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But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example
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Sarah Kendzior (Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America)
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The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
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The Russian spy agency had been ordered to make a bold move, hack the American elections, and engage in political warfare to elect Donald Trump President. Whether he knew it or not, Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Surprisingly, Clinton and her advisers believe that the most dramatic day of the campaign, October 7th, the day of the “Access Hollywood” tape, was a disaster for them. Early that day, the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Homeland Security released a statement concluding that the Russians had been attempting to interfere in the U.S. election process. But when, shortly afterward, the Washington Post released the tape—in which Donald Trump describes how he grabs women by the genitals and moves on them “like a bitch”—the D.H.S. statement was eclipsed. “My heart sank,” Jennifer Palmieri, a top Clinton adviser, recalled. “My first reaction was ‘No! Focus on the intelligence statement!’ The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was not good for Trump, obviously, but it was more likely to hurt him with the people who were already against him. His supporters had made their peace with his awful behavior.”
That evening, a third media vortex formed, as Julian Assange went to work. WikiLeaks began to dole out a new tranche of stolen e-mails. “It seemed clear to us that the Russians were again being guided by our politics,” Clinton said. “Someone was offering very astute political advice about how to weaponize information, how to convey it, how to use the existing Russian outlets, like RT or Sputnik, how to use existing American vehicles, like Facebook.
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David Remnick
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When asked at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran’s of America’s Commander-in-Chief’s forum about Putin Trump said “Well, he does have an 82 percent approval rating, according to the different pollsters, who, by the way, some of them are based right here.” Trump continued,
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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The President received a briefing days before WikiLeaks released the data to the public. The Russian Spy agency had been ordered to make a bold move, hack the American elections, and engage in political warfare to elect Donald Trump President. Whether he knew it or not Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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This is a real life spy thriller, happening in real time. It is my hope that The Plot to Hack America will inform the American electorate of how Russia executed a full scale political and cyber war on America, starting with Watergate 2.0, to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Nor are any of the statements or activities of the Trump campaign, no matter how distasteful, the behaviors or actions of clandestine agents of the Russian regime. However, even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals to intelligence professionals that the probability that Vladimir Putin has handled Trump and his associates, doing their bidding without even knowing it, is well within the KGB playbook. These Americans may be not be real agents of the Russian Federation but they may have unwittingly exposed themselves to a massive intelligence manipulation machine that, once involved, may be completely out of their control to extract themselves. The rhetoric election of 2016 reveals that damage has already been done.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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The fact that Russia can smile, deny, and at the same time conduct cyber and propaganda operations and still have Donald Trump beg them for cyber espionage assistance to hurt another American is unbelievable. If it reveals anything it proves the old KGB policy that loyalty to one’s country is elastic if the money is right. On
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”14
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated . . . In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.62
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were staunch advocates of arming the government of Ukraine in their fight with Russian separatists and Putin. During the Republican National Convention, the party platform committee proposed language to the effect that Ukraine needed U.S. weapons and NATO support to defend itself, in support of a long-held Republican position. Carter Page, now on the Trump campaign team, used to work in the Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, has personal investments in Gazprom, a Russian state oil conglomerate. He told Bloomberg that his investments have been hurt by the sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine.39 He has characterized the U.S. policy toward Russia as chattel slavery.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Carter Page joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016. In July 2016, Page went to Moscow and delivered a series of speeches on establishing a better relationship with Russia. His recommendations included easing of economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. As the Trump campaign talks about ending TPP and other trade deals, the unelected candidate’s spokespeople are out inviting business with Russian partners especially in industries that are known to have crime bosses and Russian mafia ties.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Trump gave the New York Times a wide-ranging interview in which he remarked that he saw a major change for the seventy-year old NATO alliance. He said that if Russia attacked any NATO nation, he would first consult and determine if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their aid.13 Trump set forth a policy of extortion never before heard or seen in American politics:
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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After being turned away by American banks due to bankruptcies, Trump has been getting considerable investments from Russian sources, including many with known criminal ties. At
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Then came that Friday, when WikiLeaks dumped twenty thousand Democratic Party emails in a move deliberately timed to disrupt our convention. The WikiLeaks emails—written by a wide range of DNC staff from the top leadership all the way down to the lowest employees—were carefully chosen to reveal senior members of the DNC staff speaking disrespectfully of Bernie and his supporters;
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Donna Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House)
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After CrowdStrike rebuilt the system, all of our staff had to learn new computers, new log-ins, new procedures, at the moment when their personal lives were being destroyed by these leaks. Then their bosses resigned because of the emails that were distributed by WikiLeaks, creating even more chaos and insecurity. All of this was on top of a contentious campaign. Our regular task force conference calls gave me a new appreciation of the dedication of our staff, who endured this incredibly stressful time.
