wasn’t going to register as a foreign lobbyist? Had Alptekin ever spoken with Trump himself? If Alptekin were subpoenaed by Congress or law enforcement as part of the Flynn investigation, would he cooperate and provide documents? Alptekin addressed none of these. He refused to comment to ABC News when asked whether he had been questioned or served a subpoena as part of the Flynn investigation.

In the main lobby of the Trump hotel, I tracked down an assistant of Alptekin’s and asked for an interview. She said Alptekin was no longer giving interviews. At that moment, Alptekin stood a few feet away, speaking on camera with a small TV crew. After he finished, he and his entourage sped past me in the direction of the hotel’s ballrooms, presumably to rejoin the guests for a final panel on Turkey’s shipbuilding industry.

So it goes in Donald Trump’s Washington.

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The Michael Flynn Scandal Descends on Trump’s DC Hotel

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Republicans Focus on Protecting Trump at Russia Hearing

by LillaKdw749 Posted on May 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Republicans still are not serious about investigating the Trump-Russia scandal. That message came through resoundingly when the House Intelligence Committee held a public hearing on Tuesday morning with former CIA chief John Brennan. (Actually, this was not officially a committee hearing. Democrats on the committee were informed earlier that this would be considered a “task force” hearing because the Republican chairman of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, could not appear because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.)

At the witness table, Brennan told a harrowing tale. As CIA director last summer, he saw what was happening with the hack-and-leak attack on the Democratic National Committee, and he reviewed top-secret intelligence and concluded that Russia was mounting this assault to disrupt the election, hurt Hillary Clinton, and help Donald Trump. He also at the time was aware of intelligence that showed contacts between Trump associates and Russia, and that caused him to conclude a thorough FBI investigation was warranted. He testified, “I saw interaction” that warranted concern.

This was a big deal. In March, then-FBI chief James Comey revealed during testimony to this committee that in July 2016 the bureau launched an investigation of contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Now the CIA head from then was stating that there was clear intelligence that justified that probe. He also revealed that in early August he was so concerned about the Russian operation he spoke to the head of Russia’s FSB, the country’s intelligence service, and warned him to knock it off. Brennan also revealed that in August and September he briefed a small number of congressional leaders and shared with them top-secret intelligence about Moscow’s effort to subvert the election in part to benefit Trump. (This means that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan knew many details about the Russian operation but didn’t challenge or correct Trump’s continued public assertions that Russia was not necessarily the culprit in the DNC hack.)

Yet once again Republicans did not focus on the main elements of the story. When the Republicans on the committee had the chance to question Brennan, they did not press him for more details on Russia’s information warfare against the United States. Instead, they fixated on protecting Trump.

The Republicans zeroed in on the issue of whether Trump and his associates colluded with any Russians involved in the attack on US democracy—to push Brennan to say he had not seen concrete evidence of such conspiring. Reps. Tom Rooney (R-Fla) and Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) grilled Brennan repeatedly on this point. They posed the same basic query: Did you see any evidence that Trump or his associates plotted with Russians? “I don’t do evidence. I do intelligence,” Brennan replied. Still, they kept pressing him. They were obviously hoping he would state that he had not come across any such evidence so Trump and his champions could cite Brennan as a witness for their claim no collusion occurred.

In the face of this questioning, Brennan repeatedly stated that the intelligence he saw regarding contacts between Trump associates and Russia was worrisome and deserved full FBI scrutiny. So the Republicans failed in their mission to provide cover for Trump—and they ended up highlighting the legitimacy of the FBI inquiry begun under Comey.

A similar effort fell flat. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) questioned Brennan about the intelligence community assessment released in early January that concluded the Russian clandestine operation was designed to assist Trump. He several times asked Brennan if there had been evidence contrary to this conclusion that was not included in the report. Brennan explained that the assessment was the result of a thorough interagency process that looked to develop a consensus position. Still, King seemed to suggest that the assessment might be open to question. And Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) asserted he had reviewed raw intelligence, and he insisted the information supporting the assessment that Moscow had preferred Trump was not as solid as the intelligence community maintained. Here were Republicans trying to find wiggle room for Trump.

