Daily Check-in 02/16/2018

Friday, February 16, 2018.

13 RUSSIANS, 3 COMPANIES INDICTED BY SPECIAL COUNSELOR MUELLER

Special Counselor Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians and 3 Russian entities for their actions in to influence the 2016 Presidential Election.

This indictment lays out the who, how, where, what, when, and why of the Russian Influence Operation.  It describes how they started this op back in 2014, which coincides with the Ukrainian Revolution.

The Russians used stolen identities to bypass security measures in PayPal, and used those accounts to pay for advertisements on Facebook and other social media sites.  They also paid for expenses for the Trump Campaign, even at low-level like parades.

Here are some excerpts from the indictments.  They can be found Here, at justice.gov.

Defendants’ operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign”) and disparaging Hillary Clinton. Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities. Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing as U.S. grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

There has been a lot of talk about the Russians organizing opposing rallies, and using friendly sources in the U.S. as feet on the ground.  This confirms it.

In order to carry out their activities to interfere in U.S. political and electoral processes without detection of their Russian affiliation, Defendants conspired to obstruct the lawful functions of the United States government through fraud and deceit, including by making expenditures in connection with the 2016 U.S. presidential election without proper regulatory disclosure; failing to register as foreign agents carrying out political activities within the United States; and obtaining visas through false and fraudulent statements.

So, we have Russians giving money to the Trump Campaign, and several FARA violations as well.  Not to mention, lying on an entry visa.

Defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.

Yes.  Attack everyone except Trump. and Bernie.  I mentioned in Trump vs. Bernie how this was Putin’s goal for the U.S. Presidential Election.

On or about February 10, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators internally circulated an outline of themes for future content to be posted to ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts. Specialists were instructed to post content that focused on “politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump–we support them).”

That quote is interesting.  That sounds like a direct quote from an internal email or some other type of surveillance.  Remember, The Dutch Had Eyes on Cozy Bear.

 From at least April 2016 through November 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, while concealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation through false personas, began to produce, purchase, and post advertisements on U.S. social media and other online sites expressly advocating for the election of then-candidate Trump or expressly opposing Clinton. Defendants and their co-conspirators did not report their expenditures to the Federal Election Commission, or register as foreign agents with the U.S. Department of Justice. The political advertisements included the following:

• April 6, 2016 “You know, a great number of black people support us saying that #HillaryClintonlsNotMyPresident”
• April 7, 2016 “I say no to Hillary Clinton / I say no to manipulation”
• April 19, 2016 “JOIN our #HillaryClintonForPrison2016”
• May 10, 2016 “Donald wants to defeat terrorism … Hillary wants to sponsor it”
• May 19, 2016 “Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment!”
• May 24, 2016 “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote”
• June 7, 2016 “Trump is our only hope for a better future!”
• June 30, 2016 “#Never Hillary #Hillary F orPrison #Hillary4 Prison #HillaryForPrison2016 #Trump2016 #Trump #Trump4President”
• July 20, 2016 “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”
• August 4, 2016 “Hillary Clinton has already committed voter fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.”
• August 10, 2016 “We cannot trust Hillary to take care of our veterans!”
• October 14, 2016 “Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists.”
• October 19, 2016 “Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is.”

I have personally seen several of those ads on Facebook.  Plus, this mentions that coconspirators helped pay for these ads.  The Russians had help.

To pay for the political advertisements, Defendants and their co-conspirators established various Russian bank accounts and credit cards, often registered in the names of fictitious U.S. personas created and used by the ORGANIZATION on social media. Defendants and their coconspirators also paid for other political advertisements using PayPal accounts.

PayPal.  This is the first time I’ve talked about PayPal, but it won’t be the last.  EBay announced that they’ll be cutting ties with PayPal in 2020.  Not only that, but PayPal co-founder and Trump enabler Peter Theil is leaving Silicon Valley.

Beginning in at least 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used, without lawful authority, the social security numbers, home addresses, and birth dates of real U.S. persons without their knowledge or consent. Using these means of stolen identification, Defendants and their coconspirators opened accounts at a federally insured U.S. financial institution (“Bank I”)

Louise Mensch reported last may about Silicon Valley Bank, a subsidiary of Alfa Bank, being under FISA investigation.  They could have used any bank in the United States, but there’s this little thing called the Patriot Act.  Part of it requires that all new bank accounts created require proof of human beingness and a physical presence. This prevents rampant fraud and money laundering.  The Russians would need feet on the ground to pull this off, and there’s just enough here to make me think SVB was used to set up the American Accounts.

Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased credit card and bank account numbers from online sellers for the unlawful purpose of evading security measures at PayPal, which used account numbers to verify a user’s identity. Many of the bank account numbers purchased by Defendants and their co-conspirators were created using the stolen identities of real U.S. persons. After purchasing the accounts, Defendants and their co-conspirators submitted these bank account numbers to PayPal.

See “California Man” below.