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Donna Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House)
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The New York Times had set a new editorial policy stipulating that anything Trump said needed fact checking. Editorial writer Charles Blow wrote an article suggesting that if you support Trump, you support racism.44 Sure enough, within days the CYBER BEARS hacked the New York Times in what appears to be an attempt to gain information to discredit Blow and others. What it did was reveal that anyone who publically goes against Trump is subject to attack.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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Whether he knew it or not, Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.” This
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election)
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On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks released CIA Vault 7, a cache of classified CIA documents containing information about the spy agency’s hacking tools. Vault 7
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Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
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WikiLeaks revealed that Robert Mueller, as President Obama’s FBI Director, personally delivered a sample of highly enriched uranium to Moscow. Weapons grade uranium is a strategic commodity critical to our national security.
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Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
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President Trump would be a good fit at WikiLeaks.
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Steven Magee
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President Trump has a bright future at WikiLeaks!
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Steven Magee
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It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum.
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Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
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The Trump videotape was so compelling, “the silver bullet you never find” as one GOP official put it, that there was little anyone in the party could do to counter it. That is, until WikiLeaks posted Podesta’s e-mails, which included the elusive transcript of Hillary’s paid remarks to Goldman Sachs. Unlike a targeted leak, the nature of the WikiLeaks dump—two thousand private e-mails made available to all news outlets at once—meant that editors had to divert reporters to comb through them and find anything newsworthy.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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WikiLeaks began releasing Podesta’s stolen emails on October 7, 2016, less than one hour after a U.S. media outlet released video considered damaging to candidate Trump.
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The Washington Post (The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post)
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On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of John Podesta’s emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016.
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The Washington Post (The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post)
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On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of John Podesta’ s emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016.
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Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report: The Final Report of the Special Counsel into Donald Trump, Russia, and Collusion)
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there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well. For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun. We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow. The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence. Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions. Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team’s Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was
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Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
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For the Resistance, the only organizing principle is: Which position will be worse for Trump? Is Russia a colorful country with a noble history of giving socialism a try—or the most evil regime since Nazi Germany? Do I enjoy coarseness in popular culture—or am I a hothouse flower offended by dirty language? Am I enraged by the idea of the government secretly spying on American citizens—or is that a vital part of national security? Is it outrageous that private communications of the Democratic National Committee were publicly revealed (on WikiLeaks) during a campaign, or is it totally fantastic that a secret recording of Trump (the Access Hollywood tape) was blasted all over the world a month before the election? Is transparency in government something that I support, or do I think Trump has got to get off Twitter—a novel and independent thought that has occurred only to me? In that environment, we may give Trump more than the usual latitude if he acts as if he’s under siege. He is under siege. Is he unhinged? No, he’s hinged, fighting back against the left’s infantile, knee-jerk reaction to everything he does. Instead of governing, Trump is spending his presidency refuting questions like “Did you boil and eat a small child today?” It’s one ginned-up, fake story after another. And the people doing this are the most corrupt and conflicted in the history of the world—James Comey, Robert Mueller, Brian Williams, George Stephanopoulos, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and on and on.
