Trump-Russia "collusion" - The most successful disinfo operation of the decade

[Venom]

Trump-Russia "collusion" - The most successful disinfo operation of the decade

The competent organs of Russia, the FSB, is probably pulling the strings on on this whole Trump-Russia story.

While Russian interference in the 2016 elections had been known by the CIA, FBI (according to Comey's testimony) and other agencies for a while before it was revealed to the general public,
the "Trump dossier", which jump-started an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, added a whole new dimension to the story.

As Russia commentators have said, the story reeks of typical KGB-style disinfo:

The Orbis report makes as if it knows all the ins-and-outs and comings-and-goings within Putin’s impenetrable Kremlin. It reports information from anonymous “trusted compatriots,” “knowledgeable sources,” “former intelligence officers,” and “ministry of foreign affairs officials.” The report gives a fly-on-the-wall account of just about every conceivable event associated with Donald Trump’s Russian connections. It claims to know more than is knowable as it recounts sordid tales of prostitutes, “golden showers,” bribes, squabbles in Putin’s inner circle, and who controls the dossiers of kompromat (compromising information).

As someone who has worked for more than a decade with the microfilm collection of Soviet documents in the Hoover Institution Archives, I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who follows the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports, in particular the practice of capitalizing all names for easy reference. The report includes Putin’s inner circle – Peskov, Ivanov, Sechin, Lavrov. The anonymous author claims to have “trusted compatriots” who knew the roles that each Kremlin insider, including Putin himself, played in the Trump election saga and were prepared to tell him.

From David Satter, a former journalist who worked in Russia and C-Span regular:

The investigation was carried out by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer and a director of the London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, and draws on a wealth of high-level anonymous Russian sources who, for some reason, are eager to share secret information. There is a cottage industry of former intelligence operatives who make their livings selling information from supposedly well-placed sources to politicians and businessmen. The question in such relationships is who is being used. In this case, the indications are that Steele was being used by the Russians.

Reading the Steele report, I was struck by the way his sources employed the standard techniques of Russian propaganda and manipulation.

The fact that disapproval of Trump was so high from the beginning I think made it easy to spread this incredibly baseless conspiracy theory around.
Just imagine how powerful it would be for conservatives to rub it in the faces of the overzealous opposition and House Democrats after we find no such collusion.
Pushing too hard may be dangerous. The media is really trying to pursue this angle and it may fail tremendously.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Unwarranted conclusion:

just because Russian sources were willing to talk doesn't mean that what they leaked was false. It would be very much in line with FSB procedures to leak that they have such intel, but withhold proof until it serves there purpose (if ever).

In this case, having the dirt on a presidential nominee all to yourself would be much more valuable than spreading it around.

 

[Aridas]

*shrug* When the only responsible option is to investigate something, given the situation, why would it be a huge failure to push for an investigation, while generally clearly noting the actual situation? Why would it be a huge failure to keep the public informed, to some extent, about the investigation, especially when it's provided ratings for the media outlets? As for the Democrats, they're practically swimming in material to work with as they try to get their base motivated to vote from that and so much more, including Trump's reactions. And yes, there's been plenty of cause to investigate Trump's campaign regarding collusion outside the "Trump dossier." Flynn, alone, provided enough material for that, before getting to so many others.

So... no, it wouldn't be powerful at all for conservatives to rub "being responsible" and "getting what you wanted" in the Democrats and the media's faces.

 

[Praktik]

Just imagine how powerful it would be for conservatives to rub it in the faces of the overzealous opposition and House Democrats after we find no such collusion.

Wouldn't that make the GOP and the Trump admin look especially incompetent and self-destructive, to have their agenda stalled and threatened, their credibility assailed, their political capital squandered - for nothing?

Im actually entirely open to this possibility, that collusion was minimal or potentially non-existent, I just think it makes everyone on the Trump side look even worse. It would be mean they took a big nothing and let everyone build it up into a huge, destructive something through their own incompetent handling of the issue.

 

[Venom]

Unwarranted conclusion:

just because Russian sources were willing to talk doesn't mean that what they leaked was false. It would be very much in line with FSB procedures to leak that they have such intel, but withhold proof until it serves there purpose (if ever).

In this case, having the dirt on a presidential nominee all to yourself would be much more valuable than spreading it around.

Still, the alleged reasons for this special operation are reduced to personal beefs and a story about Trump's sexual escapades.
Sounds a lot like the rumors of J Edgar Hoover cross-dressing or that Emmanuel Macron is scretely gay.

