Trump Still Won’t Condemn Navalny’s Poisoning

Posted on by Zoe Richards

President Donald Trump on Friday refused to condemn Russia over the poisoning of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, even as world leaders, as well as officials from his own administration, have stepped in to censure the move.

Trump said at a press briefing on Friday that he intended to “look at it very seriously” when asked about Navalny’s poisoning. 

When pressed about how the United States should react, the President said “I think we will,” while simultaneously appearing to cast doubt about whether or not the Russian government had been involved in the opposition leader’s poisoning.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” Trump said as he often does when he doesn’t want to assume responsibility to call out those whom he views as potential allies.

“I think it’s tragic. It’s terrible, it shouldn’t happen. We haven’t had any proof yet, but I will take a look,” Trump added.

The German government had previously said that a chemical agent produced by the Soviet Union and thought to be used by the Kremlin was used in Navalny’s poisoning. 

On Thursday, White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, called Navalny’s poisoning “deeply reprehensible” adding that the United States would “hold those in Russia accountable wherever the evidence leads.” She also reiterated a claim that “no one has been tougher on the Russian government than this president.”

But Trump’s comments on Friday are a common refrain in his rhetoric on Russia — as he repeatedly has declined to address Russian president Vladimir Putin on a series of national security issues, among them, reports of Russian operatives offering bounties to Taliban-linked militias for the killing of American and coalition troops in Afghanistan. 

Trump has isolated himself from democratic leaders around the world, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who have expressed strong public opposition to the move and demanded answers from the Russian government.

“It is interesting that everybody is always mentioning Russia,” Trump said responding to a reporter who asked about the Navalny poisoning, adding:  “I don’t mind you mentioning Russia, but I think probably China at this point is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia, because the things that China is doing are far worse, if you take a look at what’s happening with the world.”

On Thursday, at a campaign event in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump defended his efforts to “get along.”

 “If I get along with Russia, is that a good thing or bad thing? I think it’s a good thing,” Trump said. 

He reinforced those sentiments at Friday’s press briefing, saying at one point that he would “not be happy at all” if it was proven that the Russian government poisoned Navalny, but also noting, “I do get along with President Putin.”

Cohen: Trump Will Go as Far As ‘Manipulating The Ballots’ To Win Election

Posted on by Zoe Richards

President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen said Friday he believes the President will “do anything and everything” to win re-election even if that means “manipulating the ballots.”

“So Donald Trump will do anything and everything within which to win,” Cohen told NBC News’ Lester Holt in an interview when asked if he though Trump would clinch a victory in the upcoming presidential elections. “And I believe that includes manipulating the ballots,” Cohen said.

The comments come as the President earlier this week suggested at two different campaign events in North Carolina and later in Pennsylvania that his supporters should commit voter fraud by illegally casting a ballot twice – first submitting an absentee ballot and then appearing at the polls in-person to cast a second vote.

Cohen who served as President Trump’s personal lawyer and “fixer” said that his former boss would “even go so far as to start a war in order to prevent himself from being removed from office.” 

Cohen’s concerns reflect those of many Democratic lawmakers who have suggested that Trump’s ongoing attacks on mail-in voting in addition to broader efforts to delegitimize the electoral process are priming him to try to contest the election’s results should they prove unfavorable to him.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden already warned that Trump would employ unsavory tactics.

“This president is going to try to steal this election,” Biden said in June.

“My biggest fear is that there will not be a peaceful transition of power in 2020,” Cohen told NBC News.

Cohen began serving a three-year prison sentence last year for financial crimes and lying to Congress. He was released in July to home confinement following considerations about health safety in prisons amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In addition to calling Trump both a “con man” and “a cheat” during emotional testimony before Congress last year, Cohen has since spoken out warning voters about the dangers of a second-term should Trump be re-elected in November. In a video clip produced by liberal super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century that aired during the Republican National Convention, Cohen said that Trump “can’t be trusted.”

Cohen also joins a long list of Trump detractors who have written accounts about their personal and professional encounters with the President — his book that chronicles his experiences working with the President entitled “Disloyal, a Memoir,” hits shelves on Tuesday.

The White House has called Cohen’s book “fan fiction” and saying in a statement that the former Trump associate, “readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales.” 

Facebook’s Political Ad Ban Also Threatens Ability to Spread Accurate Information on How to Vote

Posted on by John Light

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Facebook this week said it would bar political ads in the seven days before the presidential election. That could prevent dirty tricks or an “October surprise” and give watchdogs time to fact-check statements. But rather than responding with glee, election officials say the move leaves them worried.

