Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump-Era Special Counsel Secures Indictment of Lawyer for Firm With Democratic Ties

      by

      The defendant, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — The special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation obtained a grand jury indictment on Thursday of a prominent cybersecurity lawyer, accusing him of lying to the F.B.I. five years ago during a meeting about Donald J. Trump and Russia.The indictment secured by the special counsel, John H. Durham, also made public his findings about an episode in which cybersecurity researchers identified unusual internet data in 2016 that they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.He concluded that the Clinton campaign covertly helped push those suspicions to the F.B.I. and reporters, the indictment shows. The F.B.I. looked into the questions about Alfa Bank but dismissed them as unfounded, and the special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.The charging of the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had been expected. He is accused of falsely telling a top F.B.I. lawyer that he was not representing any client at the meeting about those suspicions. Prosecutors contend that he was instead representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign.“Sussmann’s false statement misled the F.B.I. general counsel and other F.B.I. personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the F.B.I. of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients,” the indictment said.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, have denied the accusation, insisting that he did not say he had no client and maintaining that the evidence against him is weak. They also denied that the question of who Mr. Sussmann was working for was material, saying the FB.I. would have investigated the matter regardless.“Michael Sussmann was indicted today because of politics, not facts,” they said on Thursday. “The special counsel appears to be using this indictment to advance a conspiracy theory he has chosen not to actually charge. This case represents the opposite of everything the Department of Justice is supposed to stand for. Mr. Sussmann will fight this baseless and politically inspired prosecution.”A former computer crimes prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department for 12 years, Mr. Sussmann in 2016 represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers.He has been a cybersecurity lawyer for 16 years at the law firm Perkins Coie, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party. A colleague of Mr. Sussmann’s, Marc Elias, was the general counsel to the Clinton campaign. He left the law firm last month.The firm said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Sussmann had also departed: “In light of the special counsel’s action today, Michael Sussmann, who has been on leave from the firm, offered his resignation from the firm in order to focus on his legal defense, and the firm accepted it.”The charge against him centers on a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with the F.B.I. lawyer, James A. Baker, in which Mr. Sussmann relayed concerns about the odd internet data. Cybersecurity researchers had said it might be evidence of clandestine communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Russia’s Alfa Bank.The case against Mr. Sussmann turns on Mr. Baker’s recollection that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client — which Mr. Sussmann denies saying. There were no witnesses to their conversation.The indictment says Mr. Baker later briefed another F.B.I. official — apparently Bill Priestap, the bureau’s top counterintelligence official — about the meeting, and that Mr. Priestap’s notes say Mr. Baker recounted that Mr. Sussmann said he was “not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)In 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified under oath to Congress that he was representing the unnamed technology executive, and his legal team agrees that executive was his client at the meeting — but the only one.Internal law firm billing records, however, show that Mr. Sussmann had been logging his time on Alfa Bank matters to the Clinton campaign, the indictment says, contending that the campaign was his client, too. Those records are said to also show that Mr. Sussmann met or spoke with Mr. Elias about Alfa Bank repeatedly.Seeking to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers had argued to the Justice Department that the billing records were misleading and that he was not at the meeting at the direction or on behalf of the Clinton campaign, according to people familiar with the case. They also denied that the records could be fairly interpreted as showing