Tag: 2016 election

Trump stumbles onto a new justification for losing the popular vote: It’s Google’s fault

Washington Post logoPresident Trump is back at the White House on Monday, after a week spent mostly at his private golf club in New Jersey. In short order, he was back to his typical routine at the executive mansion. Meaning, of course, that he spent some part of the morning watching cable news.

Shortly before noon, Fox Business aired a segment discussing testimony offered to the Senate last month. Robert Epstein, a psychologist who at one point was editor in chief of Psychology Today, told senators on July 17 that his research suggested Google had given millions of votes to Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. A guest on Fox Business named Oz Sultan, who worked with Trump’s 2016 campaign, looped that claim back into the broader, ongoing criticism of social-media companies that’s currently in vogue among conservatives.

Trump, though, quickly picked out — and exaggerated — the claim about Clinton votes.

View the complete August 19 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

FBI’s McCabe and UK spy chief feared Russian link between Trump and Brexit: report

AlterNet logoThe former FBI deputy director and his counterpart at the U.K.’s MI5 intelligence agency privately shared concerns about the possible connections between the Brexit vote and Russia’s efforts to promote Donald Trump’s campaign.

Andrew McCabe, then the second-ranking FBI official, and Jeremy Fleming, the second-ranking British intelligence agency official at the time, exchanged text messages revealing their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum that U.S. officials saw as a “wake-up call,” reported The Guardian.

A person familiar with the matter told the newspaper that American officials were wary of Russian interference in western elections, but some within the FBI saw the Brexit vote as confirmation that those efforts had been successful.

View the complete July 30 article vey Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

New study shows Russian propaganda may really have helped Trump

The study does not prove Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it did find Trump’s poll numbers improved when Russian trolls were active.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his allies have long insisted that Russian’s 2016 propaganda campaign on social media had no impact on the presidential election.

A new statistical analysis says it may well have.

The study, by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does not prove that Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it demonstrates that Trump’s gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack.

View the complete July 1 article by Ken Dilanian on the NBC News website here.

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

Washington Post logoShortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor.

“I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.”

Then Mifsud disappeared.

View the complete June 30 article by Rosalind S. Helderman, Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima on The Washington Post website here.

Former federal prosecutor: Here’s the giant hole in the Mueller report — and why it means the special counsel must testify

In his May 29 televised statement, special counsel Robert Mueller told us that everything he had to say was contained in his written report, and that it contained everything that Congress and the public needed to know about his investigation. This, however, is incorrect in several material respects, and the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees should insist that he appear before them to answer extremely urgent questions.

The Mueller report is completely silent on the results of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation that was opened up shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017. The next day, Trump then confided to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. the following day in the Oval Office that — referring to the FBI’s Russia investigation — the firing of “nut job” Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. Trump then followed this confirmation by admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt in a televised interview at the White House that he had decided to fire Comey because of the “Russia thing.” Continue reading “Former federal prosecutor: Here’s the giant hole in the Mueller report — and why it means the special counsel must testify”

Trump: ‘I had nothing to do with Russia helping me get elected’

President Trump said early Thursday that he “had nothing to do with Russia helping me get elected” while slamming special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in a series of tweets.

“After spending $40,000,000 over two dark years, with unlimited access, people, resources and cooperation, highly conflicted Robert Mueller would have brought charges, if he had ANYTHING, but there were no charges to bring!” he said in his first tweet of the morning.

“Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist,” he said in a subsequent tweet.

View the complete May 30 article by Kyle Balluck and Tal Axelrod on The Hill website here.

This one act by Giuliani and his friends in the FBI could have been responsible for Trump’s win

How Rudy Giuliani engineered the infamous “Comey letter” of October 2016, and what Trump wants from him now.

A few years ago I wrote here in Salon about a phrase I call “Cokie’s Law,” referring to a comment by journalist Cokie Roberts during the Lewinsky scandal. There was a silly kerfuffle over Hillary Clinton allegedly claiming that her husband’s philandering was a result of his rough childhood. Roberts said,

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

This comment says a lot about how the media sees its role as the arbiter of truth, but it’s also illustrative of how political operatives manipulate the press to their advantage. Take, for example, this passing comment about Rudy Giuliani’s latest antics in Politico:

View the complete May 29 article by Heather Bigby Parton from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Russian agent Butina sentenced to 18 months

A federal judge on Friday ordered Russian agent Maria Butina to serve 18 months in prison, the term demanded by federal prosecutors in the case.

Butina, who was arrested in 2018, had pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government. She will get credit for nine months she has already served in prison.

Butina, dressed in a green prison uniform and wearing her long red hair down, had no visible reaction as she received her sentence.

View the complete April 26 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Report: Snowflake Trump Won’t Discuss Russian Election Meddling

Although special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation found that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians did not rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy, Mueller’s final report left no doubt that Russian government operatives went to great lengths to interfere in that presidential election. And cybersecurity experts are warning that Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election could also be a major problem for the United States.

But journalist Eric Lutz, in an article published by Vanity Fair this week, reports that President Trump’s hypersensitivity on this subject and his “fragile ego” are getting in the way of efforts to protect U.S. elections from Russian interference. Continue reading “Report: Snowflake Trump Won’t Discuss Russian Election Meddling”