Included in the ban are ads purchased by election officials — secretaries of state and boards of elections — who use Facebook to inform voters about how voting will work. The move effectively removes a key communication channel just as millions of Americans will begin to navigate a voting process different from any they’ve experienced before.

“Every state’s elections office has a very small communications office that is doing everything that they can to get the word out about the election,” said Gabe Rosenberg, the communications director for Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill (who is not related to this reporter). “This just makes it a little bit harder, for, as far as I can see, no real gain.”

The rule change was announced Thursday in a Facebook post by the site’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Previously, Facebook’s rules for fact-checking certain campaign ads but not others have come under fire. Taken together, they demonstrate how Facebook has become an integral piece of the American democratic process — but one that is controlled by the decisions of a private corporation, which can set rules in its own interest.

For elections administrators, the last few days before an election can be the most stressful and when communication is needed most. They remind voters to mail back their absentee ballots and when Election Day voting begins and ends. Many of these ads can still be run under Facebook’s new rules, as long as they’re set up more than a week before the election.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, local election offices are scrambling to find new ways for eligible voters to cast their ballots. Voting methods and locations will be changing fast, even within the seven-day window included in Facebook’s ban.

A few days before Connecticut’s primary election on Aug. 11, Hurricane Isaias struck the state, knocking out power to more than a million people. That led Connecticut’s governor to make a subtle, but crucial, change to the state’s election rules on the day before the election. He instructed elections officials to count mail-in ballots that had been postmarked by election day, instead of only those that had arrived by election day.

With power still out to tens of thousands of people and businesses, “it was really important that we told people that they only needed to postmark their ballots by election day, because the little bit of news they were getting was that the Postal Service was down,” Rosenberg said. The Postal Service’s sorting hub in Hartford had lost power for a time after the storm.

“The only way we can notify people of something changing that late in the process is via Facebook and Instagram,” he said, citing the decline of local print news and the power outage making TV out of the question. The office spent about $2,000 on ads in the week before the state’s primary, according to Facebook’s published data.

There are other scenarios under which election administrators might have an urgent need to communicate changes to voters. Dozens of cases that could affect voting rules are wending their way through state courts, including ones that govern how mail-in ballots are processed and whether felons are able to vote. A key decision could easily be made just days before Nov. 3.

Just this week, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced a $250 million donation meant, in part, to help expand voting locations, which could result in new polling places opening late in the process.

Facebook’s newly announced rules only apply to new ads about “social issues, elections or politics.” Ads placed beforehand can continue running.

There is some basis for the timing: The last few days before an election can be rife with tactics meant to avoid scrutiny.

Without a key way to communicate how polling places are changing, the chances mount that potential voters will miss important information.

Facebook said it is trying to help elections officials, not hinder them. “We’re committed to supporting the important work election administrators do to make voting possible,” Tom Channick, a Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement. He cited new Facebook tools for election administrators, including “Voting Alerts” and a page on Facebook that offers information on how to vote.

Unlike ads, the alerts don’t appear on Instagram, only on Facebook. They appear on the voting information page, but they wouldn’t normally show up in a user’s news feed. And Facebook won’t let election administrators use the voting alert tool unless their Facebook pages do not include the name or a photograph of the officeholder. Connecticut’s page, for instance, does include such information, as do the pages of elections officials in many other states.

Facebook told ProPublica that it’s sticking to its decision to include election-administration ads in the ban, but has offered to help administrators change their pages to be able to use Voting Alerts and says it’s considering ways to show the alerts more broadly.

Rosenberg says an easy solution would be to exempt election administrators’ ads from the temporary ban — or to stop counting their ads as political and forcing them to include “Paid for by” disclaimers like ads from campaigns.

That’s a solution that Facebook has used before. Facebook exempted news organizations’ ads that promoted news stories from being treated as political after pushback that the site was conflating ads for journalism with political propaganda. Facebook didn’t, however, exempt ads from the U.S. Census Bureau that urged people to fill out the census.

Rosenberg says he’s pressed Facebook for an answer about why their political ads rules apply to election administrators’ ads. He hasn’t gotten one.

“These aren’t political ads. These are the basic civic building blocks of a democracy,” Rosenberg says. “We’re just trying to make sure that voters have the info that they need in order to participate.”

