04 September 20
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04 September 20
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James Risen | Senate Report Shows What Mueller Missed About Trump and Russia
James Risen, The Intercept
Excerpt: "The final Senate report provides damning evidence of the counterintelligence threat posed by Russia in Trump's 2016 campaign."
hen Donald Trump traveled to Moscow in November 1996, looking for real estate development opportunities, he didn’t get a hotel deal in Moscow, but he may have found a new woman, and the Russian government probably knew about it, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s remarkable new report on the committee’s three and a half year investigation into Trump and Russia.
Trump met the Russian woman through his business connections at a party at a luxury hotel in Moscow, and the two apparently had a brief affair, at a time when Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples. The Senate report has redacted the woman’s name and blacked out her face in photos taken of her with Trump at the time and provided to the committee. But the report explains in detail how Russian intelligence operatives keep track of the sexual activities of visiting foreign business executives, and notes that the Moscow-based U.S. businessman who introduced Trump to the woman probably told Russian government officials about it.
The story of Trump’s alleged Moscow affair is in keeping with the bipartisan and comprehensive nature of the Senate report, which is at turns both reassuring and alarming. While it debunks the so-called Steele Dossier, which was highlighted by a wild accusation that Trump had two women urinate on his bed in his Moscow hotel room in 2013, the Senate report examines in detail the less tawdry, but far more plausible, story that Trump had a brief affair on his earlier trip to Moscow and the Russians knew about it.
In fact, the Senate report dismisses many of the most outrageous accusations involving Trump and Russia even as it provides overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign’s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention.
But the Senate report goes much further than election interference and provides the first detailed examination of the broader and complex network of relationships between Trump, his ever-shifting circle of personal and business associates, and a series of Russian oligarchs and other Russian and Ukrainian figures with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the process, the report provides badly needed context for the events of 2016 and beyond. Above all, it reveals the true nature of the counterintelligence threat posed by a president willing and eager to accept the help of a foreign adversary to win American elections.
Since its August 18 release, the Senate report — actually the fifth and final volume of the committee’s massive opus on Trump and Russia — has been overshadowed by both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and as a result, it has received far less attention from the press and the public than it deserves.
But the Senate report is particularly significant now, as the 2020 general election campaign intensifies and Trump and his supporters continue to deny that Russia tried to help him win in 2016 and that Moscow is trying to do so again this year. In recent days, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, has said that the DNI will stop in-person briefings for Congress about election interference, angering congressional Democratic leaders who charge that Ratcliffe and the Trump administration are trying to keep the public in the dark.
But the Senate report cuts through the political noise with clear and unequivocal language to explain what happened in 2016.
At nearly 1,000 pages, the Senate report is by far the best and most thorough examination of the Trump-Russia story to date, and puts the narrower and more legalistic Mueller Report to shame. Robert Mueller, the former FBI director appointed in 2017 to be special counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia case, kept his focus on gathering evidence for specific criminal prosecutions; the Senate report shows that he missed the forest for the trees.
The Senate report itself is critical of Mueller’s narrow approach and chides him and his team for having failed to grasp the true nature of the national security threat posed by Russia’s intervention in 2016. The report complains that Mueller failed to continue the FBI’s original counterintelligence investigation once the FBI handed off the broader Trump-Russia case. Instead, the special counsel abandoned the counterintelligence portions of the case and focused instead only on elements of the case that could result in criminal prosecutions.
“Over the course of its investigation, the [special counsel] successfully secured numerous criminal indictments and convictions,” the Senate report states. “While criminal prosecutions are a vital tool in upholding our nation’s laws, protecting our democratic system from foreign interference is a broader national security mission that must be appropriately balanced with the pursuit of criminal prosecutions. It is the committee’s view that this balance was not achieved. Russian interference with the U.S. electoral process was inherently a counterintelligence matter and one not well-suited to criminal prosecutions.”
The Senate report is most remarkable for its bipartisan nature. It was produced by a Republican-controlled committee, but the report almost never seems to pull its punches aimed at any of its targets. It is unsparing in its description of Trump and his campaign aides as eager to reach out for Russian help in 2016, but is equally tough in its criticism of the FBI for its missteps in its subsequent investigation of Trump and Russia’s intervention in the election. Along the way, each episode is recounted in exhaustive detail, and the result is that the reader is left with a clear understanding of the relative significance of the different chapters of the Trump-Russia case. That is a relief after years of partisanship and polarization have skewed the public’s understanding of the case.
