If it is indeed so, then thank you, Mr. Comey! - M.N. - In My Opinion: We as a nation have to be grateful and eternally indebted to him.
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OPINION: From Martha Stewart To Scooter Libby, Comey's FBI Has History Of Unscrupulous Tactics https://t.co/zx6dw6Mq5w #articles- fbi #feedly— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) December 19, 2018
If it is indeed so, then thank you, Mr. Comey! - M.N. - In My Opinion
M.N.: If Comey indeed did that: ensnared Flynn, Papa-whom-dopa-los, and others; then we as a nation have to be grateful and eternally indebted to him: he not only exposed the lying and the deceptive tendencies in the "high circles", but also helped the incoming Trump Administration to maintain the adequate collective IQ and Cleanliness Index, so to speak. Gen. Flynn was prepared "to consider" the politically tinged extradition of Gulen in exchange for about $500,000 to his newly minted firm, "Flynn Intel Group", through the recently arrested, "hard to know whose agent" Kian.If it is indeed so, then thank you, Mr. Comey for all your tactics, and all your Jesuit cunning, they are completely appropriate, justified, and well used in this particular case, and in the other similar cases.
My humble concern was of the opposite nature: that Comey was too busy riding his high horse and too un-involved as a leader to notice all that dirt on the low road. Apparently, the picture is much more complex, and it needs the accurate and objective study.
P.S. And the price doesn't seem to be quite right, General. It looks more like a line from the old, broken, outdated, and somewhat mysterious military calculator, with all the numbers and value systems and symbols mixed up. Not an easy case to unravel.
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Michael Novakhov
12.19.18
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House Republicans on Tuesday released a transcript of their explosive closed-door session a day earlier with fired FBI Director James Comey, who revealed during the questioning that FBI agents knew "exactly" what ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had told Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to interviewing Flynn at the White House.
The 173-page transcript, which documented congressional Republicans' second hearing with Comey this month, additionally included Comey's explanation of why he broke normal protocol by sending two FBI agents into the White House to interview Flynn in January 2017, without involving or notifying White House lawyers.
Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during that fateful interview about whether he had talked with Kislyak about Russia modulating its response to sweeping sanctions imposed against Russia by the Obama administration, as well as whether he had discussed whether Russia could veto a United Nations vote condemning Israel. His sentencing was delayed on Monday until March, after a fiery hearing in which the presiding judge openly voiced his "disgust" at Flynn's conduct.
Flynn was fired in February 2017 for misleading Vice President Mike Pence on the same topic, but was not charged with any wrongdoing related to the substance of his communications with Kislyak. And, a Washington Post article published one day before his White House interview with the agents, citing FBI sources, publicly revealed that the FBI had wiretapped Flynn's calls and cleared him of any criminal conduct.
"The agents went to interview Flynn to try and understand why the national security adviser was making false statements to the vice president of the United States about his interactions with the Russians during the transition," Comey said, responding to a question from House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
Comey added: "I knew certain classified facts about the nature of [Flynn's] interactions with the Russians" prior to sending the agents into the White House.
The former FBI director confirmed that one of the agents he sent was a "career counterintelligence agent," and the other was Peter Strzok -- who has since been fired from both Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team and from the FBI over his apparent bias against President Trump. Comey denied specifically sending Strzok, or hand-picking the agents who questioned Flynn.
"I knew that the vice president was making statements that he attributed to conversations he'd had with Mr. Flynn that were starkly at odds with those classified facts," he said.
Gowdy then said: "You knew exactly what General Flynn had said to the Russian Ambassador before you interviewed him." Comey replied, "Yes."
Comey quickly added: "I'm only hesitating because I don't know what I don't know, but we understood clearly the nature and extent of a variety of communications, telephonic, between Mr. Flynn and the Russian Ambassador. ... I'm only hesitating because, if there were other communications, other phones, other means of communication, we wouldn't know that. But we had clear transcripts of the conversations that we had."
Comey also said he had not discussed the Flynn interview with Trump: "We had an open investigation, criminal investigation, counterintelligence investigation," Comey said. "There was no way I would discuss that with the president."
An FBI witness report released Monday that documented the January 2017 Flynn interview -- finalized in February 2017 -- showed that Flynn apparently was aware his calls had been wiretapped. On two occasions, agents wrote, Flynn thanked them for reminding him of some of his talks with Kislyak concerning the United Nations.
"Yes, good reminder," Flynn said at one point, according to the witness report.
Pressed on his public remarks earlier this month that the FBI broke its normal protocol by interviewing Flynn without involving the White House Counsel, Comey acknowledged that "in a more established environment, there would've been an expectation that the FBI would coordinate the interview through White House Counsel."
He continued, "I'd never worked in a transition time before, but my understanding was that, in a more established administrative environment, you wouldn't get away with just calling the witness and saying, 'Can we come and talk to you?'"
