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Russian Bribery Plot Preceded Obama Uranium Deal

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Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill. (Read more from “Russian Bribery Plot Preceded Obama Uranium Deal” HERE)

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The Memo That a Russian Lawyer Took to the Trump Tower Meeting Is Finally Out

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A four-page memo that has been a central focus of the Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian attorney has finally been released.

Foreign Policy magazine published the document, which Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya took into the June 9, 2016 meeting, which was arranged by Trump Jr. and attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The document, and the meeting, have become a focus for congressional and federal investigators looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. The meeting has raised questions about collusion because Trump Jr. accepted it after an acquaintance contacted him promising that a “Russian government attorney” would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton . . .

Veselnitskaya’s memo, which Foreign Policy obtained from a Russian news station that recently interviewed the lawyer, suggests that little information about Clinton was provided to the Trump campaign. (Read more from “The Memo That a Russian Lawyer Took to the Trump Tower Meeting Is Finally Out” HERE)

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Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets

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The investigations into Russia’s role in the 2016 election are threatening to pry the lid off tech companies’ most prized possessions: the secret inner workings of their online platforms.

As the probes unfold into social media’s role in spreading misinformation, U.S. lawmakers are beginning to show an interest in the mechanics of everything from how Facebook weights news items to how Google ranks search results. The questions, which echo European regulators’ interventionist approach to technology, are a stark change for Silicon Valley companies accustomed to deference from U.S. officials on how they run their operations.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned Sept. 24 about “the use of Facebook’s algorithms and the way it tends to potentially reinforce people’s informational bias.” He added, “This is a far broader issue than Russia, but one that we really need to know more about.”

A source close to the Senate Intelligence Committee said staff investigators are eager to learn whether Russian elements used Twitter to boost disinformation in Google’s search rankings. While Google has previously said it uses Twitter and Facebook links in calculating search rankings for content, it hasn’t revealed specifics on how social media mentions factor into its algorithm. Google is famously closemouthed about how its immensely valuable search engine works, only parceling out small clues over the years.

Critics of the tech industry say the time has come for the companies to let policymakers take a closer look. (Read more from “Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets” HERE)

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Donald Trump Just Retaliated Against Russia. Here’s What He Did.

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A common narrative presented by opponents of President Donald Trump is that he is, at best, too friendly with Russia, and at worst, actively working with the adversarial nation to further his own personal or business interests.

If that was ever the case, it doesn’t appear to be so anymore, as the Trump administration announced Thursday that Moscow will be required to shut down diplomatic posts in several major American cities in a continued tit-for-tat of Cold War-esque maneuvering between the two nations . . .

Why is the Trump administration doing this? Russian President Vladmir Putin ordered the expulsion of more than 700 U.S. diplomats after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia in July. Those sanctions were the result of Russian interference in the 2016 election, human rights violations, the annexation of Crimea and military operations in the Ukraine. (Read more from “Donald Trump Just Retaliated Against Russia. Here’s What He Did.” HERE)

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Russia Says War Games Are ‘Purely Defensive’

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The Russian military dismissed Western concerns over a major war game that has underscored Cold War-style tensions in the Baltic Sea region, as the U.S. further beefed up its presence there.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Alexander Fomin said Tuesday the joint-Russian-Belarusian exercises, which will take place in September partly on Belarus’s border with NATO members Lithuania and Poland, would be of “a purely defensive nature,” testing the ability of troops to respond to a hypothetical adversary.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials have warned the maneuvers, planned amid a military buildup in the region by the alliance and Russia, could serve as a screen for Russia to deploy more military equipment and heighten the risk of an accident or miscalculation that could touch off a crisis.

The U.S. has deployed a tank brigade to Central and Eastern Europe, part of a larger deterrent force covering NATO’s eastern flank. On Tuesday, it sent seven F-15C Eagle fighter planes from a base in the U.K. to Lithuania to take over NATO’s Baltic air policing mission from Poland, a larger-than-normal deployment of aircraft. (Read more from “Russia Says War Games Are ‘Purely Defensive'” HERE)

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The Other Russia Story We Need to Talk About Is Adoption

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The Russian government uses orphans as political pawns.

The story of thousands of innocent Russian children in need of adoption has been lost amid the daily flood of news about Russia and the hyped-up debate over whether “adoption” is some kind of code for “sanctions” when it comes to high-level Russian-American meetings . . .

