Tag: Vladimir Putin

Trump says he has seen no proof of Navalny poisoning, awaiting German findings

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President Trump on Friday cast doubt on the consensus from Germany that leading Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned in an assassination attempt in Siberia, saying he is waiting to review the evidence.

“We haven’t had any proof yet,” Trump said during a briefing at the White House.

“I would be very angry if that’s the case, so we’ll take a look at the numbers and the documents, because we’re going to be sent a lot of documents over the next few days,” he added. Continue reading.

Facebook Confirms Russia Is Intervening In 2020 Election

It’s no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are hoping that President Donald Trump will defeat his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in November — as they rightly view Trump as much more sympathetic to Russian interests. The Trump administration has already confirmed that they are intervening once again. And according to Facebook, Russian operatives are trying to manipulate U.S. voters this year on the social media platform just as they did during the 2016 presidential election.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reports Facebook announced that a St. Petersburg, Russia-based troll group that interfered in the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency, is trying to interfere in this year’s election as well. O’Sullivan notes that a “network of Facebook accounts and pages” that the social media platform removed was “set up to look and operate like a left-wing news outlet.” Facebook removed the Russian troll pages after receiving a tip from the FBI.

“This is the first publicly available evidence that people connected to the Russian troll group, which is known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), are using unwitting Americans in an attempt to meddle with the 2020 election and stir discord,” O’Sullivan reports. “The operation seems to have been shut down before it could get much traction on Facebook or the rest of the internet.” Continue reading.

Why we still don’t know if Trump is a Russian asset

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As chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff is attempting to meet the Supreme Court’s guidelines for gaining access to Donald Trump’s financial records. In a memorandum to committee members on counterintelligence risks posed by the president’s financial ties, he included this footnote:

Based on the Committee’s review, it does not appear that Special Counsel Mueller issued any grand jury subpoenas to obtain the President’s financial records. The Committee also has reason to believe, based on its oversight work, that the FBI Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.

That points to a question Schiff has been asking since the Mueller probe was completed in March, 2019.  Here’s how he explained it to the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump a few weeks after Mueller wrapped up his work : Continue reading.

Trump Phone Calls Add to Lingering Questions About Russian Interference

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A Senate committee went further than the Mueller report on key points about Russia’s election sabotage operations and the Trump campaign.

WASHINGTON — More than 200 pages into a sprawling, 1,000-page report on Russian election interference, the Senate Intelligence Committee made a startling conclusion endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats: Donald J. Trump knew of and discussed stolen Democratic emails at critical points late in his 2016 presidential campaign.

The Republican-led committee rejected Mr. Trump’s statement to prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference that he did not recall conversations with his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. about the emails, which were later released by WikiLeaks. Senators leveled a blunt assessment: “Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The senators did not accuse Mr. Trump of lying in their report, released Tuesday, the fifth and final volume from a three-year investigation that laid out extensive contacts between Trump advisers and Russians. But the report detailed even more of the president’s conversations with Mr. Stone than were previously known, renewing questions about whether Mr. Trump was truthful with investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, or misled them, much as prosecutors convinced jurors that Mr. Stone himself misled congressional investigators about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks. Continue reading.

GOP senator draws fire from all sides on Biden, Obama-era probes

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is coming under fire from all sides for his investigations into the Obama administration and the Bidens.

Months into his probes, Johnson is facing increasing public pushback from Democrats, the Biden campaign and aligned outside groups who believe he is trying to undercut presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and might inadvertently spread Russian disinformation in the process.

But he’s also taking criticism from high-profile conservatives who argue the probes are moving too slowly, while some fellow GOP senators appear worried about the appearance of the investigation just months before the election. Continue reading.

Russia is trying to ‘denigrate’ Biden while China prefers ‘unpredictable’ Trump not be reelected, senior U.S. intelligence official says

Washington Post logoRussia is “using a range of measures” to interfere in the 2020 election and has enlisted a pro-Russian lawmaker from Ukraine — who has met with President Trump’s personal lawyer — “to undermine former vice president [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” a top U.S. intelligence official said in a statement Friday.