Comey also pushed back on Republicans' questions as to why the FBI didn't warn Flynn that he could be prosecuted for lying to them. Investigators had issued those warnings to several other targets in the Russia probe. In a court filing last year, Mueller's team took pains to note that FBI agents who interviewed former Trump aide George Papadopoulos on January 27, 2017 -- just days after the Flynn interview -- had advised Papadopoulos that "lying to them 'is a federal offense'" and that he could get "in trouble" if he did not tell the truth.
"He was an extraordinarily experienced person and so reasonably should be assumed to understand you can't lie to the FBI," Comey told House Republicans.
"Second, it's not protocol. The FBI does not do that in noncustodial interviews," he added. "And, third, you want to find out what the witness will say to you before you heat up an interview by raising the prospect that the witness might be lying to you."
Comey said he did not recall whether Flynn had asked about an attorney, but said then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had "volunteered to him that you are welcome to have somebody present from the White House Counsel's Office. And I think he said, in substance, there'd be no need for that."
According to a memorandum he wrote at the time, McCabe had advised Flynn that should he choose to seek counsel, the Justice Department would have to become involved.
Comey also disclosed that then-Acting Attorney General Dana Boente made a remark along the lines of, "Oh, God, I was hoping that would go away," when reminded of Trump's request that the Justice Department make clear he was not under criminal investigation. Comey, who said he had relayed Trump's request to Boente, added he did not personally inform the public that Trump was not under investigation because he felt that was the DOJ's decision to make.
Later during the hearing, under questioning from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, Comey admitted he had eliminated any mention of President Obama's secret email alias -- which he used to communicate to Hillary Clinton on her private email server -- from his public remarks at a July 5th, 2016 news conference announcing that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information.
Comey explained: "Let's imagine the Russians had captured that communication. ... We didn't want to do anything to confirm to the bad guys that they might have Barack Obama's private cover email unclassified." Comey emphasized that Obama and Clinton did not discuss classified information using that email arrangement.
But the fired FBI Director said he was worried that Clinton had exposed Obama's secret email alias by communicating with him while she was overseas.
"The concern we had was about the exposure of his unclassified email account, which was not in his name," Comey said.
Separately, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asked Comey how he informed Trump about the FBI's knowledge of the infamous, unverified opposition research dossier compiled by a firm funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC).
"I was very concerned that he might interpret it as an effort to pull a J. Edgar Hoover on him," Comey said, adding that he explained "that it was unverified, that it wasn't something that we were investigating, and then, once the conversation, in my judgment, started to go off the rails, by then telling him we were not investigating him personally."
The former FBI director excoriated Republicans on Monday after exiting the hearing -- his second Capitol Hill appearance this month where he was called to answer questions on the Russia and Hillary Clinton email probes.
“Someday, they'll have to explain to their grandchildren what they did today," a defiant Comey said of the Republicans on the two House committees that conducted the interview, accusing them of not defending the FBI from President Trump’s attacks.
Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, right, speaks to reporters after a day of testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Dec. 7, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Associated Press)
Republicans, for their part, have accused Comey of not being forthcoming. He was called back to Capitol Hill after an appearance in early December in which he repeatedly claimed not to know or remember the answers to numerous questions. Jordan told reporters he was not satisfied with Comey's answers on Monday, either.
Comey, though, cast the questioning from lawmakers on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees as political and defended his own leadership, under which agents investigated Clinton and began probing relationships between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“We had to make very hard decisions in 2016,” Comey said. “I knew we were going to get hurt by it. The question was how do we reduce the damage.”
Asked by Fox News' Catherine Herridge whether he bore any responsibility for the FBI's reputation taking a hit, he responded, "No."
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Comey called it “frustrating to be here.”
“The questions about Hillary Clinton and Steele dossier strike me as more of the same,” Comey said. “I didn’t learn anything new in there. Maybe they did.”
Lashing out at Republicans, Comey also called for them to stand up to the “fear of Fox News, fear of their base, fear of mean tweets” and “stand up for the values of this country.”
Earlier, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows told reporters Republicans planned to focus their Comey questioning on a new FBI document that was released Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act and published by Politico.
He told reporters he wanted Comey to clarify when he first became aware of the involvement of the Democratic National Committee, law firm Perkins Coie and the opposition research group Fusion GPS in the production of the dossier.
“I want to give him a chance to clarify all that,” Meadows said.
That heavily redacted document details the information regarding the bureau’s Russia investigation that Comey, serving as FBI director at the time, briefed Trump about shortly after the Republican was elected president. The document, once again, suggests the FBI was vague in the sourcing of the dossier’s origin as being funded by anti-Trump Democrats.
But Meadows also says he believes it could conflict with previous statements from Comey about what he knew of the dossier’s origins at the time.