On or about August 18, 2016, the real “Florida for Trump” Facebook account responded to
the false U.S. persona “Matt Skiber” account with instructions to contact a member of the Trump
Campaign (“Campaign Official l “) involved in the campaign’s Florida operations and provided Campaign Official 1’s email address at the campaign domain donaldtrump.com. On approximately the same day, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the email address of a false U.S. persona, joshmilton024@gmail.com, to send an email to Campaign Official 1 at that donaldtrump.com email account, which read in part:

“Hello [Campaign Official l], [w]e are organizing a state-wide event in Florida on August, 20 to support Mr. Trump. Let us introduce ourselves first. “Being Patriotic” is a grassroots conservative online movement trying to unite people offline. . . . [W]e gained a huge lot of followers and decided to somehow help Mr. Trump get elected. You know, simple yelling on the Internet is not enough. There should be real action. We organized rallies in New York before. Now we’re focusing on purple states such as Florida.” The email also identified thirteen “confirmed locations” in Florida for the rallies and requested the campaign provide “assistance in each location.”

Here’s more proof that the Russians were trying to coordinate their events with Trump’s campaign. The group asked Florida for Trump for help in location scouting.

On or about August 24, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators updated an internal ORGANIZATION list of over 100 real U.S. persons contacted through ORGANIZATION controlled false U.S. persona accounts and tracked to monitor recruitment efforts and requests. The list included contact information for the U.S. persons, a summary of their political views, and activities they had been asked to perform by Defendants and their co-conspirators.

If some random person in the Summer of 2016 reached out from Heart of Texas, Blacktivists, or one of the other groups mentioned, and asked you to recruit for their cause, congratulations.  You’ve been had by the Russians.  And, you’re probably under surveillance by the USIC as well.

 Use of U.S. Computer Infrastructure

To hide their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, Defendants and their co- conspirators—particularly POLOZOV and the ORGANIZATION’s IT department—purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up virtual private networks (“VPNs”). Defendants and their co-conspirators connected from Russia to the U.S.-based infrastructure by way of these VPNs and conducted activity inside the United States— including accessing online social media accounts, opening new accounts, and communicating with real U.S. persons—while masking the Russian origin and control of the activity.

Defendants and their co-conspirators also registered and controlled hundreds of web-based email accounts hosted by U.S. email providers under false names so as to appear to be U.S. persons and groups. From these accounts, Defendants and their co-conspirators registered or linked to online social media accounts in order to monitor them; posed as U.S. persons when requesting assistance from real U.S. persons; contacted media outlets in order to promote activities inside the United States; and conducted other operations, such as those set forth below.

Now we get to the IT side of things.  The Russians, with help here in the United States, purchased server space here, as well as a VPN connection that terminates in this country.  My guess is that these servers were located out west, like Arizona or California.  I’ve seen quite a few suspicious “news” sites on Facebook that Whois’ed to the same server farms out there.  They looked identical to sites from St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Crimea.  On top of this, they also used email services based in the United States to make these social media platforms.

Destruction of Evidence

In order to avoid detection and impede investigation by U.S. authorities of Defendants’ operations, Defendants and their co-conspirators deleted and destroyed data, including emails, social media accounts, and other evidence of their activities.

1. Beginning in or around June 2014, and continuing into June 2015, public reporting began to identify operations conducted by the ORGANIZATION in the United States. In response, Defendants and their co-conspirators deleted email accounts used to conduct their operations.
2. Beginning in or around September 2017, U.S. social media companies, starting with Facebook, publicly reported that they had identified Russian expenditures on their platforms to fund political and social advertisements. Facebook’s initial disclosure of the Russian purchases occurred on or about September 6, 2017, and included a statement that Facebook had “shared [its] findings with US authorities investigating these issues.”
3. Media reporting on or about the same day as Facebook’s disclosure referred to Facebook working with investigators for the Special Counsel’s Office of the U.S. Department of Justice, which had been charged with investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
4. Defendants and their co-conspirators thereafter destroyed evidence for the purpose of impeding the investigation. On or about September 13, 2017, KAVERZINA wrote in an email to a family member: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” KAVERZINA further wrote, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.”

As soon as Facebook shared their findings on the activity came out, they were literally destroying the evidence of their activities when one of them emailed a family member saying that she was busy with that.  That also says that we somehow had eyes on them.

Daily Check-In 10/17/2017 has a write-up of the boss of the Internet Research Agency.  He’s been called “Putin’s Chef”, so the use of Concord Catering in the indictment kind of makes sense now.

These indictments are important for several reasons.

• They establish specific crimes against the United States performed by Russian nationals.
• This shows directly that the Russians wanted Trump to win the election.
• It shows that Americans helped in this matter.
• Any action taken against the Special Counselor or Rod Rosenstein will be seen as helping Russia AND Obstruction of Justice.
• The timing comes right after the IC heads told Congress that Russia attacked us and will attack us again.
• It gives Congress time to either put election reforms and protections in place, or show their true colors.

