Tag: Trump campaign

Mueller report exposes ‘Miners for Trump’ as a Russian troll effort

Photo of a coal miner on one poster was actually a lifelong Democrat who died of black lung disease.

In October 2016, Pennsylvania social media accounts promoted “Miners for Trump” rallies around the state with a picture of a gritty coal miner. The rallies coincided with a series of presidential campaign rallies by then-candidate Donald Trump.

It turns out the social media promotions were not created by U.S. coal miners, however. Instead, they were the work of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll farm, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The IRA was the largest of the Russian efforts to help elect Trump to the presidency by manipulating social media. It housed hundreds of professional hackers in one St. Petersburg building, creating thousands of fake posts and comments a day.

View the complete April 23 article by Joe Romm on the ThinkProgress website here.

‘Students for Trump’ founder charged with fraud and faking his identity

Following in the well-worn footsteps of their leader, an entire new generation of grifters and fraudsters has arrived to bilk Americans out of their hard-earned savings. Fortunately, though, sometimes the law catches up to them.

A Tennessee man charged by New York prosecutors with pretending to be a Manhattan lawyer and taking thousands from would-be clients was the co-founder of Students for Trump, a national group that mobilized college campuses in the run-up to the 2016 election and plans to do so again in 2020.

John Lambert, 23, was arrested last week and charged by Southern District of  New York prosecutors with wire fraud for having invented a lawyer persona named “Eric Pope” that he used to solicit legal work online. ALM reported last week that the fake firm website he created appeared to have attorney biographies cribbed from senior partners at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

View the complete April 24 article from the Daily Kos website here.

What you missed in the Mueller report

POLITICO dived back into the report and its 2,000-plus footnotes to unearth a few details that have not gotten much attention.

Robert Mueller keeps on giving.

Dozens of overlooked nuggets are buried deep inside the special counsel’s 448-page report that raise yet more intriguing questions about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and shed new light on charges Mueller considered and dropped, who dished on the president, who evaded Mueller’s attempts to secure an interview, what happened to the FBI’s mysterious counterintelligence investigation and why a Russian Olympic weightlifter mistakenly ended up on the public radar.

That’s what happens when two-plus years of investigative work get distilled into a document consumed at the speed of Twitter — and where the sheer volume of news articles about the special counsel’s findings overloaded the most able multitaskers and the fastest speed-readers.

View the complete April 23 article by Darren Samuelsohn, Kyle Cheney and Natasha Bertrand on the Politico 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.

Prodded by Putin, Russians Sought Back Channels to Trump Through the Business World

WASHINGTON — At 9:34 on the November morning after Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and an informal envoy for President Vladimir V. Putin, sent a text message to a Lebanese-American friend with ties to the Trump campaign.

Mr. Dmitriev wanted to connect quickly with someone in Mr. Trump’s inner circle, preferably Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner. By the end of the month, he was in touch with Rick Gerson, a friend of Mr. Kushner’s who manages a New York hedge fund.

The two discussed a potential joint investment venture. But the special counsel’s report released Thursday suggested that Mr. Dmitriev’s real interest lay elsewhere: He had been instructed by Mr. Putin, he told Mr. Gerson, to come up with a plan for “reconciliation” between the United States and Russia.

View the complete April 20 article by Sharon LaFraniere on The New York Times website here.

With Polls and Private Meetings, Republicans Craft Blunt Messaging to Paint Democrats as Extreme

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders are sharpening and poll-testing lines of attack that portray Democratic policies on health care, the environment and abortion as far outside the norm, in hopes of arming President Trump with hyperbolic sound bites — some of them false — asserting that Democrats would cause long waits for doctors or make killing babies after birth legal.

The blunt messaging underscores one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats as they try to defeat the incumbent president: the need to define themselves and their ideas before Mr. Trump and his conservative allies do it for them.

The Republican National Committee has already begun polling in 16 states to assess ways to discredit ideas like “Medicare for all,” which Senator Bernie Sanders proposed in a bill this week, and build on the party’s broader argument that Democratic candidates like Mr. Sanders are promoting an extreme socialist agenda. Social conservative leaders have met with White House officials to discuss calling attention to Democratic-sponsored legislation to loosen restrictions on abortion in the second and third trimesters, like one that passed recently in New York.

View the complete April 12 article by Jeremy W. Peters on The New York Times website here.

Barr says Mueller report will be released ‘within a week’

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday that he will release a public version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “within a week.”

Barr also said that the redactions made to the report would be color-coded and footnoted so that the public knows why the Justice Department decided to redact those portions.

“The process is going along very well,” Barr said during testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request. “My original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.”

View the complete April 9 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Trump’s ‘business ties’ to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards reemerge, a day after he designated it a terror group

President’s firm entered partnership with ‘notoriously corrupt’ official to build Trump Tower Baku

A day after Donald Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation, reports are reemerging of the Trump Organization’s alleged participation in a scheme that likely helped the IRGC launder money to fund its interests abroad.

The US government made the unprecedented move to blacklist another country’s military because, Mr Trump said, the IRGC “actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft”.

The designation imposes sanctions including freezing assets the IRGC may have in US jurisdictions and a ban on Americans doing business with the organisation. Continue reading “Trump’s ‘business ties’ to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards reemerge, a day after he designated it a terror group”

New hints of the Mueller report: Did Trump simply get rolled by the Russians?

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

View the complete April 5 article by Heather Digby Parton with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Comey: Mueller findings show Trump lied about FBI, his attempt to destroy the agency failed

The former FBI director spoke to NBC News in his first on TV interview since the special counsel ended his investigation.

Former FBI Director James Comey, in his first television interview since special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation, said the principal findings of the probe show President Donald Trump’s blistering criticism of the FBI were lies and his attempt to destroy the agency had failed.

Comey, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, told “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt that the release of Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Mueller’s investigation“establishes, I hope, to all people no matter where they are on the spectrum, that the FBI is not corrupt, not a nest of vipers, of spies, but an honest group of people trying to find out what is true.”

Responding to Holt’s question about whether the “damage to the reputation of the justice system, FBI in particular, been worth it,” Comey replied that “on balance” it had.

View the complete March 27 article along with video of the interview on the NBC News website here.