Russia’s State TV Calls Trump Their ‘Agent’

[aubiefifty 18,230]

thedailybeast.com

 

Russia’s State TV Calls Trump Their ‘Agent’

Julia DavisUpdated Dec. 16, 2019 10:55AM ET / Published Dec. 16, 2019 10:12AM ET

7-8 minutes

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Sometimes a picture doesn’t have to be worth a thousand words. Just a few will do. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned home from his visit with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, Russian state media was gloating over the spectacle. TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled “Puppet Master and ‘Agent’—How to Understand Lavrov’s Meeting With Trump.”

Vesti Nedeli, a Sunday news show on the same network, pointed out that it was Trump, personally, who asked Lavrov to pose standing near as Trump sat at his desk. It’s almost the literal image of a power behind the throne.

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And in the meantime, much to Russia’s satisfaction, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is still waiting for that critical White House meeting with the American president: the famous “quid pro quo” for Zelensky announcing an investigation that would smear Democratic challenger Joe Biden. As yet, Zelensky hasn’t done that, and as yet, no meeting has been set.

Russian state television still views the impending impeachment as a bump in the road that won’t lead to Trump’s removal from office. But President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda brigades enjoy watching the heightened divisions in the United States, and how it hurts relations between the U.S. and Ukraine.

They’ve also added a cynical new a narrative filled with half-joking ironies as they look at the American president’s bleak prospects when he does leave office. 

Appearing on Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gusman, first deputy director general of ITAR-TASS, Russia’s oldest and largest news agency, predicted: “Sooner or later, the Democrats will come back into power. The next term or the term after that, it doesn’t matter... I have an even more unpleasant forecast for Trump. After the White House, he will face a very unhappy period.” 

“Russia's state television uses every opportunity to demoralize the Ukrainians with talking points based on Trump’s distaste for their beleaguered country.”

The host, Vladimir Soloviev, smugly asked: “Should we get another apartment in Rostov ready?” Soloviev’s allusion was to the situation of Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, who was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 and settled in the city of Rostov-on-Don.

Such parallels between Yanukovych and Trump are being drawn not only because of their common association with Paul Manafort, adviser to the first, campaign chairman for the second, but also because Russian experts and politicians consider both of them to be openly pro-Kremlin. 

Tightly controlled Russian state-television programs constantly reiterate that Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine and gave Putin no reasons to even contemplate concessions in the run-up to the recent Normandy Four summit in Paris. 

State-television news shows use every opportunity to demoralize the Ukrainians with a set of talking points based on the U.S. president’s distaste for their beleaguered country. The host of Who’s Against on Rossiya-1, Dmitry Kulikov, along with pro-Kremlin guests, took repeated jabs at the Ukrainian panelist, boasting about the meeting between Trump and Lavrov. 

“There are no disagreements or contradictions between Trump and Russia,” argued Valery Korovin, director of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, appearing on the state-television channel Rossiya-24. Korovin insisted that the Democrats in Congress are the main antagonists in the relationship between Russia and the United States.

Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the Sunday news show Vesti Nedeli, accused the Democrats of joining forces with Hollywood, carrying out various conspiracies in order to undermine Trump’s popularity. Reporting for Vesti Nedeli from Washington, Mikhail Antonov used the term “the Cold War,” a fraught rhetorical twist to describe the clash between Trump and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

“Putin has expressed undisguised delight with the crusade led by Trump and Giuliani to whitewash Moscow’s interference in the U.S. elections.”

Related in World

Appearing on Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gusman noted: “The scariest part of our relationship with America is that the level of trust between our countries, our governments, our political powers, is precisely at zero.” 

“But not between the presidents,” chimed in the host. 

Rudy Giuliani, acting as the president’s personal attorney and determined to divert attention from Trump’s impeachment to former Vice President Biden’s alleged corruption, recently embarked on an “evidence-gathering” trip to Ukraine. Shortly after Giuliani’s return to the United States, Russian state television started airing video clips of his OAN (One America News Network) “documentary.” It purports to prove Kyiv’s meddling in U.S. elections and accuses former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch of “lying under oath in Congress to whitewash [Joe] Biden’s corruption.” Giuliani’s efforts on behalf of President Trump are bound to pay propaganda dividends for the Kremlin. 

Putin has expressed undisguised delight with the crusade led by Trump and Giuliani to whitewash Moscow’s interference in the U.S. elections and pin the blame on Kyiv. Last month, the Russian president smugly remarked “Thank God no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

Rossiya-1 reporter Valentin Bogdanov surmised that by now the majority of American Republicans believe that Ukraine interfered in the U.S. elections, with the show airing various clips from Fox News. 

The absurdity of such claims spawned by the Russian security services puts the hypocrisy of the Republicans on full display. The Kremlin, having argued for years that democracy is a sham and the West is devoid of morals and principles, can now showcase the GOP as its “Exhibit A.” 