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REPORT: DHS Indicates White Supremacists Pose Gravest Terror Threat

Posted on by Zoe Richards

White supremacists pose the most serious terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security.

Three different drafts of the report obtained by Politico characterize the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat in the United States.

All three documents also report that 2019 was the deadliest year for domestic violent extremists since the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

The documents indicate that “lone offenders” and “small cells of individuals” are increasingly joining up with people who share their ideologies and “will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States.” 

“Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists – who increasingly are networking with likeminded persons abroad – will pose the most persistent and lethal threat,” the report indicates.

Later drafts of the report refer to “Domestic Violent Extremists” –– shifting away from the terminology “white supremacist extremists” –– as “the most persistent and lethal threat.”

The threat of these groups in all three reports is ranked above the immediate danger posed by foreign terrorist groups.

“Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year,” the report states. 

According to Politico, none of the drafts indicated a threat from Antifa, who President Donald Trump and White House officials have suggested are invading American cities to cause chaos by looting and initiating violent riots.  Two drafts of the report suggest that extremists have tried to exploit the “social grievances” that have proliferated protests around the country.

“Among DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists], we judge that white supremacist extremists (WSEs) will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland through 2021,” all three versions of the report state.

The two later drafts of the report suggest that “simple tactics – such as vehicle ramming, small arms, edged weapons, arson, and rudimentary improvised explosive devices – probably will be most common.”

The report also weighed in on foreign threats, indicatinf that in fact Russia  will probably be “the primary covert foreign influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in the Homeland.” 

The news comes as President Trump often appears to defend Russia, even refusing in a press conference on Friday to condemn Russia for the poisoning of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The President seeking to turn attention away from Putin, said that he found it “interesting” how often Russia was invoked with regard to foreign relations.

As he redirected, President Trump continued instead to rail against China — painting the East Asian nation as a key threat, even as national security officials have indicated grave concerns about continued Russian meddling in the US elections. 

“I don’t mind you mentioning Russia, but I think probably China, at this point, is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia because the things that China is doing are far worse, if you take a look at what’s happening with the world,” Trump said.

According to Politico, former acting DHS Sec. Kevin McAleenan led the department to begin producing annual homeland threat assessments. All three versions of the report — entitled DHS’s State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020 — were produced in August.

It is unclear when the assessment which has not been released publicly, will be made accessible.

Strzok Calls Attacks From Trump ‘Outrageous’ And ‘Cruel’

Posted on by Zoe Richards

WASHINGTON (AP) — Peter Strzok spent his FBI career hunting Russian and Chinese spies, but after news broke of derogatory text messages he had sent about President Donald Trump, he came to feel like he was the one being hunted.

There were menacing phone calls and messages from strangers, and anxious peeks out window shades before his family would leave the house. FBI security experts advised him of best practices — walk around your car before entering, watch for unfamiliar vehicles in your neighborhood — more commonly associated with mob targets looking to elude detection.

“Being subjected to outrageous attacks up to and including by the president himself, which are full of lies and mischaracterizations and just crude and cruel, is horrible,” Strzok told The Associated Press in an interview. “There’s no way around it.”

A new book by Strzok traces his arc from veteran counterintelligence agent to the man who came to embody Trump’s public scorn of FBI and his characterization of its Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.” The texts cost Strzok his job and drew vitriol from Trump. But even among Trump critics, Strzok isn’t a hero. His anti-Trump texts on a government phone to an FBI lawyer gave Trump and his supporters a major opening to undercut the bureau’s credibility right as it was conducting one of the most consequential investigations in its history.

Trump’s attacks have continued even as two inspector general reports found no evidence Strzok’s work in the investigations were tainted by political bias and multiple probes have affirmed the Russia probe’s validity.

Strzok expresses measured regret for the texts in “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump,” due out Tuesday.

“I deeply regret casually commenting about the things I observed in the headlines and behind the scenes, and I regret how effectively my words were weaponized to harm the Bureau and buttress absurd conspiracy theories about our vital work,” Strzok writes.

Before becoming a virtual household name, Strzok spent two decades at the FBI toiling in relative anonymity on sensational spy cases. He helped uncover Russian sleeper agents inside the U.S., worked the Edward Snowden case and led the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information. (She did, he writes, but not in a way meriting prosecution).

After the Clinton case concluded in July 2016, Strzok opened an investigation into whether the campaign of her Republican opponent was coordinating with Russia, conceiving the “Crossfire Hurricane” codename he says proved prescient.

