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      Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House

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      Vladimir PutinKremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White HouseExclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy
      Support independent Guardian journalism Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan SabbaghThu 15 Jul 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 15 Jul 2021 16.12 EDTVladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.The report – “No 32-04 vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.This would help bring about Russia’s favoured “theoretical political scenario”. A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.The Kremlin summitThere is no doubt that the meeting in January 2016 took place – and that it was convened inside the Kremlin.An official photo of the occasion shows Putin at the head of the table, seated beneath a Russian Federation flag and a two-headed golden eagle. Russia’s then prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, attended, together with the veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.Also present were Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister in charge of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; Mikhail Fradkov, the then chief of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service; and Alexander Bortnikov, the boss of the FSB spy agency.Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s former director, attended too as security council secretary.According to a press release, the discussion covered the economy and Moldova.The document seen by the Guardian suggests the security council’s real, covert purpose was to discuss the confidential proposals drawn up by the president’s analytical service in response to US sanctions against Moscow.The author appears to be Vladimir Symonenko, the senior official in charge of the Kremlin’s expert department – which provides Putin with analytical material and reports, some of them based on foreign intelligence.The papers indicate that on 14 January 2016 Symonenko circulated a three-page executive summary of his team’s conclusions and recommendations.In a signed order two days later, Putin instructed the then chief of his foreign policy directorate, Alexander Manzhosin, to convene a closed briefing of the national security council.Its purpose was to further study the document, the order says. Manzhosin was given a deadline of five days to make arrangements.What was said inside the second-floor Kremlin senate building room is unknown. But the president and his intelligence officials appear to have signed off on a multi-agency plan to interfere in US democracy, framed in terms of justified self-defence.Various measures are cited that the Kremlin might adopt in response to what it sees as hostile acts from Washington. The paper lays out several American weaknesses. These include a “deepening political gulf between left and right”, the US’s “media-information” space, and an anti-establishment mood under President Barack Obama.The paper does not name Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival. It does suggest employing media resources to undermine leading US political figures.There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.After the meeting, according to a separate leaked document, Putin issued a decree setting up a new and secret interdepartmental commission. Its urgent task was to realise the goals set out in the “special part” of document No 32-04 vd.Members of the new working body were stated to include Shoigu, Fradkov and Bortnikov. Shoigu was named commission chair. The decree – ukaz in Russian – said the group should take practical steps against the US as soon as possible. These were justified on national security grounds and in accordance with a 2010 federal law, 390-FZ, which allows the council to formulate state policy on security matters.According to the document, each spy agency was given a role. The defence minister was instructed to coordinate the work of subdivisions and services. Shoigu was also responsible for collecting and systematising necessary information and for “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object” – a command, it seems, to hack sensitive American cyber-targets identified by the SVR.The SVR was told to gather additional information to support the commission’s activities. The FSB was assigned counter-intelligence. Putin approved the apparent document, dated 22 January 2016, which his chancellery stamped.The measures were effective immediately on Putin’s signature, the decree says. The spy chiefs were given just over a week to come back with concrete ideas, to be submitted by 1 February.Written in bureaucratic language, the papers appear to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the usually hidden world of Russian government decision-making.Putin has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in western democracy. The documents seem to contradict this claim. They suggest the president, his spy officers and senior ministers were all intimately involved in one of the most important and audacious espionage operations of the 21st century: a plot to help put the “mentally unstable” Trump in the White House.The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016.A matter of weeks after the security council meeting, GRU hackers raided the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and subsequently released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign.The report seen by the Guardian features details redolent of Russian intelligence work, diplomatic sources say. The thumbnail sketch of Trump’s personality is characteristic of Kremlin spy agency analysis, which places great emphasis on building up a profile of individuals using both real and cod psychology.Moscow would gain most from a Republican victory, the paper states. This could lead to a “social explosion” that would in turn weaken the US president, it says. There were international benefits from a Trump win, it stresses. Putin would be able in clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russia bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf, it says.Other parts of the multi-page report deal with non-Trump themes. It says sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea have contributed to domestic tensions. The Kremlin should seek alternative ways of attracting liquidity into the Russian economy, it concludes.The document recommends the reorientation of trade and hydrocarbon exports towards China. Moscow’s focus should be to influence the US and its satellite countries, it says, so they drop sanctions altogether or soften them.‘Spell-binding’ documentsAndrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies and author of The Red Web, said the leaked material “reflects reality”. “It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the security council,” he said. “Decisions are always made like that, with advisers providing information to the president and a chain of command.”He added: “The Kremlin micromanages most of these operations. Putin has made it clear to his spies since at least 2015 that nothing can be done independently from him. There is no room for independent action.” Putin decided to release stolen DNC emails following a security council meeting in April 2016, Soldatov said, citing his own sources.Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador in Moscow and an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, described the documents as “spell-binding”. “They reflect the sort of discussion and recommendations you would expect. There is a complete misunderstanding of the US and China. They are written for a person [Putin] who can’t believe he got anything wrong.”Wood added: “There is no sense Russia might have made a mistake by invading Ukraine. The report is fully in line with the sort of thing I would expect in 2016, and even more so now. There is a good deal of paranoia. They believe the US is responsible for everything. This view is deeply dug into the soul of Russia’s leaders.”Trump did not initially respond to a request for comment.Later, Liz Harrington, his spokesperson, issued a statement on his behalf.“This is disgusting. It’s fake news, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA was fake news. It’s just the Radical Left crazies doing whatever they can to demean everybody on the right.“It’s fiction, and nobody was tougher on Russia than me, including on the pipeline, and sanctions. At the same time we got along with Russia. Russia respected us, China respected us, Iran respected us, North Korea respected us.“And the world was a much safer place than it is now with mentally unstable leadership.” TopicsVladimir PutinDonald TrumpRussiaUS elections 2016EspionageUS politicsEuropenewsReuse this content More