Appearing on The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev in October, political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev argued that Trump has to destroy the Republican Party in order to secure his own long-term survival. The impeachment proceedings seemed to expedite the process, with the GOP’s self-immolation for the sake of its “Dear Leader.”

Prompted by the head-spinning swerve of the Republicans, Tucker Carlson of Fox News even argued that, in the Ukrainian conflict, the U.S. should be taking the side of Russia. Kremlin-controlled Russian state media doesn’t suffer from a similar lack of clarity.

Appearing on Soloviev’s show, Semyon Bagdasarov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, exclaimed: “The United States is the enemy. It is our enemy. It is a hostile state that aims to destroy our country... We are at war!”

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[AU64 10,122]

Fake news for the suckers in the Dem party who want to believe crap like that.     Sowing seeds of discords in the western democracies.....a Russian specialty and so many people willing to believe the disinformation campaigns.....including our own FBI and CIA leadership. 

[aubiefifty 18,230]

17 minutes ago, AU64 said:

Fake news for the suckers in the Dem party who want to believe crap like that.     Sowing seeds of discords in the western democracies.....a Russian specialty and so many people willing to believe the disinformation campaigns.....including our own FBI and CIA leadership. 

says the fox news boy and hannity suck up........

[augolf1716 21,966]

I keep telling you guys 

 

 

[AU64 10,122]

4 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

says the fox news boy and hannity suck up........

Almost never watch either one of them.

So if you have differences of opinion that is fine but this sounds like a kind of answer that a few people here respond when they are caught spouting nonsense.  That commentary you posted is such a bunch of BS that I can't believe you wasted your time reading it . And you complain about Hannity ?   my gosh that is rich.

So you believe these Russian propagandists?. Shame on you.

[aubiefifty 18,230]

8 hours ago, AU64 said:

Almost never watch either one of them.

So if you have differences of opinion that is fine but this sounds like a kind of answer that a few people here respond when they are caught spouting nonsense.  That commentary you posted is such a bunch of BS that I can't believe you wasted your time reading it . And you complain about Hannity ?   my gosh that is rich.

So you believe these Russian propagandists?. Shame on you.

well you are as bad a trump homer as anyone on this board. and i love the way all your news sources are sterling and everyone elses is not. the fact remains as soon as trump gave his shout outs they began their work against clinton. jesus dude he has been getting his pic taken with a known russian agent.as for hannity if you have not realized he is one of the biggest liars on cable then every single point you make becomes suspect. but then your fine christian pres lies his ass off daily so that seems to be the new norm. so at the end of the day you can accuse me of a lot of things but voting for trump and enabling his lying ass will never be on the list.

[homersapien 12,228]

16 hours ago, AU64 said:

Fake news for the suckers in the Dem party who want to believe crap like that.     Sowing seeds of discords in the western democracies.....a Russian specialty and so many people willing to believe the disinformation campaigns.....including our own FBI and CIA leadership. 

Sounds like you are part of their program.

Trump is working hand in hand with Putin - even if for slightly different reasons -  to undermine Ukraine.  "Crowdstrike" being the salient example  (see below).

Putin is playing Trump like a puppet, a useful fool.  His election interference succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and he is guaranteed to repeat in 2020.

 

CrowdStrike, Ukraine, and the DNC server: Timeline and facts

President Donald Trump, Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have all given credence to what cybersecurity experts and the US intelligence community deride as a baseless conspiracy theory pushed by Russia. That theory posits that Ukraine, and not Russia, was responsible for hacking into the networks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Kennedy quickly backtracked from blaming Ukraine for the DNC hack, but nonetheless left wiggle room to return to this contention. After admitting he was “wrong” to imply Ukraine and not Russia hacked the DNC, he went on to say, “There is a lot of evidence, proven and unproven — everyone’s got an opinion — that Ukraine did try to interfere, along with Russia and probably others, in the 2016 election.”

This promotion of a discredited theory by the highest government officials undermines efforts to deal with the consensus primary threat, security experts believe. It also casts doubt on established security forensic practices.

Where did the Ukraine election hacking theory originate?

Much has been written about this frustrating theory since President Trump released notes from a phone call he had with Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019, during which Trump told the newly elected Ukrainian president, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Last week, Trump spelled his belief in greater relief when talking with the hosts of TV show Fox and Friends. During a 53-minute interview, he said “A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine. They have the server, right? From the DNC ... they gave the server to CrowdStrike — or whatever it’s called — which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”

From the perspective of the cybersecurity community and some members of the intelligence community, the mention of CrowdStrike in the Zelensky call notes initially seemed out of the blue, a confusing non-sequitur. Certainly, Trump had mentioned the DNC server before his call with Zelensky.

At a joint press conference held with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018, Trump said, "We have groups wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven't they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that."

The FBI properly collected forensic evidence

Trump’s mention of the FBI’s failure to take the presumably single server was considered then and now a misleading accusation given that the DNC decommissioned more than 140 servers after the Russian hack, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented in his Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. Moreover, the FBI took images of those servers, engaged in memory dumps of connected devices and collected network logs, gathering enough forensic evidence to conduct their analysis.