“I can’t imagine how the director of the FBI did not know the connection between Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, and the DNC, as it related to the infamous dossier,” Meadows told reporters.
During an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier in April, Comey said he first learned about the existence of the dossier in the fall of 2016 but still didn’t “know…for a fact” that the DNC and Hilary Clinton campaign had funded the work. The dossier was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign. The FBI document vaguely refers to it as being paid for by “private clients.”
“An FBI source … volunteered highly politically sensitive information … on Russian influence efforts aimed at the US presidential election,” the memo said.
Referring to Steele, who authored the dossier, the memo said, “The source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years." It also said, "The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI.”
Trump has railed against the FBI for relying in part on a dossier funded by Trump’s political opponents as it began investigating the relationships between Russia and members of Trump’s campaign.
Earlier this year, Comey said during his book tour that he didn’t tell the president about the origins of the dossier during the briefing, saying it “wasn’t necessary.”
Comey returned for more Capitol Hill testimony after the prior Dec. 7 session left lame-duck Republican lawmakers fuming as Comey repeatedly said "I don't remember," "I don't know" and "I don't recall" when grilled about investigations Republicans believed were aimed at hurting Trump.
The questioning covered the FBI's probe of Clinton's email server and how a counter-intelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election morphed into an all-encompassing probe of Trump's inner circle, including the obtaining of FISA warrants used to spy on American citizens.
A transcript of the marathon interview was released on Dec. 8, demonstrating the fired FBI boss' lack of responsiveness and the tension between him and GOP lawmakers.
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and Caroline McKee contributed to this report.
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· · · · · · · · ·
Russia's disinformation campaign wasn't just on Facebook and Twitter. Here are all the social media platforms Russian trolls weaponized during the 2016 US elections Business Insider
Researchers found that virtually no social media platform was untouched by the Russian-linked disinformation campaign.
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The salacious and unverified opposition research dossier cited by the FBI as its main justification to surveil a top Trump aide contains many claims that are "likely false," according to the Yahoo News reporter who was among the first to break the news of the dossier's existence.
Michael Isikoff's statements on John Ziegler's Free Speech Broadcasting podcast came a day before Michael Cohen adviser Lanny Davis reiterated that Cohen has never been to Prague -- where, according to the dossier, he traveled to arrange a payment to Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The dossier was created by British ex-spy Christopher Steele and funded by the firm Fusion GPS -- which was retained by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
"In broad strokes, Christopher Steele was clearly onto something, that there was a major Kremlin effort to interfere in our elections, that they were trying to help Trump's campaign, and that there was multiple contacts between various Russian figures close to the government and various people in Trump's campaign,” Isikoff said.
But he added: “When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, we have not seen the evidence to support them, and, in fact, there's good grounds to think that some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven and are likely false."
On four occasions, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court that it "did not believe" Steele was the direct source for Isikoff's Sept. 23, 2016 Yahoo News article implicating former Trump aide Carter Page in Russian collusion.
Instead, the FBI suggested to the court, the article by Michael Isikoff was independent corroboration of the salacious, unverified allegations against Trump in the infamous Steele dossier. Federal authorities used both the Steele dossier and Yahoo News article to convince the FISA court to authorize a surveillance warrant for Page.
But London court records show that contrary to the FBI's assessments, Steele briefed Yahoo News and other reporters in the fall of 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS -- the opposition research firm behind the dossier. The revelations were contained heavily-redacted documents released earlier this year after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the organization Judicial Watch.
"The FBI does not believe that Source #1 [Steele] directly provided this information to the identified news organization that published the September 23rd News Article," the FBI stated in one of the released FISA documents. "Source #1 told the FBI that he/she only provided this information to the business associate and the FBI."
The documents describe Source #1 as someone "hired by a business associate to conduct research" into Trump's Russia ties -- but do not mention that Fusion GPS was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign.
Instead, the documents say only: "The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump's] campaign." Fox News believes that the U.S. person is Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS.
Senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, left, continued to communicate with former British spy Christopher Steele, right, even after the FBI cut ties with him. (AP)
Page announced in October he is filing a defamation lawsuit against the DNC over the dossier's claims. He is also suing Perkins Coie and its partners, the law firm that represented Clinton’s campaign and hired Fusion GPS.
Page told Fox News’ “Hannity” at the time that his lawsuit goes “beyond any damages or any financial aspects."
“There have been so many lies as you’re alluding to and you look at the damage it did to our Democratic systems and our institutions of government back in 2016. And I’m just trying to get some justice,” he said.
Meanwhile, ex-Cohen attorney Lanny Davis laughed off a suggestion during an MSNBC interview on Sunday that his former client had ever made a trip to Prague to pay Russian hackers.
“No, no Prague, ever, never,” Davis said.