that he billed the meeting with Mr. Baker to the campaign, as the indictment accuses him.Mr. Durham is known to have been closely scrutinizing the Alfa Bank episode since last fall, including using a grand jury to subpoena documents and question witnesses in ways that suggested he was pursuing a theory that the data had been manipulated or the analysis of it knowingly torqued.The 27-page indictment disclosed much of what he found, including quoting extensively from internal communications of unnamed researchers.The unidentified technology executive whom Mr. Sussmann represented was not the first researcher to scrutinize the data. But his company had access to large amounts of internet data, and he came to play an important role in driving the research and analysis, which he told Mr. Sussmann about around July 2016, the indictment said.In August of that year, the technology executive outlined to other researchers the goal of the effort, saying that unspecified “VIPs” wanted to find “true” information that would merit closer scrutiny. Noting that Mr. Trump had claimed he had no interactions with Russian financial institutions, the executive wrote that data suggesting that was false “would be jackpot” and would “give the base of a very useful narrative.”The executive also wrote: “Being able to provide evidence of *anything* that shows an attempt to behave badly in relation to this, the VIPs would be happy. They’re looking for a true story that could be used as the basis for closer examination.”But one of the researchers working on the project worried that their analysis had weaknesses and that suggested they all shared anti-Trump sentiment.“The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like” Trump, the indictment quoted one unnamed researcher as writing. “This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”In early September, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann met with a New York Times reporter who would later draft a story about Alfa Bank, and also began work on a so-called white paper that would summarize and explain the researchers’ data and analysis, billing the time to the Clinton campaign.On Sept. 12, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann called Mr. Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, and spoke about his “efforts to communicate” with the Times reporter about the Alfa Bank allegations. Both billed the call to the campaign. And three days later, Mr. Elias exchanged emails with top campaign officials about the matter.In the meantime, on Sept. 14, five days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I., the technology executive emailed three researchers helping him with data. The executive sought to ensure the analysis they were assembling would strike security experts as simply “plausible,” even if it fell short of demonstrably true, prosecutors said.Mr. Sussmann also continued to push the Alfa Bank story to reporters. A month before the election, as Times editors were weighing whether to publish an article the reporter had drafted, Mr. Sussmann told him he should show the editors an opinion essay saying the paper’s investigative reporters had not published as many stories regarding Mr. Trump as other media outlets, the indictment said.Michael E. Sussmann, a lawyer from the firm Perkins Coie, during a cybersecurity conference in 2016.via C-SPANAttorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham in May 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr stoked expectations among Mr. Trump’s supporters that the prosecutors would uncover grave offenses by high-level government officials and support claims that the Russia investigation was a plot concocted by the so-called deep state to sabotage Mr. Trump.To date, Mr. Durham’s investigation has fallen short of those expectations. Out of office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?”The current attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said at his confirmation hearing in February that he would let Mr. Durham continue to work and told Congress in July that he agreed with Mr. Barr’s earlier direction that Mr. Durham should eventually submit a report in a form that could be made public.Funding for most Justice Department operations, like much of the federal government, is controlled by an annual budget that covers a fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Spokesmen for Mr. Garland and Mr. Durham have declined to answer questions about whether Mr. Durham’s office has funding approval to continue operating beyond this month.But in announcing the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, the Justice Department said, “The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing.” More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties

      by

      The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.Any indictment of the lawyer — Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s 2016 hacking of its servers — is likely to attract significant political attention.Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie — whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmann’s, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign — of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia.The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Another partner at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, was then serving as the general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Elias, who did not respond to inquiries, left Perkins Coie last month.In their attempt to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers are said to have insisted that their client was representing the cybersecurity expert he mentioned to Congress and was not there on behalf of or at the direction of the Clinton campaign.They are also said to have argued that the billing records are misleading because Mr. Sussmann was not charging his client for work on the Alfa Bank matter, but needed to show internally that he was working on something. He was discussing the matter with Mr. Elias and the campaign paid a flat monthly retainer to the firm, so Mr. Sussmann’s hours did not result in any additional charges, they said.Last October, as Mr. Durham zeroed in the Alfa Bank matter, the researcher who brought those concerns to Mr. Sussmann hired a new lawyer, Steven A. Tyrrell.Speaking on the condition that The New York Times not name his client in this article, citing a fear of harassment, Mr. Tyrrell said his client thought Mr. Sussmann was representing him at the meeting with Mr. Baker.“My client is an apolitical cybersecurity expert with a history of public service who felt duty bound to share with law enforcement sensitive information provided to him by D.N.S. experts,” Mr. Tyrrell said, referring to “Domain Name System,” a part of how the internet works and which generated the data that was the basis of the Alfa Bank concerns.Mr. Tyrrell added: “He sought legal advice from Michael Sussmann who had advised him on unrelated matters in the past and Mr. Sussmann shared that information with the F.B.I. on his behalf. He did not know Mr. Sussmann’s law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign and was simply doing the right thing.”Supporters of Mr. Trump have long been suspicious of Perkins Coie. On behalf of Democrats, Mr. Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to look into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. That resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The F.B.I. cited some information from the dossier in botched wiretap applications.Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.Mr. Durham has also apparently weighed bringing some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. Outside lawyers for the firm recently met with the special counsel’s team and went over the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing that it was insufficient for any legal sanction.The lawyers for Perkins Coie and the firm’s managing partner did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.Mr. Sussmann, 57, grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University and then Brooklyn Law School. He spent 12 years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department, where he came to specialize in computer crimes. He has since worked for Perkins Coie for about 16 years and is a partner in its privacy and cybersecurity practice. Mr. Sussmann and his firm have been particular targets for Mr. Trump and his supporters.In October 2018, a Wall Street Journal columnist attacked Mr. Sussmann, calling him the “point man for the firm’s D.N.C. and Clinton campaign accounts,” apparently conflating him with Mr. Elias. Perkins Coie responded with a letter to the editor saying that was not Mr. Sussmann’s role and that the unnamed client on whose behalf he spoke to the F.B.I. had “no connections to either the Clinton campaign, the D.N.C. or any other political law group client.”Four months later, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Sussmann by name in a slightly garbled pair of Twitter posts, trying to tie him to the Clinton campaign and to the Steele dossier.Raising the specter of politicization in the Durham inquiry, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann are said to have argued to the Justice Department that Mr. Baker’s recollection was wrong, immaterial and too weak a basis for a false-statements charge. There were no other witnesses to the conversation, the people familiar with the matter said.In a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client,” but also said Mr. Sussmann had told him “he had cyberexperts that had obtained some information that they thought should get into the hands of the F.B.I.”However, Mr. Durham’s team is said to have found handwritten notes made by another senior F.B.I. official at the time, whom Mr. Baker briefed about the conversation with Mr. Sussmann, that support the notion that Mr. Sussmann said he was not there on behalf of a client. It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at trial under the so-called hearsay rule.A lawyer for Mr. Baker declined to comment.Mr. Durham has been under pressure to deliver some results from his long-running investigation, which began when then-Attorney General William P. Barr assigned him in 2019 to investigate the Russia inquiry. Out of office and exiled from Twitter, Mr. Trump has issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Mueller Scrutinized an Unidentified Member of News Media in Russia Inquiry