The way a lot of us view this situation I have to say seems a bit cartoonish.
This however is consistent with an operation to mess with our minds.

 

[CORed]

You know, although I think Donald Trump is the most unqualified idiot ever to hold the office of POTUS, I strongly suspect that there is little or nothing to the Russian collusion thing. It is mostly wishful thinking on the part of Democrats that they will find something worthy of impeachment there.

OTOH, the person doing the most to keep the whole thing alive right now is none other than Donald Trump. First he fires Comey, now he is bad-mouthing Mueller and making noises about firing him. If he truly has nothign to hide, he should stop trying so hard to hide it. Since it is Donald Trump we are talking about, it is entirely possible that there really is nothing there and it's just ego and stupidity driving the whole thing.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Trump has been trying to do business with Russia for years and years and years with little success. He would have done a lot for something that would actually generate cash, unlike his Casino or Golf Courses.
But I doubt there was enthusiasm from the Russian to do something clearly shady with him, since it is obvious that he has memory problems and could only remember a code-word or contact channel if he wrote it on a Post-it.
No wonder they rather went for his satellites.

 

[Praktik]

You know, although I think Donald Trump is the most unqualified idiot ever to hold the office of POTUS, I strongly suspect that there is little or nothing to the Russian collusion thing. It is mostly wishful thinking on the part of Democrats that they will find something worthy of impeachment there.

OTOH, the person doing the most to keep the whole thing alive right now is none other than Donald Trump. First he fires Comey, now he is bad-mouthing Mueller and making noises about firing him. If he truly has nothign to hide, he should stop trying so hard to hide it. Since it is Donald Trump we are talking about, it is entirely possible that there really is nothing there and it's just ego and stupidity driving the whole thing.

If its minimal or nothing, might even explain some of Trump's actions getting him deeper in the quicksand - i could totally see him being MORE frustrated because of that, and in turn, making poorer decisions.

That said, there's a third option - not much Trump participation/awareness, someone like Roger Stone knowing a bit more.

The real answer might be: yes there's collusion (on timing and targeting of information releases), and no Trump didn't know much or anything about it.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, so don't dare imagine leaders and bureaucrats to be omniscient, always amazing decision makers where everything comes up the way they want. Opportunism and luck explains most outcomes. Incompetence and human frailty explain the rest.

 

[dudalb]

Wouldn't that make the GOP and the Trump admin look especially incompetent and self-destructive, to have their agenda stalled and threatened, their credibility assailed, their political capital squandered - for nothing?

Im actually entirely open to this possibility, that collusion was minimal or potentially non-existent, I just think it makes everyone on the Trump side look even worse. It would be mean they took a big nothing and let everyone build it up into a huge, destructive something through their own incompetent handling of the issue.

Trump's whole "Never admit you have made a mistake,never back down;always double down" philosophy will probably be what destroys him.

 

[Praktik]

Trump's whole "Never admit you have made a mistake,never back down;always double down" philosophy will probably be what destroys him.

Thats what everyone else thought - then he got 306 buddy, 306!!

Nobody though they would get above 270, let alone 306!!

 

[dudalb]

Thats what everyone else thought - then he got 306 buddy, 306!!

Nobody though they would get above 270, let alone 306!!

True, but quite a few of the swing votes that gave Trump the White House are having a bad case of buyer's regret.

 

[Venom]

You know, although I think Donald Trump is the most unqualified idiot ever to hold the office of POTUS, I strongly suspect that there is little or nothing to the Russian collusion thing. It is mostly wishful thinking on the part of Democrats that they will find something worthy of impeachment there.

OTOH, the person doing the most to keep the whole thing alive right now is none other than Donald Trump. First he fires Comey, now he is bad-mouthing Mueller and making noises about firing him. If he truly has nothign to hide, he should stop trying so hard to hide it. Since it is Donald Trump we are talking about, it is entirely possible that there really is nothing there and it's just ego and stupidity driving the whole thing.

My thoughts exactly.

Trump can't let go of this because he is in his own little bubble. I'm the boss, the CEO of the country. This Russia thing is understandably annoying him, but he does the worst possible thing and fires the FBI director in the midst of an investigation and all around fs up.

 

[Axxman300]

Still, the alleged reasons for this special operation are reduced to personal beefs and a story about Trump's sexual escapades.
Sounds a lot like the rumors of J Edgar Hoover cross-dressing or that Emmanuel Macron is scretely gay.

The way a lot of us view this situation I have to say seems a bit cartoonish.
This however is consistent with an operation to mess with our minds.