In the interview, Strzok said he wanted his book to lend insight into the Clinton probe, Russian election interference and, “first and foremost, the counterintelligence threat that I see in Donald Trump.”

“To do that,” he added, “I wanted to show the reader what happened but also why they should believe me.”

As the investigation progressed, Strzok came to regard the Trump administration’s actions regarding Russia as “highly suspicious” and the president as compromised by Russia, including because of financial dealings in Moscow about which Strzok says Trump repeatedly lied.

Those concerns deepened after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director and bragged to a Russian diplomat that “great pressure” was removed. The FBI began investigating whether Trump himself was under Russia’s sway, finding “too much smoke” to not look for fire, Strzok writes.

“And the closer we got to the Oval Office, the stronger the smell seemed to become,” he said.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation revealed significant contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia but found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

Strzok documents pivotal moments during the investigation, recounting for instance how then-national security adviser Michael Flynn “baldly lied” to him and another agent about his Russian contacts even though Flynn had not shown customary signs of deceit agents are trained to look for.

Though Trump supporters contend the interview was designed to get Flynn to lie, Strzok says the FBI actually gave him multiple prompts to refresh his memory. While Attorney General William Barr has said the interview was done without a legitimate purpose, Strzok says it was necessary to better understand the Trump orbit’s ties to Russia and Flynn’s own “hidden negotiation with a foreign power that had just attacked our elections.”

Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Barr’s request to dismiss the case is pending.

In another episode, he says then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asked him to remain behind after a meeting and pressed him skeptically about a perjury investigation into Attorney General Jeff Sessions for statements made at his confirmation hearing. Sessions was never charged. Rosenstein declined to comment.

Strzok’s stint on Mueller’s team was short-lived, upended in the summer of 2017 by the inspector general’s discovery of anti-Trump text messages he’d exchanged during the campaign with an FBI lawyer with whom he had had an extramarital relationship.

He was summoned to meet with Mueller, who in a “soft voice” told Strzok he was being removed.

Transferred into the more bureaucratic Human Resources Division, Strzok says Deputy Director David Bowdich reassured him the situation could be worse, including if Trump had gotten hold of the texts.

That’s exactly what happened two months later when news broke about the texts and the Justice Department disclosed them to reporters. By his own count, Strzok says, Trump has attacked him since then more than 100 times in tweets.

The text message leak is part of a lawsuit from Strzok, who also conveys discontent at how his career ended.

After Trump accused Strzok of treason, Strzok appealed to the FBI for a statement condemning the remarks, but got none. The FBI scrambled to remove his access to categories of classified information so Director Chris Wray could inform lawmakers the next day. Senior leadership overturned a lower-level decision in firing him.

Today, Strzok is teaching at Georgetown University and watching from the outside for election interference from Russia, which he warns had information it did not use in 2016.

“I can’t talk in a lot of detail about that,” he added, “but I do think they returned those arrows to their quiver and made them better for this year.”

In First Interview Since FBI Firing, Strzok Frets About Trump-Russia Unknowns

Posted on by Kate Riga

In his first interview since being fired from the FBI, former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok articulated his fears that a combination of political influence and limited investigatory scope has obscured details of President Donald Trump’s Russian ties that may never come to light. 

Continue reading “In First Interview Since FBI Firing, Strzok Frets About Trump-Russia Unknowns” →

Biden Says Trump ‘Just Doesn’t Care’ About Americans’ Economic Hardships Amid COVID

Posted on by Cristina Cabrera

Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden on Friday accused President Donald Trump of being apathetic toward the economic hardships millions of Americans are suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Continue reading “Biden Says Trump ‘Just Doesn’t Care’ About Americans’ Economic Hardships Amid COVID” →

Keep An Eye On This

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

We’re keyed in on how President Trump is pushing to prioritize his own re-election above public health by rushing out a COVID vaccine before it’s ready. The story has a lot of moving parts, but we’re keeping a close eye on a scheduled meeting in late October.

Trump-Endorsed QAnon Candidate Shows Off Gun, Encourages ‘Offense’ Against ‘The Squad’

Posted on by Zoe Richards

GOP House candidate and QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) on Friday defended a threatening photo she posted to Facebook a day before that shows her with a gun and suggested she wanted to “go on the offense” seemingly against three Democratic congresswomen.

Continue reading “Trump-Endorsed QAnon Candidate Shows Off Gun, Encourages ‘Offense’ Against ‘The Squad’” →