Rooney took another stab at undermining the dominant narrative of the Trump-Russia scandal. He asked whether the Russians had been rooting for Clinton to fail or for Trump to win. “It was both,” Brennan replied. Rooney suggested that the Russians had gathered information damaging for Clinton’s campaign that it did not release, and he asked Brennan, what would that mean for the conclusion that Russians were trying to help Trump? It appeared as if Rooney thought this would be an a-ha! moment: If the Russians sat on anti-Clinton material, well, that must be an indicator they hadn’t’ engaged in cyber-skullduggery to help Trump. Brennan shot this down with a simple reply: Since the Russians, like many others, believed Clinton would win, they might have been holding on to that material to damage her once she became president.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) also tried to race to Trump’s rescue. Complaining that some Democrats on the committee have publicly said they have seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, Turner asked Brennan if it would be accurate to characterize the intelligence Brennan saw when he was CIA chief as evidence of collusion. Brennan responded that this would not be an accurate characterization. Turner smiled, as if he had just blown a hole in the Democrats’ case. Moments later, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) asked Brennan if he had seen the evidence and material shared by the FBI with the House Intelligence Committee in classified meetings. No, he had not. So Turner had proved nothing.

Perhaps the most absurd act of GOP distraction came when Rep. Ben Wenstrup (R-Ohio) raised an episode from 2012, when President Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic telling Dmitry Medvedev, then the president of Russia, that he would have more flexibility to negotiate with Vladimir Putin after the US presidential election. Calling this moment “pretty disturbing,” Wenstrup asked Brennan, “Would you question that interaction?” Brennan didn’t take the bait and said he had nothing to say in response. Wenstrup suggested that perhaps this should be investigated. Brennan didn’t reply.

Gowdy finished up his questioning by concentrating on leaks and the unmasking within top-secret reports of Americans picked up incidentally by US intelligence surveillance. This has become a favorite topic of Republicans looking to defect from the core features of the Trump-Russia scandal. And Gowdy, a bit defensively, noted he had waited until the end of the hearing to pose these questions so the claim could not be made that Republicans are “hyperfocused” on the matter. Yet compared with previous hearings, Gowdy was restrained in declaiming leaks. This time he did not suggest, as he has before, that journalists should be prosecuted for publishing stories containing classified information.

When the hearing ended, the Republicans departed the room quickly. A few Democratic members lingered. One complained about the slow pace of the committee’s investigation. Another pointed out that Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who’s leading the committee’s Russia investigation in Nunes’ absence, had barely participated in the hearing. Conaway had opened the hearings without any reference to the interactions between Trump associates and Russia, but he had presented a prayer that invoked Jesus. As one Democrat noted, Conaway did not ask a single question during the proceedings. “That tells you all you need to know,” this member said.

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Republicans Focus on Protecting Trump at Russia Hearing

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Macron Campaign Hit With "Massive and Coordinated" Hacking Attack

by ElviraEJKC Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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A massive trove of documents purporting to contain thousands of emails and other files from the campaign of Emmanuel Macron—the French centrist candidate squaring off against right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen—was posted on the internet Friday afternoon. The Macron campaign says that at least some of the documents are fake. The document dump came just over a day before voting is set to begin in the final round of the election and mere hours before candidates are legally required to stop campaigning.

At about 2:35 p.m. ET, a post appeared on the 4chan online message board announcing the leak. The documents appear to include emails, internal memos, and screenshots of purported banking records.

“In this pastebin are links to torrents of emails between Macron, his team and other officials, politicians as well as original documents and photos,” the anonymous 4chan poster wrote. “This was passed on to me today so now I am giving it to you, the people. The leak is massvie and released in the hopes that the human search engine here will be able to start sifting through the contents and figure out exactly what we have here.”

The Macron campaign issued a statement Friday night saying it was the victim of a “massive and coordinated” hacking attack. That campaign said the leak included some fake documents that were intended “to sow doubt and misinformation.”