Yet after the story broke, the FSB hauled their top cyber-crime man off to a dark hole:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/...ailov-russian-cybercrimes-agent-arrested.html

If you follow white-hat hacker, The Jester, then you followed the Russian hacking all the way from last summer, and you also would know that they've hacked the RNC too. That data will drop into public domain at the worst possible time for them.

Thing is that the Russian thing isn't one story but a bunch of enterprises. The fact is that few people even understand the problem (that includes me), nor have a clue how all of this shakes out.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

IIIClovisIII, care to explain why Trump cannot bring himself to publicly admit the Russians interfered in the election?

Why has Trump not denounced the Russian interference?

You'd think that with the fake news as you hypothesize it, Trump would be all over condemning the Russians rather than trying to stop the investigation.

And, the collusion is not going to be the bigger issue here, whether Trump was involved in that or not. The bigger issue is going to be Trump's finances. You don't appear to be keeping up.

Is Donald Trump’s casino empire linked to money laundering? Past financial crimes may be the president’s biggest problem

Campaign collusion could become an afterthought as investigators begin to focus on the Atlantic City money trail

There's a theme emerging in Mueller's Russia probe that could prove damning for Trump

Robert Mueller in recent days has hired lawyers with extensive experience in dealing with fraud, racketeering, and other financial crimes to help him investigate whether President Donald Trump's associates colluded with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Lawmakers intensify negotiations in pursuit of key Trump-related banking records

The stand-off over records from the Treasury Department’s financial intelligence section led Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden to hold up the nomination of President Trump’s pick for undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, New York attorney Sigal Mandelker, until investigators have access to the federal banking records, which detail suspicious financial transactions around the globe. A vote on her nomination is on the calendar for this week, suggesting the two sides are close to a deal.

“We’re in talks right now,” Wyden told ABC News on Monday. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get what we need.”

Senate investigators have been in talks with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, since May over access to the banking records....

FinCEN, the Treasury agency responsible for tracking the illegal movement of money, maintains a database of millions of transactions that have been flagged by banks as unusual or problematic, known as suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Law enforcement agencies around the country have access to the information, but so far, congressional investigators have not had access.

Mueller Is Coming for Trump

The special counsel’s expanding probe will reveal loads of dirt from the president’s financial past—making the temptation to fire him even greater....

hat you don’t know can hurt you very badly, and there is a great deal that Republicans do not know about Donald Trump. From shady business dealings to questionable tax schemes to potential Russian collusion, the president is dogged by scandals whose depth and significance remain unclear. With few exceptions, Republicans are eager to protect Trump from serious inquiries, running interference where they can while pushing through their legislative agenda as quickly and secretively as possible. The GOP isn’t quite sure what it’s helping Trump to cover up—but as long as he promises to sign its bills, the party will condone his outrageous misdeeds.

This strategy now appears poised to backfire spectacularly. On Wednesday, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump’s inner circle for financial crimes

If you were in the inner circle you might be very willing to make an immunity deal.

And we haven't even gotten into Kushner trying to get a Russian bank under sanctions and tied to Putin to refinance his billion dollar underwater 666 property in NY.

At Kushners’ Flagship Building, Mounting Debt and a Foundered Deal

Does the Theory That Jared Kushner Met With the Russians to Get a Real Estate Loan Make Any Sense?

In December, Sergey Gorkov, the chairman of the Russian state bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, visited New York for a conversation with Jared Kushner.

Each man was playing two roles. Kushner was still the CEO of his family’s real estate company, which dealt with foreign lenders like Frankfurt, Germany–based Deutsche Bank and Paris-based Natixis for its big purchases.

This is who Kushner met with, BTW:

Gorkov, meanwhile, was the head of a bank with $59 billion in assets, restrained by sanctions that the U.S. imposed in 2014. VEB’s ties to the Kremlin are deep. Gorkov graduated from the Academy of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, a kind of Langley-on-the-Moskva. He had been appointed as VEB chairman by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February. In March, a VEB banker in New York pleaded guilty to spying for Russia.

Back to the story:

Sean Spicer said in March that Kushner met with Gorkov as part of his role as a “conduit” with foreign leaders.

Gorkov described his trip in different terms, as part of a new, global corporate strategy to meet business and financial leaders in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. In a statement released when news of the encounter was revealed in March, Gorkov identified Kushner by his then-job as head of Kushner Companies.

 

[Aridas]

The real answer might be: yes there's collusion (on timing and targeting of information releases), and no Trump didn't know much or anything about it.