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Ann Coulter (Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind)
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Did you ever hear about Trump supporters crashing Clinton or Sanders rallies? No. We didn’t resort to planting agitators at their events. But according to Project Veritas’s investigation, the Clinton campaign not only knew about the plants, they requested them. In the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails, there were allegedly references to “birddogging,” or the practice of having people sit in the front row at Trump events to stir things up, in full view of the cameras.
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Omarosa Manigault Newman (Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House)
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Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief, disputes this and says the leaks didn’t come from a “state party.” The agencies don’t believe him. The report suggests that WikiLeaks had become, in effect, a subbranch of Russian intelligence and its in-house publishing wing. In September WikiLeaks moved its hosting to Moscow.
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Luke Harding (Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win)
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THE HAMMER is the supercomputer system, the hardware, the exploit-throwing system or simply the framework. HAMR is a collection of exploits, applications that work off of the HAMMER framework. Montgomery designed exploits such as WILDTURKEY and MEDUSA that work in conjunction with THE HAMMER. WikiLeaks confirmed the existence of HAMMER in its CIA Vault 7 document drop on March
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Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
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March 7, 2017, just three days after the tweets from President Trump and The American Report, WikiLeaks dumped CIA
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Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
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Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely that the Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails somehow related to Hillary Clinton before WikiLeaks caused the dissemination of hacked Democratic National Committee emails to the media, beginning on July 22, 2016.
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Andrew C. McCarthy (Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency)
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Equally worrisome was the way Trump used information from Russian affiliated sites on the campaign trail. We didn’t think it was necessarily nefarious. He just amplified evidence to buttress a viewpoint, however wild or incredible, that he wanted to insert into the debate. But it troubled us that he was willing to use what amounted to Russian disinformation in pursuit of those ends. The information wasn’t coming from CNN or FOX. It was coming from places like RT and Sputnik. Outlets that were clearly closely affiliated with Russia. Similarly, we knew that WIKILEAKS had released material that the Russian government had stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By late summer 2016, the public did too, thanks to reports in the press. But Trump and his campaign, didn’t seem to care. The stolen material was helpful to them and he mentioned it, a lot. Over the course of 2016, Trump made reference to WIKILEAKS over 135 times on the campaign trail. From a counterintelligence perspective, it was problematic that a presidential candidate would use material stolen by a hostile foreign adversary for his own political gain. From a patriotic perspective, I wasn’t just worried about a candidate relying on actors outside the US to help his presidential prospects, I was repulsed.
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Peter Strzok (Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump)
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The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign. The Trump Campaign showed interest in the WikiLeaks releases and, in the summer and fall of 2016, [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter] After [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter] WikiLeaks's first Clinton-related release [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter], the Trump Campaign stayed in contact [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter] about WikiLeaks's activities. The investigation was unable to resolve [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter] WikiLeaks's release of the stolen Podesta emails on October 7, 2016, the same day a video from years earlier was published of Trump using graphic language about women.
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Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report)
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According to Gates, by the late summer of 2016, the Trump Campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.207 [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter]208 [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter] while Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport. [REDACTED: Harm to Ongoing Matter], shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.209
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Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report)
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Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted on July 23. “Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from WikiLeakes [sic], really vicious. RIGGED.” The Russians had to be cheering. An American presidential nominee was using his massive media microphone to amplify their work. Score.
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Amanda Carpenter (Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us)
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Fall 2016. On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of John Podesta's emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016. The FBI and other U.S. government institutions were at the time continuing their investigation of suspected Russian government efforts to interfere in the presidential election. That same day, October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint public statement "that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." Those "thefts" and the "disclosures" of the hacked materials through online platforms such as WikiLeaks, the statement continued, "are intended to interfere with the US election process.
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The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
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Those “thefts” and the “disclosures” of the hacked materials through online platforms such as WikiLeaks, the statement continued, “are intended to interfere with the US election process.
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Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report: The Final Report of the Special Counsel into Donald Trump, Russia, and Collusion)