Lust, Avarice, Opportunism, Incompetence
In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is a throwback to an earlier era of congressional investigations in which bipartisanship was the rule, not the exception. The report is so thick with research and evidence that the letters from Republican and Democratic senators on the committee, attached at the end of the report and arguing over the report’s meaning, seem trivial by contrast.
Perhaps the only significance of the attached letter from the Republican senators is the name of one senator who didn’t sign it: Richard Burr of North Carolina, who until recently was the committee’s chair. Burr was forced to step aside in May, after the disclosure that he was under investigation for stock sales he made before the American public knew the extent of the likely economic threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. But by that time, the committee’s work on the Trump-Russia case was virtually complete. In hindsight, Burr appears to have played a key role in protecting the committee’s investigation from excessive partisan influence.
The independence of the committee’s investigation is evident in its clear and concise conclusions.
“The committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president,” the report states. “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”
The GRU, a Russian intelligence service, conducted the hacks and then used a false cyber front to transfer data to WikiLeaks, which then published the Clinton-related documents at key moments in the 2016 campaign, according to the report. The U.S. media obligingly wrote stories based on the documents, without aggressively pursuing evidence that the leaks were the product of a Russian cyberattack.
The report states that “while the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump campaign sought to maximize the impact of those materials to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. To do so, the Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails; took steps to obtain inside information about the content of releases once WikiLeaks began to publish stolen information; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release; and encouraged further theft of information and continued leaks.”
One of the most intriguing sections in the report deals with the relationship between Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chair, and a Russian intelligence officer. Indeed, the Manafort section of the report is a prime example of how the Senate investigators brought fresh eyes to a well-known episode in the Trump-Russia case and, unlike Mueller, found new information by examining it as a counterintelligence matter.
In March 2016, longtime international lobbyist Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign and by May was named the campaign’s chair. Manafort offered to work for Trump for free.
But Manafort came to the Trump campaign with a lot of baggage and was facing a desperate financial squeeze. He had spent years working for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin, who had tasked him to conduct influence operations in countries where Deripaska had major business interests. Deripaska also introduced Manafort to Ukrainian oligarchs and eventually Manafort went to work for Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych until he was ousted from power in 2014 in the wake of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution.
By 2016, Manafort was caught up in a fight with Deripaska over an investment that had gone sour, and he saw his new position with the Trump campaign as a lifeline to help him resolve the situation. “Once on the campaign, Manafort quickly sought to leverage his position to resolve his multi-million dollar foreign disputes and obtain new work in Ukraine and elsewhere,” the Senate report concluded.
One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska.
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters.
The Mueller report found that Manafort had shared Trump polling data with Kilimnik, but didn’t examine why he had done so. The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.” The Manafort-Kilimnik relationship, the Senate report concludes, represents “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
The Senate report is filled with such rich details, shedding new light on the wide cast of characters surrounding both Trump and Putin, and the end result is an engrossing tale of modern intelligence — and of lust, avarice, squalid opportunism, and incompetence — worthy of John le Carré. With its depth of research, layered with an understanding of a complex series of personal networks in both the United States and Russia, the Senate report has done what none of the previous investigations have achieved. It has brought the Trump-Russia story to life.
Michael Forest Reinoehl was killed by police in Washington State. (photo: VICE)
Suspect in Fatal Shooting of Portland Right-Wing Protester Killed by Law Enforcement
Conrad Wilson and Kimberley Freda, NPR
Excerpt: "Just hours after an interview was posted online in which Michael Reinoehl took responsibility for the fatal shooting Aug. 29 of Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland, Reinoehl was killed by law enforcement officers as they attempted to arrest him in Olympia, Washington, according to the U.S. Marshals Service."
READ MORE
A car seen moving through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York City on Thursday night. (photo: Twitter)
A Car Plowed Through Black Lives Matter Protesters in Times Square, NYPD Denies It Was an Unmarked Vehicle
Ashley Collman, INSIDER
Collman writes: "A car plowed through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Times Square on Thursday, and the police are asking the driver to come forward."
Video shows the moment a black Ford Taurus approached the intersection of 46th Street and Seventh Avenue, where several protesters were crossing the street. When the protesters refused to move, the car accelerated through the crowd.
Some people at the scene claimed the vehicle was an unmarked police car, but the New York City Police Department denied in a tweet that the car belonged to its fleet.
According to WABC, the police are asking that the driver of the vehicle come forward.
The police told WABC that the driver was involved in a separate rally to support President Donald Trump that crossed paths with the Black Lives Matter protesters, who were demanding justice for Daniel Prude, a Black man who died after an arrest in Rochester, New York, in March.
A video posted to social media early Friday morning showed a man wearing an American-flag shirt and what appeared to be a "Make America Great Again" hat getting into the rear passenger seat of the vehicle before the car drove into the Black Lives Matter protest in Times Square.
A police spokesman told the New York Daily News that officers tried to direct the vehicle toward the New York Marriott Marquis, a hotel located opposite Times Square, and away from the Black Lives Matter protesters but that the driver drove straight down 46th street instead.
While the NYPD tweeted that no injuries had been reported, reporters spoke with people at the scene who said they had been hit.
"The car just hit me. He hit me straight on and kept going," a cyclist who asked to be identified by only his first name, Rob, told the Daily News. "I was working barricade. My knee is bad and my bike is ruined."
Lora Gettelfinger, 33, told Gothamist that she was hit in the leg by the vehicle.
"I'm in shock. I'm just happy to be alive right now," she said.
Cars driving through protests has become a recurrent problem since the Black Lives Matter movement reignited at the end of May in response to the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis.
A University of Chicago researcher recently found that there had been 50 vehicle-ramming incidents at protests since late May, according to NPR.
In one notable incident in May, a marked NYPD SUV was caught on video driving through protesters in Brooklyn.
Projects Trump administration believes could be fast-tracked include gas leasing development plan in the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska. (photo: Al Grillo/AP)
Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Dozens of Fossil Fuel Projects During Pandemic
Emily Holden, Guardian UK
Holden writes: "The Trump administration has identified dozens of major fossil fuel, energy and water projects that could be fast-tracked by expediting environmental reviews amid the pandemic, according to internal government documents."
At least 19 of the projects are from companies that have spent a total of $16m lobbying the interior department since early 2017, according to an analysis by the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities. ConocoPhillips spent $11.2m of that amount lobbying the department, including on plans to drill for oil and gas within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the group said.
Three of the companies that could potentially benefit have met with the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, personally. Another is the Garrison Diversion Conservancy District, which Bernhardt represented as a lawyer at the firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The district is seeking to divert water from the Missouri River to supply the Red River Valley in North Dakota, a project environmental advocates oppose.
The list was obtained with a public records request by the Center for Biological Diversity and first reported by the Associated Press. It was written in response to an executive order Donald Trump signed in June directing agencies to use emergency authority to speed energy and infrastructure projects during the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic.
The administration had already prioritized the approval of many of the projects on the list before the executive order. Agencies are trying to finalize unfinished business before 20 January, in case Trump does not win re-election.
Some of the projects are caught up in years-long legal battles and would be difficult to speed along.
Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said some of the projects were likely added to the list to make the executive order “look more important than it is”.
That said, he added that big projects involve consultations and reviews on endangered species, historic preservation and impacts to tribes.
“There’s lots of boxes that have to be checked and we won’t know until many months or sometimes years later what they did behind the scenes to try to finish those quickly,” Hartl said.
The projects that the Trump administration believes could be fast-tracked include the Jordan Cove gas export project in Oregon, the coastal plan oil and gas leasing development plan in the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska, the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project off the coast of Massachusetts and the Arrow Canyon solar project in Nevada.
The deputy interior secretary, Katharine MacGregor, outlined the projects in a list addressed to Larry Kudlow, the president’s assistant for economic policy.
Trump’s executive order is one of many ways his administration has sought to help fossil fuel companies during the pandemic, including directing millions of dollars in small business assistance to the industry under a program available to all types of businesses.
Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman at the White House council on environmental quality, told E&E News that agencies would still have to “comply with all existing laws protecting our environment, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act and other statutes”.
