March 8, 2017
“Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups,” by Bloomberg’s Michael Riley: “Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms. At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the U.S. presidential election, said the people, who provided broad outlines of the campaign. At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway. Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession. Along with emails, the hackers are stealing documents from popular web-based applications like SharePoint, which lets people in different locations work on Microsoft Office files.”
March 7, 2017
Leashes Come Off Wall Street, Gun Sellers, Polluters and More
Giants in telecommunications, like Verizon and AT&T, will not have to take “reasonable measures” to ensure that their customers’ Social Security numbers, web browsing history and other personal information are not stolen or accidentally released.
Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase will not be punished, at least for now, for not collecting extra money from customers to cover potential losses from certain kinds of high-risk trades that helped unleash the 2008 financial crisis.
And Social Security Administration data will no longer be used to try to block individuals with disabling mental health issues from buying handguns, nor will hunters be banned from using lead-based bullets, which can accidentally poison wildlife, on 150 million acres of federal lands.
These are just a few of the more than 90 regulations that federal agencies and the Republican-controlled Congress have delayed, suspended or reversed in the month and a half since President Trump took office, according to a tally by The New York Times.
The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
In many cases, records show that the changes came after appeals by corporate lobbyists and trade association executives, who see a potentially historic opportunity to lower compliance costs and drive up profits. Slashing regulations, they argue, will unleash economic growth.
On a near daily basis, regulated industries are now sending in specific requests to the Trump administration for more rollbacks, including recent appeals from 17 automakers to rescind an agreement to increase mileage standards for their fleets, and another from pharmaceutical industry figures to reverse a new rule that tightens scrutiny over the marketing of prescription drugs for unapproved uses. As of late Friday, word had leaked that the automakers’ request for a rollback was about to be granted, too.
What Trump didn’t want you to see him signing.
The deconstruction of the administrative state will not be televised.
MAKING IT EASIER FOR MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE TO GET GUNS:
REMOVING TRANSGENDER PROTECTIONS:
In leaked document, the case for Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ takes another huge hit.
GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST
President Trump signed a new executive order that will ban travelers from six majority-Muslim nations seeking new visas from entering the United States for 90 days. The original order, which came under heavy legal scrutiny, had included a seventh country — Iraq.
The new order, which takes effect March 16, provides other exceptions not contained explicitly in previous versions: for travelers from those countries who are legal permanent residents of the United States, dual nationals who use a passport from another country and those who have been granted asylum or refugee status. the total number of refugees who can enter the U.S. this fiscal year will still go down from 110,000 to 50,000.
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March 6, 2017
At the center of the turmoil in the White House is an impatient president frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks or to implement any signature achievements. Interviews with 17 insiders offer a look at the tumultuous recent days.
Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.
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The FBI director’s request is the latest rebuff of Trump’s unfounded accusation that then-President Obama had ordered a wiretap of his campaign headquarters. Former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, denied allegations that wiretaps were authorized against Trump. James Comey reportedly asked DoJ to refute president’s allegation because of his concern that it was false and suggested the FBI had broken the law
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March 5, 2017
U.S. Can’t Effectively Counter Nuclear Threat, Times Finds.
- Under President Barack Obama, the Pentagon stepped up cyberattacks to disrupt North Korea’s nuclear program.
- But some experts have grown increasingly skeptical about the tactic.
- Upon leaving office, Mr. Obama warned President Trump that this threat would likely be his most urgent problem.
Trump’s View of Military: Raw Power as Means and End
President Trump seems fixated on preparing the armed forces for a potential conflict with great powers like China and Russia.
March 3, 2017
The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post revealed that Jeff Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and did not disclose that fact to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Democrats had been calling for weeks for Sessions to step away from the investigation, though he had resisted pressures to do so.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is not the only member of President Trump’s campaign who spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a diplomacy conference connected to the Republican National Convention in July. At least two more members of the Trump campaign’s national security officials also spoke with Kislyak at the event, and several more Trump national security advisers were in attendance.
It's unknown what the Trump campaign officials who spoke with the ambassador – J.D. Gordon and Carter Page – discussed with him. Those who took part in the events in Cleveland said it is not unusual for presidential campaign teams to interact with diplomats.
However, the newly-revealed communications further contradict months of repeated denials by Trump officials that his campaign had contact with officials representing the Russian government.
— Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
The Russian ambassador who met with then Sen. Jeff Sessions last year has left a path of repeated involvement in the U.S. presidential election campaign.
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s staff became embroiled in an election monitoring brouhaha last fall, and President Obama expelled 35 members of Kislyak’s team late last year for their alleged interference in the election campaign to help Donald Trump.
Current and former US intelligence officials have described Kislyak as a top spy and recruiter of spies, a notion that Russian officials have dismissed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that "nobody has heard a single statement from US intelligence agencies' representatives regarding our ambassador," and attacked the "depersonalized assumptions of the media that are constantly trying to blow this situation out of proportion."