The remarks by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, were some of the most detailed to date about foreign interference in the presidential race and come after earlier criticism from Democratic lawmakers that Evanina had not shared with the public some of the alarming intelligence he gave them in classified briefings.

Evanina also said that the government of China does not want Trump to win reelection in November, seeing the incumbent as “unpredictable.” Evanina described China’s efforts to date as largely rhetorical and aimed at shaping policy and criticizing the Trump administration for actions Beijing sees as harmful to its long-term strategic interests. Continue reading.

Foreign policy experts struggle to explain Trump’s devotion to Vladimir Putin

AlterNet logoAmericans who are old enough to remember the Cold War find it ironic that President Donald Trump has such a favorable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s relationship with Putin is the focus of an op-ed that Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, wrote for its website — and according to Sciutto, their relationship is one that foreign policy experts and former members of Trump’s administration have a hard time explaining.

“When interviewing current and former Trump administration officials for my upcoming book, ‘The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World,’ I found that explaining Trump’s deference to Russia was one of the most difficult questions for them to answer,” Sciutto explains. “And even they acknowledged the record fails to back up the president.”

Sciutto asked Susan Gordon, former principal deputy director of national intelligence, what Trump believes he needs Putin for — and she responded, “To not be an adversary. To not drive up (Trump’s) need to respond militarily. To not force (him) to spend money in places (he doesn’t) want to. To not have someone who (he) won’t deal with. To not create another front where (he has) to engage militarily. (Russia) are so powerful that to have them as an enemy is not in (the) best interest of what he’s trying to achieve globally, and from a U.S. perspective.” Continue reading.

Trump Still Defers to Putin, Even as He Dismisses U.S. Intelligence and the Allies

New York Times logoSay this about President Trump’s approach to Moscow: It’s been consistent.

WASHINGTON — On the eve of accepting the Republican nomination for president four years ago, Donald J. Trump declared that he would pull out of NATO if American allies did not pay more for their defense, waving away the thought that it would play into the hands of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has spent his career trying to dismantle the Western alliance.

Asked about his deference to the Kremlin leader, Mr. Trump responded, “He’s been complimentary of me.”

This week, as his renomination nears, Mr. Trump announced that he was pulling a third of American troops from Germany. He declared in recent days that he had never raised with Mr. Putin, during a recent phone conversation, American intelligence indicating that Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan, because he distrusted the information from his own intelligence agencies. Nor has he issued warnings about what price, if any, Mr. Putin would pay for seeking to influence the 2020 election or pushing disinformation about the coronavirus. American intelligence agencies say Russia is trying both. Continue reading.

Germany rejects Trump’s proposal to let Russia back into G7: foreign minister

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.

Trump raised the prospect last month of expanding the G7 to again include Russia, which had been expelled in 2014 following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

But Maas told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in eastern Ukraine. Continue reading.

Trump directed the CIA to share intel on counterterrorism with the Kremlin despite no discernible reward: Ex-intelligence officials

AlterNet logoU.S. intel officials have been alleging that according to their sources, the Russian government offered a bounty to Taliban extremists if they would kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Just Security discussed these allegations with some former Trump Administration officials, trying to gleam some insight into what President Donald Trump and his officials knew about Russian government activity in Afghanistan.

“Why would the Russian government think it could get away with paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers?,” Just Security’s Ryan Goodman writes. “One answer to that question may be the extraordinary response that Moscow received when the Trump Administration learned of a precursor to the bounty operation. From mid-2017 and into 2018, Pentagon officials became increasingly confident in intelligence reports that the Kremlin was arming the Taliban, which posed a significant threat to American and coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan.”

President Donald Trump and his administration have had much better relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin than President Barack Obama did. And according to Goodman, “Trump directed the CIA to share intelligence information on counterterrorism with the Kremlin despite no discernible reward, former intelligence officials who served in the Trump Administration told Just Security.” Continue reading.