The Macron camp compared the document dump to last year’s hacking of emails associated with Hillary Clinton. The US intelligence community has concluded that Russia was responsible for the Clinton hacks. “This operation is obviously a democratic destabilization as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” the Macron statement said.

The timing of the leak is particularly noteworthy. Under French law, candidates and their campaigns cannot speak to the media or do anything in public in the 24 hours before the start of Sunday’s election. The Macron campaign’s statement was issued three minutes before the deadline.

It’s unclear when the files originally appeared on the internet. The official Twitter account for WikiLeaks—the group that released the Clinton emails last year—tweeted a link to a page where the Macron data was hosted at 1:13 p.m. ET.

“Fully analyzing the hacked documents to verify that they are genuine will take some time, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks very serious,” said Matt Tait, a former information security specialist for the GCHQ (the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency) and CEO of Capital Alpha Security.

In February, Macron said he had evidence his campaign had “suffered repeated and multiple attacks from hackers” and that “many come from Ukraine.” At the time, the Macron campaign blamed the Russian government for the attacks, a claim the Kremlin denied. The campaign suspected the attacks were coming their way because of Macron’s tough stance on Russia. Le Pen, on the other hand, has taken a much more favorable stance toward Russia.

Earlier on Friday, according to the New York Times, the Le Pen campaign claimed in a statement that its campaign website had been the victim of “regular and targeted” attacks, and that a hacker “close to extreme-left circles” had been arrested.

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Macron Campaign Hit With "Massive and Coordinated" Hacking Attack

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This Tech Company’s Anti-Censorship Stance Is Helping Hate Speech

by HectorDias6618 Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet. Women are whores, blacks are inferior and a shadowy Jewish cabal is organizing a genocide against white people. The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier this year.

Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet.

The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company—Cloudflare. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites—speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.

The widespread use of Cloudflare’s services by racist groups is not an accident. Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.

“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”

Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining.

This has led to campaigns of harassment against those writing in to protest the offensive material. People have been threatened and harassed.

ProPublica reached out to a handful of people targeted by The Daily Stormer after they or someone close to them complained to Cloudflare about the site’s content. All but three declined to talk on the record, citing fear of further harassment or a desire to not relive it. Most said they had no idea their report would be passed on, though Cloudflare does state on the reporting form that they “will notify the site owner.”

“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.

Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content.

“We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”

ProPublica asked Cloudflare’s top lawyer about its policy of sharing information on those who complain about racist sites. The lawyer, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, defended the company’s policies by saying it is “base constitutional law that people can face their accusers.” Kramer suggested that some of the people attacking Cloudflare’s customers had their own questionable motives.

Hate sites such as The Daily Stormer have become a focus of intense interest since the racially divisive 2016 election—how popular they are, who supports them, how they are financed. Most of their operators supported Donald Trump and helped spread a variety of conspiracy theories aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. But they clearly have also become a renewed source of concern for law enforcement.

In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chief Will D. Johnson, chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Human and Civil Rights Committee, highlighted the reach and threat of hate on the Internet.

“The internet provides extremists with an unprecedented ability to spread hate and recruit followers,” he said. “Individual racists and organized hate groups now have the power to reach a global audience of millions and to communicate among like-minded individuals easily, inexpensively, and anonymously.

“Although hate speech is offensive and hurtful, the First Amendment usually protects such expression,” Johnson said. “However, there is a growing trend to use the Internet to intimidate and harass individuals on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, disability, or national origin.”

A look at Cloudflare’s policies and operations sheds some light on how sites promoting incendiary speech and even violent behavior can exist and even thrive.

Jacob Sommer, a lawyer with extensive experience in internet privacy and security issues, said there is no legal requirement for a company like Cloudflare to regulate the sites on their service, though many internet service providers choose to. It comes down to a company’s sense of corporate responsibility, he said.

For the most part, Sommers said, a lot of companies don’t want “this stuff” on their networks. He said those companies resist having their networks become “a hive of hate speech.”