The calls for a special prosecutor will avalanche now. Republicans in the Senate who aren’t from deep-red states are going to join the call for a special prosecutor, as Ohio’s Rob Portman did shortly after Schumer spoke. Sessions will resist, and the White House will resist, but eventually, the untenable nature of their position will show up in the poll numbers, and they’ll relent.
Sessions will have to relent to have a chance of keeping his job. But this just shows why it was so corrupt for Trump to name him in the first place. It’s becoming clearer and clearer why Trump wanted an attorney general he could trust not to investigate him.
March 2, 2017
Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose
WASHINGTON POST
Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year while he was still a senator and a prominent surrogate of the Trump campaign, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. During his confirmation hearing for attorney general, Sessions did not disclose these conversations. “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said in response to a question about communications between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” In a written questionaire, Sessions said "no" to the question of whether he had been in contact with the Russian government regarding the 2016 campaign. (A spokesperson for Sessions said he met with Kislyak in his capaicty as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and that he couldn't remember what exactly they discussed). Sessions now oversees the Justice Department and the FBI that are investigating alleged Russian meddling and potential ties to the Trump camp. Sessions has resisted calls for him to recuse himself from the ongoing investigations.
Obama Aides Left a Trail of Intelligence on Russian Efforts
In a new report by The New York Times, three former U.S. officials say that American allies, specifically the British and the Dutch, provided information that described meetings between Russian officials and associates of President Trump during the campaign in European cities. Additionally, the report contends that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications of Russian officials discussing contacts with Trump associates. The report also says that the Obama administration scrambled to spread information about Russian contacts with Trump associates prior to Trump's inauguration in order to prevent the president from destroying intelligene or obstructing inestigations. Additionally, over a half-dozen current and former officials said there were efforts to keep and distribute information in an attempt to ensure that there was a proper Congressional investigation.
Wilbur Ross Is Another Trump Cabinet Pick With Underexamined Russian Ties
After Ross and his team invested more than $1 billion in the troubled Bank of Cyprus, he became one of its two vice chairmen. Putin appointed the other.
A study prepared exclusively for DCReport.org by James S. Henry reveals deep financial ties between Donald Trump’s nominee for Commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and three Russian oligarchs, whose lives and fortunes depend on staying in the good graces of Vladimir Putin.
These connections raise many new questions about Trump’s reliance on the Putin regime, which all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say interfered in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf, but which Trump disputes.
These relationships between nominee Ross and the oligarchs involve ownership and management of a European bank with a reputation for laundering Russian money and making bad loans.
The study also compared flight records of Trump’s campaign plane and a plane used by one of the oligarchs. During the campaign, the two planes often were at the same airports at the same time.
Henry, DCReport.org’s senior editor for economics investigations, gathered the information and connected the dots.
Henry is a lawyer and former chief economist for the McKinsey & Co. business consulting firm. He abandoned his executive career to spend more than four decades exposing corrupt international banking. In 1976 Henry became the first person to urge eliminating large denomination bills to thwart drug trafficking and tax evasion. Henry served as a consultant on the massive Panama Papers that revealed a global network of tax evasion and other dubious financial practices of the international elite.
The records Henry combed through shows that Ross and his team invested more than $1 billion in the troubled Bank of Cyprus. Ross became one of two vice chairman of the bank. Putin appointed the other.
Soon Ross named a new chairman, who earlier left under a cloud as chairman of Deutsche Bank. On that chairman’s watch, Deutsche Bank paid $20 billion in fines. Among these was a $650 million fine for helping launder Russian money through Deutsche Bank offices in Moscow, New York City and Cyprus.
Deutsche Bank is Trump’s largest known lender, having extended him more than $300 million of loans that remain outstanding.
Why Ross would appoint anyone with such a poor record of banking conduct, and why he worked with the Russian oligarchs, remains a mystery.
This report first appeared at DCReport.org
| The agreement to pay Christopher Steele, who compiled a controversial dossier on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, ultimately fell apart but shows that U.S. investigators considered him to be credible on the president’s alleged Russia ties. Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news.” . Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman scoop: “The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.” While Trump derided the dossier as "fake news" – and the agreement eventually fell apart -- the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that bureau investigators considered him credible on Trump’s alleged Russia ties. How it happened: At the time of the October agreement, FBI officials were probing Moscow's activities -- including possible communications with Trump's team -- and were "aware of the information" Steele had been gathering for the Democratic research firm. The firm was due to stop paying Steele in the final weeks before Election Day, but Steele said he felt like his work "was not done." Steele had previously been hired by the FBI and was known for both high work quality and the breadth of knowledge developed over nearly two decades working on Russian-related issues. Ultimately the FBI never paid Steele – and communications between the agency and the former spy were interrupted as the now-famous dossier became the subject of international headlines. Still, the revelations are likely to strain an already-tense relationship between the intelligence community and the White House. Steele is now in hiding. Key quote: Steele at one point last year suggested that a Putin-orchestrated plan to help Trump may have been in the works for years. “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years,” he wrote last June. |
| By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman • Read more » |
Since 2008, nearly every state moved right in both presidential and state politics.
| A look at how each state has shifted over the past decade. |
| By Philip Bump • Read more » |
March 1, 2017
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