      by

      The scrutiny was one of several new disclosures the Justice Department made about investigative actions involving the news media during the Trump years.WASHINGTON — The special counsel who investigated Russia’s 2016 election interference, Robert S. Mueller III, scrutinized “a member of the news media suspected of participating in the conspiracy” to hack Democrats and make their emails public, the Justice Department disclosed on Wednesday.The deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Russia investigation, approved a subpoena in 2018 for the unnamed person’s phone and email records. He also approved seeking a voluntary interview with that person and then issuing a subpoena to force the person to testify before a grand jury, the department said.“All of this information was necessary to further the investigation of whether the member of the news media was involved in the conspiracy to unlawfully obtain and utilize the information from the hacked political party or other victims,” the department said.No member of the news media was charged with conspiring in the hack-and-dump operation, and the disclosure on Wednesday left many questions unanswered.It did not say why the person was suspected of participating in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election, or whether that person ever testified before a grand jury.Nor did it define “member of the news media” to clarify whether that narrowly meant a traditional journalist or could broadly extend to various types of commentators on current events. (For example, it has been known since September 2018 that Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and political commentator, was subpoenaed that year.)A Justice Department spokesman declined to provide further clarity, and several former law enforcement officials who were familiar with the Mueller investigation did not respond to requests for information.The disclosure of the scrutiny of a member of the news media was contained in a revision to a report issued by the Trump administration about investigative activities that affected or involved the news media in 2018. The Trump-era version of that report had omitted the episode.The Justice Department under President Biden also issued reports on Wednesday covering such investigative activities in 2019, which the Trump-era department failed to issue, and in 2020. And it provided new details about leak investigations at the end of the Trump administration that sought records for reporters with CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.The report for 2019 disclosed another investigative matter apparently related to the special counsel’s office, which by then had issued its final report and closed down. During the prosecution of one of the people who was charged with “obstructing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” a U.S. attorney authorized subpoenaing an unnamed member of the news media for testimony, and that person agreed to comply.Prosecutors, however, ultimately did not call that person to testify at the trial. The report did not say whether any subpoena was issued, or whether obtaining one was merely approved. Nor did it say what the person would have testified about.It also did not say whether it was referring to the trial of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime friend, which took place in 2019. Mr. Stone was charged, among other things, with obstructing one of Congress’s Russia investigations; he was convicted, but then pardoned by Mr. Trump.The 2019 report also glancingly discussed two previously unknown episodes in which the Justice Department investigated members of the news media for “offenses arising from news gathering activities” without saying what those allegations were.One section of the report briefly discussed an investigation into one member of the news media for such offenses. It said the attorney general had authorized prosecutors to use various legal tools to force companies to turn over communications and business records about the target. (The report did not name the attorney general; President Donald J. Trump appointed William P. Barr to the post in February 2019.)In that case, the report said, investigators used a “filter team” in an effort “to minimize the review of news media-related materials and safeguard any such materials.”Another section of the 2019 report discussed an investigation into “employees of a news media entity” for such offenses. It said the attorney general had authorized investigators to conduct voluntary interviews of “two members of the news media employed by a media entity” in connection with the matter, but provided no further details.In contrast to those sparse accounts, the Justice Department also released a detailed timeline of the leak investigations late in the Trump era into sources for reporters with CNN, The Post and The Times, all of which spilled over into the Mr. Biden’s presidency and which the Biden administration disclosed earlier this year.The leak investigations involving CNN, The Times and The Post were opened in August 2017, both involving stories published or aired in preceding months. The chronology did not explain why three years later, there was a sudden urgency to go after the reporters’ communications records.Mr. Barr approved requests to try to obtain a CNN reporter’s communications records in May 2020, the chronology shows. He approved going after the Times reporters’ materials in September 2020. And on Nov. 13, after Mr. Trump lost the presidential election, Mr. Barr approved a request to try to obtain the Post reporters’ communications records.The Justice Department successfully obtained call data — records showing who called whom and when, but not what was said — for the reporters at the three organizations. The chronology said the phone companies had been legally free to reveal that they had received subpoenas, although none did.While the department ultimately obtained some email records for a CNN reporter, Barbara Starr, it did not succeed in getting email records for the Times and Post reporters whose stories were under scrutiny. The Biden-era department ultimately dropped those efforts.Still, the fight over those materials — including the imposition of gag orders on some news media executives, and a delay in notifying the reporters that their materials had been sought and in some cases obtained — spilled over into the Biden administration. The chronology showed that in April Attorney General Merrick B. Garland approved extending a delay in notifying Ms. Starr about the matter.In July, at the direction of Mr. Biden, Mr. Garland barred prosecutors and F.B.I. agents from using subpoenas, search warrants and other tools of legal compulsion to go after reporters’ communications records or force them to testify about confidential sources — a major change in Justice Department policy from practices under recent previous administrations of both parties.At the request of Mr. Garland — who also ordered the production of the timelines — the Justice Department inspector general has opened an investigation into the decision by federal prosecutors to secretly seize the data of reporters, as well as communications records of House Democrats and staff members swept up in leak investigations. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Scottish Group Seeks Source of Trump’s Funds for Golf Courses