Jonathan Vick, associate director for investigative technology and cyberhate response at the Anti-Defamation League, agrees. He said that many of the hosts they talk to want to get hate sites off their networks.

“Even the most intransigent of them, when they’re given evidence of something really problematic, they do respond,” he said.

Cloudflare has raised at least $180 million in venture capital since its inception in 2009, much of it from some of the most prominent venture capital firms and tech companies in the country. The service is what’s known as a content delivery network, and offers protection from several cyber threats including “denial of service” attacks, where hundreds of computers make requests to a website at once, overwhelming it and bringing it down.

Company officials have said Cloudflare’s core belief is in the free and open nature of the internet. But given its outsize role in protecting a range of websites, Cloudflare has found itself the target of critics.

In 2015, the company came under fire from the hacker collective Anonymous for reportedly allowing ISIS propaganda sites on its network. At the time, Prince, the company’s CEO, dismissed the claim as “armchair analysis by kids,” and told Fox Business that the company would not knowingly accept money from a terrorist organization.

Kramer, in an interview with ProPublica, reiterated that the company would not accept money from ISIS. But he said that was not for moral or ethical reasons. Rather, he said, Cloudflare did not have dealings with terrorists groups such as ISIS because there are significant and specific laws restricting them from doing so.

In the end, Kramer said, seedy and objectionable sites made up a tiny fraction of the company’s clients.

“We’ve got 6 million customers,” he told ProPublica. “It’s easy to find these edge cases.”

One of the people ProPublica spoke with whose information had been shared with The Daily Stormer‘s operators said his complaint had been posted on the site, but that he was “not interested in talking about my experience as it’s not something I want to revisit.” Someone else whose information was posted on the site said that while she did get a few odd emails, she wasn’t aware her information had been made public. She followed up to say she was going to abandon her email account now that she knew.

“The entire situation makes me feel uneasy,” she said.

Scott Ernest had complained about The Daily Stormer‘s conduct after Anglin, its owner, had used the site to allegedly harass a woman in the town of Whitefish, Montana. After his complaint, Ernest wound up on the receiving end of about two dozen harassing emails or phone calls.

“Fuck off and die,” read one email. “Go away and die,” read another. Those commenting on the site speculated on everything from Ernest’s hygiene to asking, suggestively, why it appeared in a Facebook post that Ernest had a child at his house.

Ernest said the emails and phone calls he received were not traumatizing, but they were worrying.

“His threats of harassment can turn into violence,” he said of Anglin.

Anglin appears quite comfortable with his arrangement with Cloudflare. It doesn’t cost him much either—just $200 a month, according to public posts on the site.

“Any complaints filed against the site go to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare then sends me an email telling me someone said I was doing something bad and that it is my responsibility to figure out if I am doing that,” he wrote in a 2015 post on his site. “Cloudflare does not regulate content, so it is meaningless.”

Representatives from Rackspace and GoDaddy, two popular web hosts, said they try to regulate the kinds of sites on their services. For Rackspace, that means drawing the line at hosting white supremacist content or hate speech. For GoDaddy, that means not hosting the sort of abusive publication of personal information that Anglin frequently engages in.

“There is certainly content that, while we respect freedom of speech, we don’t want to be associated with it,” said Arleen Hess, senior manager of GoDaddy’s digital crimes unit.

Both companies also said they would not pass along contact information for people who complain about offensive content to the groups generating it.

Amazon Web Services, one of the most popular web hosts and content delivery networks, would not say how they handle abuse complaints beyond pointing to an “acceptable use” policy that restricts objectionable, abusive and harmful content. They also pointed to their abuse form, which says the company will keep your contact information private.

According to Vick at the ADL, the fact that Cloudflare takes money from Anglin is different from if he’d just used their free service.

“That’s a direct relationship,” he said. “That raises questions in my mind.”

Some companies offering other services vital to success on the web have chosen not to do business with Anglin’s The Daily Stormer. Google, PayPal and Coinbase, for instance, have chosen to cut off his accounts rather than support his activities. Getting booted around from service to service can make it hard to run a hate site, but Cloudflare gives the sites a solid footing.