While Cohen's team has long denied he made the trip, the latest denial comes after Cohen pleaded guilty in two separate prosecutions linked to his work for President Trump. Cohen has pledged to cooperate with federal authorities, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has said he has largely done so.
Fox News reported in August that embattled Justice Department official Bruce Ohr had contact in 2016 with then-colleague Andrew Weissmann, who is now a top Mueller deputy, as well as other senior FBI officials about the controversial anti-Trump dossier and the individuals behind it.
The sources said Ohr's outreach about the dossier – as well as Steele; the opposition research firm behind it, Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS; and his wife Nellie Ohr's work for Fusion – occurred before and after the FBI fired Steele as a source over his media contacts. Ohr's network of contacts on the dossier included: anti-Trump former FBI agent Peter Strzok; former FBI lawyer Lisa Page; former deputy director Andrew McCabe; Weissmann and at least one other DOJ official; and a current FBI agent who worked with Strzok on the Russia case.
Weissmann was kept "in the loop" on the dossier, a source said, while he was chief of the criminal fraud division. He is now assigned to Mueller’s team.
Ohr's broad circle of contacts indicates members of FBI leadership knew about his backchannel activities regarding the dossier and Steele.
Congressional Republicans are still trying to get to the bottom of Ohr's role in circulating the unverified dossier, which became a critical piece of evidence in obtaining a surveillance warrant for Page in October 2016.
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Last night, Mr Mueller published portions of the FBI’s interviews with Mr Flynn at the request of the judge hearing the case after the Trump camp alleged the bureau had sought to entrap him.
Mr Flynn's lawyers suggested that investigators discouraged him from having an attorney present during the interview at the start of last year and never informed him it was a crime to lie.
Prosecutors shot back, “He does not need to be warned it is a crime to lie to federal agents to know the importance of telling them the truth. The defendant undoubtedly was aware, in light of his 'many years' working with the FBI, that lying to the FBI carries serious consequences.”
The defendant's lawyers also insinuated that Mr Flynn deserves credit for not publicly seizing on the fact that FBI officials involved in the investigation later came under scrutiny themselves. Former deputy director Andrew McCabe, who contacted him to arrange the interview, was fired this year for what the Justice Department said was a lack of candor over a news media leak.
Peter Strzok, one of the two agents who interviewed Michael Flynn, was removed from Robert Mueller's team and later fired for trading anti-Trump texts with another FBI official.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th December, 2018) Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that the new report prepared by private analysis firms to give the US Senate a broader insight into Russia's suspected 2016 US election tampering causes nothing but confusion.
"What I have read accessible in the public domain on this report can not cause anything but confusion, because there are absolutely common claims and accusations. Some of them are absolutely incomprehensible to us. We are accused of somebody's criticism on a particular situation in the United States, and Russia is not mentioned," the spokesman said.
A draft of the report was obtained by The Washington Post newspaper, which leaked details on Sunday. The analysis by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a social media intelligence firm, looked into millions of online posts by IRA, who was charged in the United States for allegedly trying to tilt the 2016 campaign in Donald Trump's favor.
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Months after US President Donald Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sites on a new target: special counsel Robert Mueller.
Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralise the biggest threat to his staying there.
The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies.
One post on Instagram – which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal – claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups”.
Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters.
The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday.
The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday.
One of the reports, written by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm Graphika, became public when The Washington Post obtained it and published its highlights Sunday.
The other report was by social media research firm New Knowledge, Columbia University and Canfield Research.
The other report was by social media research firm New Knowledge, Columbia University and Canfield Research.
Former FBI chief James Comey lashes out at Donald Trump for ‘lies’
Together the reports describe the Russian campaign with sweep and detail not before available. The researchers analysed more than 10 million posts and messages on every major social media platform to understand how the Russians used American technology to build a sprawling online disinformation machine, with each piece playing a designated role while supporting the others with links and other connections.
The reports also underscore the difficulty of defeating Russian disinformation as operatives moved easily from platform to platform, making the process of detecting and deleting misleading posts impossible for any company on its own to manage.
Twitter hit political and journalistic elites. Facebook and its advertising targeting tools divided the electorate into demographic and ideological segments ripe for manipulation, with particular focus on energising conservatives and suppressing African-Americans, who traditionally are more likely to vote for Democrats.
YouTube provided a free online library of more than 1,100 disinformation videos. PayPal helped raise money and move politically themed merchandise designed by the Russian teams, such as “I SUPPORT AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT” T-shirts.
Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Reddit and various websites also played roles.
“We hope that these reports provide clarity for the American people and policymakers alike, and make clear the sweeping scope of the operation and the long game being played,” said Renee DiResta, research director at New Knowledge.
Social media researchers said the weaponisation of these sites and services highlights the broadening challenge they face in combating the increasingly sophisticated tactics of Russia and other foreign malefactors online.
