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Russian Troll Factory Paid US Activists To Fund Protests During Election (theguardian.com)
bestweasel writes: The Guardian reports on another story about Russian meddling, but interestingly, this one comes from a respected Russian news source, the RBC. From the report: "Russian trolls posing as Americans made payments to genuine activists in the U.S. to help fund protest movements on socially divisive issues. On Tuesday, the newspaper RBC published a major investigation into the work of a so-called Russian 'troll factory' since 2015, including during the period of the U.S. election campaign, disclosures that are likely to put further spotlight on alleged Russian meddling in the election. RBC said it had identified 118 accounts or groups in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that were linked to the troll factory, all of which had been blocked in August and September this year as part of the U.S. investigation into Russian electoral meddling. Perhaps the most alarming element of the article was the claim that employees of the troll factory had contacted about 100 real U.S.-based activists to help with the organization of protests and events. RBC claimed the activists were contacted by Facebook group administrators hiding their Russian origin and were offered financial help to pay for transport or printing costs. About $80,000 was spent during a two-year period, according to the report."
That's less than a 30 second TV advertisement for HOURS of news coverage.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
These are the 2 big stories regarding Russia today, and explains a lot of what went down, and the concentrated effort (and we do know it was a Clinton campaign effort thanks to wikileaks) to link Trump to Russia during the campaign in order to take the heat off herself.
http://thehill.com/policy/nati...
http://www.newsweek.com/james-...
It's Comey and the Obama DOJ that needs to be investigated for obstruction of justice.
folks really hate phony protestors. What made all this work so well is that Russia didn't get caught during the election. If they had Hilary would probably be president, especially if we got it as an October surprise instead of Comey reopening the investigation just long enough to help throw the election Trump's way.
Not that Hilary is a spring chicken herself but it took a fundamental breakdown over just about everything to make a guy who used to be a Simpson's joke our actual president.
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It is absurd that RBC, which is now run by Putin loyalist and tabloid owner Grigory Berezkin, is being described as "a respected Russian news source". RBC USED to be a respected news source, until early 2016 when their reporting on government corruption got their leadership forcibly ousted and replaced with people that would play nice with the administration. There's probably some true information mixed into this story along with the falsehoods because that's how Russian intelligence generally operates, but to present what is straight-up Russian government-backed propaganda as journalism is, at very best, negligent to the point of maliciousness.
Before the Election
Dec. 10, 2015
Lt. Gen Michael Flynn is part of a panel discussion in Moscow for the 10th anniversary of government-backed Russia Today, for which he receives payment (The Washington Post, Aug. 15, 2016). Officials notice an increase in communication between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, following the Russia Today event (CNN, May 19, 2017).
Late 2015
British intelligence agencies detect suspicious interactions between Russia and Trump aides that they pass on to American intelligence agencies (The Guardian, April 13, 2017).
March 19, 2016
Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is sent an email that encourages him to change his email password, likely precipitating the hack of his account (CBS News, Oct. 28, 2016).
March 21
During an interview with The Post, Trump lists Carter Page as part of his foreign policy team. Page had been recommended by a son-in-law of President Richard Nixon, New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox (WP, March 21, 2016).
March 28
Political veteran Paul Manafort is hired to help the Trump campaign manage the delegate process for the Republican National Convention. He is recommended by Trump confidante Roger Stone (New York Times, March 28, 2016). Before joining the campaign, Manafort lobbied on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. That deal followed a memo from Manafort in which he offered a plan that could "greatly benefit the Putin Government." His relationship with Deripaska ended in 2009 (Associated Press, March 22, 2017). Manafort also worked on behalf of the Russia-friendly Party of Regions in Ukraine, helping guide the party's leader, Viktor Yanukovych, to the country's presidency. Yanukovych would later be ousted. (WP, Aug. 19, 2016)
April 27
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) may have met with Kislyak at a reception at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington before a foreign-policy speech given by Trump (CNN, May 31, 2017).
June
At a closed-door meeting of foreign policy experts and the prime minister of India, Page praises Putin effusively (WP, Aug. 5, 2016).
June 9
Donald Trump, Jr., Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner meet at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya's efforts to reverse a law passed in 2012 sanctioning Russians suspected of human rights violations at some point drew the attention of the FBI. The meeting was not initially reported to the government by Kushner as required when he took a position with the administration (Times, July 8, 2017). After the meeting was originally reported, Trump, Jr. admitted that the pretext for the conversation was that he believed Veselnitskaya to have information incriminating Hillary Clinton (Times, July 9, 2017).
June 15
A hacker calling himself "Guccifer 2.0" releases the Democratic National Committee's research file on Donald Trump (Gawker, June 15, 2016). News reports already link the stolen data to Russian hackers (WP, June 14, 2016).
