yes and I think both sides are doing it. it's as simple as that to me.
AP News: Trump campaign’s Russia contacts ‘grave’ threat, Senate says
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Naive. Democrats are not allowing foreign nations to attack our citizens with sock puppet trolls pretending to be 'left' and 'right' so that they can attack actual people from both sides of a issue.
So for example someone who is a Republican says something they care about, and get attacked from the 'left' as being racist and anything else that fires them up, causing that actual person to push back. But trolls are endless, especially when they can simply be cyborgs or bots, and eventually they burn out, so in comes the 'right' troll to defend that person against their other sock puppet account on the left. That way the actual person comes away thinking 'the libs' are trolls and their 'friends' on the right are the ones who are good.
Overtime through using propaganda news-esque websites like 'OANN' or 'the Hill' can add credibility while avoiding issues that paint Trump in a bad light (unless the person who is under attack is a left leaning voter, then the trolls push them further to the extreme and paint everything in the Democratic party as evil establishment). This hardens people's information bubbles and makes it very difficult actual information to seep in.
Yes this militarized attack from the Russian military to help Trump get elected is occurring on the left and the right, on the left it pushes people towards not voting or third party candidates, and from the right it attacks the Democrats by radicalizing people against things like BLM protestors and believing Trump's lies are actually good for our nation.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/lev-parnas-charged-giuliani-ukraine/2020/09/17/83b69f82-f92c-11ea-89e3-4b9efa36dc64_story.html
NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed new charges Thursday against Lev Parnas, an associate of President Trump's personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, accusing the Soviet emigre of defrauding investors in a fraud-protection company he founded — and for which Giuliani was paid $500,000 to consult.
Parnas already faced charges of campaign finance fraud for allegedly using a shell company to filter political donations from a foreign national to candidates seeking state and federal office in the United States. The superseding indictment filed Thursday in the Southern District of New York does not reference Giuliani, though it indicates that prosecutors have been closely scrutinizing a company that hired him while he was also serving as the president’s lawyer.
Giuliani, whose activities have faced scrutiny from the U.S. attorney’s office here, has said there was nothing improper about the money he received just before looking for information in Ukraine that may prove damaging to Trump’s political opponents — namely former vice president Joe Biden, now the Democratic nominee for president. Those efforts factored prominently in Trump’s impeachment proceedings several months ago.
In a statement, Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy said, “Today’s indictment remains a set of allegations only, and does not alter the presumption of innocence. . . . Mr. Parnas looks forward to vigorously defending against the allegations in court.”
Robert Costello, a lawyer for the former New York mayor, sought to distance his client from the new charge against Parnas.
“Rudy Giuliani is not involved in this,” Costello said. “ . . . If you can read English, you know that Rudy Giuliani is not mentioned at all in this indictment.”
Giuliani was paid $500,000 by company founded by arrested associate
Parnas and another man, David Correia, are accused of duping investors by using their company, Florida-based Fraud Guarantee, to cover personal expenses. The pair “made materially false representations concerning, among other things, how much money Parnas had contributed to the company and how much money the company had raised overall,” the new indictment asserts.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan telegraphed several months ago that additional counts were expected in the case.
Prosecutors say there are at least seven victims who believed they were financing Fraud Guarantee, a company that claimed to be in the business of fighting corporate fraud.
“ ‘Fraud Guarantee’ takes on a different meaning in light of today’s allegations that the company was a vehicle for committing fraud, not insuring against it,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.
One of the seven people who, according to the indictment, invested in Fraud Guarantee after receiving false information gave a total of $500,000 in September and October 2018, money prosecutors said was sent to the account of a consulting firm that Parnas and Correia had retained on behalf of the company. The dollar figure and dates match money that, as The Washington Post has previously reported, was invested in the company by a New York lawyer and used to pay Giuliani for consulting services.
A significant amount of money was withdrawn from Fraud Guarantee since its inception in 2012, when Parnas and Correia began claiming the start-up would help protect other businesses from fraud, prosecutors said. Fraud Guarantee would allegedly offer insurance polices to other businesses to protect against fraud, although the operation Parnas and Correia purportedly launched “never became operational,” according to the new indictment.
The two told investors they were “not taking salaries and that all investor funds would be used for appropriate business expenses,” prosecutors said. Those statements were false, the U.S. attorney’s office alleges.
Between January 2013 and January 2014, three backers gave Fraud Guarantee about $750,000, most of which was not used for business purposes, prosecutors say. About $230,000 was withdrawn in cash and another $130,000 paid for Parnas’s personal rent costs, the indictment says, adding that Parnas and his wife spent “tens of thousands” on what investigators believe were personal expenses — including about $30,000 to a luxury car leasing company.
Parnas’s wife has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Parnas was initially charged in October 2019 along with Correia and two others: Igor Fruman and Andrey Kukushkin. Their arrests — and, in the case of Parnas and Fruman, their proximity to Trump — heightened suspicions about the president’s dealings with Ukraine.
