Donald Fires FBI Director who's investigating Russian Election Hacking

[Red]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...-rosenstein-said-just-what-we-needed-to-hear/

"Thank you, Rod J. Rosenstein. You are just the person the country needed to hear from right now.

The deputy attorney general’s announcement Friday that a dozen Russian intelligence agents have been charged with conspiring to hack Democrats during the 2016 presidential election was a badly needed reminder of what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe is all about, and why it must be allowed to proceed.

In tone and substance, Rosenstein’s statement was comforting, a reminder that adult supervision still exists in Washington.

“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on who was victimized,” Rosenstein said. “The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious. There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”

------------------------------------

Timing. Specifically July 27, 2016:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/07/13/...s-they-immediately-started-trying-/index.html

Meanwhile, I have been reading that House Republicans are planning to impeach Rosenstein, possibly next week. At the same time, the Mueller probe may be nowhere near being finished;

 

[colton]

Good post. Fwiw, my Republican party affiliation is hanging by a thread. If they do impeach Rosenstein I will resign and become an independent.

 

[Jazzta]

“So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”

If only that were the case.. what a goof lol

 

[Red]

A state sponsored attack by my nation's principle adversary in the post WWII era, a nation that is as much mafia state as nation state, and this is how the president of my country responds. There can be no excuse for this. I know I pointed out before the election that this was an attack on this nation. This is not how a legitimate leader of this nation responds. Today he blamed Obama, forgetting that Mitch McConnell vetoed issuing a bipartisan condemnation before the election, threatening to call it interference in the election by Obama.

And this is how the president of our nation responds. Before he had even left for Europe, "President Trump had been aware all along about the charges against Russian actors". Roll that thought around in your mind. Then consider his words and actions since he was told the interference had been officially tied to Russian military intelligence. This is how the president of our country is responding.

Shame on this man. He's unqualified like no man who has ever held the office.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news...ller-trump-and-putin-now-have-a-summit-agenda

"Trump has only talked about Putin in admiring terms, suggesting their summit meeting would be a cakewalk in comparison to his own dealings with troublesome allies. Before leaving for Europe, Trump told reporters the Putin session may be the “easiest” one of all those on his schedule. On Thursday, he reiterated the point at the end of the contentious nato gathering in Brussels, tweaking allies even as he spoke longingly about Putin: “hopefully, someday, maybe he’ll be a friend.”

The narrative for Helsinki seemed set: Trump came to Europe to trash America’s friends while lavishing the Russian strongman with praise. On Friday morning, Trump underscored the point at an awkward joint press conference with May. Never mind Putin’s 2016 election interference, or the shadow of the special counsel investigation hanging over him; that was just a “witch hunt,” Trump told reporters, before grudgingly acknowledging that he would raise the issue of Russia’s 2016 hacking with the leader who had ordered it. As for the rest of the Helsinki summit agenda, well, that was pretty much beside the point, Trump said; it was a “loose meeting,” and he really just wanted to sit down with Putin and establish a “relationship.”

What a difference a couple of hours makes. At noon in Washington, as Trump was arriving for afternoon tea with the Queen of the United Kingdom, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Rod Rosenstein, announced the bombshell indictment by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, of a dozen Russian military intelligence officers, for stealing Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 election. Suddenly, the Helsinki summit took on a whole different urgency. Would Trump, finally, belatedly, actually, confront Putin directly about this state-sponsored attack on the American political system? Would the President persist in questioning the findings of his own government experts when it came to the Russian hacking? Would the summit even take place, given the indictments? Should it?

In fact, we already know Trump’s answer to those questions. Rosenstein dropped another astonishing revelation into his press conference: President Trump had been aware all along about the charges against Russian actors, and had been briefed on them by the Justice Department even before he left for Europe. “The President is fully aware of the department’s actions today,” Rosenstein told reporters as he announced the indictments, which lay out in methodical detail the ways in which agents of the Russian government systematically worked to infiltrate the Democrats’ 2016 campaign with the apparent goal of helping Trump win the American Presidency.

Trump knew the indictment was coming when he bragged about what an easy meeting he would have with Putin. He knew it was coming when he once again attacked the investigation by his own government as “rigged.” And he knew it was coming when he rambled on about an agenda for the Helsinki summit that would cover just about everything but the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Talk about brazen."

 

[Red]

“So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”

If only that were the case.. what a goof lol

On the one hand I hear you clearly enough. On the other hand, from my perspective, the Mueller investigation needs to be protected. Regardless of our failings, regardless of being firmly in the clutches of an oligarchy, this man will not be put above and outside the rule of law. We can worry about the revolution another day. First things first, at least this is how I see it. First things first.

 

[Red]

7/15/18 interview of Adam Schiff. Views Putin as an unindicted co-conspirator. Feels the inclusion of the fact, in the indictments, that the first Russian intelligence hack of Clinton's personal server occurred on July 27, 2016, the same day Trump urged the Russians to look for Clinton emails, was intentional on Mueller's part....

 

[Red]

Seems like the "rigged witch hunt" has some pretty sharp intelligence working for us, even though the president does not share that respect, and would rather take Putin's side....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-wonder-what-else-america-knows-about-russia/

When Russian President Vladimir Putin sits down at the table in Helsinki on Monday, he will surely have in the back of his mind some intelligence worries that have nothing to do with the U.S. president seated across from him.