July
At some point this month, the FBI begins investigating possible links between the Russian government and Trump's campaign (Wired, March 20, 2017).
July 7
Page travels to Moscow to give a lecture (NYT, April 19, 2017). The Trump campaign approved the trip (USA Today, March 7, 2017). This trip was likely the catalyst for the FBI's request for a secret surveillance warrant to track PageÃs communications (WP, May 25, 2017).
July 11 or 12
Trump campaign staffers intervene with the committee developing the Republican Party's national security platform to remove language call arming Ukraine against Russian aggression. (July 18, 2016).
July 18
At an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation as part of the Republican National Convention, Sessions and Kislyak have a brief conversation (WP, March 2, 2017).
Flynn delivers a speech at the Republican convention, joining in the crowd's "Lock her up!" chant. "If I, a guy who knows this business, if I
Ask yourself, is what I'm hearing designed to unite or divide? You then have your answer to who the real enemy is.
What, they outbid Israel?
Table-ized A.I.
Here's the reasons (most to least):
1. Arrogance. She didn't think she had to campaign in the swing states. She actually believed in that "blue firewall" nonsense.
2. Trump's billions of dollars in free media coverage. Nobody in the press would denounce him because they were getting too many hits.
3. Russia. Russia. Russia. (insert Brady Bunch joke here). We had an ex-KGB pro with the full backing of his nation throw his hat in the ring for Trump.
4. Her health. She really was too old for this shit.
5. 30 years of bad press. Not just the emails. Everything. The Republicans knew she was going to run for president at some point. They have a multi-billion dollar media machine dedicated to their cause (Fox, Beitbart, all of Koch media, etc, etc). They've been hammering away at her since her husband left office.
6. TPP. Crap deal for everyone except the ruling class. In an election about jobs that hurt a lot.
7. Warmongering. In an effort to show everyone that a woman could be "strong" she went around the world pissing off our allies. A lot of folks figured she'd get us in a war. Meanwhile Trump was saying he wouldn't do that. Jokes on them, he's already got us on the brink of two new wars (to add to the 7 we're already fighting, look it up).
That's about it. Folks mostly agreed with her on everything except the TPP because most Americans are genuinely conservative. e.g. they don't want much change except maybe some more help from the government (for them only of course, not those lazy Blacks^X Welfare slobs). She's a right of center moderate. Exactly what most voters wanted.
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...none of them had an agenda to support Trump.
One might almost believe that narrative was...fake news?
The Guardian article mentions that basically their efforts were to show division, not particularly meddle in the election. Their funding supported mainly Texas independence (ludicrous), gun rights, and racial issues, particularly black lives matter protests. This is pretty much what Russian Intel has done for years; the history of kgb funding for anti American, labor, and leftist movements in Europe and the USA has been well documented historically.
The notion that they put $80k into this just suggests how little they expected of it.
-Styopa
> (Clinton Uranium deal investigated by the FBI,
No. And shame on you for lying about it.
It was not the "clinton uranium deal" that was investigated. It was a bunch of russians doing kickbacks and money laundering, going as far back as 2004. As for Clinton's involvement, this is what the article says:
Russian nuclear officials trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons even though agents had gathered documents showing the transmission of millions of dollars from Russia’s nuclear industry to an American entity that had provided assistance to Bill Clinton’s foundation,
The millions went to a company that also worked with the clinton foundation, but note that the article explicitly avoids saying the millions were passed through to the foundation rather than being spent elsewhere, like aforementioned kickbacks to russians.
Furthermore, whenever the Uranium One deal is mentiond, everybody should remember this key fact: Russia was never given an export license, thus the uranium could never leave the US (and in fact barely any of it even left the ground because importing uranium from abroad is cheaper than mining it here). Here's the official statement from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency:
Neither Uranium One nor ARMZ holds an NRC export license, so no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.
> and Comey wrote the Hillary conclusion months before interviewing Hillary.)
Another half-truth that is a full lie. Interviewing her was basically a formality, especially if you believe the narrative that she's a master manipulator. The FBI investigation began no later than August the year before, 9 months before Comey began drafting the statement. All of the evidence gathered by then was already exculpatory that the writing was already on the wall.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/31/politics/comey-clinton-investigation/index.html
A person familiar with the matter pushed back on the notion that Comey had already reached a conclusion that affected the investigation.
The person said back in spring 2016, agents and Justice Department officials were talking about how the investigation would end and there was a belief that the evidence was going in a direction to not support bringing charges. This individual said by April 2016 the FBI had reviewed most of the evidence and didn't find evidence suggesting that Clinton had violated federal law. The person said the FBI wanted to interview her but didn't believe it was going to change the outcome.