      by

      The Trump Company invested hundreds of millions in the properties during a time when the former president was reporting heavy losses on his income tax returns.LONDON — A Scottish judge on Wednesday opened a path to a possible investigation into the purchase of Donald Trump’s two golf courses in Scotland, in a ruling that could force the former president to explain how he funded the deals.The Scottish government had resisted pressure to demand financial details from Mr. Trump through an “unexplained wealth order,” a powerful legal instrument usually deployed against leading figures in organized crime or drug trafficking.But on Wednesday a judge ruled that Avaaz, an online campaign group, should be given the right to challenge the government’s rejection of calls for such a move.Nicknamed “McMafia orders,” unexplained wealth orders were introduced in 2018 to strengthen the government’s armory against organized crime. Those subject to them can ultimately be forced to forfeit their assets if they are unable to explain satisfactorily how they were purchased.Though it remains far from clear that such an investigation will ever arise in this case, Wednesday’s court decision is nonetheless a setback for Mr. Trump, whose financial and tax dealings are under investigation in the United States.“This was a hurdle we had to jump, and we can now proceed to the substance,” said Nick Flynn, legal director of Avaaz, welcoming the ruling.“If you don’t think there is reasonable suspicion over these purchases then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention,” he added. “It’s the collective responsibility of Scottish ministers to act on this.”Mr. Trump bought a golf course near Aberdeen in 2006. But campaigners have focused more of their questions on the purchase of the larger and more prestigious Turnberry property for $60 million in 2014 — a time when he was reporting substantial losses on his income tax returns. Despite the Trump Organization’s investment of nearly $300 million, none of the Scottish properties have turned a profit.Though Eric Trump once said that most of the company’s financing came from Russia in those years, he has since said that the golf course investments were financed with company funds. Mr. Trump himself has denied that the money came from Russia.On Wednesday, Sarah Malone, executive vice president of Trump International Scotland, described the push to investigate the funding of the organization’s golf courses as “political game-playing at its worst and a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money which further damages Scotland’s reputation as a serious country to invest in and do business.”“We have developed and operate two globally acclaimed, multi-award winning visitor destinations in Scotland and make a significant contribution to the Scottish leisure and tourism economy. This latest attempt to undermine that investment is an utter disgrace,” Ms. Malone said in a statement.Scottish ministers initially rejected the idea of issuing an unexplained wealth order, and there was a dispute over whose responsibility it would be to authorize such an investigation. In February, Scotland’s Parliament voted against a motion, brought by the Scottish Green Party, that would have pressed for more details on the source of the Trump Organization’s money.But on Wednesday in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, the judge, Lord Sandison, sided with Avaaz, saying that its legal claim “had real prospects of success” and there was “a sensible legal argument to be had on the matters raised by the petition.” He also rejected Scottish government arguments that the petition had been filed too late to proceed.The decision was welcomed by the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, who said in a statement that he was “glad we are a step forward in getting some clarity over why Trump’s business dealings in Scotland haven’t been investigated. It should never have got to the stage of a legal challenge from a nongovernmental organization for the Scottish government to confirm or deny whether they will seek a ‘McMafia order.’”In a statement, the Scottish government said that “it would be inappropriate for us to comment on an ongoing legal action.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      After Biden Meets Putin, U.S. Exposes Details of Russian Hacking Campaign