To be clear, that Trump's campaign, especially figures like Flynn and Manafort, but not Trump specifically, has been the main thing under investigation all along when trying to determine whether there actually was collusion or not would seem to point at this being the possibility that actually had sufficient evidence to pursue all along. If there actually was collusion found, of course, the chances that Trump was involved jump significantly (and likely jump for Pence even moreso), but would not necessarily be the case.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

The competent organs of Russia, the FSB, is probably pulling the strings on on this whole Trump-Russia story.

While Russian interference in the 2016 elections had been known by the CIA, FBI (according to Comey's testimony) and other agencies for a while before it was revealed to the general public,
the "Trump dossier", which jump-started an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, added a whole new dimension to the story.

As Russia commentators have said, the story reeks of typical KGB-style disinfo:



From David Satter, a former journalist who worked in Russia and C-Span regular:



The fact that disapproval of Trump was so high from the beginning I think made it easy to spread this incredibly baseless conspiracy theory around.
Just imagine how powerful it would be for conservatives to rub it in the faces of the overzealous opposition and House Democrats after we find no such collusion.
Pushing too hard may be dangerous. The media is really trying to pursue this angle and it may fail tremendously.

This isn't the first time foreigners have tried to influence a US election. What was Mitt Romney's fund raiser in Jerusalem if it wasn't an invitation for foreigners to help influence a US election?

Trump wanted the US to stay out of Syria and thereby avoid conflict with Russia. Hillary wanted to interfere in Syria and thereby create conflict with Russia. It doesn't take an Einstein to see which of the two candidates Russia would prefer. Why wouldn't they interfere if they could?

But to think that the Trump campaign actively worked with Russia is sillier than saying the Moon landings were an inside job.

 

[Venom]

Trump wanted the US to stay out of Syria and thereby avoid conflict with Russia. Hillary wanted to interfere in Syria and thereby create conflict with Russia. It doesn't take an Einstein to see which of the two candidates Russia would prefer. Why wouldn't they interfere if they could?

But to think that the Trump campaign actively worked with Russia is sillier than saying the Moon landings were an inside job.

It could be a impressively executed bluff.

Part of me thinks if Russia was really so interested in having good relations with Trump in particular, they wouldn't be lying to White House staff and harassing U.S. Air Force.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

From what we know about past Russian interference in elections, we know that it usually isn't the main parties who are targeted, but fringe groups: I wasn't surprised to see Jill Stein at the Dinner with Putin.
So supporting Trump early on would be right up their alley to throw the whole election process into dissaray, as would sabotaging Clinton, for geo-strategic and personal reasons.

But once Trump got nominate, things probably went weird for the Russians: people around Trump (Flynn, Mannaford and others) seemed to keep much more contact than could be in the interest of Putin to keep the process deniable.
Trump and Kushner have publicly stated many times that they want to do big business with Russia and probably thought these connections could benefit them - but that is not what the Russians really wanted.

So right now, it looks to me more like a bunch of amateurs trying to collude with Russia for personal gain while at the same time Russia was trying to undermine the process as a whole.
No professional intelligence officer could think that Trump would make a good asset.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

It remains to be seen if there was systemic or individual collusion. What has already been seen and is firmly on record is the complete lack of a response from the Trump administration, no interest in halting cyberwarfare on democracy. In that, in terms of arguments put forth, nearly the entire GOP is marching in lockstep chanting one lie, slander, misdirect, untruth, and unscientific "fact" after another, with consistent policy of protecting their financiers' interests. This is the Putin playbook, even if he is an adept using Goebbels fine lessons. Who needs collusion or conspiracy among the like-minded?

The underlying assumption being, of course, that democracy and capitalism need no generational turnover in power and wealth, since the superior genes rise to the top and remain there by nature. Creeping fascism from loose-minded creeps.

 

[Praktik]

But to think that the Trump campaign actively worked with Russia is sillier than saying the Moon landings were an inside job.

Was *almost wth ya* - but I mean - I think its a little more plausible than moon landing fakery. Like - especially now with so many years of more and more proof from different sources (like Indian and Chinese space programs) so i submit it IS more ridiculous to believe in moon landing fakery than to think that maybe some Trump campaign operatives coordinated either: information release (content) or (timing).

Im not saying there WAS - im pretty 50/50 on it. Why is it so ridiculous to think someone like Roger Stone might have asked for the trigger to be pulled when it was best for the campaign? Didn't have to be that way, not saying it was. But - its not that crazy, really, is it? I guess i can't get to your levels of incredulity on it.

Im 100/0 the moon landing was real.