Parnas has said he began working with Giuliani in Ukraine in late 2018, introducing him to current and former government officials who claimed to have information indicating it was Ukraine — not Russia — that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, and about the Ukrainian energy company that employed Biden’s son Hunter while the vice president oversaw U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
Parnas made a $50,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party in 2016, and a pro-Trump super PAC reported receiving a $325,000 donation from a different company incorporated by Parnas and Fruman in 2018.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/21/russian-agent-trump-counterintelligence/
Continued in next post.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Continued:
Review of ‘Donald Trump v. the United States’ by Michael S. Schmidt
But none of that has ever happened in the Trump case. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation seems to have vanished. It wasn’t handed off to Mueller — to the surprise of many in and outside of the American intelligence community. There’s no sign the FBI pursued it. Perhaps it’s still going on in the deepest secrecy. But I doubt it. I think it’s likely that the Trump Justice Department waylaid it. And so does Strzok, who was removed from Mueller’s team and dismissed from the FBI over some politically pungent texts disparaging Trump, who in turn accused him of treason. I made Strzok a bet — my tattered copy of J. Edgar Hoover’s bestseller “Masters of Deceit” — that the case was killed. He wouldn’t take that wager.
At this point, only a dedicated team of FBI agents, CIA counterspies, and Treasury Department money-laundering experts can solve the mystery of Trump’s relationship with Russia, even if it doesn’t learn the truth for years to come.
The investigators have to follow the money, as they did with Ames and Hanssen, who between them received more than $4 million from the Kremlin. They have to look at Trump and his business empire going back to the 1980s — the casinos that teemed with Russian high rollers and failed to report suspicious transactions, the real estate deals with shady Russians, and every single one of those 500 limited liability companies.
They need to see the secret records of his conversations with Putin, just as they needed to piece together the ripped-up messages Ames wrote to his Russian handler. After his first face-to-face talk with Putin in 2017, Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter, Marina Gross. And no American but she knows what they said at their second two-hour tete-a-tete in Helsinki two years ago. If the FBI can’t get the records, it needs to talk to Gross. Her code of confidentiality, like those of lawyers and priests, can be breached if need be.
Ideally, the FBI would do what they did in the Hanssen case: recruit a Russian intelligence officer, specifically one with a case file bearing Trump’s name. That person can be bought for the right price. And that file is locked away somewhere in the vast archives of the Russian spy services.
Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
There’s a classic story about an American agent of influence that predates the Cold War — and might presage the strange case of Donald Trump, if these questions about his relationship with Russia go dormant. Samuel Dickstein was a member of Congress from Manhattan, elected in 1922, and chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in the 1930s. He walked into the Soviet Embassy in 1937 and offered the ambassador his services for $25,000 a year — three times his congressional salary. In exchange, he sold fake passports to Soviet spies. And he held headline-grabbing public hearings investigating Joseph Stalin’s enemies in the United States. Dickstein served 11 terms in Congress. His file lay locked up in the KGB archives for 60 years. Today, if you go down to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to the intersection of Pitt and Grand streets, you’ll be standing in Samuel Dickstein Plaza. He got away with it.
Review of ‘Donald Trump v. the United States’ by Michael S. Schmidt
But none of that has ever happened in the Trump case. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation seems to have vanished. It wasn’t handed off to Mueller — to the surprise of many in and outside of the American intelligence community. There’s no sign the FBI pursued it. Perhaps it’s still going on in the deepest secrecy. But I doubt it. I think it’s likely that the Trump Justice Department waylaid it. And so does Strzok, who was removed from Mueller’s team and dismissed from the FBI over some politically pungent texts disparaging Trump, who in turn accused him of treason. I made Strzok a bet — my tattered copy of J. Edgar Hoover’s bestseller “Masters of Deceit” — that the case was killed. He wouldn’t take that wager.
At this point, only a dedicated team of FBI agents, CIA counterspies, and Treasury Department money-laundering experts can solve the mystery of Trump’s relationship with Russia, even if it doesn’t learn the truth for years to come.
The investigators have to follow the money, as they did with Ames and Hanssen, who between them received more than $4 million from the Kremlin. They have to look at Trump and his business empire going back to the 1980s — the casinos that teemed with Russian high rollers and failed to report suspicious transactions, the real estate deals with shady Russians, and every single one of those 500 limited liability companies.
They need to see the secret records of his conversations with Putin, just as they needed to piece together the ripped-up messages Ames wrote to his Russian handler. After his first face-to-face talk with Putin in 2017, Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter, Marina Gross. And no American but she knows what they said at their second two-hour tete-a-tete in Helsinki two years ago. If the FBI can’t get the records, it needs to talk to Gross. Her code of confidentiality, like those of lawyers and priests, can be breached if need be.
Ideally, the FBI would do what they did in the Hanssen case: recruit a Russian intelligence officer, specifically one with a case file bearing Trump’s name. That person can be bought for the right price. And that file is locked away somewhere in the vast archives of the Russian spy services.
Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
There’s a classic story about an American agent of influence that predates the Cold War — and might presage the strange case of Donald Trump, if these questions about his relationship with Russia go dormant. Samuel Dickstein was a member of Congress from Manhattan, elected in 1922, and chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in the 1930s. He walked into the Soviet Embassy in 1937 and offered the ambassador his services for $25,000 a year — three times his congressional salary. In exchange, he sold fake passports to Soviet spies. And he held headline-grabbing public hearings investigating Joseph Stalin’s enemies in the United States. Dickstein served 11 terms in Congress. His file lay locked up in the KGB archives for 60 years. Today, if you go down to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to the intersection of Pitt and Grand streets, you’ll be standing in Samuel Dickstein Plaza. He got away with it.
No American uses the phrase "American internet"....
theforeigndisinformationagentsezwhut?
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hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/police-consent-decrees-trump-administration-oversight
Obama had 2 years to get anything done and the Republicans won back the house using their "Tea Party" nonsense. You are lying pretending like Obama had not worked his ass off to correctly get done a lot of the work done that was ignored for a very long time while simultaneously dealing with the Republican obstruction of everything he tried to pass to help our nation.
Right up to stopping any bi partisan response to the Russian attack on our nation prior to the elections.
You can play the 'both sides' nonsense that the Republicans push all day long, it doesn't make it any more true than when the convicted felons Trump hired (that worked closely with the Russian military to break the law in the 2016 election and continue to this day for Trump's benefit) used it to attack Clinton.
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
I bet he abuses cannabis too.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/22/secret-cia-assessment-putin-probably-directing-influence-operation-denigrate-biden/
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.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Treasury Department have identified Derkach as a Russian agent, but it has not been publicly reported that the CIA, NSA and FBI believed Putin may be personally directing the campaign. Derkach has denied working on behalf of Moscow.
The CIA assessment described Derkach’s efforts in detail and said that his activities have included working through lobbyists, members of Congress and U.S. media organizations to disseminate and amplify his anti-Biden information. Though it refers to Derkach’s interactions with a “prominent” person connected to the Trump campaign, the analysis does not identify the person. Giuliani, who has been working with Derkach publicly for several months, is not named in the assessment.
The CIA, NSA and FBI all declined to comment, but none of the three agencies disputed any of the details of this reporting. Details about the intelligence used to form the assessment have been withheld at the agencies’ request to protect sources and methods. The White House also declined to comment.
On Sept. 10, following calls from Democratic lawmakers, the Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, alleging that he “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a Sept. 10 statement that “Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world.” The Treasury Department stated Derkach “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election,” which he did by releasing edited audio tapes and other unsupported information that were then pushed in Western media.
On Aug. 7, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement from National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina that named Derkach as part of a Russian effort to “denigrate” Biden by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”
Last week, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray referred to Evanina’s statement in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee without referring to Derkach by name. Wray said the FBI was tracking “very active efforts” by Russia “to both sow divisiveness and discord, and I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden.”
Trump responded to Wray by saying he was bothered the FBI director didn’t talk about China’s interference. ODNI has also reported that China and Iran are attempting to interfere in the U.S. political process. Trump has also personally promoted the anti-Biden information Derkach is peddling. On Aug. 18, Trump retweeted a since-banned Twitter user who posted part of a purported 2016 audio tape Derkach released this year of Biden speaking with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Johnson has launched an investigation into Biden and Burisma, the results of which could be released as early as this week. The State Department provided Johnson with more than 16,000 pages of information for his investigation months ago, but only shared those documents with Congress on Friday, following a subpoena by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.).
After meeting with Derkach in December, in the middle of Trump’s impeachment proceedings, Giuliani tweeted that U.S. aid to Ukraine might face a “major obstacle” if the Ukrainian government didn’t resolve his concerns about corruption. Giuliani and Derkach’s allegations against Biden were covered extensively by the One America News Network, which sent a correspondent with Giuliani to Kiev. In February, Giuliani interviewed Derkach on YouTube, where Derkach alleged that U.S. aid to Ukraine was misspent.
Even though Derkach is a former member of a pro-Russian party who attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow, Giuliani has consistently defended his relationship with Derkach. Following the Treasury Department’s announcement sanctioning Derkach, Giuliani told the New York Times he had “no reason to believe [Derkach] is a Russian agent,” but added, “How the hell would I know?”
Engel told me he is not surprised to learn that parts of the intelligence community have concluded Putin is directly trying to help Trump’s election campaign, again. But he called on the administration to publicly release these findings.
“What’s most infuriating is that the administration seems to be doing everything it can to hide the facts from Congress and the American people,” he said. “The president seems to be trying to turn the entire executive branch into an arm of his reelection campaign, dangerously politicizing foreign policy and intelligence.”