“Some of the platforms that don’t have as much traffic, but still have highly engaged communities, are the most vulnerable to a challenge like misinformation,” said Graham Brookie, head of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Accused Russian agent Maria Butina, who ‘tried to infiltrate NRA gun lobby’, pleads guilty in US to conspiracy
“They don’t have the resources to dedicate to making their platforms more resilient.”
One unexpected star of the new reports Monday was Facebook’s photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram. Over the years of the disinformation campaign, Instagram generated responses on a scale beyond any of the others – with 187 million comments, likes and other user reactions, more than Twitter and Facebook combined.
But it had been the least scrutinised of the major platforms before this week as lawmakers, researchers and journalists focused more heavily on Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Instagram’s use by the Russians more than doubled in the first six months after Trump’s election, the researchers found.
It also offered access to a younger demographic and provided easy likes in a simple, engaging format.
“Instagram’s appeal is that’s where the kids are, and that seems to be where the Russians went,” said Philip Howard, head of the Oxford research group.
The report anchored by New Knowledge found that the Russians posted on Instagram 116,000 times, nearly double the number of times they did on Facebook, as documented in the report.
The most popular posts praised African-American culture and achievement, but the Russians also targeted this community for voter suppression messages on multiple platforms, urging boycotts of the election or spreading false information on how to vote.
On Monday, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People called for a weeklong boycott of Facebook starting Tuesday, saying the company’s business practices – and the spread of “disingenuous portrayals of the African-American community” on its site – should prompt further congressional investigation.
Facebook said in a statement that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”
Reddit said it is “always evaluating and evolving our approaches to detecting malicious activity and have grown our team significantly since 2016.”
Medium did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Tumblr pointed to a November blog post, which said the company took down Russian-related disinformation ahead of the 2018 election. PayPal said it “works to combat and prevent the illicit use of our services.” Twitter said it has made “significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service”.
The emergence of Mueller as a significant target also highlights the adaptability of the Russian campaign.
He was appointed in May 2017 as special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian influence on the Trump campaign.
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In that role, he has indicted the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked troll farm behind the disinformation campaign, and others affiliated with the disinformation campaign on criminal charges.
A Clemson University research team, not affiliated with either of the reports released Monday, found that the Russians tweeted about Mueller more than 5,000 times, including retweets first posted by others.
Some called for his firing, while others mocked him as incompetent and still others campaigned for the end of his “entire fake investigation”.
The report by New Knowledge highlighted the focus on Mueller and fired FBI director James Comey, who was falsely portrayed as “a dirty cop”.
The Russian operatives often spread jokes to undermine the investigations into their disinformation campaign, the researchers found.
One showed Democrat Hillary Clinton saying: “Everyone I don’t like is A Russian Hacker”.
At one point, soon after the 2016 election, the Russian operatives also began to make fun of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for saying social media didn’t have an impact on Trump’s victory – a claim for which he later apologised.
On Capitol Hill, top Democrats said Monday that the revelations in the pair of Senate reports underscored the need to study social media and consider fresh regulation to stop Russia and other foreign actors from manipulating American democracy in future elections.
“I think all the platforms remain keenly vulnerable, and I don’t have the confidence yet companies have invested the resources and people power necessary to deal with the scope of the problem,” said Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
In particular, Schiff described the Instagram revelations as “surprising”, contradicting the data and testimony Facebook previously provided to the committee.
Republican Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee that asked the researchers to analyse the tech companies’ data, said the findings show “how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology.”
Every other Republican lawmaker on the Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment or didn’t respond.
Facebook executives barely discussed the role of Instagram when they testified before Congress late last year about Russian meddling.
At the time, the company said the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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Bijan Kian made his first appearance in court Monday.
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- Michael Flynn’s business partner charged with illegally lobbying for Turkey The Washington Post
- Two ex-associates of Michael Flynn charged with illegal lobbying for Turkey Fox News
- Ex-Flynn business associates charged with trying to influence US politicians in Turkish lobbying case CNN
- Michael Flynn's Business Partner Indicted Ahead of Trump Aide's Sentencing HuffPost
- Michael Flynn's business partners charged with illegal lobbying for Turkey New York Post
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Now he is awaiting sentencing on December 18 for lying to the FBI. According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sentencing memo filed Tuesday, because of his extensive cooperation with investigators as well as his more than three decades of public service, prosecutors are requesting a minimal sentence, including the possibility of no jail time for Flynn.
Flynn has spoken to prosecutors 19 times as part of his plea agreement, which underlines his value to Mueller as a witness because of his early involvement in the Trump campaign and the key role he played in the transition, all of which gives him important insights into the campaign's precise involvement with the Russians.
How did Flynn's long fall from grace happen? This story is based on interviews with multiple former colleagues of Flynn's in the military, as well as with his colleagues in the Trump White House. (I have also interviewed Flynn in the past, although he has not spoken to the media while awaiting sentencing.)
