Republicans siding with Putin over Biden are showing their ‘adoration’ for a ‘murderous autocrat’: journalist

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During his four years as president, Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that he did not consider Russian President Vladimir Putin an adversary of the United States. But President Joe Biden, during his two months in the White House, has been much tougher on Putin — and journalist Steven Beschloss, in a scathing March 22 article for his America, America blog, calls out Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Rep. Matt Gaetz and other Republicans he believes have become Putin’s useful idiots during the Biden era. 

Gaetz, during a recent appearance on Hannity’s show, told the Fox News host, “Putin and Biden, it would not end like ‘Rocky IV.’ I don’t think the American would prevail.” And Hannity joked that Putin would have the upper hand in a debate with the U.S. president.

Beschloss explains, “After four years of never a negative word about Putin from Trump — not after the interference in our election, not after the killings of Russian journalists and political opponents in Russia and on foreign soil, not after it was revealed the Russians put bounties on American soldiers — this cute interplay may have sounded like no big deal. Just more fun and games from among the same bunch who’ve perpetrated the Big Lie of election fraud and are determined to gloss over and move on from the deadly insurrection…. But make no mistake: The continuing adoration of Putin represents the embrace of autocracy over democracy — indeed, the dark desire to learn from the anti-democratic tactics of a murderous autocrat.” Continue reading.

Putin authorized extensive election influence campaign, intelligence report says.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.

The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s  Continue reading.

Trump translator says listening to calls with Putin ‘felt like eavesdropping on two friends chatting in a bar’

The Russian translator who was the only American to hear several secret conversations between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin would of course never expose what the two world leaders said in private, but she did reveal one disturbing fact about their relationship.

Putin attacked America in the years leading up to the 2016 presidential election, helped Trump win the White House, and has benefitted from his mysterious relationship with the billionaire real-estate mogul turned disgraced and twice-impeached president. Russia has since attacked the U.S., including with its cash-for killing U.S. soldiers bounty program, and its continued attacks on American elections.

Russia is considered America’s enemy by most national security experts, but Trump never treated it as an enemy. His highly-criticized meeting with Putin in Helsinki, during which he said he had no reason to believe Russia attacked the 2016 election, made that clear. Continue reading.

Biden has first call with Putin as president

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President Biden spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, the first call between the two leaders since Biden was elected president, and pressed the Russian leader on the SolarWinds hack and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the call took place Tuesday afternoon and Biden intended to communicate his administration’s desire to seek a full five-year extension of the New START nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Biden also planned to raise concerns about ongoing Russian aggression, she said.

The White House later issued a formal readout of the call stating Biden and Putin agreed “to have their teams work urgently” to complete the five-year extension of New START by the Feb. 5 deadline. Continue reading.

Putin rejects Donald Trump’s criticism of Biden family business

MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that he saw nothing criminal in Hunter Biden’s past business ties with Ukraine or Russia, marking out his disagreement with one of Donald Trump’s attack lines in the U.S. presidential election.

Putin was responding to comments made by Trump during televised debates with Democratic challenger Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Trump, who is trailing in opinion polls, has used the debates to make accusations that Biden and his son Hunter engaged in unethical practices in Ukraine. No evidence has been verified to support the allegations, and Joe Biden has called them false and discredited. Continue reading.

Trump Thought He Had a Nuclear Deal With Putin. Not So Fast, Russia Said.

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Trump administration officials want to broaden the New START accord and warn that the price of a new deal will rise after the election. Joe Biden supports a straight five-year extension of the deal.

President Trump had a pre-election plan to show he had gotten something out of his mysteriously friendly relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In the weeks before the election, the two men would announce that they had reached an agreement in principle to extend New START, the last remaining major arms control agreement between the two countries. It expires on Feb. 5, two weeks after the next presidential inauguration.

Mr. Trump has long refused to sign off on a clean five-year extension of the agreement, a step both leaders could take without Senate approval. He has described the Obama-era treaty as deeply flawed — the same thing he said about the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iran nuclear accord — because it did not cover all of Russia’s nuclear arms, or any of China’s. Continue reading.

Trump ‘is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts’: HR McMaster

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During an appearance on MSNBC this Thursday, former National Security advisor to President Trump, H.R. McMaster, was asked if President Trump is posing a greater threat to the 2020 election than Vladimir Putin.

McMaster said that he agrees Trump is “aiding an abetting Putin’s efforts” by not directly “calling out Putin for what he’s doing.”

The retired lieutenant general also addressed what many say is President Trump’s refusal to directly condemn white supremacist groups, saying he “missed a huge opportunity” and that it should be “super easy to condemn white supremacists.” Continue reading.

Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation to interfere in the 2020 presidential election against former vice president Joe Biden, which involves a prominent Ukrainian lawmaker connected to President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a top-secret CIA assessment concluded, according to two sources who reviewed it. 

On Aug. 31, the CIA published an assessment of Russian efforts to interfere in the November election in an internal, highly classified report called the CIA Worldwide Intelligence Review, the sources said. CIA analysts compiled the assessment with input from the National Security Agency and the FBI, based on several dozen pieces of information gleaned from public, unclassified and classified intelligence sources. The assessment includes details of the CIA’s analysis of the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach to disseminate disparaging information about Biden inside the United States through lobbyists, Congress, the media and contacts with figures close to the president.

“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,” the first line of the document says, according to the sources. Continue reading.

We now know the reason for Mueller’s biggest mistake

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After Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation into ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, the big question still loomed: Was the president guilty of a serious crime?

Attorney General Bill Barr quickly took it upon himself to answer the question, explaining that the special counsel’s work had failed to accuse Donald Trump of criminal acts, and he personally concluded that insufficient evidence existed for any charge. This announcement stunned and perplexed many observers while cheering the president’s allies. The truth only became clear weeks later when the Mueller report was finally released: It laid out substantial evidence that Trump was guilty of many instances of obstruction of justice, but the report was written so as to avoid making this conclusion explicit. (Mueller also sent a letter to Barr arguing that his initial statements about the resolution of the case had been misleading.)

Now, new revelations from one of Mueller’s top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, reveal the context of Mueller’s peculiar choice — one that I’ve argued was a colossal mistake. Continue reading.

Is it a coincidence that Moscow is peddling the same lies as the Trump campaign?

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No journalist has done a better job of fact-checking Donald Trump during his presidency than Daniel Dale. But now the CNN reporter, formerly of the Toronto Star, has done an invaluable service by outlining the nine conspiracy theories the president is continuously peddling. As Dale suggests, “Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years.” but never before has he pushed so many at one time.

Two of them align completely with disinformation campaigns coming out of Moscow. For example, we learned that the Russian government began promoting the lies about mail-in ballots as early as last March.

Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News, again echoing a frequent and unfounded complaint raised by President Donald Trump.

Continue reading.