Former President Donald Trump on Monday praised his relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
The statements came after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was transferred to a prison hospital and the Pentagon warned about Russia’s troop build-up along the border with Ukraine.
Fox News personality Sean Hannity asked Trump what he would do differently if he were to run again in 2024 and win. Continue reading.
Russian government proxies “helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network” as part of the Kremlin’s wide-ranging effort to influence the 2020 presidential election by falsely accusing President Joe Biden of corruption in Ukraine, the U.S. intelligence community revealed in a report Tuesday.
The report does not explicitly identify the documentary or network in question. But the timeline and subject matter match The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder, which the pro-Trump One America News Network aired in late January 2020. Former Trump aide Michael Caputo hosted that one-hour special, which featured separate interviews with a former Ukrainian official later sanctioned by the federal government for his role in a Russian influence operation and with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), at the time the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
According to the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized Russian influence operations aimed at undermining Biden’s campaign and supporting then-President Donald Trump during the 2020 election cycle. The report assesses that Russian intelligence services and their Ukraine-linked proxies — including “Russian influence agent” Konstantin Kilimnik and Ukrainian legislator Andriy Derkach — sought to use U.S. media outlets and prominent Americans to launder allegations of corrupt ties between Biden, his family, and Ukraine, and to falsely accuse Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Continue reading.
Before Merrick Garland took office last week, the new attorney general surely understood that he would face a difficult and almost-overwhelming set of problems — including reconstruction of the Justice Department after the ruinously partisan rule of his predecessor William Barr; overseeing hundreds of federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists; and dealing with the scandal detritus of the Trump regime, which may eventually involve indictments of the former president, his associates and even members of his family.
But this week, we learned of still more troubling issues that may require Garland’s attention, when the department of homeland security and the director of national intelligence released declassified reports on foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. The classified versions of those reports were on the attorney general’s desk when he arrived for his first day of work, and what they indicate is the worst U.S. intelligence scandal since the fabricated reports that justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Continue reading “Why Did Our Top Officials Lie About China — And Russia?”
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.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday released a declassified report on foreign actors’ attempts to influence and interfere in the 2020 election.
The big picture: The U.S. intelligence community found that Russia and Iran conducted influence operations aimed at affecting the outcome of the election, but that China did not. The report found no indications that foreign actors attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process.
Russia: U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the election and sowing divisions. Continue reading.
However we decide to account for Donald Trump’s astonishing rise and fall, we now know that he was certainly no stranger to a sprawling netherworld of Russian gangsters and oligarchs.
Now there are stunning new allegations in federal court documents that this Russian criminal network with worldwide reach hired Felix Sater, one of Trump’s closest associates, to hide a fortune stolen in Kazakhstan.
The central Asian country was once part of the Soviet Union. The stolen fortune cited in the lawsuit is the tip of the iceberg. Keep reading. Continue reading.
Lost in the news on the day of Trump’s Insurrection was a devastating new watchdog report to Congress on the politicizing and distorting of intelligence during Donald Trump’s time in office.
The analytic ombudsman, career intelligence community veteran Barry A. Zulauf, determined that under Trump national intelligence reports had become highly politicized. Important findings were suppressed to appease Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in American elections.
Zulauf’s unclassified report paints a frightening picture of just how much the Trump administration skewed intelligence to suppress knowledge of interference by Russia in our 2020 elections. Continue reading.
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.
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump’s angry supporters were seen storming the U.S. Capitol but the president’s Kremlin-controlled Russian state broadcasts are still circulating lies the series of events that erupted on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. According to Russian media, members of Antifa were seen storming the Capitol—not Trump supporters.
According to The Daily Beast, Russian media outlets claimed “the pro-Trump insurrectionists were merely “peaceful demonstrators” and blamed “Antifa” for the violence that took place in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021.”
Although the (FBI) has announced a series of developments regarding the Capitol riots, including the arrests of more than 100 Trump supporters, Russian media has focused on featuring clips from conservative news networks like Fox News in addition to remarks from widely known conservative public figures including Tucker Carlson, a number of Republican lawmakers, and other Trump allies and apologists. Continue reading.
President Trump addressed the ongoing cyber hacks of the U.S. government for the first time on Saturday, seeking to turn blame away from Moscow in defiance of mounting evidence while downplaying how devastating the intrusions appear to be.
In a bizarre outburst on Twitter that Trump’s critics condemned for its alarming disconnect from the facts, the president contradicted his top diplomat, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who on Friday pinned the breaches that have afflicted at least five major federal agencies “clearly” on Russia. Rather, the president baselessly suggested that the true culprit “may be China (it may!)”
Trump’s aversion to calling out the Kremlin for its malign activities in cyberspace and his deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin has become a hallmark of his presidency. He has repeatedly trusted the word of Putin over the assessments of his own intelligence community, including its conclusion that Russia waged a sophisticated campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election — a verdict Trump believes calls into question the legitimacy of his victory four years ago.
