Trump and Russia; Spasiba, Harasho!

[pErvinalia]

Another Trump thread!???!?!?!??!?

Admins! Can't we merge this thread with the Trump and Russia thread? Why do we need one?

yeah, stop triggering 42!

[JimC]

Mergifying has happened anyway...

[L'Emmerdeur]

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

"‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer"

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

...

Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone’s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference.

Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.

“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.”

Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke worked on an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)

Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

[Brian Peacock]

FOX & FRIENDS: IP addresses can be easily spoofed and if crooked Hilary's servers were that insecure she deserved to be hacked, particularly by those she was in collusion with.

[Forty Two]

Our democracy is in massive danger - https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... nts-on-it/

[Forty Two]

The Obama administration “was like having the ‘good parent’ at home," the former first lady said. "The responsible parent, the one who told you to eat your carrots and go to bed on time."

“And now we have the other parent,” Obama added. “We thought it’d feel fun — maybe it feels fun for now because we can eat candy all day and stay up late and not follow the rules.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... d-to-trump

According to Michelle, Barack was the parent who told you what to do all the time.... told you what eat, when to sleep... what to think!

Now we have the guy who let's you do as you please, because we're not children, we're adults, and we don't need anyone to tell us to eat carrots and go to bed on time... but, she views us as children, eating candy all day and staying up late and not "following the rules" because we aren't adults...we need a President to give orders....

[Tero]

Manafort. Collusion will come out of Manafort.

[Tero]

Even if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference accomplishes nothing more than filing indictments against one identity thief, two money launderers, three liars and 13 Russian cyber-op artists, his efforts will have helped to rejig U.S.-Russia relations for a decade or maybe more.

Shockwaves created by Mueller’s 10-month probe couldn’t help but have emboldened the Treasury Department this week as it slammed Russia President Vladimir Putin with a bundle of sanctions where it hurts: the pocketbooks of seven of his most faithful oligarchs and 12 of their companies. Working in consultation with the State Department, Treasury applied sanctions to another 17 senior Russian government officials. In its announcement, Treasury linked “the Kremlin’s malign agenda” directly to the sanctioned elites.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... chs-217833

[Tero]

Suitcases full of cash:
Suleiman Kerimov:

"He is alleged to have brought hundreds of millions of euros into France — transporting as much as 20 million euros at a time in suitcases, in addition to conducting more conventional funds transfers — without reporting the money to French tax authorities."

Investigators are believed to be looking into whether foreign cash got into the coffers of American political organizations, and if this is how, the implications are huge.

Foreign contributions to U.S. elections are illegal. And people entering the United States must notify Customs and Border Protection if they're bringing in currency or "monetary instruments" worth more than $10,000 — or it can be seized and those carrying it potentially could face civil or criminal penalties.

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/07/60023475 ... ll-of-cash

[Forty Two]

Manafort. Collusion will come out of Manafort.

Keep up the wishful thinking, lol. I’m sure they are saving the really juicy evidence for just the right moment....

[Brian Peacock]

But wouldn't it be great if we got along with Russia.

[Tero]

Not before Putin is gone. But even after, nationalist forces will rule.

Or were you being sarcastic?

[pErvinalia]

It's important that we get along with fascists.

[JimC]

Not before Putin is gone. But even after, nationalist forces will rule.

Or were you being sarcastic?

Brian's middle name is Sarkie...

[Scot Dutchy]

Would it be great if we just had peace in the world.