Are these Russians going to get extradited to the United States?  Not unless they leave Russia.  Remember a few weeks ago when a a Russian hacker was captured on vacation in Spain and sent here?  If any of them try to leave Russia, they stand a good chance of getting stopped, detained, and shipped here to face trial.

Now, the Americans that helped them are a different story.

 

“CALIFORNIA MAN” RICHARD PINEDO PLEADS GUILTY

About an hour after the indictments dropped and the Trump supporters twisted themselves into knots saying “See, no Americans were involved!”, Mueller busts out a guilty plea for Richard Pinedo.

Richard ran a company called Auction Essentials, where he would sell bank account numbers on the dark web to anyone who had the money.  He would either set up the accounts himself, or buy them from someone else.  Richard would sell these accounts, and ask no questions.

It turns out that he sold some of these bank accounts to the Russians in the indictment, and they were used to bypass the PayPal verification system.  Anyone can set up an account with them, but to have it listed in the U.S., they require it being linked to a U.S. bank account.

I’ve never liked PayPal, and never will.  It’s too easy to scam people with it by reversing charges without proof, and the fraud protection sucked.  But they were the first “Internet Currency”, and without them, Elon Musk wouldn’t have launched an electric car into space.

There is a Richard Pinedo, of Ventura County, California that belongs to the Ventura County Tea Party.  I do not know yet if this is the same person or not, but I would not be surprised in the slightest at this point.

 

HOW TRUMP USED INTERMEDIARIES TO PAY OFF HIS AFFAIRS

Now that I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Russia fucking America, let me talk about Trump fucking young women.  More to the point, how his friends covered it up.

Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker broke one hell of a story about a young woman in the Adult Entertainment Industry that allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump just a few months after his wife gave birth to their son Barron, and how about a decade later, this woman was paid into silence.

No, it’s not Stormy Daniels.

It’s former Playmate of the Year Karen McDougall.

Their stories are almost the exact same.  They fucked Trump, he offered to pay them, they said no, it went on for a while, then they split up.  Years later, right before the election, a surrogate for Trump offers to pay the women if they’ll keep their mouth shut.

For Karen, that surrogate is David Pecker, owner of American Media, which owns the National Enquirer.  He bought her story for $150,000, promised her a platform for articles, and a couple other things.

Instead of publishing, Pecker buried the story.

Karen told her story, even at the risk of legal action, because she doesn’t want other women to go through what she’s gone through.

If you’re wondering who Ronan Farrow is, Ask Harvey Weinstein.

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

FCC CHAIRMAN AJIT PAI UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR POSSIBLY COLLUDING WITH SINCLAIR BROADCASTING

FACEBOOK TAKES DOWN NALVANY VIDEO

SCHIFF: HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS PROOF OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION

 

RUMOR MILL: THE MEDIA CONSPIRACY

While most of Twitter and Reddit are talking about what’s going on today, I ran across a very interesting thread by Lincoln’s Bible.  He’s the one who mentioned a few weeks back about a lot of Anti-Trump movies in the pipeline in Hollywood.  This came out earlier in the day, right after the Ronan Farrow story broke.  It answered a question I had  a while back during the election.

We know that Trump is an asshole, a misogynist and a racist.  The Billy Bush Pussygate tape showed the first two definitively, and there are strong rumors of the last from several people that worked on The Apprentice.  Among these include Tom Arnold and George Takei.  Before the election, there was a large outcry for the behind-the-scenes tapes to leak out showing Trump dropping the N-word.  But the owner of that show, Mark Burnett, refused to release anything.

Why?  Why would he not do what was being seen as a patriotic duty and release information vital to the fate of the country?

Lincoln’s Bible answered that question…they be mobbed up.

Burnett and Pecker hold power over Trump, and are both fond of Vladimir Putin.  They hold undue leverage over Trump, and others in society.  Burnett made half the country think Donald Trump was what a good boss should be, and Pecker has been running Pro-Trump or Anti-Democrat stories on his tabloid rag for about two years.

I’m not sure where this is leading, but it’ll be interesting.  Not necessarily good, but interesting.

 

That’s it for today, I think.

So, what happens now?  I don’t know.  I still haven’t heard a confirmation that Rick Gates has signed his flipping paperwork, but that’ll probably happen Tuesday when the courts open.  There’s a reason the Russian Indictments came out today.  As I said, this makes it nearly impossible to fire Robert Mueller before he lays out Obstruction of Justice charges.  The end game is not Obstruction, but it will be the low-hanging fruit that gets Trump and Pence out of office.  Once they’re out, the Mueller can go for the kill.

Corruption.  Abuse of Power.  RICO.  Human Trafficking.  Money Laundering.  Espionage.  Treason.

I don’t how fast things will go from here on out.  I think these just bought several months, but I think things will accelerate from here on out.

Why?  I don’t know, I just got a feeling that things will go on a little faster from here on out, until we get to indictments against Trump for Obstruction of Justice.

Also, I’ve learned over the past couple years to always bet on stupid when Trump is involved.  Rule 45:  Out of all possible outcomes, pick the dumbest one available.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur