Tag Archives: russia

Trump’s UN Pick Contradicts Him on Major International Issues

by GalenRamsey Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came out hard against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. She used her platform during the GOP’s response to President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union speech to urge fellow Republicans to resist the urge “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices” in her party’s primary. She said in February 2016 that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” and only tepidly supported him after first backing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and then Sen. Ted Cruz during the primary.

The notoriously thin-skinned Trump responded by calling the Indian American governor “very weak on illegal immigration,” and by tweeting, “The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!” Nonetheless, as president-elect, Trump picked Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, calling her a “proven deal-maker” with “a track record of bringing people together regardless of background or party affiliation.” Haley accepted his nomination: “Our country faces enormous challenges here at home and internationally,” she said, adding that she was “honored that the president-elect has asked me to join his team.”

But during her Senate Foreign Relations committee confirmation hearings Wednesday, flanked by her husband, son, parents, and two brothers, Haley joined other Cabinet nominees in expressing differences with Trump on foreign policy issues, starting with Russia.

“Do you agree, that both at the UN in New York and on the streets of Aleppo, Moscow has acted as an active accomplice in Assad’s murder of his own people?” Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), asked.

“Yes,” Haley responded.

A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), said it was very clear that Russia had interfered in the US presidential election and asked Haley whether she would “stand up to Vladimir Putin and against Russia’s attempt to interfere with our electoral system?”

“We should stand up to any country that attempts to interfere with our election system,” Haley said. Udall then asked her what her message to her Russian counterpart at the UN would be regarding election meddling.

“That we are aware that it has happened, we don’t find it acceptable, and that we are going to fight back every time we see something like that happening,” Haley replied. “I don’t think Russia’s going to be the only one—I think we’re going to start to see this around the world with other countries. And I think that we need to take a firm stand that when we see that happen, we are not going to take that softly, we are going to be very hard on that.”

Trump has continually downplayed and cast doubt on the findings of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI that Russia’s government attempted to influence the 2016 US presidential election in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and boost Trump’s chances of winning. Haley was just the latest of his nominees to publicly break from the president-elect on Russia: Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson did, and so did Defense Secretary nominee General James Mattis and the nominee for CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo.

Haley also came out in support of NATO, calling it “an important alliance for us to have…and I think it’s an alliance we need to strengthen.” Trump has called NATO “obsolete.”

Unlike the confirmation hearings for some of Trump’s other Cabinet picks, there were no contentious exchanges with even the Democratic senators during her three-and-a-half-hour hearing. Haley was long considered to be one of Trump’s least controversial appointees.

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Trump’s UN Pick Contradicts Him on Major International Issues

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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McClatchy has the latest on the investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump team:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election….The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

….One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said….A key mission of the six-agency group has been to examine who financed the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

….The working group is scrutinizing the activities of a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire and of multiple individuals from Russia and other former Soviet nations who had similar connections, the sources said.

….The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia. One of McClatchy’s sources confirmed the report.

That’s an awful lot of agencies investigating an awful lot of allegations against an awful lot of people. And as the article says, you can’t get a warrant unless you can demonstrate at least some kind of plausible probable cause. That means these folks are working off a lot more than just the famous dossier produced by the ex-MI6 spy.

At this point, I flatly don’t know what I believe anymore. This is all crazy stuff, but a whole bunch of investigators don’t seem to be treating it as crazy. Either way, though, the guy at the center of all this is going to become president of the United States in two days.

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

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Donald Trump Hopes the EU Collapses

by MyrtisFrith Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is giving interviews this weekend! Here’s what he has to say:

His health care plan, which is almost down to the “final strokes,” will provide “insurance for everyone.”
He wants to give Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices.
He thinks more countries will leave the EU, and that’s fine with him. He believes the EU is just a Trojan Horse for German domination of trade, which makes it bad for America.
If BMW opens a plant in Mexico, he’s going to hit them with a 35 percent import tariff.
He wants to do a deal with the Russians. Perhaps he’ll lift sanctions on Russia in return for a reduction in nuclear arms.1
Jared Kushner is a genius who will negotiate peace in the Middle East.2
He’s going to keep using Twitter in the White House in order to communicate directly with his fans.3

I guess that’s it for now. I can’t wait to see Trump’s health care plan, which is apparently going to provide far better coverage than Obamacare and cost a lot less. Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll bet Democrats will be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.

1So Russia gets its sanctions lifted and gets to save money by paring back its expensive and useless nuclear arsenal. Maybe I’m just being obtuse, but it’s not clear to me what the US gets out of this deal.

2This is just a wild guess on my part, but I’ll bet Kushner has never spoken to a Palestinian leader in his life and doesn’t have the slightest clue what they want from any kind of peace agreement.

3This is something that too many people continue to misunderstand. Trump’s tweets aren’t meant for the press or for Congress or for you and me. They’re meant for his true believers. You should always read them with that in mind.

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Donald Trump Hopes the EU Collapses

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Evidence of Bizarre Trump-Russia Ties Continues to Ooze Out

by KarriETKHijgayn Posted on January 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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So what’s new on the Trump-Russia front? First up, the Independent tells us that the former MI6 agent behind the now-famous dossier alleging close ties between Russia and the Trump team was dismayed that his findings didn’t generate more action during the presidential campaign:

Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

….By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.

The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.

In related news, BuzzFeed says Israel is extremely interested in the possibility of Trump-Russia ties:

“You can trust me that many intelligence agencies are trying to evaluate the extent to which Trump might have ties, or a weakness of some type, to Russia,” one of the intelligence officers said….The officer said part of Israel’s interest in the dossier — and in other intelligence on Trump’s ties to Russia — stems from concern that secrets Israel shares with the Unites States might be fed to Russia.

Earlier this week, Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper reported that Israeli intelligence officials were questioning whether to continue sharing intelligence with the incoming Trump administration. The report said that during a recent meeting with US intelligence officials, Israel was told that the Russians had “leverages of pressure” to use against Trump. BuzzFeed News could not independently confirm that a meeting had taken place.

Other reports suggest that British intelligence is thinking along the same lines as Israel. And the Daily Beast reports that a group dedicated to hacking the NSA and releasing its prize malware has suddenly gone out of business a few days before Trump’s inauguration:

The Shadow Brokers emerged in August with the announcement that they’d stolen the hacking tools used by a sophisticated computer-intrusion operation known as the Equation Group, and were putting them up for sale to the highest bidder. It was a remarkable claim, because the Equation Group is generally understood to be part of the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program.

….It soon emerged that the Shadow Brokers really had the goods….Virtually nobody, though, believed the Shadow Brokers’ claim that they were mere hackers trying to sell the exploits for a quick fortune.

The more persuasive theory, supported by no less than Edward Snowden, is that the Shadow Brokers are one of the same Russian government hacking groups now accused of targeting the U.S. election….Under this theory, the Shadow Brokers were part of a tit-for-tat in the intelligence world. The group emerged just as the U.S. began confronting Russia over its election hacking, and then seemed to release its secrets in time with the public thrusts and parries between the two countries….Now, with a new, friendlier administration coming in, Vladimir Putin may be pressing the reset button.

The more I read about this stuff, the harder I find it to believe. It just seems wildly ridiculous, the kind of thing that would barely pass muster on a TV potboiler, let alone in real life. The truth is that I’d probably dismiss it entirely if it weren’t for the vast amount of very public and very strange evidence that Team Trump and Team Putin are very close.

I don’t know. This is all completely outlandish, and I can hardly bring myself to credit it. And yet, there’s an awful lot of evidence that points in the direction of it being true—or at least partly true, anyway. Strange days.

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Evidence of Bizarre Trump-Russia Ties Continues to Ooze Out

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The Spy Who Wrote the Trump-Russia Memos: It Was "Hair-Raising" Stuff

by LinetteTalbot66 Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last fall, a week before the election, I broke the story that a former Western counterintelligence official had sent memos to the FBI with troubling allegations related to Donald Trump. The memos noted that this spy’s sources had provided him with information indicating that Russian intelligence had mounted a yearslong operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump and had gathered secret compromising material on Trump. They also alleged that Trump and his inner circle had accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin. These memos caused a media and political firestorm this week when CNN reported that President Barack Obama and Trump had been told about their existence, as part of briefings on the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia hacked political targets during the 2016 campaign to help Trump become president. For my story in October, I spoke with the former spy who wrote these memos, under the condition that I not name him or reveal his nationality or the spy service where he had worked for nearly two decades, mostly on Russian matters.

The former spy told me that he had been retained in early June by a private research firm in the United States to look into Trump’s activity in Europe and Russia. “It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” he recalled. One question for him, he said, was, “Are there business ties in Russia?” The American firm was conducting a Trump opposition research project that was first financed by a Republican source until the funding switched to a Democratic one. The former spy said he was never told the identity of the client.