And, by The Daily Stormer‘s account, advice and assurances. In a post, the site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways—including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.

Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”

A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer‘s issues get resolved.

“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech—something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.

Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.

“Andrew Anglin has the right to be out there and say what he wants to say. But the people who object to what he has to say have a right to object as well,” he said. “You should be able to respond to everybody in the chain.”

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This Tech Company’s Anti-Censorship Stance Is Helping Hate Speech

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Reuters: Putin-Controlled Think Tank Created Plan to Interfere With US Election

by locuridemuncainconstanta Posted on April 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Reuters reports that Vladimir Putin personally directed RISS, a Russian think tank, to develop plans to interfere with the US election:

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

….The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals. It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

According to Reuters, there’s no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded in this. It was purely a Russian operation. Nor did the RISS plans say anything about the release of hacked emails. “The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.”

So we have the RISS plan. We have the email hacks, which were far more extensive than initially reported. We have the RT cable network and the Sputnik news agency, which specialized in anti-Clinton stories. We have the Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg writing pro-Trump tweets under hundreds of aliases. We have thousands of Russian Twitter bots to make sure the tweets went viral. We have Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear and dozens of other covert Russian operations. We have Guccifer 2.0. We have DCLeaks.com. And finally, Russia appears to have used Wikileaks—either wittingly or unwittingly—for maximum exposure of all its hacks.

That’s a pretty big operation. Did it work? We’ll never know, but given how close the election was, the answer is probably yes.

Continued:  

Reuters: Putin-Controlled Think Tank Created Plan to Interfere With US Election

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With Nunes Out, the New Guys Running the Trump-Russia Probe Ain’t Much Better

by GiseleDRTxuhaxi Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, the inevitable happened: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, announced he was yielding the reins on his panel’s derailed investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes claims the reason for his retreat is that the House ethics committee is investigating whether he publicly revealed classified information—a charge he insists is “baseless.” Whatever happens with this ethics inquiry, his departure does not guarantee the investigation will fare any better than it has.

In his statement, Nunes curiously said nothing about Vladimir Putin’s secret political attack on the United States. Nor did he mention the question of contacts between Trump associates and Moscow. He only discussed one aspect of the committee’s probe: the leaking of classified information (mainly about Michael Flynn, who was fired from the national security adviser post after news reports showed he had lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the transition). “The charges…are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of US citizens and other abuses of power,” Nunes declared. So even as he said bye-bye to the probe, the congressman—who served on the Trump transition team and who delegitimized himself while trying to provide cover to President Donald Trump for his fact-free charge that Barack Obama had wiretapped him—was still promoting Trump’s distraction of choice: The big story is what happened when Trump and his team were possibly picked up by “incidental” intelligence collection, not Putin’s attempt to subvert an American election or the FBI’s investigation of Trump associates for possibly coordinating with Russia.

And the committee members Nunes designated as his heirs have been champions of the same diversionary tactic.

Nunes, who is retaining his post of committee chairman, assigned the task of running the Russia investigation to Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas). He also noted that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) will assist Conaway. At the committee’s first hearing for its Russia probe—before Nunes ran the investigation into a ditch—his three designees, as they questioned FBI chief James Comey and National Security Agency head Mike Rogers, focused on the narrow issue of leaks and unmasking. (“Unmasking” is the term of art for when a senior US official cleared to handle top-secret reports based on intelligence intercepts of foreign targets requests an intelligence agency to disclose to him or her the identity of a US citizen referenced in a report.) Or they asked questions designed to raise doubts about the intelligence community’s assessment that Putin meddled in the election to assist Trump. That is, they stuck to the GOP’s political script.

Moreover, in early January, Conaway dismissed the issue of Russian involvement in the campaign with a wacky comparison. Speaking to a Dallas newspaper, he compared the Russian hacking-and-leaking assault to standard campaign moves: “Harry Reid and the Democrats brought in Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth. Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada. You don’t hear the Democrats screaming and saying one word about that.” As the Dallas Morning News reported, “Asked whether he considers that on par with Russian cyber-intrusions that aimed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Conaway said: ‘Sure it is, it’s foreign influence. If we’re worried about foreign influence, let’s have the whole story.'”

This attitude was on full display during the hearing with Comey and Rogers—at which Comey declared the FBI had no evidence to support Trump’s Obama-wiretapped-me claim and revealed the FBI had been investigating Trump-Russia contacts since July. When Conaway was granted time for questioning, he dwelled on when and why the FBI and the NSA had reached the conclusion that the Russian operation was designed to help Trump. Conaway tried to make an issue out of the fact that the FBI hit this conclusion with more certainty a few weeks before the NSA did late last year. Comey had to point out, “To be clear, Mr. Conaway, we all agreed with that judgment.” And Rogers echoed him.

Conaway’s intent was clear: to attempt to show this damaging-to-Trump assessment was still iffy. This led him into a bizarre exchange with Comey over rooting for college football teams and whether a person can cheer for one team to lose and not really desire the other team to win. (Conaway referenced his wife’s favorite team, the Red Raiders of Texas Tech.) Comey noted that “logically, when Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose,” he wanted Trump to win. Conaway then tried to discredit a Washington Post story by noting that the anonymous sources who provided the newspaper information about the US intelligence community’s assessment of the Russian operation (before that evaluation was made public) had probably broken the law. It was not obvious what he was driving at. But Conaway had not bothered to express any outrage over the Russian intervention or to encourage the FBI’s ongoing investigations. He was in Trump-damage-control mode.

Rooney used his grilling time to pose to Rogers a long and detailed series of questions about incidental collection and unmasking. These are not unimportant subjects. But they have nothing to do with how Putin and Russian intelligence intervened in the election. (Rogers noted that only 20 senior-ranked officials at the NSA, including himself, are authorized to approve unmasking requests.) Then came the money shot. Rooney asked, “If the NSA obtained the communication of General Flynn while he was communicating with the surveillance target legally, would you please explain how General Flynn’s identity could be unmasked based on the exceptions that we discussed?” So this was all about targeting those current or past US officials who had leaked information on Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador. Rooney was more concerned about the leaking than Flynn’s deceptions and back-channel communications (for which Flynn was fired). Rogers replied, “I’m not going to discuss even hypotheticals about individuals, I’m sorry.”

Nevertheless, Rooney decried the “serious crime” that had apparently been committed via a presumed act of unmasking. He noted he was worried that the intelligence community had broken a “sacred trust” with the American people. (There was not a word about Flynn violating any trust.) He did not once address the Russian intervention.

When Rooney was done, Gowdy picked up this line of questioning. Gowdy is best known for running the House special committee on Benghazi that went on endlessly—after other House committees had scrutinized the matter and blown apart the various anti-Clinton conspiracy theories of the right—and was marred by partisan moves and, yes, leaks from the GOP side of the committee. (Gowdy also declared during the campaign that he believed Clinton should be prosecuted for how she handled her official email when she was secretary of state.) Citing several newspaper stories about Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador—which referred to classified intercepts that had captured these communications—Gowdy said to Comey, “I thought it was against the law to disseminate classified information. Is it?” Comey replied, “Yes, sir. It’s a serious crime. I’m not going to comment on those particular articles because I don’t want to, in any circumstance, compound a criminal act by confirming that it was classified information, but in general, yes, it’s a serious crime.”

Gowdy subsequently followed up with this question: “Is there an exception in the law for reporters who want to break a story?” Comey answered, “Well that’s a harder question as to whether a reporter incurs criminal liability by publishing classified information and one probably beyond my ken.” But Gowdy suggested that a reporter could be prosecuted for publishing a story containing classified information. “You’re not aware of an exception in the current dissemination of the classified information statute that carves out an exception for reporters?” he asked the FBI chief. No, Comey said: “I’m not aware of anything carved out in the statute. I don’t think a reporter’s been prosecuted certainly in my lifetime, though.”

