RT and let's keep this trending until integrity is restored to the oval office. #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachTrump

#ImpeachTheMF

— Kit Williamson‏  @kitwilliamson

Moscow (eTruePolitics) – “It’s a new world and I think our dictionary should reflect the immense changes going on now,” Russian president Putin said in announcing the addition of the noun ‘trumpski’ to the official dictionary of the Russian language.

“This is a GREAT HONOR,” said current U.S. president Donald Trump in a late night tweet.

Perspective | Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal.

Shell companies put figures from Putin’s Mafia into Trump Tower. Should that be worrying?

www.washingtonpost.com

Collusion or not, President Trump and the Russians are thick as thieves.

What I mean is that for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.

Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long insisted that American democracy itself is corrupt. Under his aegis, the Russians have methodically studied various components of the American body politic — campaign finance, our legal system, social media and perhaps especially the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find.

As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” 

They had long and deep relationships. According to a tape recording made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s.

Over the next three decades, dozens of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other white-collar professionals came together to facilitate such transactions on a massive scale. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the United States since the 1980s, were shifted “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

• David Bogatin
• Jacob (Yacov) Bogatin
• Semion Mogilevich *** Russian Mafia Boss
• Vyacheslav Ivankov
• Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov

The Russians Are Getting Heavily Involved In The Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Fight

The Russians are always looking for ways to divide and weaken America, and Republicans have handed them a new one by pushing the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

www.politicususa.com

The Russians are using the Kavanaugh nomination to weaken America. The Russians don’t really care who is on the Supreme Court in the United States. They share a common goal with Trump, and that is to keep the United States fighting with itself and weak. Trump and his horrible Supreme Court nominee are useful tools toward the overall goal of divided USA.

The Republican Party has become the Putin party, and Russian efforts to meddle in US national affairs aren’t limited to elections. Brett Kavanaugh had already damaged the country before he was even up for a vote to be confirmed.

The Hamilton 68 dashboard, which attempts to track Russian influence operations on Twitter, is charting a lot of Kavanaugh activity right now. https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org

Facebook appears Russia’s biggest useful idiot in Vladimir Putin’s bold war

Well, Mark, you moved fast and broke things. Now, how are you going to fix it?

www.thedrum.com

To put it simply: Brad Parscale, the digital director for Trump’s presidential campaign, has said Facebook was the social platform that was most responsible for his surprise election victory.

While Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified in November at US Congressional hearings alongside representatives of Google and Twitter on Russian election interference, Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s investors were probably lighting cigars with $100 bills back at their offices. The social network announced a 47% increase in quarterly revenue to $10.1bn at around the same time as the hearings.

Facebook started with Zuckerberg’s famous motto: ‘Move fast and break things.’ But anyone who encourages people to destroy things with such reckless disregard is an immature brat at best or a dangerous psychopath at worst.

Russia pulled down the pants of the social media and tech industries -- to the detriment of the entire western world. I wonder how social media startups and VCs feel today when they get a taste of their own medicine by someone else who moved fast and broke things. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin should co-present at the next TechCrunch Disrupt.

Instead, companies such as Facebook that are dominated by software engineers have always put blind faith in data and algorithms even though data can always be hacked and algorithms can always be manipulated. 

Now, we see where that road lies. As a character in a 2017 episode of the US satirical cartoon South Park stated, Zuckerberg created a platform that provides a monetary incentive for people -- or governments -- to spread misinformation.

Did a Russian Photographer Smuggle a Surveillance Device Into the White House?

Trump thumbed his nose at the American people on Monday by meeting with Russian officials as suspicions about his campaign ties to the country are at their peak. Adding insult to injury, the White House didn’t allow any U.S. press to be present. But Russian press got a front row seat in the Oval Office and former intelligence officials worry that they may have smuggled in surveillance equipment.

gizmodo.com|Rhett Jones

According to a report from the Washington Post, the administration was surprised to learn that the photographer wasn’t just Lavrov’s personal photographer but is also a journalist for Russian state media outlet Tass.

“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” an administration official said.

Someone on Twitter decided to ask former deputy CIA director David S. Cohen if it was “a good idea to let a Russian gov photographer & all their equipment into the Oval Office.” Cohen’s response was simply, “No, it was not.”

Officials from the White House insisted that there was no way a Russian photographer could smuggle any devices inside his equipment. Their reasoning was that he “had to go through the same screening as a member of the U.S. press going through the main gate to the [White House] briefing room.” But the Post’s intelligence sources say that the “standard screening for White House visitors would not necessarily detect a sophisticated espionage device.”

Putin says those behind Trump dossier are 'worse than prostitutes'

Russian president dismisses alleged links between US president-elect and Moscow and says sex claims are ‘obvious fake’

www.theguardian.com|Shaun Walker

“This is an adult, and a man who for years organised beauty contests and spoke with the most beautiful women in the world. I can hardly believe that he ran off to meet with our girls of low social morals. Although of course ours are the best in the world,” said Putin.

“The people who order these fakes which are being spread against the president-elect of America and use them in the political battle are worse than prostitutes. They have no moral limits,”