      by

      The revelations, which dealt with a Russian espionage campaign, came after President Biden demanded that President Vladimir V. Putin rein in more destructive ransomware attacks.WASHINGTON — Two weeks after President Biden met President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he rein in ransomware attacks on U.S. targets, American and British intelligence agencies on Thursday exposed the details of what they called a global effort by Russia’s military intelligence organization to spy on government organizations, defense contractors, universities and media companies.The operation, described as crude but broad, is “almost certainly ongoing,” the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, known as GCHQ, said in a statement. They identified the Russian intelligence agency, or G.R.U., as the same group that hacked into the Democratic National Committee and released emails in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump.Thursday’s revelation is an attempt to expose Russian hacking techniques, rather than any new attacks, and it includes pages of technical detail to enable potential targets to identify that a breach is underway. Many of the actions by the G.R.U. — including an effort to retrieve data stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services — have already been documented by private cybersecurity companies.But the political significance of the statement is larger: It underscored the scope of hacking efforts out of Russia, which range from the kind of intelligence gathering engaged in by the G.R.U. and the intelligence agencies of many states to the harboring of criminal groups like the one that brought down Colonial Pipeline. The company provides much of the gasoline, jet fuel and diesel used on the East Coast, and when it was attacked, it shut down the pipeline for fear that the malicious code could spread to the operational controllers that run the pipeline.Ever since the pipeline attack, the Biden administration’s focus on cyberattacks shifted, homing in on the potential for disruption of key elements of the nation’s economic infrastructure. It has focused on Russia-based criminal groups like DarkSide, which took credit for the Colonial attack, but then announced it was shutting down operations after the United States put pressure on it. The F.B.I. later announced it had recovered some of the more than $4 million in ransom that Colonial paid the hackers to unlock the company’s records.Whether those ransomware attacks abate will be the first test of whether Mr. Biden’s message to Mr. Putin at the summit in Geneva sunk in. There, Mr. Biden handed him a list of 16 areas of “critical infrastructure” in the United States and said that it would not tolerate continued, disruptive Russian cyberattacks. But he also called for a general diminishment of breaches originating from Russian territory.“We’ll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order,” Mr. Biden said at the end of the meeting, only minutes after Mr. Putin declared that the United States, not Russia, was the largest source of cyberattacks around the world. Mr. Biden also repeatedly said that he was uncertain Mr. Putin would respond to the American warning or the series of related financial sanctions imposed on Moscow over the past five years.According to administration officials, the White House or intelligence agencies did not intend the advisory as a follow-up to the summit. Instead, they said, it was released as part of the National Security Agency’s routine warnings, said Charlie Stadtlander, an agency spokesman, “not in response to any recent international gatherings.”But that is unlikely to matter to Mr. Putin or the G.R.U., as they try to assess the steps the Biden administration is willing to take to curb their cybercampaigns — and in what order.For now, it is the ransomware attacks that have moved to the top of the administration’s agenda, because of their effects on ordinary Americans.Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said days after the summit that it might take months to determine whether the warning to Mr. Putin resulted in a change in behavior. “We set the measure at whether, over the next six to 12 months, attacks against our critical infrastructure actually decline coming out of Russia,” he said on CBS. “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so we will see over the course of months to come.”It was unclear from the data provided by the National Security Agency how many of the targets of the G.R.U. — also known as Fancy Bear or APT 28 — might be on the critical infrastructure list, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At the time of the attacks on the election system in 2016, election systems — including voting machines and registration systems — were not on the list and were added in the last days of the Obama administration. American intelligence agencies later said Mr. Putin had directly approved the 2016 attacks.But the National Security Agency statement identified energy companies as a primary target, and Mr. Biden specifically cited them in his talks with Mr. Putin, noting the ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shut down in May, and interrupted the delivery of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel along the East Coast. That attack was not by the Russian government, Mr. Biden said at the time, but rather by a criminal gang operating from Russia.In recent years, the National Security Agency has more aggressively attributed cyberattacks to specific countries, particularly those by adversarial intelligence agencies. But in December, it was caught unaware by the most sophisticated attack on the United States in years, the SolarWinds hacking, which affected federal agencies and many of the nation’s largest companies. That attack, which the National Security Agency later said was conducted by the S.V.R., a competing Russian intelligence agency that was an offshoot of the K.G.B., successfully altered the code in popular network-management software, and thus in the computer networks of 18,000 companies and government agencies.There is nothing particularly unusual about the methods the United States says the Russian intelligence unit used. There is no bespoke malware or unknown exploits by the G.R.U. unit. Instead, the group uses common malware and the most basic techniques, like brute-force password spraying, which relies on passwords that have been stolen or leaked to gain access to accounts.The statement did not identify the targets of the G.R.U.’s recent attacks but said that they included government agencies, political consultants, party organizations, universities, and think tanks.The attacks appear to mostly be about gathering intelligence and information. The National Security Agency did not specify ways that the Russian hackers damaged systems.The recent wave of G.R.U. attacks has gone on for a relatively long time, beginning in 2019 and continuing through this year. Once inside, the G.R.U. hackers would gain access to protected data and email — as well as to cloud services used by the organization.The hackers were responsible for the primary breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 which resulted in the theft, and release, of documents meant to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton.On Thursday, the National Security Agency released a list of evasion and exfiltration techniques the G.R.U. used to help information technology managers identify — and stop — attacks by the hacking group.That lack of sophistication means fairly basic measures, like multifactor authentication, timeout locks and temporary disabling of accounts after incorrect passwords are entered, can effectively block brute force attacks. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      With Putin, Biden Tries to Forge a Bond of Self-Interest, Not Souls