An unidentified man participates in a Blue Lives Matter rally Sunday, Aug. 30, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (photo: Morry Gash/AP)
Blue Lives Matter Supporters Arrested With Slew of Firearms Outside Kenosha After Police Received Tip
Alexander Mallin and Meredith Deliso, ABC News
Excerpt: "Two Missouri men were arrested on firearm charges after a tipster warned law enforcement the pair were traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with assault-style weapons, according to court documents."
Michael M. Karmo, 40, and Cody E. Smith, 33, were arrested at a hotel near Kenosha on Tuesday and charged with illegal possession of firearms, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. According to the criminal complaint against them, they were found with a major cache of firearms and weapons in their vehicle and hotel room that included an AR-15, a shotgun, handguns, a dagger, a saw and magazines.
Civil unrest, violence and looting erupted in Kenosha after Jacob Blake, who is Black, was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer on Aug. 23. Two protesters were fatally shot, and a third wounded, by an alleged 17-year-old gunman during protests in the days following Blake's shooting.
According to the complaint, the Kenosha Police Department advised the FBI on Tuesday that a law enforcement agency in Iowa had received a tip that Karmo and an unidentified man were traveling with firearms from Missouri to Kenosha. Karmo allegedly told the tipster on Aug. 31 that "he was going to Kenosha with the intention of possibly using the firearms on people," the complaint stated.
Text messages between Karmo and the tipster allegedly included a photograph of Karmo holding a rifle with a drum-style magazine in it along with the message, "This is the game changer," the complaint said.
After receiving the tip, law enforcement looked at a Facebook page with the username "Michael Karmo" and found photos of someone who appeared to be Karmo posing with firearms, including assault-style rifles, according to the complaint. The complaint also included photos from Karmo's alleged account, including one that appears to be Karmo posing with a gun in front of a Blue Lives Matter flag.
FBI officials tracked down Karmo and Smith Tuesday evening outside a Toyota Highlander in the parking lot of a hotel in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, the complaint said. Items allegedly recovered from the car and their hotel room included an Armory AR-15 assault rifle, a Mossberg 500 AB 12-Gauge shotgun, two handguns, a "homemade silencer-type device," a twisted cable survival saw, ammunition, body armor and a drone, according to the complaint.
Both men had prior convictions that prohibited them from possessing firearms and ammunition, according to the DOJ.
In interviews with the FBI, Smith allegedly said he and Karmo traveled to Kenosha to attend a rally for President Donald Trump on Tuesday and "to see proof of the rioting," according to the complaint.
Karmo allegedly told the FBI the two co-workers and roommates next planned to go to Portland, Oregon, which has had nightly, at times violent, protests for several months. One person was shot and killed in downtown Portland Saturday during demonstrations.
"Karmo stated that he would be willing to 'take action' if police were defunded," the complaint alleged.
Karmo allegedly told the FBI he and Smith are members of an organization called the 417 Second Amendment Militia, the complaint said.
Both men waived their Miranda rights, according to the complaint.
More than 250 people -- most of them from outside Kenosha -- have been arrested since the police shooting of Blake, according to the Associated Press. On Wednesday, the city ended a state-of-emergency curfew that had been in place since Aug. 24.
Amid calming tensions, Trump visited Kenosha on Tuesday to survey the damage and thank law enforcement, while former Vice President Joe Biden visited Blake and his family on Thursday.
Israeli forces secure the scene of an alleged attack in the central occupied West Bank on 2 September 2020. (photo: Reuters)
Israel Approves Policy of Withholding Bodies of All Slain Palestinians
Middle East Eye
Excerpt: "Israel will now withhold the bodies of all slain Palestinians accused of staging attacks on Israelis, not just those said to be Hamas members, following a security cabinet decision on Wednesday."
Israel has long been criticised by human rights advocates for its policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinians its forces killed during alleged attacks on its citizens.
Defence Minister Benny Gantz requested that the policy, which Israel says is used as a deterrent, be extended to all Palestinians, regardless of their political affiliation or whether the alleged attack led to any Israeli casualties.
"Refusal to return the bodies of terrorists is part of our commitment of maintaining the security of Israeli citizens, and of course to bring [dead or missing soldiers] home. I hope our enemy understands and internalises the message well," he said.