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      Divisive 2016 US election linked to higher risk of heart trouble

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      How stressful can an election campaign really be? Potentially life-threatening, researchers say, at least in the case of the 2016 US presidential election. The divisive campaign may have raised the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and worsened high blood pressure in people with underlying cardiovascular disease, two studies suggest.One study focused on nearly 2,500 people (mostly white, with an average age of about 71) with implanted cardiac devices in North Carolina, a swing state in the 2016 election that was subjected to fiercely negative political commercials and campaign events.Researchers examined the incidence of cardiac arrhythmias (too fast or too slow heartbeats or irregular heart rhythms) in a six-week period spanning before and after the election, and compared it with two six-week control periods June/July 2016 and October/November 2015.There was a 77% rise in the risk of cardiac arrhythmias during the election phase versus the control periods, even after accounting for factors including age and underlying medical conditions, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.In particular there was an 82% rise in the incidence of atrial arrhythmias, an abnormal heart rhythm that begins in the heart’s upper chambers and can lead to blood clots, stroke and other complications. There was a 60% jump in the rate of ventricular arrhythmias, an abnormal heart rhythm involving the heart’s lower chambers that can lead to cardiac arrest.The study’s lead author, Dr Lindsey Rosman, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, said previous research had indicated that acute cardiovascular events tend to rise in the aftermath of events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. “But the direct link between a stressful political election and an increase in cardiac events hasn’t been established – until now.”The researchers also assessed whether the risk of arrhythmia differed by political party affiliation. Surprisingly, people who voted for the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, did not experience a higher rate of arrhythmias compared with those who voted for the winner, Donald Trump.A separate study investigated changes in blood pressure among different ethnic groups. Readings from about 2,000 non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic people of colour, and Mexican Americans in the pre-election period (May to October 2016) were compared against 1,700 randomly selected participants from the three groups a year into the new presidency (November 2017 to April 2018.)The researchers found significant increases in blood pressure among black and Mexican American participants with hypertension, but no significant rises in people who did not already have hypertension (regardless of their ethnic background.The lead author, Dr Andrew Hwang, an assistant professor of clinical science at High Point University, North Carolina, said it was possible that the passage of time may have played a role in worsening blood pressure measures. “However, given that the 2016 US election was a major national event, we may be able to suspect that the election may have contributed, in part, to changes in blood pressure.” More

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      ‘The Capitol riot was our Chernobyl’: James Comey on Trump, the ‘pee tape’ and Clinton’s emails

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      As an investigator turned author, James Comey has developed a forensic eye for detail. The colour of the curtains in the Oval Office. The length of Donald Trump’s tie. Something about the US president that the camera often misses.
      “Donald Trump conveys a menace, a meanness in private that is not evident in most public views of him,” says Comey, a former director of the FBI, from his home in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC.
      That menace came flooding out to engulf the US on 6 January when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people, including a police officer, were killed in the mayhem. Comey, whose unorthodox interventions in the 2016 election are blamed by many liberals for putting Trump in the White House, watched in horror.
      “I was sickened to watch an attack on the literal and symbolic heart of our democracy, and, as a law enforcement person, I was angered. I am mystified and angry that Capitol Hill wasn’t defended. It’s a hill! If you wanted to defend it, you could defend it, and for some reason it was not defended. I think that’s a 9/11-size failure and we’re going to need a 9/11-type commission to understand it so that we don’t repeat it.”
      If he were still at work in the FBI’s brutalist building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Comey would be at the heart of the hunt for the domestic terrorists. He misses the job. Aged 60, a father of five and grandfather of one, he has spent the pandemic learning yoga, training to become a foster parent again and preparing for a teaching job at Columbia University in New York.
      Comey has also written another memoir, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, a slender sequel to his 2018 bestseller, A Higher Loyalty. It includes anecdotes from his law enforcement career, tangling with the New York mafia and others, and quotations from William Shakespeare and Trump (who reported to Comey that “Putin told me: ‘We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world’”). It acknowledges the flawed history of his beloved FBI while defending the nobility of its purpose; he calls for it to strip the name of the former director J Edgar Hoover from its headquarters and rename it in honour of the civil rights hero John Lewis. More

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      Many midwest Democrats stayed home in 2016. Will they turn out for Biden?

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      Jamal Collins took the trouble to vote four years ago even though, like a lot of people in Cleveland, he didn’t imagine it would change very much.
      Eight years of deflated hopes for Barack Obama had left the African American teacher wondering if any president could really make that much difference to the lives and livelihoods Collins saw around him. He even thought there might be an upside to the election of Donald Trump.
      “I’m kinda glad it happened,” Collins said a few weeks after the new president moved into the White House. “It really is an eye-opener on what’s really going on. The real truth about America. The real truth that there’s still a lot of racism. People voted for this sort of stuff.”
      A lot of people in Cleveland chose not to vote. Driven by disillusionment with Obama and dislike for Hillary Clinton, turnout fell in the overwhelmingly Democratic city where nearly half the population is black, as it did in others across the midwest, helping to usher Trump to victory. More

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      Wicked Game review: a fascinating but flawed memoir by Trump's jailed associate