The former intelligence official went to work and contacted his network of sources in Russia and elsewhere. He soon received what he called “hair-raising” information. His sources told him, he said, that Trump had been “sexually compromised” by Russian intelligence in 2013 (when Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest) or earlier and that there was an “established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.” He noted he was “shocked” by these allegations. By the end of June, he was sending reports of what he was finding to the American firm.

The former spy said he soon decided the information he was receiving was “sufficiently serious” for him to forward it to contacts he had at the FBI. He did this, he said, without permission from the American firm that had hired him. “This was an extraordinary situation,” he remarked.

The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was “shock and horror.” After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. But he said, “My track record as a professional is second to no one.”

The former spy told me that he was reluctant to be talking with a reporter. He pointed out this was not his common practice. “Someone like me stays in the shadows,” he said. But he indicated that he believed this material was important, and he was unsure how the FBI was handling it. Certainly, there had been no public signs that the FBI was investigating these allegations. (The FBI at the time refused to tell me if it had received the memos or if it was examining the allegations.)

“This was something of huge significance, way above party politics,” the former spy told me. “I think Trump’s own party should be aware of this stuff as well.” He noted that he believed Russian intelligence’s efforts aimed at Trump were part of Vladimir Putin’s campaign to “disrupt and divide and discredit the system in Western democracies.”

After speaking with the former counterintelligence official, I was able to confirm his identity and expertise. A senior US administration official told me that he had worked with the onetime spook and that the former spy had an established and respected track record of providing US government agencies with accurate and valuable information about sensitive national security matters. “He is a credible source who has provided information to the US government for a long time, which senior officials have found to be highly credible,” this US official said.

I also was able to review the memos the former spy had written, and I quoted a few key portions in my article. I did not report the specific allegations—especially the lurid allegations about Trump’s personal behavior—because they could not be confirmed. The newsworthy story at this point was that a credible intelligence official had provided information to the FBI alleging Moscow had tried to cultivate and compromise a presidential candidate. And the issue at hand—at a time when the FBI was publicly disclosing information about its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email at the State Department—was whether the FBI had thoroughly investigated these allegations related to Russia and Trump. I also didn’t post the memos, as BuzzFeed did this week, because the documents contained information about the former spy’s sources that could place these people at risk.

When I spoke with the former spy, he appeared confident about his material—acknowledging these memos were works in progress—and genuinely concerned about the implications of the allegations. He came across as a serious and somber professional who was not eager to talk to a journalist or cause a public splash. He realized he was taking a risk, but he seemed duty bound to share information he deemed crucial. He noted that these allegations deserved a “substantial inquiry” within the FBI. Yet so far, the FBI has not yet said whether such an investigation has been conducted. As the former spy said to me, “The story has to come out.”

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The Spy Who Wrote the Trump-Russia Memos: It Was "Hair-Raising" Stuff

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Trump Says Climate Change Is a Hoax. Rex Tillerson Just Disagreed.

by NamMcPheegzzqy Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

At his confirmation hearing Wednesday to become secretary of state, Rex Tillerson contradicted President-elect Donald Trump’s positions on climate change and his promise to withdraw the United States from global climate action.

Although Exxon Mobil, where Tillerson served as CEO, has been accused of impeding efforts to address global warming, Tillerson has acknowledged the threat posed by climate change. When Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Tillerson whether the United States should lead international efforts to address climate change, Tillerson responded, “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address the threats of climate change, which do require a global response. No one country is going to solve this alone.”

One of the most important places where this conversation took place was during negotiations for the United Nations’ 2015 Paris climate agreement, which Trump disparaged on the campaign trail. Trump promised in a May campaign energy speech to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement.” After winning the election, he told the New York Times that he’s “looking at it very closely” and said, “I have an open mind to it.” But his appointment of climate change deniers to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy indicates that Trump is unlikely to reconsider his views.

“The president-elect has invited my views on climate change,” Tillerson said. “He knows I am on the public record with my views. I look forward to providing those, if confirmed, to him and policies around how the United States should carry it out in these areas.”

Trump has also pledged to “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs.” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) asked Tillerson if he would suspend State Department funding to the Green Climate Fund, a major feature of the Paris agreement. Tillerson replied only that he would conduct a thorough review from the “bottom up.”

Tillerson hedged in his assessment of the threat of climate change, but his stance clearly differed from Trump’s claims that climate change is a “hoax.”

“I came to the decision a few years ago that the risk of climate change does exist and the consequences could be serious enough that it warrants action,” Tillerson said. “The increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect are very limited.”