Legal rights organisation Adalah denounced the cabinet decision on Wednesday.
"The Israeli security cabinet’s decision to withhold the bodies of Palestinians is extremely problematic and is driven clearly by motivations for vengeance,” the statement read. “The policy of using human bodies as bargaining chips violates the most basic universal values and international law, which prohibit cruel and inhuman treatment.”
Israel holds the remains of hundreds of Palestinian dating back to 1967, kept in morgues or otherwise buried in unkempt graves in what is known as the cemetery of numbers.
It does so in contravention of international law, with the Geneva Convention stating that parties of an armed conflict must bury each other’s dead honourably.
Israel says it keeps the bodies to use as leverage in negotiations with Palestinians, although some are returned to their families following legal action.
Responding to a petition of six Palestinian families, Israel’s High Court ruled in September 2019 that it was legal for the military to confiscate bodies of alleged attackers.
In 2017, court briefly ruled that the policy was illegal, before the decision was overturned.
In November, Gantz’s predecessor Naftali Bennett ordered the military not to release any Palestinian bodies to their families, regardless of their affiliation or the nature of the alleged attack.
However, later cabinet discussions resulted in some bodies of minors being handed over.
A photo of a highland wild dog in Papua, Indonesia. (photo: New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation)
Thought to Be Extinct for 50 Years, New Guinea's Singing Dogs Found Alive in the Wild
Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine
Fox writes: "The New Guinea singing dog was thought to be extinct in the wild, but new genetic research suggests their distinctive howl still echoes in the highlands of the Oceanic islands."
he New Guinea singing dog was thought to be extinct in the wild, but new genetic research suggests their distinctive howl still echoes in the highlands of the Oceanic islands, reports James Gorman for the New York Times.
Not seen in the wild by scientists since the 1970s, conservation biologists thought the only New Guinea singing dogs left on Earth were the 200 to 300 captive animals residing in zoos and sanctuaries, reports Michael Price for Science.
But anecdotal reports and a pair of photographs suggested a similarly tan-colored, medium-sized wild dog was roaming the mountainous terrain near a gold mine on Papua, the western, Indonesian half of the large island north of Australia.
“The locals called them the highland wild dog,” James McIntyre, president of the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation and co-author of the paper, tells the Times. “The New Guinea singing dog was the name developed by caucasians. Because I didn’t know what they were, I just called them the highland wild dogs.”
To find out what these highland wild dogs really were, McIntyre trekked into the rugged terrain surrounding the Grasberg Mine, one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, in 2016. The expedition produced 149 photographs of 15 individual dogs as well as an array of fecal samples. Per Science, if one were trying to cast a pooch for the role of the New Guinea singing dog, the wild dogs looked, acted and sounded the part.
However, the fecal samples didn’t have enough genetic material for a proper analysis, so in 2018 the researchers returned and collected blood samples from three of the animals, according to the paper which was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These three samples were used to sequence the highland wild dogs’ genomes. The researchers then compared the dogs’ nuclear DNA with 16 captive New Guinea singing dogs, 25 dingoes as well as more than 1,000 individuals from 161 additional breeds.
The genetic analysis suggests that these highland wild dogs are in fact part of a wild population of New Guinea singing dogs. Crucially, the newly revealed wild population is much more genetically diverse than captive singing dogs, which descended from just eight individuals and are severely inbred, reports Katie Hunt for CNN.
“Assuming these highland wild dogs are the original New Guinea singing dogs, so to speak, that really gives us a fantastic opportunity for conservation biology,” Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute and co-author of the study, tells Ed Cara of Gizmodo. “It’ll give us a chance to reintroduce the original genetics of these dogs into this conservation population.”
Both the wild dogs and the captive singing dogs are close relatives of the Australian dingo, and relatively distant relatives of domestic dogs. The New Guinea singing dog’s closest domesticated relatives are East Asian breeds including the chow chow, Akita and shiba inu, according to Science. This connection suggests that the singing dog may have split off from the ancestors of these Asian breeds some 3,500 years ago when humans and a few canine companions migrated to Oceania, per the Times.
Ostrander tells the Times that the genome of the wild singing dogs offers researchers a “missing piece that we didn’t really have before,” that may help clarify the history of dog domestication.
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