The source also said Comey was not involved in the day-to-day steps of the investigation, so even if he reached a conclusion it wouldn't have affected the result of the investigation.
A second person familiar with the matter told CNN that Comey had not already made up his mind, and that it did not influence the investigation. The second source says the FBI had already reviewed much of the evidence by spring and it was becoming more clear that it was not likely to support bringing charges.
> If we can't abide the truth, then we're no different from the media talking heads.
You are different from the media talking heads. You are an unabashedly hyperpartisan liar, they are just poorly informed. You, on the other hand, know the whole truth because it takes exceptional discipline to write out all the parts that don't support your ideology of idiocy.
Call it off topic but there's a little PAC by the name of 'Correct The Record' that the Clinton Campaign tried to use to 'correct the record' by hiring paid shills to basically troll and disrupt pro Trump social media campaigns. Supposedly the spent an even $1,000,000 on trying to do this.
But remember, be really upset that someone in the Russian Federal dropped $80K.
On June 3 last year, Donald Trump Jr. received an email offering him "official documents" containing what was described as "very high level and sensitive information" from Russia's chief prosecutor that would "incriminate" Hillary Clinton and which was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr.'s response: "if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer." Days later, the now famous meeting in Trump Tower followed.
What is plain as day from Trump Jr.'s own words is that he hoped - gleefully- to acquire dirt to use against Hillary Clinton by meeting with someone identified to him in the email chain as a "Russian government attorney." What is also plain as day - and should have been obvious to any sentient American, including Trump Jr., and fellow meeting attendees campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner - is that if the Russian government possessed such dirt, it either came from or could have come from the Russian intelligence services and was being dangled before them by the Russian government to advance Russian purposes.
To spell it out a bit more, interference of any sort by any foreign country in our elections is never acceptable. But Russia is not just any foreign country. It is a hostile power with a long history of spying on the United States and also attempting to influence our politics by both overt and covert means. Any derogatory material on Hillary Clinton which the Russians possessed might have been obtained by the dark arts of espionage: by blackmailing one or more of her associates, by planting moles in her entourage, and/or by intercepting her and her associates' telephone calls and (as actually happened) hacking their emails.
Citation Provided is an opinion article, but the section I've quoted is based directly on legitimate news articles I'm too lazy to dig up.
Hillary was asked if Harvey Weinstein's behavior reminded her of her husband. She said "close but no cigar".
I'll let myself out now.
Sounds like you have no idea about Russian sources of news. Why don't you learn something before spewing ignorant russophibic drivel?
Russia has far more freedom of speech than say China and it has a few very respected news sources. The way it works in Russia, if say under 2% of population reads the source, Putin's administration usually does not consider it as a threat and leaves it alone. They did shut down or take over any big independent TV channels and newspapers.
People remember the anti-Trump protests just after he was elected. Along with the lies about the size of his inauguration crowd, they became iconic and the hallmarks of his election victory. They really were exceptional - there is always some dissent when new presidents come in, but the shear scale of those protests and the fact that they dwarfed the inauguration itself will always be remembered.
As for the point, it's not just to change people's minds. It's to demonstrate that the other narrative, in that case Trump's claim to be extremely popular and well liked, is false. It's an expression of their strong feelings on the matter. You might as well say that speech is pointless because it often doesn't change people's minds immediately, but I think most people accept that's now how things works.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeesh. You think the face she puts on every morning is "natural"? Without makeup she looks like Palpatine.
Here's how it works. You pay someone to participate in a protest and then have them do something that's really ugly and angers people.
Same thing happened at Tea Party rallies. Some random guy shows up with a racist sign, news media films him then asks rally organizers why they didn't toss the guy out.
The 0.002% of lobbyists.
Okay, so $80,000 versus $3.15 billion dollars in lobbying money. Oh, that is just the official amount expended lobbying Congress. We're not even addressing the billions expended lobbying the American public on a multitude of issues.
Contemplate that...
Oh, and $80,000 expended on divisive issues. Is it possible that maybe Russians who do business in the U.S. have feelings on issues? Maybe a Russian is pro-2nd Amendment. Who knows.
But this is such a miniscule drop in the bucket it is laughable.
Thanks for attempting to Correct the Record, there, AC, but you left out this bit about the Clintons from The Hill article:
"They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill."
and that helps to put the bit you tried to quote in a fuller context. So here's the full paragraph you butchered:
"The final court case also made no mention of any connection to the influence peddling conversations the FBI undercover informant witnessed about the Russian nuclear officials trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons even though agents had gathered documents showing the transmission of millions of dollars from Russia’s nuclear industry to an American entity that had provided assistance to Bill Clinton’s foundation, sources confirmed to The Hill."
I'd say your redactions paint a different picture than what the thrust of the article was about.