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-scrambles-to-do-nuclear-deal-with-russia-before-election-issuing-ultimatum/2020/09/22/fe4769f2-fc38-11ea-830c-a160b331ca62_story.html
Frustration is mounting inside the Trump administration as Russia gives little indication of whether it will agree to an arms control deal before President Trump faces reelection, according to senior U.S. administration officials, who are trying to secure the deal.
U.S. officials presented a proposal to the Russians two weeks ago in Vienna as part of negotiations that began in June. Under the deal, the United States and Russia would extend the soon-to-expire New START pact for a limited time while negotiating a replacement treaty. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would sign a political agreement outlining a framework for the replacement treaty and what it would cover.
The administration’s scramble to cut a deal with Russia before the election comes as the president’s top diplomats have been rushing to secure diplomatic achievements as U.S. voters begin going to the polls.
Trump has long sought to negotiate an arms control deal with Moscow, but so far his administration has only pulled out of pacts with the former Cold War foe, citing violations by Russia. In comments Sept. 4, Trump said arms control talks with Russia were a “very important thing”— more important than addressing global warming. Trump and Putin have been discussing a deal for months.
But the Russian government has given the U.S. negotiators little direct feedback outside public commentary since they presented their proposal about two weeks ago, according to U.S. officials. The result is U.S. frustration, which boiled over into comments in a Russian media outlet by Trump’s top nuclear negotiator, Marshall Billingslea, and a response from his Russian counterpart.
The “price of admission” for Russia to secure the deal with the United States will go up if the Kremlin doesn’t agree to terms before the U.S. presidential election, Billingslea warned in an interview Monday with the Russian newspaper Kommersant. Billingslea said the United States would insist on “a number of new conditions” if Russia waits until after the election to decide and Trump wins.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s main arms control negotiator, warned that such ultimatums wouldn’t result in a deal.
“Either they can stop making their ultimatums and we can start to negotiate something, or there will be no agreement,” Ryabkov told the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. Ryabkov said the U.S. demands don’t correspond to Russia’s idea of what must be done to ensure strategic stability.
In his own separate interview with Kommersant, Ryabkov said “the offer made by the Americans does not look like a good deal” and rejected the U.S. preconditions. Still, U.S. officials didn’t read Ryabkov’s comments as the final word on whether Russia would agree to some sort of deal before the election or thereafter.
At stake is the future of New START, a 2010 treaty that expires in February and restricts the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and certain launch platforms. If the treaty isn’t extended or replaced, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers will return to an era without substantive restraints on their arsenals for the first time in decades, potentially paving the way for a new nuclear arms race.
Because the Trump administration didn’t begin substantive negotiations until this year, the arms control standoff is colliding with the American political calendar. Moscow is probably calculating whether Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden would offer more favorable terms.
Russia has said it would like to extend the treaty, which includes a clause that can prolong the pact for five years without ratification if both presidents agree. In his online platform, Biden has said he would pursue an extension of New START, which President Barack Obama negotiated.
The Trump administration, however, has argued that New START is insufficient because it doesn’t include China and regulates only a portion of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The administration is willing to extend the pact only if its replacement addresses those issues and others. China has rejected U.S. calls to join the talks with Russia, citing its smaller nuclear arsenal.
The proposal offered by Billingslea two weeks ago in Vienna goes beyond the parameters of New START to encompass all the nuclear warheads of both countries, a senior U.S. official said. It would include a complex monitoring system allowing both nations to observe which nuclear weapons are coming into Russian or American facilities for refurbishment and which are coming out of the facilities for deployment.
The proposal also allows for an increased number of inspections and faster access to sites that inspectors request to visit, among other things, the senior official said.
U.S. officials drafted the proposal in the form of a political agreement that would become a treaty once China agrees to join the accord — a goal that has eluded U.S. negotiators.
The lack of response by Moscow to the proposal has led some U.S. officials to conclude that Putin has not empowered Ryakbov to cut a deal. Billingslea made his public comments to the Russian newspaper Kommersant in part to underscore the U.S. offer to Putin and seek clarity from the Russian side on its interest in an agreement, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing diplomatic negotiations.
“So far the proposal stands in the form that we made it in. If and when Moscow expresses a desire to go down this path that, frankly speaking, President Putin has already discussed multiple times with President Trump, then we are ready,” Billingslea told Kommersant.
Promoting himself as a dealmaker, Trump has sought to undertake nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia since the 1980s, when he expressed an interest in conducting talks with the Soviets on behalf of the Reagan administration. When asked about the recent poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny at a Sept. 4 White House news conference, Trump instead emphasized that arms control talks were underway.
“With Russia, we’re right now negotiating a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is very important. It’s a very important thing. To me, it’s the most important thing,” Trump said. “Some people say ‘global warming’; I don’t. I say this is far more important.”
The Trump administration began substantive negotiations with Russia over New START in earnest only this year, leaving insufficient time to hammer out an entirely new treaty.
The result is an attempt to extend the current treaty, probably for a year or two, on the condition that Russia agrees to certain elements in a follow-on treaty. Such a deal would allow Trump to tout a nuclear accord with Russia on the campaign trail, even if the specifics of a new treaty haven’t actually been hashed out — and may not result in an actual follow-on pact.