Most experts argue that the FBI’s forensic methods produced superior evidence than would be obtained from unplugging the machine and hauling it away, which would have caused important evidence resident in memory to disappear. Finally, a physical DNC server hacked by the Russians now sits in the DNC basement next to the filing cabinet broken into by the Watergate burglars.

“CrowdStrike got a forensic image, which was provided to the FBI,” according to a Department of Defense cyber threat analyst who spoke with CSO. “Nobody needs the physical hardware anymore.”

Key facts about the DNC hack

Other contradictory facts surrounding Trump’s finger-pointing at Ukraine also appear to be incontrovertible.

1. CrowdStrike is an American company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, founded by three American citizens, all of whom came from cybersecurity company McAfee. The company’s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch was born in Moscow and escaped as a young teen with his family to the United States during the Soviet era. The company is publicly traded on the US Nasdaq exchange.
2. In May 2016, CrowdStrike’s incident response team was called by the DNC to respond to a breach and discovered two sophisticated Russian adversaries (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear) on the DNC network. CrowdStrike discussed its investigation in a blog post after the DNC went public with the attack. In December 2016, CrowdStrike released a more detailed report on its analysis.
3. In January 2017, a comprehensive assessment by the US intelligence community concluded, among other things, that Russian intelligence gained access to the DNC networks starting in July 2015 and maintained that access through March 2016.
4. In July 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought an indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign. The indictment offers specific and persuasive evidence on how Russia accomplished the breaches. It also outlines how that evidence was weaponized through the use of fake persona Guccifer 2.0, among other means of information dissemination.
5. The 448-page report by Mueller on his team’s investigation into Russian 2016 election interference, submitted to Attorney General William Barr on March 22, 2019, concluded that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and "violated US criminal law." The report offered fine-grained detail from the indictment and other work by the special counsel’s office as evidence that Russian military intelligence hacked into "the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)."

DNC hack related to earlier German Parliament hack

Intelligence agencies and cybersecurity specialists were tracking Russian threat groups long before the DNC hack, studying their fingerprints and monitoring their activities. Shortly after the DNC revealed it had been hacked, Matt Tait, a noted cybersecurity researcher formerly with Google Project Zero and now a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, highlighted a technical discovery by cybersecurity expert and author Thomas Rid linking Russia to the DNC server hack.

 

Rid discovered that the malware control servers used in the DNC hack are the same computers as the malware control servers used in the hack of the German Parliament years earlier. The German Bundestag hack was attributed to Russian intelligence by the head of Germany’s BfV intelligence.

An assault on objective reality

In the face of all this evidence, how do cybersecurity experts cope with what appears to be a rising tide against what they perceive to be objective reality? Most infosec professionals valiantly point out that the Ukraine theory is not based in truth. Or as a Department of Defense cyber threat analyst tells CSO, “The DNC server in Ukraine story is massive bull**** that makes no sense.”

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at Upguard, essentially said that in the current political environment, facts are the enemy of the truth, to quote Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “Every US intelligence agency has concluded that the GRU [Russian military intelligence] conducted, and is still conducting, a prolonged assault on the integrity and process of US elections. That's a fact,” he tells CSO.

“But due to the president of the United States openly stating that he does not agree and that the whole situation is a ‘hoax,’ the conclusions of those intel agencies suddenly become a fuzzy political thing,” he said.

Nicholas Weaver, a senior staff researcher focusing on computer security at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, tells CSO that “Russia's hacking of the DNC and Podesta is cloaked in only ‘implausible deniability.’  Those who want to convince themselves otherwise are simply willfully ignoring the mountains of evidence.  The only reason to do that is to admit the truth is to go up against the President's personal delusions.”

Those delusions, though, likely have as their origin Russian military intelligence itself. Buzzfeed took a deep look at the origins of the Ukraine conspiracy theory, noting that the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory first surfaced in Russian propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik News. The theory then caught fire in the fever swamps of 4chan and reddit and morphed into what it is today.

Former National Security Council official Fiona Hill laid the Ukraine conspiracy theory directly at Russia’s feet during her House impeachment hearing testimony. It is, she said, a “fictional narrative being propagated and perpetrated by the Russian security services themselves.”

In short, according to Upguard’s Vickery, “The ‘Ukraine did it’ story has zero evidence behind it other than vapid claims of the Russian government. I would love to see their evidence.”

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3482006/crowdstrike-ukraine-and-the-dnc-server-timeline-and-facts.html

 

Putin is laughing his ass off at Trump.

[AUFAN78 4,156]

8 hours ago, homersapien said:

 

Putin is playing Trump like a puppet, a useful fool. 

Putin is laughing his ass off at Trump

And Democrats. Do not dismiss that fact. To sow discord in our democracy was and is his goal. He succeeded.