At least we got some legal action this Friday.
If feels like a long, Mueller-indictment-free wait until we make it through the election.
But weren’t the funds supposed to be used for Russian adoptions?
Weird…
$10 million was billed just between January 2018 and June 2018
The Russians are definitely coming for us in the midterms.
Maybe it was a bad idea for the GOP to insist it didn’t happen in 2016 and that nothing preventative would ever need to be done in the future. Maybe Russia was emboldened by the extraordinary success it had for such a bargain-basement price.
The Russians did what they did. Calling their effort an “extraordinary success” is more than we actually know.
It’s a lot worse than we know.
Trump is unfit, and not in a good way.
It seems to me that, among other things, the details in this indictment are a shot across the bows of Concord in all its ramifications. Mueller’s people are revealing, by the details of email messages, that they likely have every byte that passed in or out of the company in the past several years. And the search software to correlate it.
Concord Management, Concord Catering and the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin were named as defendants in Mueller’s indictment, and Concord Management has hired American lawyers who are fighting the case in court.
…against the alleged accountant who helped manage Russia’s election-meddling activities on social media offered new details on how the Internet troll farm was financed.
Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a Russian national based in St. Petersburg, was in charge of “the budgeting and payment of expenses associated with social media operations, web content, advertising campaigns, infrastructure, salaries, travel, office rent, furniture, and supplies, and the registration of legal entities” as part as the Internet troll campaign known as “Project Lahtka,” according to the complaint.
So reading the information in this order makes me think that Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and Trump have a lot in common, both were sometimes slow in paying for what they wanted, and both set up new companies for their new projects. So now I wonder if Prigozhin has two sons that are worthless too?
Nothing to see here. Move along now. …
Nothing exciting here. Just a name that accounts for money directed against US democracy. Not like we’ll see that person in court.
I am sure someone at this site can answer this question. Where can one find specific examples of the work of the St. Petersburg gang? I ask because it would be useful to distinguish between the Russians’ work and the usual messages of hate and fear put out by the disciples of the Church of Rove and Atwater. Update: the complaint is fairly clear on how the R’s worked (R= either Russians or Republicans). It appears to be a fake blogger or Facebook “person” spinning an actual story. Further update: Wow! I have a few FB “friends” who are real people who have actually reposted at least a half dozen of the examples listed near the end of the complaint. How do I break it to them that they have been spreading “ideas” that have now been demonstrated to be Russian-concocted propaganda? Better yet, why should I think they care; after all, the memes feed into their pre-conceived notions
I am sure someone at this site can answer this question. Where can one find specific examples of the work of the St. Petersburg gang? I ask because it would be useful to distinguish between the Russians’ work and the usual messages of hate and fear put out by the disciples of the Church of Rove and Atwater.
Something like this ? Twitters collection of Russian and Iranian trolls. Enjoy !
https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html#data
Thank you. TPM readers are the best!
If our elections can really be manipulated by something as trivial as trolling to elect the worst person ever to enter the white house as president, it really says something about the average voter, something really, really, really bad. At the very least, people should realize that they cannot rely on a general tendency of common sense to keep things in check. If you can vote, and you choose not to do so, you risk throwing the entire country to the wolves.
Well, if they wanted to throw us into a period of doubt and turmoil, they certainly achieved that, and apparently with considerable ease. Although I was feeling concerned in the weeks leading up to the election itself, a year earlier I would never have dreamed that the US would elect the orange narcissist into the most powerful position in the country. It seems clear that it was the outcome the Russians wanted, and since they got it, I don’t know what to call it other than a success, and admittedly a pretty extraordinary one. I can only hope that we have learned our lesson and don’t fall for that again (at least not most of us).
Surely we could have gotten ourselves into “a period of doubt and turmoil” without the kind solicitations of our Russian friends!
We’ve done it before.
Rooster crows when sun rises — got what he wanted? — therefore a success?
More seriously: It’s quite obvious that Putin wanted a certain outcome in 2016. And unlike our rooster, he did make a conscious effort in that direction, but we still cannot quantify the effect he had — as should be obvious, and as our own intelligence agencies have said.
Trump certainly succeeded (beyond his own initial expectations). How much Putin had to do with it is not clear. No doubt some people are happy to give Putin the credit, perhaps to absolve others of blame.
Here’s something I do know with certainty: Interfering in other countries’ elections is a hostile act. We’ve done it ourselves innumerable times, causing untold grief, and misery, and extinction of hope. No one should do it, and those who do should be exposed and punished to whatever extent is just and possible.
Well, I suppose this is the central question. Have we already messed ourselves up so much that we would have ended up with Trump as president even without Russian efforts? I can only say that I sincerely hope the answer is no.
And not just any Russians, either—agents of Russian military intelligence, who attacked us. We were attacked, and by the Russian military—and the GOP would have us do nothing (and may have actively helped, given their intimate knowledge of American politics). I’ll never wrap my head around that.
Could this be coming from Manafort interrogations, given it is DOJ out of Eastern Virginia?
Only a success if there is a reasonable expectation that the rising of the sun would be a direct result of the crowing of the rooster. If, as is the case (and is highly predictable with or without rooster crowing), the rising of the sun has other causes, then the rooster is suffering from the mistaken belief that magic works.