Putin’s elite spy world has been penetrated by U.S. intelligence. That’s the implication of the extraordinarily detailed 29-page indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers handed up by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators on Friday. The 11-count charge includes names, dates, unit assignments, the GRU’s use of “X-agent” malware, its bitcoin covert funding schemes and a wealth of other tradecraft.

Putin must be asking himself: How did the Americans find out all these facts? What other operations have been compromised? And how much else do they know?

“The Russians have surely begun a ‘damage assessment’ to figure out how we were able to collect this information and how much damage was done to their cyber capacity as a result,” says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, in an email. “They are probably also doing a CI (counter-intelligence) assessment to determine whether we have any human sources or whether the Russians made mistakes that we were able to exploit.”

Must the GRU assume that officers named in Friday’s indictment are now “blown” for further secret operations? Should Russian spymasters expect that operations they touched are now compromised? What about other Russian operations that used bitcoin, or X-agent, or another hacking tool called X-Tunnel? Has the United States tracked such operations and identified the targets? Finally, how are U.S. intelligence services playing back the information they’ve learned — to recruit, exploit or compromise Russian officers?

“I suspect the senior officers of the GRU who were involved do not have bright futures,” says Smith. “Putin will never extradite them, but it would be great if they were to defect to the U.S. and tell us what they know.”

Looking at this case through a counterintelligence lens raises an intriguing new series of questions. In putting all the detail into the indictment, Mueller was giving Russian intelligence a hint of how much America can see. But this public disclosure may mask much deeper capabilities — perhaps a capacity to expose many more layers of GRU military-intelligence operations and those by the Russian civilian spy services, the FSB and the SVR. American intelligence agencies rarely tip their hand this way by disclosing so much in an indictment; clearly they did so here to send messages.

Explains one former CIA officer: “Given that we clearly had so much of the Russian internal communication and cyber footprints, they must be asking what else do we have? Do we have communications between the units and more senior officers in the GRU? With the General Staff? With the Kremlin? With Putin? Probably not the latter directly, but the Russians are very bureaucratic and it’s hard for me to imagine there is not a clear trail of higher level approvals, progress reports, etc.”

Friday’s indictment is a legal document. But it’s also a shot across the Kremlin’s bow. The message is: If you don’t stop cyber-operations against the United States, we have the detailed information to identify and disrupt your intelligence services, officers, sources and methods. Mueller isn’t asking Russia to stop; he’s warning them of the consequences of going forward.

The indictment also sends a message to President Trump and members of his entourage who are potential targets of Mueller’s probe: Here’s a hint of what we know; how much are you willing to wager that we don’t know a lot more about Russian contacts and collusion? For example, the indictment is a proffer of Mueller’s information about contacts between GRU cut-out “Guccifer 2.0” and Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and adviser. What else does Mueller have?

Seeing these details, we have new appreciation for the dilemma of FBI officials James B. Comey, Peter Strzok and the handful of others who saw the unfolding story of Russia’s secret attempt to undermine Hillary Clinton and help Trump. As Strzok put it in his statement to a House committee Thursday: “In the summer of 2016, I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign.”

Strzok kept quiet about the conspiracy he was watching. Trump was elected president. But now, at last, with Friday’s indictment, we see a bit of what Strzok and the other intelligence officials saw.

And here’s a spooky final question: How much has the intelligence community told Trump about its operations against Russia? If you were one of the American intelligence officers who helped gather the information that’s included in Friday’s indictment, what would you think about the fact that Trump has asked for a private meeting first with Putin?

 

[Deleted member 365]

Trump was briefed in detail about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election two weeks before his inauguration. But why then would he spend everyday since then denying Russia’s attacks on the election via twitter, interviews, press conferences, and refusing to enforce sanctions?

Clearly, the only explanation is that he’s compromised.

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html

 

[jazzrule]

Trump was briefed in detail about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election two weeks before his inauguration. But why then would he spend everyday since then denying Russia’s attacks on the election via twitter, interviews, press conferences, and refusing to enforce sanctions?

Clearly, the only explanation is that he’s compromised.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html

Guess you don't watch Hannity where he showed multiple footage of Trump saying the Russians meddled in our elections. Quit watching CNN for your news and you might learn the truth, but you can not handle the truth.

 

[Gameface]

Guess you don't watch Hannity where he showed multiple footage of Trump saying the Russians meddled in our elections. Quit watching CNN for your news and you might learn the truth, but you can not handle the truth.

Guess you haven't seen on multiple ne s sources where one day he says they didn't then the next day he has prepared remarks where he says they did and then when asked the day after that he denies it again.

 

[Siro]

@One Brow
Being anti GMO or Vacinnation isn’t The same as attacking the FBI and declaring a war on the “Deep State” because they’re investigating Trump. Or endorsing trade wars while ignoring economists to own the libs. or denying climate change cuz the poor oil companies are being bullied by a few free huggers.

Being anti-vaccine is almost infinitely worse than "attacking the FBI". I can't believe I'm hearing this.

 

[Deleted member 365]

Being anti-vaccine is almost infinitely worse than "attacking the FBI". I can't believe I'm hearing this.

An entire political party is attacking the FBI and working to overthrow our institutions. All because they’re either too scared of their crazy *** delegates in their primaries or because they’re corrupt from Russian rubles donated to the NRA.

Not the same as a handful of clowns who think that Jenny McArthy knows stuff.