Gowdy did not ask anything related to how the Kremlin had targeted a political party and presidential campaign to subvert an election. Instead, he fixated on leaks and locking up journalists who receive and report classified secrets. He pressed Comey to investigate the Flynn leak, and he ticked off a list of Obama officials who might have had access to unmasked names—James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates—as if to suggest one or more of them deserved to be investigated for the Flynn leak.

Toward the end of the hearing, Gowdy did speak one sentence about the FBI’s Russia investigation. He told Comey, “I want you to go find every single witness who may have information about interference, influence, motive, our response, collusion, coordination, whatever your jurisdiction is, wherever the facts may take you. Though the heavens may fall, go do your jobs because nature abhors a vacuum.” But Gowdy then cautioned people not to confuse “evidence” with “facts” and to be wary of hearsay. This seemed to be an indirect way of questioning media reporting regarding the Russian intervention in the election and the contacts between Trump associates and Russia. In any event, Gowdy had tried to turn the hearing into an inquiry about the Flynn leak and the once-obscure subject of unmasking—which matched the agenda of Trump defenders.

Acting in a partisan and puzzling manner, Nunes made a hash of the House intelligence committee’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. After his botched stunt, his credibility was shot. Stepping aside was the correct action. Yet he has placed this important exercise in the hands of men who have indicated they are not fully concerned with the main issues, which, of course, are rather inconvenient for their party and its president. Conaway, Rooney, and Gowdy have not yet demonstrated they can mount an independent and vigorous investigation on this politically sensitive terrain. Nunes may be gone, but the challenges facing the committee remain.

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With Nunes Out, the New Guys Running the Trump-Russia Probe Ain’t Much Better

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Watch the Top Democrat on the Senate Intel Committee Explain the Trump-Russia Scandal

by charlenestahl1 Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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The US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday convened its first hearing in its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. In stark contrast to the House intelligence committee’s investigation—which has been brought to a halt by the partisan brinksmanship of the panel’s chair, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)—the leaders of the Senate investigation say they are trying to keep things as bipartisan and transparent as possible. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the committee’s vice chairman, used his opening statement to sum up Russia’s election interference—and the ways that Trump associates may have been connected to this Kremlin operation. “We are seeking to determine if there is an actual fire, but there’s clearly a lot of smoke,” Warner said. Read his full statement below:

Today’s hearing is important to help understand the role Russia played in the 2016 presidential elections.

As the U.S. intelligence community unanimously assessed in January of this year, Russia sought to hijack our democratic process, and that most important part of our democratic process, our Presidential elections. As we’ll learn today, Russia’s strategy and tactics are not new, but their brazenness certainly was.

This hearing is also important because it is open, as the chairman mentioned—which is unusual for this Committee. Due to the classified nature of our work, we typically operate behind closed doors.

But today’s public hearing will help, I hope, the American public writ large understand how the Kremlin made effective use of its hacking skills to steal and weaponize information and engage in a coordinated effort to damage a particular candidate and to undermine public confidence in our democratic process.

Our witnesses today will help us to understand how Russia deployed this deluge of disinformation in a broader attempt to undermine America’s strength and leadership throughout the world.

We simply must – and we will – get this right. The Chairman and I agree it is vitally important that we do this as a credible, bipartisan, and transparent a manner as possible. As was said yesterday at our press conference, Chairman Burr and I trust each other, and equally important, we trust our colleagues on this committee that we are going to move together and we are going to get to the bottom of it and get it right.

As this hearing begins, let’s take a minute to review what we know: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a deliberate campaign carefully constructed to undermine our election.

First, Russia struck at our political institutions by electronically breaking into the headquarters of one of our political parties and stealing vast amounts of information. Russian operatives also hacked emails to steal personal messages and other information from individuals ranging from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

This stolen information was then “weaponized.” We know that Russian intelligence used the “Guccifer 2.0” persona and others like WikiLeaks and seemingly choreographed times that would cause maximum damage to one candidate. They did this with an unprecedented level of sophistication about American presidential politics that should be a line of inquiry for us on this committee and candidly, while it helped one candidate this time, they are not favoring one party over another, and consequently should be a concern for all of us.