During his military career few could have predicted the path that Flynn would eventually take. As a colonel in charge of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Flynn was a well-loved, effective team leader and an intensely hard-working officer who was constantly deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn used to joke that he lived at the JSOC base in Balad, Iraq, and took his vacations at the JSOC base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
The hours working for JSOC were brutal, 17-hour days every day of the week, but the mission was clear. Flynn and his boss, General Stanley McChrystal, understood by 2005 that the United States was losing the war in Iraq and that JSOC wasn't configured well enough to destroy the industrial strength insurgency it was facing, which was led by al Qaeda in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq wasn't a traditional military opponent operating with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, but rather a loose network of like-minded jihadists. McChrystal's mantra became "it takes a network to defeat a network."
To become a network, JSOC would have to get flatter and more agile. McChrystal and Flynn reconfigured JSOC so it communicated more seamlessly with all the components of the intelligence community and more quickly processed the intelligence gathered on raids so other raids could be immediately launched based on what was gleaned from the initial operation.
The results were startling; JSOC went from doing only four or five raids a month to doing hundreds every month, and al Qaeda in Iraq took a huge beating.
In 2012 Flynn, now promoted to lieutenant general, was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn wanted to turn DIA into something more like JSOC with more analysts deployed "forward" in the war zones.
This was an excellent idea. After all, if you are supposed to be providing intelligence on a war, it helps if you are not working in an office 6,000 miles from where the conflict is actually happening. But DIA is a bureaucratic behemoth of some 17,000 employees, most of whom are quite happy living in the Washington, DC, area as opposed to, say, working for a year at Bagram Air Base in the windswept, mountainous deserts of Afghanistan.
The DIA desk jockeys pushed back against Flynn and his plans to deploy many of them to the war zones. Flynn had never commanded a giant organization like DIA. The first rule of bureaucratic politics is if you want to make big changes you need to enlist folks to help, Flynn didn't make much of an effort to do this at DIA, which ruffled bureaucratic feathers and irritated his bosses at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.
'Flynn facts' and conflicts with Obama team
At DIA, Flynn also began developing some eccentric notions. Flynn
became convinced
that the jihadist attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 was orchestrated by Iran, which on the face of it made little sense since the Shia regime in Iran rarely cooperates with Sunni militants. There was also no evidence for this fanciful notion, but Flynn pushed his analysts at DIA to find a link that didn't exist.
It was Flynn's failures to distinguish between conjecture and truth that led analysts at DIA to coin the term "
Flynn facts
."
When Flynn was running DIA, the Obama administration's view of the terrorism threat was best encapsulated by President Obama's
statement
to New Yorker editor David Remnick in January 2014 that the group that would evolve into ISIS was merely a "jay-vee" team.
Flynn had a far less sanguine view, warning that the global jihadist movement was not waning in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, as was then the conventional analysis. Flynn made this case publicly in congressional testimony on February 11, 2014, when Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, asked him if al Qaeda was indeed on the run, as the Obama administration was claiming.
A few months later, Flynn
made
a similar public statement at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference held in July in Aspen, Colorado, that attracts top US national security officials and the journalists who cover them.
CNN's Evan Perez asked Flynn, "Are we safer today than we were two years, five years, ten years ago?"
"My quick answer is we're not," Flynn replied.
Flynn went on to say that focusing only on the declining fortunes of "core" al Qaeda, the group that had attacked the United States on 9/11, was to gloss over the fact that jihadist ideology was in fact "exponentially growing."
As ISIS conquered much of Iraq during the summer of 2014 and imposed its brutal, totalitarian rule, it was clear that Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS, while Flynn had understood the threat far better than many of his peers. But Flynn had angered his two bosses, Michael Vickers, the overall head of intelligence at the Pentagon, as well as James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.
Vickers and Clapper thought that Flynn trying to shake things up at DIA was actually sabotaging morale at the agency, according to Clapper's autobiography, "Facts and Fears." They decided to force Flynn out of office a year early.
Flynn in the civilian world
Flynn seems to have been both bitter and embarrassed about the way he had been fired. In his own mind he was forced out because he wasn't playing along with the Obama administration line that the war on terror was largely over, according to his autobiography, "The Field of Fight." For Vickers and Clapper, it was much simpler: They fired him because he was a bad manager.
Either way Flynn, a highly decorated officer with 33 years service in the army, much of it in Special Operations, at the age of 55 had his career abruptly ended -- and in an inglorious manner to boot.
Perhaps by way of compensation, once he was out in the civilian world, Flynn wanted to show that he was a rainmaker. Flynn set up Flynn Intel Group, which took on all manner of clients, a number of them with links to foreign governments.