      by

      Theirs seems likely to be a strained and frustrating association, one where the two leaders may maintain a veneer of civil discourse even as they joust on the international stage.No one peered admiringly into anyone’s soul. No one called anyone a killer. By all appearances, President Biden’s much-anticipated meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was not warm, but neither was it hot. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      F.E.C. Dismisses Case Against Democrats Over Outreach to Ukraine

      by

      The Federal Election Commission voted 4 to 2 not to pursue accusations that Democrats in 2016 sought help from Ukraine to damage Donald J. Trump’s campaign.The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint by an ally of President Donald J. Trump accusing the Democratic Party and one of its former consultants of violating campaign finance laws by working with Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign by damaging Mr. Trump’s.An unusual bipartisan combination of members of the commission voted against pursuing a complaint filed in 2017 by Matthew G. Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor and staunch defender of Mr. Trump who was later appointed acting attorney general.He filed the complaint after Mr. Trump and his White House began publicly calling for investigations of the matter in an effort to deflect attention from revelations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign advisers met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.Mr. Whitaker claimed in his complaint that the Democratic National Committee and a consultant who had worked for it, Alexandra Chalupa, violated a prohibition on foreign donations by soliciting damaging information and statements from Ukrainian government officials about Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time.The commission — which is composed of three members selected by each party — voted 4 to 2 in April that there was not probable cause to believe that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee broke the law, according to documents released Wednesday.The four commissioners voted against a recommendation by the commission’s general counsel to find probable cause that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee violated the foreign donation ban by trying to arrange an interview in which Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president at the time, might say something critical about Mr. Manafort.While the four commissioners issued statements disputing the general counsel’s characterization that Ms. Chalupa’s communications with the embassy prompted the ban, they also offered very different ideological concerns.The three Republican commissioners said in a statement accompanying the decision that they had “grave constitutional and prudential concerns” about the general counsel’s reading of the law, which they cast as an overreach. Ms. Chalupa’s communication with the embassy, they wrote, “did not ask that Ukrainian officials convey a thing of value within the meaning of a ‘contribution’ to the D.N.C.”The Republicans were joined in voting against probable cause by Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner since 2002, who cited concerns about Russian disinformation as a basis for her vote.Bipartisan votes have become more rare in commission enforcement matters in recent years, as Democratic commissioners who tend to favor stricter campaign finance rules have sometimes found themselves at loggerheads with their Republican colleagues, who tend to oppose campaign finance restrictions as burdensome infringements on free speech.The result has been deadlocked votes that effectively block the pursuit of cases.The dismissal of the complaint by Mr. Whitaker came amid a flurry of deadlock votes as the commission works its way through a backlog of matters related to the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Whitaker’s complaint, which was filed in his capacity as the executive director of a conservative watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, asserted that the Trump Tower meeting presented “comparable circumstances” to the Ukrainian matter.The complaint was based on an article in Politico revealing that Ms. Chalupa had discussions with officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington about Mr. Manafort’s work for Russia-aligned Ukrainian politicians.Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the report, with the president suggesting on Twitter that his attorney general should investigate the matter, and his press secretary telling reporters, “If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the D.N.C., who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.”Andrii Telizhenko, a former official at the embassy who was quoted in the article discussing Ms. Chalupa, was penalized in January by the Treasury Department for being part of what it called “a Russia-linked foreign influence network” that spread “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations” about President Biden during the 2020 campaign.While the Treasury Department did not accuse Mr. Telizhenko of spreading disinformation during the 2016 campaign, Ms. Weintraub said in a statement that the assertions by the Treasury Department and others “completely undermined the credibility of the complaint” based on his claims.Mr. Telizhenko, who provided testimony to commission staff, said in an interview that he stood by his claims, and rejected claims of connections to the Russian influence network cited by the Treasury Department.Nonetheless, the F.E.C.’s handling of the matter is something of a repudiation to Mr. Trump, particularly given that Republican commissioners he nominated voted that there was not probable cause to believe a violation had been committed.Ms. Chalupa, the Democratic National Committee and the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust did not respond to requests for comment. More