The Trump administration has had little success securing arms control deals.
U.S. officials have failed to reach a formal pact with North Korea, which has tested nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The administration has also been unable to negotiate a new deal with Iran, which has exceeded the restrictions on its nuclear program set by a 2015 international nuclear agreement that Trump abandoned.
Frustration is mounting inside the Trump administration as Russia gives little indication of whether it will agree to an arms control deal before President Trump faces reelection, according to senior U.S. administration officials, who are trying to secure the deal.
U.S. officials presented a proposal to the Russians two weeks ago in Vienna as part of negotiations that began in June. Under the deal, the United States and Russia would extend the soon-to-expire New START pact for a limited time while negotiating a replacement treaty. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would sign a political agreement outlining a framework for the replacement treaty and what it would cover.
The administration’s scramble to cut a deal with Russia before the election comes as the president’s top diplomats have been rushing to secure diplomatic achievements as U.S. voters begin going to the polls.
Trump has long sought to negotiate an arms control deal with Moscow, but so far his administration has only pulled out of pacts with the former Cold War foe, citing violations by Russia. In comments Sept. 4, Trump said arms control talks with Russia were a “very important thing”— more important than addressing global warming. Trump and Putin have been discussing a deal for months.
But the Russian government has given the U.S. negotiators little direct feedback outside public commentary since they presented their proposal about two weeks ago, according to U.S. officials. The result is U.S. frustration, which boiled over into comments in a Russian media outlet by Trump’s top nuclear negotiator, Marshall Billingslea, and a response from his Russian counterpart.
The “price of admission” for Russia to secure the deal with the United States will go up if the Kremlin doesn’t agree to terms before the U.S. presidential election, Billingslea warned in an interview Monday with the Russian newspaper Kommersant. Billingslea said the United States would insist on “a number of new conditions” if Russia waits until after the election to decide and Trump wins.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s main arms control negotiator, warned that such ultimatums wouldn’t result in a deal.
“Either they can stop making their ultimatums and we can start to negotiate something, or there will be no agreement,” Ryabkov told the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. Ryabkov said the U.S. demands don’t correspond to Russia’s idea of what must be done to ensure strategic stability.
In his own separate interview with Kommersant, Ryabkov said “the offer made by the Americans does not look like a good deal” and rejected the U.S. preconditions. Still, U.S. officials didn’t read Ryabkov’s comments as the final word on whether Russia would agree to some sort of deal before the election or thereafter.
At stake is the future of New START, a 2010 treaty that expires in February and restricts the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and certain launch platforms. If the treaty isn’t extended or replaced, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers will return to an era without substantive restraints on their arsenals for the first time in decades, potentially paving the way for a new nuclear arms race.
Because the Trump administration didn’t begin substantive negotiations until this year, the arms control standoff is colliding with the American political calendar. Moscow is probably calculating whether Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden would offer more favorable terms.
Russia has said it would like to extend the treaty, which includes a clause that can prolong the pact for five years without ratification if both presidents agree. In his online platform, Biden has said he would pursue an extension of New START, which President Barack Obama negotiated.
The Trump administration, however, has argued that New START is insufficient because it doesn’t include China and regulates only a portion of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The administration is willing to extend the pact only if its replacement addresses those issues and others. China has rejected U.S. calls to join the talks with Russia, citing its smaller nuclear arsenal.
The proposal offered by Billingslea two weeks ago in Vienna goes beyond the parameters of New START to encompass all the nuclear warheads of both countries, a senior U.S. official said. It would include a complex monitoring system allowing both nations to observe which nuclear weapons are coming into Russian or American facilities for refurbishment and which are coming out of the facilities for deployment.
The proposal also allows for an increased number of inspections and faster access to sites that inspectors request to visit, among other things, the senior official said.
U.S. officials drafted the proposal in the form of a political agreement that would become a treaty once China agrees to join the accord — a goal that has eluded U.S. negotiators.
The lack of response by Moscow to the proposal has led some U.S. officials to conclude that Putin has not empowered Ryakbov to cut a deal. Billingslea made his public comments to the Russian newspaper Kommersant in part to underscore the U.S. offer to Putin and seek clarity from the Russian side on its interest in an agreement, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing diplomatic negotiations.
“So far the proposal stands in the form that we made it in. If and when Moscow expresses a desire to go down this path that, frankly speaking, President Putin has already discussed multiple times with President Trump, then we are ready,” Billingslea told Kommersant.
Promoting himself as a dealmaker, Trump has sought to undertake nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia since the 1980s, when he expressed an interest in conducting talks with the Soviets on behalf of the Reagan administration. When asked about the recent poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny at a Sept. 4 White House news conference, Trump instead emphasized that arms control talks were underway.
“With Russia, we’re right now negotiating a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is very important. It’s a very important thing. To me, it’s the most important thing,” Trump said. “Some people say ‘global warming’; I don’t. I say this is far more important.”
The Trump administration began substantive negotiations with Russia over New START in earnest only this year, leaving insufficient time to hammer out an entirely new treaty.
The result is an attempt to extend the current treaty, probably for a year or two, on the condition that Russia agrees to certain elements in a follow-on treaty. Such a deal would allow Trump to tout a nuclear accord with Russia on the campaign trail, even if the specifics of a new treaty haven’t actually been hashed out — and may not result in an actual follow-on pact.
The Trump administration has had little success securing arms control deals.
U.S. officials have failed to reach a formal pact with North Korea, which has tested nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The administration has also been unable to negotiate a new deal with Iran, which has exceeded the restrictions on its nuclear program set by a 2015 international nuclear agreement that Trump abandoned.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Kamila Harris in Detroit starts talking about 5:20 into the video. @11:55 the questions start. But @42:30 she gets to the most important part of the talk. The Russian military is attacking us all everyday all day. Everything you and your family do online is collected and used to spit out propaganda aimed at harming our nation's mental health. And Trump allows it because it helps him keep us weak.
@18:40 the next question comes, but the guy introducing the 22 year old student makes a great point. Anyone 26 and under on their parents insurance have a stake in this election, because right now Trump is trying to repeal the very legislation that allows you to be on your parents insurance. It is easy to forget that prior to Obamacare kids would get kicked off their parents insurance when they went off to school. I remember at 21 working to pay my now wife's COBRA insurance of a couple hundred a month so she could get the medical treatment that she needed.
@38:00-ish the Lt. Gov of Michigan lays out exactly what is at stake in the upcoming election. Biden is not someone who has ever turned his back on helping people in our nation.
@18:40 the next question comes, but the guy introducing the 22 year old student makes a great point. Anyone 26 and under on their parents insurance have a stake in this election, because right now Trump is trying to repeal the very legislation that allows you to be on your parents insurance. It is easy to forget that prior to Obamacare kids would get kicked off their parents insurance when they went off to school. I remember at 21 working to pay my now wife's COBRA insurance of a couple hundred a month so she could get the medical treatment that she needed.
@38:00-ish the Lt. Gov of Michigan lays out exactly what is at stake in the upcoming election. Biden is not someone who has ever turned his back on helping people in our nation.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/8bb28627b03474a3a5ce2454ae3d1639
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said at a news conference, responding to a question about whether he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”
Trump has been pressing a monthslong campaign against mail-in voting this November by tweeting and speaking out critically about the practice. More states are encouraging mail-in voting to keep voters safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The president, who uses mail-in voting himself, has tried to distinguish between states that automatically send mail ballots to all registered voters and those, like Florida, that send them only to voters who request a mail ballot.
Trump has baselessly claimed widespread mail voting will lead to massive fraud. The five states that routinely send mail ballots to all voters have seen no significant fraud.
Trump on Wednesday appeared to suggest that if states got “rid of” the unsolicited mailing of ballots there would be no concern about fraud or peaceful transfers of power.
“You’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly,” Trump said. “There’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control, you know it, and you know, who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
It’s unlikely that any chaos in states with universal mail-in voting will cause the election result to be inaccurately tabulated, as Trump has suggested.
The five states that already have such balloting have had time to ramp up their systems, while four states newly adopting it — California, New Jersey, Nevada and Vermont — have not. Washington, D.C., is also newly adopting it.
Of those nine states, only Nevada is a battleground, worth six electoral votes and likely to be pivotal only in a national presidential deadlock.
California, New Jersey, Vermont and D.C. are overwhelmingly Democratic and likely to be won by that party’s nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said at a news conference, responding to a question about whether he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”
Trump has been pressing a monthslong campaign against mail-in voting this November by tweeting and speaking out critically about the practice. More states are encouraging mail-in voting to keep voters safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The president, who uses mail-in voting himself, has tried to distinguish between states that automatically send mail ballots to all registered voters and those, like Florida, that send them only to voters who request a mail ballot.
Trump has baselessly claimed widespread mail voting will lead to massive fraud. The five states that routinely send mail ballots to all voters have seen no significant fraud.
Trump on Wednesday appeared to suggest that if states got “rid of” the unsolicited mailing of ballots there would be no concern about fraud or peaceful transfers of power.
“You’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly,” Trump said. “There’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control, you know it, and you know, who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
It’s unlikely that any chaos in states with universal mail-in voting will cause the election result to be inaccurately tabulated, as Trump has suggested.
The five states that already have such balloting have had time to ramp up their systems, while four states newly adopting it — California, New Jersey, Nevada and Vermont — have not. Washington, D.C., is also newly adopting it.
Of those nine states, only Nevada is a battleground, worth six electoral votes and likely to be pivotal only in a national presidential deadlock.
California, New Jersey, Vermont and D.C. are overwhelmingly Democratic and likely to be won by that party’s nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I think it is worth reading the minority concerns about the report on Trump's connections to the Russian militaries attack on our nation's citizens, to the point that Trump actively helped their efforts.
It is made clear that there were other potential criminality on Trump's part that was discovered, but was not tied to Russia. Which explains how Trump and all of his minions specifically avoid any discussion about any other nation by pretending that only "Russia" is the concern, and not all of Trump's shady dealing with other nations and dictators.
Also telling is that the Republicans redacted almost an entire page on the 'ongoing concerns' portion.
It is made clear that there were other potential criminality on Trump's part that was discovered, but was not tied to Russia. Which explains how Trump and all of his minions specifically avoid any discussion about any other nation by pretending that only "Russia" is the concern, and not all of Trump's shady dealing with other nations and dictators.
Also telling is that the Republicans redacted almost an entire page on the 'ongoing concerns' portion.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
This guy is so agonizingly close to fully understanding the attack that Russians have conducted on our society.
I highly recommend people watch this video and the Netflix 'Social Dilemma' to understand how pervasive social media is on people.
He doesn't understand the trolling aspect, that all the data that he understand is used can just as easily (for the Russian military) to have actual people with a handful of accounts troll these people who are hooked.
If you have watched the movie on Netflix, there is a scene where the young white male is completely immersed in his social media and the girl he liked quit talking to him. If they actually understood the trolling, they would have known that at that low point, all of a sudden 'girls' he was talking with online start picking on him, and when he spirals lower, a third 'person' comes to his rescue and subtly radicalizing that teen boy into hating women on say a video game like the guy in the above video 'hopes' someone doesn't incentivize trolls to brainwash our children. When we actually have proof that this has already been happening, and Trump is actively helping keep us in the dark about.
Then over time that 'friend' subtly starts getting him interested in guns, maybe some african racist shit. And then when that kid is all keyed up, the 'friend' tells him about how he can buy a gun and ammo online (from a country like Russia so the kid is assured to get them as cheep as needs be) and he goes to murder American families he deems as 'Mexicans'.
All the while the 'girls' he met online that overtime when he fully alienated his friends and family (who have their own trolls attacking them on whatever forum they use), the 'friend' who turned him onto the domestic terrorism starter kit, are all the same militarized troll in Russia who sees everything that kid is reading, watching, conversations, mood, sleep, etc and knows exactly what to use to get them to respond the way that they want them to.
Once these people making these warning of social media videos start to understand that portion of the attack that Russia has done on our nation, I am hopeful we will be able to work together to get out of this mess the internet brought to us.
I think it starts with us all telling congress that advertising needs to become illegal without some sort of compensation/opt out for everyone. The data is out there, it is entirely useful, but people should not have to worry about it being used to coerce them without their consent for someone else profit.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Oregon's senator Ron Wyden closed out the bi-partisan senate report with a very clear explanation of how and where the investigation into Trump's numbers conflicts of interest with the Russia militaries ties to his election were not looked at because the Republicans pulled their punches with their investigation and hid key information with redactions (not security reasons, purely to be able to pretend they are unable to talk about how much Trump sold out our elections).
Trump really needs another 'friendly' SCOTUS in a seat because they were kind enough to push Trump's documents being released to the House until after the 2020 election, ensuring that Americans are flying blind with Trump's obvious corruption.
Trump really needs another 'friendly' SCOTUS in a seat because they were kind enough to push Trump's documents being released to the House until after the 2020 election, ensuring that Americans are flying blind with Trump's obvious corruption.
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hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I really hope Ted Cruz winds up in jail for being just as dirty as Trump.
I don't think it is a coincidence that the Russian military snatched the file on 'Cruz' after his running in the the election was already over. Not unless they had ties to him and wanted to see what was known.
Nor that all the Steele nonsense that Trump and his trolls try to deflect to when they started out working as conservative op-ed as discussed in the Fusion GPS hearing.
I don't think it is a coincidence that the Russian military snatched the file on 'Cruz' after his running in the the election was already over. Not unless they had ties to him and wanted to see what was known.
Nor that all the Steele nonsense that Trump and his trolls try to deflect to when they started out working as conservative op-ed as discussed in the Fusion GPS hearing.
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hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/putin-is-running-a-disinformation-campaign-on-navalnys-poisoning/2020/10/02/0889ef54-0411-11eb-897d-3a6201d6643f_story.html
THE TRUTH of who ordered and who carried out the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny should not be a parlor game. President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, a former director of the Federal Security Service, and the Kremlin leader who commands a loyal security establishment, presumably can snap his fingers and get the answer, if he doesn’t already know. But it is evident by Russia’s obfuscations and misdirections that Mr. Putin is instead running a disinformation machine to deflect responsibility for the assassination attempt.
Mr. Navalny, recovering in Germany from poisoning with a substance from the Novichok class of Soviet-era nerve agents, said in an interview with Der Spiegel that responsibility for the attack on his life rests with the man in the Kremlin. “I assert that Putin was behind the crime, and I have no other explanation for what happened,” he said. “I have no other versions of the crime. I am not saying this to flatter myself, but on the basis of facts.” Mr. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, rejected the charge and offered the lame and ludicrous claim that Mr. Navalny is working with the CIA.
Mr. Navalny had been organizing local election campaigns in Tomsk, then fell ill aboard a plane en route to Moscow on Aug. 20. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Since this all happened inside of Russia, the Russian authorities should get to the bottom of what was clearly an attempt on his life. Instead, Mr. Putin and others around him have been doing everything but. On Sept. 9, after Mr. Navalny was transported to Germany, and doctors there confirmed use of the nerve agent, Russia denounced “groundless accusations against” the country and a “massive misinformation campaign.” Then, on Sept. 14, according to Le Monde, Mr. Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron in a phone call that Mr. Navalny may have poisoned himself, that he was an “Internet troublemaker who has simulated illnesses in the past.”
On Sept. 25, Russia criticized “a broad smear campaign baselessly accusing Russian authorities of allegedly poisoning the Russian citizen.” Russia suggested that perhaps the incident was “another staged mystical use of chemical weapons,” and claimed that since the United States and European nations had studied Novichok compounds, this “refutes any possible arguments that such technologies should only be associated with the U.S.S.R. or Russia.” In other words, move on, nothing to see here.
Mr. Putin doth protest too much. The Novichok class of nerve agents was invented in the Soviet Union as a chemical weapon — and inherited by Russia. This compound is in possession of the state that Mr. Putin leads. All the evidence suggests that Russia’s intelligence services used the same nerve agent in a 2018 murder attempt against former KGB officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. And, speaking of precedent, we recall the fate of others who criticized Mr. Putin: Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov. All were murdered.
Mr. Putin is fooling no one with the parlor games.
THE TRUTH of who ordered and who carried out the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny should not be a parlor game. President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, a former director of the Federal Security Service, and the Kremlin leader who commands a loyal security establishment, presumably can snap his fingers and get the answer, if he doesn’t already know. But it is evident by Russia’s obfuscations and misdirections that Mr. Putin is instead running a disinformation machine to deflect responsibility for the assassination attempt.
Mr. Navalny, recovering in Germany from poisoning with a substance from the Novichok class of Soviet-era nerve agents, said in an interview with Der Spiegel that responsibility for the attack on his life rests with the man in the Kremlin. “I assert that Putin was behind the crime, and I have no other explanation for what happened,” he said. “I have no other versions of the crime. I am not saying this to flatter myself, but on the basis of facts.” Mr. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, rejected the charge and offered the lame and ludicrous claim that Mr. Navalny is working with the CIA.
Mr. Navalny had been organizing local election campaigns in Tomsk, then fell ill aboard a plane en route to Moscow on Aug. 20. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Since this all happened inside of Russia, the Russian authorities should get to the bottom of what was clearly an attempt on his life. Instead, Mr. Putin and others around him have been doing everything but. On Sept. 9, after Mr. Navalny was transported to Germany, and doctors there confirmed use of the nerve agent, Russia denounced “groundless accusations against” the country and a “massive misinformation campaign.” Then, on Sept. 14, according to Le Monde, Mr. Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron in a phone call that Mr. Navalny may have poisoned himself, that he was an “Internet troublemaker who has simulated illnesses in the past.”
On Sept. 25, Russia criticized “a broad smear campaign baselessly accusing Russian authorities of allegedly poisoning the Russian citizen.” Russia suggested that perhaps the incident was “another staged mystical use of chemical weapons,” and claimed that since the United States and European nations had studied Novichok compounds, this “refutes any possible arguments that such technologies should only be associated with the U.S.S.R. or Russia.” In other words, move on, nothing to see here.
Mr. Putin doth protest too much. The Novichok class of nerve agents was invented in the Soviet Union as a chemical weapon — and inherited by Russia. This compound is in possession of the state that Mr. Putin leads. All the evidence suggests that Russia’s intelligence services used the same nerve agent in a 2018 murder attempt against former KGB officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. And, speaking of precedent, we recall the fate of others who criticized Mr. Putin: Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov. All were murdered.
Mr. Putin is fooling no one with the parlor games.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Looks like the Judge has said 15 more pages must be un-redacted by Nov 2nd.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/whats-new-unredacted-mueller-report
A lot of the volume 1 redactions that were uncovered have to do with Roger Stone and his being in contact with Wikileaks (who were working with the Russian military and helped smuggle Edward Snowden and the stolen NSA files to Putin).
In Volume 2, Trump directing his campaign to work with Stone is uncovered.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white-power-symbol-or-just-right-wing-troll
https://www.lawfareblog.com/whats-new-unredacted-mueller-report
A lot of the volume 1 redactions that were uncovered have to do with Roger Stone and his being in contact with Wikileaks (who were working with the Russian military and helped smuggle Edward Snowden and the stolen NSA files to Putin).
In Volume 2, Trump directing his campaign to work with Stone is uncovered.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white-power-symbol-or-just-right-wing-troll