Out of some combination of naiveté and arrogance Flynn, the maverick who came out of the "special" insular world of Joint Special Operation Command, did not play by the rules when it came to the lobbying work he did for some of his foreign clients, for which he was supposed to register officially as an agent of a foreign government. In Flynn's sentencing memo, the Special Counsel says that Flynn misrepresented his work on behalf of the Turkish government for which he and his company were paid more than half a million dollars.
Flynn also began dipping his toe into politics. After meeting with Donald Trump in August 2015 Flynn came away deeply impressed. Trump was a good listener; he asked smart questions and he seemed truly worried about the direction that the country was heading, according to an
interview
Flynn gave to The Washington Post.
Flynn became a prominent presence on the Trump campaign and a vocal critic of Obama's supposedly "weak" policies on ISIS. This, of course, dovetailed very neatly with what Trump was saying.
Flynn's support of Trump was all the more important because he was the only person on Trump's campaign team with any experience of America's post-9/11 wars that continued to grind on at various levels of intensity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Like Trump, Flynn thought that the United States could work with Putin and even sat next to the Russian president at a gala dinner in Moscow in December 2015 that celebrated the 10th anniversary of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-sponsored TV network, an appearance for which Flynn was handsomely
paid
. The Russians, through his speaking agency, gave Flynn $33,750.
Flynn
later told
a Washington Post reporter that this wasn't a big deal, as RT was similar to CNN, a bizarre claim given that RT is effectively an arm of the Kremlin.
In the spring of 2016, Trump started to seriously consider Flynn as a possible candidate to be his running mate. The three-star general would certainly help on the commander in chief issue. At the time, the leading candidates to be Trump's running mate were former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Flynn. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was seen as only a distant possibility for the number two-slot on the ticket, according to a senior Trump campaign official.
Flynn made his first, big appearance on the public stage when he made a fiery speech of support for Trump at the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 19, 2016. Flynn angrily charged Obama and Clinton with endangering the United States and even lying about the nature of the terrorist threat: "Tonight, Americans stand as one with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence...Because Obama chose to conceal the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam, Americans are at a loss to fully understand the enormous threat they pose against us."
As he spoke, Flynn led the crowd in chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and incited them, "Get fired up! This is about this country!"
Flynn declared, "I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she put our nation's security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server."
The crowd started chanting, "Lock her up! Lock her up!"
Hesitating only slightly, Flynn added his voice to the chants declaring, "Lock her up, that's right! Damn right, exactly right. And you know why we're saying that? We're saying that because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth of what [Clinton] did, I would be in jail today."
Officers who had served with Flynn were dismayed and puzzled by this performance, which went against their code not to take such clearly partisan positions, even in retirement. The angry man on stage didn't seem like the Mike Flynn they knew.
Growing enamored of neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues
Some of his peers felt Flynn had succumbed to a case of "Obama Derangement Syndrome" after he was fired from running the Defense Intelligence Agency. That might be a partial explanation for Flynn's impassioned rhetoric against Obama and Clinton, but in the years after he was pushed out of the military Flynn had also became enamored of leading neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues.
Flynn coauthored a book, "Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies." with Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative academic who was a longtime, bitter critic of the Iranian regime. In "Field of Fight," which was published just before the Republican convention, Flynn claimed the United States was in a world war with "radical Islam," which it was losing. Flynn also claimed that American Islamists were trying to create "an Islamic state right here at home." This is a common conspiracy theory of the far right.
Flynn also
wrote
for the New York Post about a supposed "enemy alliance" that included Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela as well as al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. This was George W. Bush's "axis of evil" on steroids and scarcely more convincing since ISIS and Iran were at war, as were al Qaeda and ISIS, and none of these terrorist groups had any relationship with the North Koreans or with leftist regimes in Latin America.
At the same time Flynn became increasingly gripped by rightist conspiracy theories. In August 2016 Flynn claimed in a speech that Democratic members of the Florida legislature
were trying to install Sharia law
in their state. This was, of course, nonsense.
Flynn also
tweeted
that fear of Muslims was "rational" and publicly said that Islam was really a "political ideology" rather than a religion. When he was in uniform, Flynn had never made these kinds of assertions about Muslims and Islam.
Flynn's inability to distinguish easily between facts and obvious falsehoods seemed to worsen as the presidential campaign continued. Flynn claimed in an interview with Breitbart News that there wer
e Arabic signs
along the United States-Mexico border to guide potential terrorists into the States and that he had seen evidence of these signs. Flynn said, "I have personally seen the photos of the signage along those paths that are in Arabic. They're like waypoints along that path as you come in. Primarily, in this case the one that I saw was in Texas and it's literally, it's like signs, that say, in Arabic, 'This way, move to this point.' It's unbelievable." It was unbelievable because it was completely false.