Pressed on his past statements in favor of a carbon tax, Tillerson, who at first suggested that the issue would be outside his purview at the State Department, said it would be better to replace “the hodgepodge of approaches we have today” on climate policy.

Compare Tillerson’s stance with the one taken by Trump three years ago:

In a debate with Hillary Clinton last year, Trump denied ever calling climate change a hoax.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked Tillerson about reporting from the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News that Exxon Mobil had internally acknowledged climate science while publicly waging a campaign to undermine it. Tillerson demurred. “Since I’m no longer CEO of Exxon Mobil, I can’t speak on their behalf,” he said. “You’ll have to ask them.” Asked if he was refusing to answer or simply lacked the knowledge to do so, Tillerson quipped, “A little of both.”

In his opening statement, Tillerson made no mention of the climate change, despite military experts’ view that climate change is a threat to national security. Russia was the main focus at the hearing’s morning session, but protesters occasionally interrupted the questioning to bring up climate change. “My home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy,” one said as she was escorted out of the room. “Rex Tillerson, I reject you.”

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Trump Says Climate Change Is a Hoax. Rex Tillerson Just Disagreed.

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Spy Agencies Say: Yeah, Russia Did It

by RandallBabbidge Posted on January 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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The intelligence community released its unclassified assessment of Russian hacking activity today. However, anyone who was hoping to learn more about how they collected their information will be sorely disappointed. There’s none of that at all. It’s just a series of assessments, and you either believe them or you don’t.

If you want to read the whole report, we have it here. Oddly, it includes a lengthy annex about the actions of the RT television network, which is a public organ of Russian influence. But RT probably played virtually no role in the 2016 election. The real damage was done via email hacking, and helped along by anonymous twitter trolls who spread ugly anti-Hillary memes. Placing that much weight on RT really makes no sense, and I don’t know why they did it.

In any case, if you don’t want to read the whole thing, the executive summary is below. The intelligence community seems pretty sure that (a) Putin directed the influence campaign, (b) he did it to discredit Hillary Clinton, (c) Russian military intelligence carried out the hacking and relayed information to WikiLeaks, (d) they also hacked Republican sites but didn’t make any of it public, and (e) this all worked really well, so Russia will probably do it again.

Donald Trump, of course, brushed it all off. Minutes after meeting with the intelligence chiefs and hearing the classified version of all this, he released an obviously prewritten statement saying that lots of countries try to hack us; it had absolutely no effect on the election—zilch, Zero, NADA, NOTHING!; and from now on we shouldn’t talk about any of this publicly because we don’t want to give anything away to our enemies.

Seriously. That’s what he said.

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Spy Agencies Say: Yeah, Russia Did It

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Can Trump Ever Be Convinced That Russia Is Behind Election Meddling?

by Adele4435kfd Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump met on Friday with the heads of several US intelligence agencies for a personal briefing about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 president election. But it’s still unclear whether Trump believes what he was apparently told—or what it would take to convince him to accept the government’s findings that Moscow hacked Democratic targets to help Trump win the election.

After the briefing, Trump issued a statement noting that “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee.” But he did not say he accepts the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow did so during the 2016 campaign and was behind the leaking of Democratic emails through WikiLeaks and other sites. Trump did insist that “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.” Given that Trump repeatedly cited the WikiLeaks material during the campaign, his claim that Russian hacking had no effect on the election is hard to prove.

The meeting comes a day after several top intelligence officials briefed a Senate committee on the matter. Hours after the Senate hearing, the Washington Post reported that US intelligence officials claim to have identified people who passed stolen Democratic emails and other materials to WikiLeaks and that intercepted communications between senior Russian government officials revealed Vladimir Putin’s regime had celebrated Trump’s victory. Several other media outlets later confirmed the Post‘s account.

Trump tweeted that reporters were given access to the materials because of “Politics!” and later questioned how the government could be confident in its conclusions, pointing to a report that the Democratic National Committee blocked or delayed access to its servers, according to the FBI. (The DNC and others noted that it was not necessary or customary for FBI investigators to access the servers in order to investigate the hack.) On Friday, Trump tweeted that he was “asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing.”

On Friday morning, before his briefing, Trump told the New York Times that the intense focus on Russian hacking is “a political witch hunt” led by people embarrassed that Trump won in November.

“Making this about the election and not the subversion of a foreign government is beyond disturbing,” a former CIA official tells Mother Jones. “This isn’t about politics; it’s about espionage. He needs to get his head wrapped around the fact that he will be the target the moment he steps into office as POTUS.”

The Trump transition team and Hope Hicks, his campaign spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment. Incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has complained this week that reporters have gone too far in declaring Russia the culprit.

