WTF Community

Day 540

General Discussion
#1

Updated 7/13/2018 9:17 AM PDT

1/ Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that a grand jury returned indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officials on charges of hacking into the DNC, DCCC, and state election offices to steal and release documents in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. The defendants worked for the Russian intelligence service known as the GRU. They used a tactic called "spearfishing" to trick users into revealing their account information. They used keystroke loggers and other malicious software to obtain account information and access sensitive U.S. computer systems and email accounts, which they later released to the public. (Department of Justice)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/07/13/day-540/
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#2

YES! good start to the Friday the 13th day. :smile:

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#3

Here is the indictment

Check out Page 7, 22. Isn’t July 27th, 2016 the day Trump publically asked Russia to find Hillary’s emails? Happy reading. :wink:

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#4

I’m taking over for @matt again today, folks! Let me know what stories I missed!

Also, anyone feel like helping me go through the text of the indictments to pull out relevant/interesting stuff?

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#5

I believe you are correct: https://youtu.be/3kxG8uJUsWU

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#7

I’ve gone through the entire indictment and added some of the most relevant excerpts I came across to the main post. Let me know what I missed!

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#9

White House reactions to the 12 Indictments against Russians is to say that no one from the WH is being targetted. (ie, no collusion)

“As Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said today:

“There is no allegation in this indictment that Americans knew that they were corresponding with Russians.
oThere is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result.”

Today’s charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result. This is consistent with what we have been saying all along.”

Some are asking Trump to cancel his meeting with Putin on Monday - See Schumer’s request

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#10

:white_check_mark: Added it to the list!

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#11

Those who have were taking advantage of Guccifer 2’s ‘help’ 1) Roger Stone 2) Rep Brian Mast (R-FL) - someone who was once touted to also be head of the VA.

(Stone has acknowledged exchanging messages with Guccifer 2.0 but has denied any wrongdoing.)

Learning that hacker “Guccifer 2.0” had tapped into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates, Mr. Nevins wrote to the hacker to say: “Feel free to send any Florida based information.”

Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.

Soon after, the hacker sent a link to the blog article to Roger Stone, a longtime informal adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump, along with Mr. Nevins’ analysis of the hacked data.

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#12

All spelled out…how the announcement by T, asking for Russia to find Hillary’s emails as told by VOX.

On the very same day in 2016 that Donald Trump urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, Russian intelligence officers launched a new attack to hack his opponent’s personal emails, according to the latest indictments from special counsel Robert Mueller.

It is maybe the most eyebrow-raising detail in an indictment filled with them. Mueller on Friday indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for crimes related to the hacking and public release of Democratic emails to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

To be clear, the Russian hacking of people close to Clinton didn’t start on July 27, 2016, when Trump stood before the whole world and said he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails that are missing … I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Emails from the Democratic National Committee had already been hacked and leaked, and we would later learn that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email account had already been compromised. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has previously explained, the email phishing expeditions against Democrats were already well underway by March 2016. That’s around the time that Podesta’s emails, which would play such a prominent role in the final months of the campaign, were infiltrated.

So Trump’s comments can’t be claimed as the start of Russia’s digital attacks against American political parties and figures. But the timing is nevertheless uncanny. On July 27, Trump calls for Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails. That same day — “after hours” as the indictment notes, which strongly suggests this was after Trump’s statement — the hackers go after Clinton’s personal email.

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#13

@MarshallCohen (CNN reporter)

NEW NUMBERS: Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought 191 criminal charges against 35 defendants, according to CNN’s count. This includes 112 new charges brought today against a dozen Russian operatives for hacking.

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#14

Comments from
John McCain - discouraging T from meeting with Putin
Adam Schiff - call off meeting (see full statement on @RepAdamSchiff thread)

Manu Raju
‏@mkraju (Manu Raju- CNN)

McCain says Trump “must be willing to confront Putin from a position of strength and demonstrate that there will be a serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression … If President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward.”

Comments from Adam Schiff to call off meeting

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#15

Safely placed exclusive interview…Putin’s chance to shine. (!)

#16

Russian intelligence officers allegedly launched a website in June 2016 to release emails stolen from Clinton campaign officials, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in an indictment released Friday.

Mueller alleges that the Russian officers initially registered the domain for DCLeaks.com in April 2016, and launched the site “[o]n or about June 8, 2016.”

“Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign,” the indictment reads.

The complaint also alleges that officers used the site to release documents stolen in the past, including those from people affiliated with the Republican Party.

The allegations were included in Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military officers for the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the election have focused on a number of other events in the spring and summer of 2016.