Unexpected victory
That Flynn seemed to have never really expected Trump to win the election was underlined by
an article
written by Flynn that appeared in The Hill newspaper on Election Day 2016 that compared Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in in exile in Pennsylvania, to Ayatollah Khomeini.
For the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen was an obsession. It had fingered Gulen for purportedly masterminding a botched military coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016.
Flynn's article suggested that Gulen, who had very good reasons to fear for his safety if he ever returned to Turkey, should not be allowed to remain in the United States.
No one who really thought he would be the next US national security adviser would have published such a provocative piece in a relatively obscure publication the very same day that his candidate was elected to the most powerful job in the world.
The article also risked drawing attention to the fact that Flynn's consulting firm had been paid more than half a million dollars by a company close to the Erdogan government, despite the fact that Flynn hadn't registered as an agent of a foreign government as is required by law.
Flynn's positions and actions during the campaign and the transition were not those of the typical national security adviser, but then nor were the president-elect's.
Two days after Trump was elected president, Obama sat down with Trump in the Oval Office and, among other matters,
warned Trump
against hiring Flynn in any senior role.
A week after meeting with Obama, though, Trump offered Flynn the key job of national security adviser. Flynn's loyalty to Trump and early support for him trumped questions about his temperament as well as his lack of experience managing the complex national security bureaucracy -- and the fact that he had never worked at the White House.
Mike Flynn was only 24 days in his job when he was
forced to resign
. The reason given: that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him that during the transition he hadn't discussed lifting Obama-era sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States, when in fact he had. This lie appears to have been an effort to cover up the fact that Flynn was conducting substantive American foreign policy before he was ever in office. The United States operates on the principle that there is only one president at a time.
Flynn repeated the lies about the Russian ambassador to the FBI and compounded his legal jeopardy by
lying
about his links to the Turkish government in documents filed with the U.S. government, according to Tuesday's sentencing memo.
Those actions completed Flynn's fall from grace. No American National Security Adviser has served as briefly as Mike Flynn.
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Two men involved in a Turkish lobbying campaign led by former National Security adviser Michael Flynn have been charged with illegally lobbying in a case related to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
The case unsealed Monday against Flynn's former business partner, Bijan Kian, and Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin, accuses the two men of conspiring to "covertly and unlawfully" influence U.S. politicians on behalf of Turkey.
The new charges appear to shed light on the co-operation of Flynn, who last year admitted to lying about several aspects of the lobbying work. In recommending he serve no prison time, prosecutors said Flynn not only helped with the Russia probe but also an undisclosed — and separate — criminal investigation. Documents filed alongside that recommendation spend several paragraphs laying out the details of Flynn's Turkish lobbying.
Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, was arrested and made an initial appearance Monday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He is indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. Alptekin, a dual Turkish-Dutch citizen living in Istanbul whose full name is Kamil Ekim Alpetekin, remains at large.
According to the indictment, Kian was vice chairman of Flynn's business group, the Flynn Intel Group. The two worked throughout 2016 to seek ways to have cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited from the U.S. to Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Gulen of directing a failed coup. Flynn is referred to in the indictment only as "Person A."
Kian's lawyer, Robert Trout, declined comment after Monday's hearing. Kian was released on a personal recognizance bond pending an arraignment scheduled for Tuesday.
Alptekin is also charged with failing to register as a foreign agent and also making false statements.
The indictment describes Kian and Flynn as co-founders of Alexandria-based Flynn Intel Group, which is listed in the indictment only as "Company A." It accuses Kian and Alptekin of illegally lobbying in the U.S. to discredit Gulen and have him extradited. According to the indictment, Alptekin worked at the direction of the Turkish government, but the defendants worked to conceal that fact.
In the summer of 2016, when Flynn was working as an adviser to the Trump campaign, the three initiated what they called a "Truth Campaign" that compared Gulen to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.
On Nov. 8, 2016 — Election Day — Flynn wrote an op-ed piece in The Hill newspaper titled "Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support." The column uses the same comparison between Gulen and Khomeini. The indictment notes that Flynn's column uses identical or very similar language to that prepared by Kian in a draft op-ed.
"We all remember another quiet, bearded elder cleric who sat under an apple tree ... in the suburbs of Paris in 1978," Flynn wrote in the op-ed, mimicking language provided to him by Kian. "He claimed to be a man of God who wanted to be a dictator."
Several days before the column was published, Kian crowed to Alptekin in an email about the advantageous timing of the pending op-ed piece coinciding with Election Day. "The arrow has left the bow!"
Alptekin, who had complained a week earlier that the Flynn Group had not done enough work to honour the contract, responded that Kian's op-ed was "right on target."
Flynn, a retired three-star general, pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the then-Russian ambassador. He is scheduled for sentencing Tuesday.
Kian and Alptekin's prosecution is led not by the special counsel but prosecutors with the Eastern District of Virginia.
___
Day reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2018 Prince George Citizen
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