But security researchers say there is plenty of information in the public domain to conclude that the Russian government was involved in the hacks. That involvement was first reported by the Washington Post in June and has since been bolstered by several formal government announcements. The most recent government report, issued jointly by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on December 29, offered a basic outline of the US government’s conclusions and explained some of the technical evidence that led the US intelligence community to pin the blame on Russia.

“The evidence is airtight,” says Dave Aitel, a former NSA research scientist who now runs a security research firm. “I don’t know anyone in the industry that takes the doubts seriously. Within the industry, it’s not a question.”

Matt Tait, a security researcher and former information security specialist for the Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s version of the National Security Agency, said the information that’s been presented so far by the US government and private security research firms who have investigated the hacks supports the case against the Russians.

“The public evidence for this hack is unusual in how compelling it is compared with almost all other breaches, and that to people who are motivated and technical enough to go through it properly, it provides a solid case even without access to the secret sources and methods used by the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Tait writes in an email to Mother Jones.

“There is additional information that the IC could provide,” he adds, “but frankly, for people who are not persuaded by the evidence that is currently public, I suspect there is no quantity of additional evidence that the IC could release that will be persuasive to those people.”

But Jeffrey Carr, a private information security researcher, believes there needs to be more independent vetting of the intelligence community’s conclusions. “I want to see a chain of verifiable evidence available for peer review that is internally consistent, that is not dependent solely upon technical evidence, and that brings us to reasonable certainty as defined by international law,” he wrote on Medium this month.

Still, it’s not clear that anything would convince Trump to accept Russia’s role in the hacks. “Based on the already overwhelming public evidence, what—short of a video of Putin himself at the keyboard—could change Trump’s mind?” former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey tweeted Friday morning. Her next tweet: “Trump isn’t actually interested in being persuaded by evidence. His only question is whether he can maintain plausible deniability.”

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Can Trump Ever Be Convinced That Russia Is Behind Election Meddling?

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It Turns Out That Trump Knows Nothing New About Russia’s Hacking

by JanisWhatley Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Just to keep everyone up to date, here’s the latest on Donald Trump’s claim that he knows “things that other people don’t know” regarding Russia’s hacking during the election. As you recall, he promised to fill us in on Tuesday (or Wednesday), but you will be unsurprised to learn that this didn’t happen. Why? Trump claims it’s because the CIA failed to come through with the goods:

Very strange indeed! Needless to say, Trump is lying. The CIA briefing was scheduled for Friday all along. The New York Times reports that Trump’s tweet was posted “as senior national security officials — including the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr. — were completing plans to travel to New York on Friday to brief him about their findings.”

Of course, if this briefing is what Trump was waiting for, then he doesn’t know anything more than the rest of us about the Russian hacking. He’s just waiting until he gets briefed, at which point he will presumably announce that the last-minute dossier the CIA cobbled together is crap and he doesn’t believe it.

In related news, Trump is apparently planning to reorganize and cut back the CIA. This would be very convenient, since Trump could then say anything he wants. If the CIA leaks conflicting information, Trump can just say it’s coming from bitter executives who are angry about his budget cutbacks.

Only 16 days until this guy is president. Tick tick tick.

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It Turns Out That Trump Knows Nothing New About Russia’s Hacking

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Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

by DorotheaLinton Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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We’ve had a busy day of Trump news. I know you all want to be on top of things, so here’s the latest. First, Trump was asked what he thought about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement that sanctions were due against Russia and Vladimir Putin for their hacking during the election. Check out his reply:

I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind the security we need. But I have not spoken with the senators and I will certainly will be over a period of time.

Later, asked about Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Trump produced another bit of word salad that made it clear he had no idea what a settlement even was. This is probably why Trump hasn’t spoken to the press in such a long time. This kind of callow blather might have been entertaining when it was coming from a buffoon candidate who had no chance of winning,1 but not when it’s coming from the president-elect.

In other news, Politico reports that Trump was irritated by President Obama’s comments at Pearl Harbor yesterday. Obama said, “even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” Those are fairly boilerplate remarks, but “these felt to Trump like direct criticism of the president-elect, according to two people close to Trump.” Gee, I wonder why?

Finally, Trump announced that Sprint was bringing 5,000 jobs back to America. “I just spoke with the head person,” Trump told Bloomberg. “He said because of me they’re doing 5,000 jobs in this country.” Here’s how it played in the nation’s press:

The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

1Actually, it wasn’t entertaining even back then.

Original article: 

Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

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