Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Let’s finish the job.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Optimism opens the door to great things.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let there be snark.

“woke” is the new caravan.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Tonight’s Russia News

Tonight’s Russia News

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The Washington Post tonight says that a junior member of the Trump campaign team, George Papadopoulos, was trying to set up a meeting with Russians back in Spring 2016, not always to the agreement of other team members. But he seems to have kept trying.

But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted. Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials. Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal from Papadopoulos for Trump to do so.

Who was Papadopoulos, and why was he so eager to set up a meeting with the Russians? What could they do for the campaign? Papadopoulos claimed to be an intermediary for the Russian government. If I were his boss in the campaign, I would have had some questions about that.

The Don Jr. – Kushner – Manafort meeting with the Russians was June 9, and there were other interactions between campaign personnel during the summer. There seems to be no connection between Papadopoulos and those meetings, but there’s not a lot of information here.

The leaks keep coming. This looks like a part of a Russian campaign to get into the Trump campaign. It would not be surprising if they were working on multiple levels.

Seems to me that we need to know who all these people are that walked into the Trump campaign off the street.

The Russian International Affairs Council is mentioned toward the end of the article as one more point of contact for Papadopoulos. I looked at their discussion board on LinkedIn for a while a couple of years back. It had one of the weirdest combinations of blind ideologues and just plain goofy people that I’ve seen, along with a moderator who kept appealing for reasonable discussion. I didn’t spend much time on it.

 

 

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    TenguPhule

    This looks like a part of a Russian campaign to get into the Trump campaign. It would not be surprising if they were working on multiple levels.

    Expected at this point.

  2. 2.

    TenguPhule

    It had one of the weirdest combinations of blind ideologues and just plain goofy people that I’ve seen, along with a moderator who kept appealing for reasonable discussion.

    Not going to touch that one with a ten foot pole.

  3. 3.

    David Anderson

    I think the most important part of this story, is that senior campaign officials quickly sent out the word that this was not right. These Warnings went to high and low officials in the campaign. And they occurred before the June meeting. They knew!

  9. 9.

    NotMax

    The Russian Tea Room: the place for go for sturgeon in season.

    The Russian ‘T’ Room: the place to go for immersion in treason.

  10. 10.

    JPL

    Trump is identifying the bad people

    Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied…truly bad people!

  13. 13.

    Adam L Silverman

    @David Anderson: Penetration at all levels:
    http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/14/obama-russia-election-interference-241547?lo=ap_f1

    As early as 2014, the administration received a report that quoted a well-connected Russian source as saying that the Kremlin was building a disinformation arm that could be used to interfere in Western democracies. The report, according to an official familiar with it, included a quote from the Russian source telling U.S. officials in Moscow, “You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe … and in the U.S., Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places.”

    That report was circulated among the National Security Council, intelligence agencies and the State Department via secure email and cable in the spring of 2014 as part of a larger assessment of Russian intentions in Ukraine, the official said.

  14. 14.

    Fr33d0m

    intermediary for the Russian government

    How many intermediaries for foreign governments (rivals or otherwise) existed in any campaign over history? I’m betting this is the only one

  15. 15.

    Roger Moore

    @David Anderson:
    My guess is that they were already either in touch with or trying to get in touch with Russia, but doing it as quietly as possible. The last thing they wanted was for some ham-handed underling making obvious what they wanted to keep quiet.

  16. 16.

    PST

    It may have been pointed out on other threads already, but it is nice to see that in the Gallup tracking poll, Trump hit new highs of disapproval and lows of approval today, breaking 60 percent and 35 percent, respectively, for the first time. Since it’s a rolling three-day average, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new record tomorrow. I think this weekend’s events may have knocked some sense into a few supporters who don’t identify as white supremacists but have somehow remained in denial about the nature of Trumpism.

  19. 19.

    dmsilev

    @JPL: He’s playing to his base (i.e. racists). “See, I’m really with you; I just tried to shovel some BS at those FakeNews guys to shut them up”.

  21. 21.

    dmsilev

    @PST: I saw someone make an interesting point about the Gallup number, specifically the disapproval (61%). Obama, Clinton, HW Bush, Reagan, and Carter never reached a disapproval that high. W Bush did, but it took him six or seven years, including Iraq and Katrina. Trump managed it in six or seven _months_.

  26. 26.

    trollhattan

    Well now, COINTELPRO?

    The Department of Justice has requested information on visitors to a website used to organize protests against President Trump, the Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said in a blog post published on Monday.

    Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, said that it has been working with the Department of Justice for several months on the request, which believes goes too far under the Constitution.

    DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day.

    “That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”

    When contacted, the Justice Department directed The Hill to the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.

    The company is currently challenging the request. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in Washington.

  30. 30.

    MomSense

    It’s a common name but I can’t help notice it’s the same name as the head of the military junta that ruled Greece from ’67 to ’74.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: There really isn’t one. Except, perhaps, more people are hearing of them doing great things with Frederick Douglas, more and more.

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Princess: One thing he doesn’t mention is that the Center for the National Interest is a long standing Russian foreign policy promotion front in DC.

  40. 40.

    Adam L Silverman

    More Manafort:

    CREAM TEAM
    Paul Manafort Sought $850 Million Deal With Putin Ally and Alleged Gangster
    Trump’s one-time campaign chair has a history of unorthodox real estate deals. But this may have been the wildest of all.

    LACHLAN MARKAY
    SPENCER ACKERMAN
    08.14.17 8:00 PM ET
    Paul Manafort partnered on an $850 million New York real estate deal with an ally of Vladimir Putin and a Ukrainian moneyman whom the Justice Department recently described as an “organized crime member.”
    That’s according a 2008 memo written by Rick Gates, Manafort’s business partner and fellow alumnus of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In it, Gates enthused about finalizing with the financing necessary to acquire New York’s louche Drake Hotel.
    Two former federal prosecutors told The Daily Beast that the hotel deal was likely to be an item of focus for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin.

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