Their plight stems from the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russia in response to human rights abuses by Russian officials. President Vladimir Putin retaliated by imposing a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children.

For years until then, American families had labored through an onerous process to adopt an average of 3,000 Russian children annually.

But the cold-hearted action of Putin, labeled a dictator by many of his critics, dramatically decreased the chance for thousands of orphans to have a family and left hundreds of Americans, who were in the midst of the adoption process, in complete despair. (Read more from “The Other Russia Story We Need to Talk About Is Adoption” HERE)

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Hersh: Here’s Who Invented Russia ‘Collusion’

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The entire Russia collusion story was a fiction made up by intelligence chiefs who lied about President Trump, and lied to President Obama and the media, according to a person on a just-released audio recording who is almost certainly legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Further, the person who recorded the audio is almost certainly financier Ed Butowsky, who hired private investigator Rod Wheeler to investigate the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last July.

Wheeler filed a defamation lawsuit against Butowsky and Fox News on Tuesday over a story the network retracted about the investigation.

The text of Wheeler’s lawsuit described a conversation between Hersh and Butowsky in which the reporter said: “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy.”

WND did some digging and discovered those identical words appear on the audio recording, apparently verifying they were spoken by Hersh and taped by Butowsky. Judging by a report in the Washington Post, the conversation happened during, or before, February. (Read more from “Hersh: Here’s Who Invented Russia ‘Collusion'” HERE)

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Russia Wasn’t the Only Foreign Country to Target Clinton Campaign Emails

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North Korean hackers attempted to infiltrate the Hillary Clinton campaign’s email systems, according to a report circulated within the campaign last year.

That’s according to an interesting report published by CyberScoop, a cybersecurity website.

According to CyberScoop, North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) attempted to break into Clinton campaign systems by targeting a group of outside advisers working on East Asia policy for the campaign.

Using an attack method known as spearphishing, which attempts to wrangle users’ passwords, the hackers were able to infiltrate the email accounts of outside Clinton campaign advisers who work for an unnamed Washington, D.C. think tank. (Read more from “Russia Wasn’t the Only Foreign Country to Target Clinton Campaign Emails” HERE)

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Bombshell Dropped on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ Mantra

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. . .How far has Russia fallen off the media’s radar? So far, that, in a jaw-dropping role-reversal, it is actually the White House now pushing the story on the media . . .

At the end of Thursday’s daily press briefing, a visibly bemused White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders chided reporters, “You guys love to talk about Russia, and there’s been nonstop coverage. And the one day that there might have been a question on Russia, there wasn’t.”

So she raised the topic herself, noting, “[T]here was public testimony that further discredited the phony dossier that’s been the source of so much of the fake news and conspiracy theories. And we learned that the firm that produced it was also being paid by the Russians.”

That revelation didn’t just chill mainstream media interest. The Democrats also suddenly stopped uttering their Russia mantra.

That’s because Thursday’s testimony indicated the entire Russia collusion story may be turned on its head in fantastic fashion. (Read more from “Bombshell Dropped on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ Mantra” HERE)

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Russian Leader: US Isn’t Strong Enough to Be Perceived as a Threat to Russia

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Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, gave a rare interview to a US outlet that aired [this week]. In speaking to HBO’s “Real Sports,” he denied that gay people are humans, that they exist in his region, and that his government regularly detains or tortures them, despite ample reports to the contrary. . .

Kadyrov, known for his forceful style of speaking, said: “America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia. We have a strong government and are a nuclear state.

“Even if our government was completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed. We will put the whole world on its knees and screw it from behind.”

The New York Times points out that Russia built a system in the 1980s that could do what Kadyrov described, known as the Perimeter System. Essentially, if there were a nuclear attack to destroy the government of Russia — or anything a 1980s-era system would perceive as an attack — an automated system would empty Russia’s missile silos in a counterattack.

Bruce Blair, the former US nuclear officer who broke the story of the Perimeter System for The Times in 1993, told Business Insider that the system works when it detects nuclear explosions. Only a small crew, deep in a bunker, has a hand in the otherwise automated system, according to Blair. (Read more from “Russian Leader: US Isn’t Strong Enough to Be Perceived as a Threat to Russia” HERE)

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