Tag: Mueller Report

Mueller report: Russia hacked state databases and voting machine companies

Russian intelligence officers injected malicious SQL code and then ran commands to extract information

The Russian military intelligence unit known by its initials GRU targeted U.S. state election offices as well as U.S. makers of voting machines, according to Mueller’s report.

Victims of the Russian hacking operation “included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities,” the report said. “The GRU also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.”

The Russian intelligence officers at GRU exploited known vulnerabilities on websites of state and local election offices by injecting malicious SQL code on such websites that then ran commands on underlying databases to extract information.

View the complete April 22 article by Gopal Ratnam on The Roll Call website here.

Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians

Donald J. Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition, according to a New York Times analysis.

The report of Robert S. Mueller III, released to the public on Thursday, revealed at least 30 more contacts beyond those previously known. However, the special counsel said, “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.”

Very few, if any, of these interactions were publicly known before Mr. Trump took office.

View the complete April 19 article by Karen Yurish and Larry Buchanan on The New York Times website here.  This web post has interactive graphics showing who met with what Russian entity through the election cycle.

The Mueller report: A profile of a president willing to sell out his country

It’s hard to come to any conclusion other than Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

When Attorney General William Barr provided a brief, four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation on March 22, it was obvious there were more questions remaining than answers. The full report was rumored to have clocked in at well over three hundred pages and Barr’s summary left much to be desired as to just what Mueller had uncovered. The message that Donald Trump would not be charged with offenses directly relating to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and that the Department of Justice had decided not to file charges of obstruction of justice, was met by celebration with some and puzzlement by others.

Having finally had a chance to look at an initial, redacted version of the report, Americans got a chance last Thursday to see for themselves just what horrors Attorney General Barr had been trying to bury for his president. In Mueller’s 448-page detailed narrative of his investigation, we saw the story of a campaign deeply steeped in Russian efforts to undermine our free and fair elections and a president attempting to or actively breaking the law to cover it up.

Continue reading “The Mueller report: A profile of a president willing to sell out his country”

Senate Republicans tested on Trump support after Mueller

Special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report poses a test for vulnerable Senate Republicans running for reelection, forcing them to decide how far to distance themselves from President Trump heading into 2020.

Mueller declined to pursue charges of conspiracy, illegal coordination or obstruction of justice, but much of his report reflects poorly on the president and reveals there are several more federal investigations that have yet to wrap up.

While House Democrats will need to decide how hard to go to attack Trump in the wake of the report and whether to pursue a politically charged impeachment process, Senate Republicans have to figure out how far to go to defend the president.

View the complete April 21 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Armed with Mueller report, Democrats confront challenge of Trump’s messaging machine

President Trump summarized the special counsel report on the day of its release with four words in all caps — “NO COLLUSION. NO OBSTRUCTION.”

The first two were not addressed by the report. The second two falsely described Robert S. Mueller III’s findings.

But the pithy declaration, set in a Game of Thrones “Game Over” meme and repeated frequently by Trump’s surrogates on television, helped to establish a reading of the report’s implications that Trump would embrace in the days to come. In response, Democratic leaders offered no memes or catchphrases of their own. They called instead for less redaction of the document and more congressional hearings.

View the complete April 20 article by Michael Scherer on The Washington Post website here.

Mueller’s report proves why Trump loves Fox News — and why he needs it now more than ever

It’s no secret that Fox News and the Trump administration are deeply entwined: They are the conjoined twins of misinformation.

So it hardly raised an eyebrow when the president took to Twitter on Thursday to urge everyone to tune in to Fox for Attorney General William P. Barr’s (misleading) prelude to the release of the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The results were predictable: Fox’s early news coverage was somewhat straight — kept so largely by the presence of Fox’s designated truth-teller, Chris Wallace.

View the complete April 20 article by Margaret Sullivan on The Washington Post website here.

5 unresolved mysteries about Russian meddling in Mueller’s report

Even in a 448-page report, the special counsel left several big questions unaddressed or only partially answered.

Over 448 pages, special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report covered a huge amount of ground, from Trump campaign contacts with Russian operatives to President Donald Trump’s efforts to thwart Mueller’s probe.

But while Mueller found that the Trump campaign did not conspire with the Russian government, he didn’t resolve every mystery surrounding the Kremlin’s 2016 presidential election interference scheme.

Several lines of inquiry that Mueller and the FBI — not to mention countless journalists and amateur internet sleuths — had reportedly been pursuing went unaddressed in the copious document. They include mysterious interactions between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank computer servers, the inner workings of the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, and influence-peddling by Middle Eastern countries targeting Trump’s fledgling administration. Other avenues, like whether compromising tapes exist of the president and what a Russian oligarch did with the internal Trump campaign polling data he was given, were left open-ended.

View the complete April 19 article by Natasha Bertrand on the Politico website here.

Senator Romney’s Statement on Mueller Report

One of the things we can’t understand is how the media is only focusing on the Democratic Congress’ reaction to the release of the redacted Mueller report. This is a Republican administration.  The Republicans in Congress appeared cowed by the possibility of a mean tweet from Donald Trump. The only Republican responding has been Mitt Romney, and see if you can spot what’s missing from his statement:

WASHINGTON— U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) released the following statement regarding the Mueller report:

“I have now read the redacted Mueller report and offer my personal reaction.

“It is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice. The alternative would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis. The business of government can move on. Continue reading “Senator Romney’s Statement on Mueller Report”

The Memo: Mueller’s depictions will fuel Trump angst

Special counsel Robert Mueller painted a damning picture of the Trump administration, even as he handed the president a victory on the central issue of collusion with Russia.

The Trump White House, as portrayed by Mueller, revolves around an impulsive and angry president who issues orders that underlings often defy, ignore or seek to delay.

The depiction will enrage a president who fixates on the concept of strength and is hypersensitive about any suggestion that he is not in absolute control of his administration.

View the complete April 20 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.

After weeks of saying he was totally exonerated, Trump now calls Mueller report ‘total bulls—‘

The president’s rhetoric about the Mueller report has abruptly changed.

The day after the Justice Department released the Mueller report, President Donald Trump tweeted that, in his opinion, parts of the report are “total bullshit.” That’s quite a departure from Trump’s earlier comments, in which he claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was a “total exoneration” of him.

Last month, Trump repeatedly proclaimed his own exoneration after Attorney General William Barr released a memo which concluded that the Mueller report did not find the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Continue reading “After weeks of saying he was totally exonerated, Trump now calls Mueller report ‘total bulls—‘”