Second, Russia continually sought to diminish and undermine our trust in the American media by blurring our faith in what is true and what is not. Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik successfully produced and peddled disinformation to American audiences in pursuit of Moscow’s preferred outcome.

This Russian “propaganda on steroids” was designed to poison the national conversation in America. The Russians employed thousands of paid Internet trolls and bot-nets to push-out disinformation and fake news at high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation.

This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach – and potentially influence – millions of Americans.

This is not innuendo or false allegations. This is not fake news. This is actually what happened to us, and understanding all aspects of this attack is important.

Russia continues these sorts of actions as we speak. Some of our close allies in Europe are experiencing exactly the same kind of interference in their political processes. Germany has said that its Parliament has been hacked. French presidential candidates right now have been the subjects of Russian propaganda and disinformation. In the Netherlands, their recent elections, the Dutch hand-counted their ballots because they feared Russian interference in their electoral process.

Perhaps, most critically for us, there is nothing to stop them from doing this all over again in 2018, for those of you who are up, or in 2020, as Americans again go back to the polls.

In addition to what we already know, any full accounting must also find out what, if any, contacts, communications or connections occurred between Russia and those associated with the campaigns themselves.

I will not prejudge the outcome of our investigation. We are seeking to determine if there is an actual fire, but there’s clearly a lot of smoke. For instance:

• An individual associated with the Trump campaign accurately predicted the release of hacked emails weeks before it happened. This same individual also admits to being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, the Russian intelligence persona responsible for these cyber operations.
• The platform of one of our two major political parties was mysteriously watered-down in a way which promoted the interests of President Putin — and no one seems to be able to identify who directed that change in the platform.
• A campaign manager of one campaign, who played such a critical role in electing the President, was forced to step down over his alleged ties to Russia and its associates.
• Since the election, we have seen the President’s national security advisor resign — and his Attorney General recuse — himself over previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian government.
• And, of course, in the other body, on March 20th, the Director of the FBI publicly acknowledged that the Bureau is “investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russian efforts.”

I want to be clear, at least for me: This investigation is not about whether you have a “D” or an “R” next to your name. It is not about re-litigating last fall’s election. It is about clearly understanding and responding to this very real threat.

It’s also, I believe, about holding Russia accountable for this unprecedented attack against our democracy. And it is about arming ourselves so we can identify and stop it when it happens again. And trust me: it will happen again if we don’t take action.

I would hope that the President is as anxious as we are to get to the bottom of what happened. But I have to say editorially, that the President’s recent conduct — with his wild and uncorroborated accusations about wiretapping, and his inappropriate and unjustified attacks on America’s hard-working intelligence professionals — does give me grave concern.

This Committee has a heavy weight of responsibility to prove that we can continue to put our political labels aside and get to the truth. I believe we can get there. I have seen firsthand, and I say this to our audience, how seriously members on both sides of this dais have worked so far on this sensitive and critical issue.

As the Chairman and I have said repeatedly, this investigation will follow the facts where they lead us .If at any time I believe we’re not going to be able to get those facts, and we’re working together very cooperatively to make sure we get the facts we need from the intelligence community, we will get that done.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your commitment to this serious work and your commitment to keeping this bipartisan cooperation, at least, if not all across the hill, alive in this committee. Thank you very much.

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Watch the Top Democrat on the Senate Intel Committee Explain the Trump-Russia Scandal

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Jeff Sessions Met Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump Campaign

by ManuelaRuth Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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And now here comes the Washington Post on contacts between the Trump team and Russia:

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

….Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.

That was Mike Flynn’s initial answer too, wasn’t it? That he “didn’t remember” the details of a conversation from less than half a year ago. I wonder how long Sessions’ version will hold up?

Can we all now agree that maybe Sessions really does need to recuse himself from the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia?

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Jeff Sessions Met Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump Campaign

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