One of those events, held June 9, 2016, was the infamous Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and several top Trump campaign officials.
>
President Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya after British music producer Rob Goldstone told him that Veselnitskaya had damaging information on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. replied to Goldstone in an email.

Veselnitskaya later reportedly told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she did not work for the Russian government and only met with Trump Jr. to discuss Russian sanctions imposed under the Magnitsky Act.

Despite her testimony, she told NBC News earlier this year that she had worked as an “informant” for the Russian government.

Mueller’s indictments released Friday come just days before President Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki for a bilateral summit.

Trump has faced pressure from lawmakers to bring up Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election when he sits down with Putin on Monday.

Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in the election.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Friday that Trump was “fully aware” of the latest indictments in the Russia probe ahead of the president’s trip to meet Putin.

#17

What a specticle…T’s role as disrupter in chief did not go unnoticed.

Amid the Trumpian Chaos, Europe Sees a Strategy: Divide and Conquer

More important, for the long term, they have begun to believe that underneath the presidential narcissism, sarcasm and bluster there is a strategy: to undercut European solidarity in NATO and the European Union so the United States can exercise its economic and military power to shape relations with individual countries, just as China and Russia seek to do.

The atmospherics have been awful. Mr. Trump happily broke protocol at NATO and in Britain, skipping appointments with other leaders, forcing changes in the agenda, scolding other leaders, calling an early news conference to get onto morning television programs in America, making unfounded claims about agreements and giving an interview to the British mass-market tabloid The Sun that deeply embarrassed his host, Prime Minister Theresa May.

#18

Today we learned with absolute certainty that the Russian government engaged in a massive, prolonged attack on the very foundations of our democracy. It was a highly effective attack that was executed with military precision. And what is our government’s response? “We know nothing.” That’s it? Really? Imagine if, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR’s only response was, “No one in the White House had anything to do with this. Now let’s just ignore it and get back to business as usual.”

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#19

Outrageous…

So glad the timing of these indictments really pegs Russia to manipulating our data and hacking during the 2016 election, and leaves very little ‘wiggle’ room for T to deny (but of course he will) especially in front of Putin.

The pundits - half are saying ‘be very afraid,’ as we have just opened an incredibly dark part of are history, like the McCarthy era. Let’s hope as Barack Obama put it…

After Trump’s election, Obama reportedly said: “We’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

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#20

Let’s not forget Jared Kushner’s security clearance (or lack thereof) - He’s still America’s peacekeeper in the Middle East, but does not have full clearance. But there could be some loopholes. :persevere:

For the first year of the Trump administration, Kushner had nearly blanket access to highly classified intelligence, even as he held an interim security clearance and awaited the completion of his background investigation.

But when White House security officials granted him a permanent clearance in late May, he was granted only “top secret” status — a level that does not allow him to see some of the country’s most closely guarded intelligence, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security issues.

Kushner has not yet been approved to review “sensitive compartmented information,” better known as SCI. The Central Intelligence Agency determines who can access this information, which primarily involves U.S. intelligence sources and surveillance methods, they said.

That has blocked Kushner at times from seeing some parts of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified summary of world events that sometimes describes intelligence programs and operatives, the people said.

Kushner’s lack of SCI access suggests that the CIA has not signed off on his receiving that level of intelligence, security experts said. The White House security office has authority to independently grant a “top secret” clearance after reviewing a staffer’s FBI background investigation.

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#21

Timeline of events…see Russian Foreign Ministry remarks below.

3:45 p.m.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry is denouncing the United States’ indictment of 12 alleged military intelligence agents accused of hacking into Democratic accounts in the 2016 US elections.

The ministry says “obviously, the purpose of this is to spoil the atmosphere” before Monday’s summit of President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.

The ministry’s statement blames “influential political forces of the United States, who oppose the normalization of relations between our countries and have been manufacturing blatant slander for two years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-latest-doj-russians-stole-info-on-500000-us-voters/2018/07/13/b53c9b88-86ba-11e8-9e06-4db52ac42e05_story.html?utm_term=.d9c7593b718f

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#22

@dragonfly9
Russia’s Foreign Ministry is denouncing the United States’ indictment of 12 alleged military intelligence agents . . .

To me, this is the most outrageous statement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry:

It is regrettable that the circulation of false information in Washington has become the norm . . .

How very sad and alarming it is to know that a huge percentage of Americans are willing to believe Russia’s government over our own intelligence services (how else can you explain Trump’s appx. 42% approval rating?). Just think about that – they will believe that the pages and pages of highly specific charges of Russian hacking exposed by our FBI are false because Russia says they are. When will Trump’s base wake up and understand that we are being attacked by a foreign power that is supported by our President and the Republican party?

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