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      Under a title which calls to mind Chris Isaak’s hit song from 1989, the former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates offers an interesting mixture of vignettes and dish, an effort to rewrite the history of 2016 before the 2020 election is over. Wicked Game is surprisingly readable and will leave process junkies with plenty to chew on.Making sausage is seldom pretty. The book reminds us that even after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, with his win in the Indiana primary on 3 May 2016, the convention was more than two months away. Trump’s opponents had plenty of time to organize one last challenge.Convention fights are rare – but possible. In 1980, Ted Kennedy mounted an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He lost. Four years before, Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Gerald Ford. In helping the president push back, Paul Manafort won his spurs.As a rookie candidate, Trump never recognized that he could be displaced. But Manafort and Gates did. Catapulted into the Trump campaign by the businessman Tom Barrack and the profane prankster Roger Stone, they took names and put down a prospective revolt before the convention got going. In the primaries, letting Trump be Trump worked. Nailing down the nomination required different skills. Patience and attention to detail mattered.And yet, in Trump’s universe, almost no one lasts, be they wives or staffers. Manafort would be forced out in favor of Steve Bannon, Trumpworld’s dark lord who would in turn be ousted from the White House and now stands under federal indictment.The Trump campaign was a hazardous place to be. Gates emerged as Barrack’s deputy on the inaugural committee. But in the end, while a jury convicted Manafort on charges arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s campaign investigation, Gates copped a guilty plea, cooperated and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.Despite it all, Trump 2016 kept its eye on the prize, first winning the nomination, then the electoral college. Its message was venomously acrid – but somehow coherent. It got the biggest things right. Four years later, candidate and minions are distracted. Trump’s rallies are borscht belt shtick infused with anger and self-pity, the backdrop a mounting death toll. The US is far from turning the corner against the coronavirus. The grim reaper stalks the land.What worked against Hillary Clinton is coming up short against Joe Biden, everyone’s favorite uncle. When a “billionaire” sitting president has less cash on hand than his challenger, in the final days of a campaign, something has gone wrong.As for scoop, Gates lets the reader know Mike Pence was not the vice-presidential pick of Trump’s dreams. The Indiana governor had tepidly backed Ted Cruz. As Gates reminds us, Trump is not one to forget.And then there was Ivanka.“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!” her father gushed, according to Gates, who italicizes his reaction: “OK … He’s not joking.”It turned out Pence was a good pick: all the loyalty of a puppy without the need to housebreak. Unlike Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich, the two other actual finalists, Pence conveyed a degree of stability and helped with white evangelicals, a key constituency that has stuck with Trump throughout. The former governor also brought that beatific gaze.By contrast, Christie labored under the cloud of Bridgegate and Gingrich had a personality that sucked all the air out of the room. Trump would not abide competition. As Trump put it, in Gates’s telling, “there was something wrong and off” about the former House speaker. Gingrich’s wife was appointed ambassador to the Vatican – a consolation prize.Twisting the knife, Gates also announces that Gingrich was Jared and Ivanka’s pick. It would neither be the first nor last time the dauphins would get things wrong. Kushner thought firing James Comey would bring bipartisan plaudits. We all know it did not.Instead, firing Comey triggered a two-year special counsel investigation that snared Gates and Manafort, enveloped the president and helped hand the House to the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi should send Kushner chocolates.Gates’s judgments can be premature. He lavishes praise on Brad Parscale, data guy to the 2016 campaign, now former campaign manager for 2020. Gates describes Parscale’s data operations as invaluable but adds, inauspiciously, that they continue “to this day”.Not quite. First, Parscale grossly overestimated the demand for a June rally in Oklahoma which apparently resulted in the sad death of Herman Cain, a contender for the 2012 nomination and ardent supporter of the president who contracted Covid-19. Ultimately, Parscale was dismissed. In September, he was hospitalized, after menacing his wife and threatening to harm himself.Gates also goes all-in on denouncing Robert Mueller and attacking any suggestion of “collusion” with Russia. Here too, he may have gotten over his skis.According to the Senate intelligence committee’s final report, Russia and WikiLeaks coordinated on interference in the 2016 election, while the Trump campaign “tracked” news about WikiLeaks, “Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and the press team” paying heed to Julian Assange’s document dumps.Gates emerges from his own book as a sympathetic figure, too low on the totem pole to be a driving force, close enough to the sun to get badly burned. If nothing else, his Wicked Game is a morality tale for our times. As Isaak sang: “Strange what desire will make foolish people do.” More

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      Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

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      Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.The secret effort concentrated on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed.The claims have come from an investigation by Channel 4 News, which was leaked a copy of a vast election database it says was used by the Trump campaign in 2016.Comprising the records of 198 million Americans, and containing details about their domestic and economic status acquired from market research firms, the investigation claimed voters were segmented into eight categories.One was marked “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters thought likely to vote for Clinton or not at all – were disproportionately black.According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.The effort is said to have been devised in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultant that ceased trading last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles.In Michigan, a state that Trump won by 10,000 votes, 15% of voters are black. But they represented 33% of the special deterrence category in the secret database, meaning black voters were apparently disproportionately targeted by anti-Clinton ads.In Wisconsin, where the Republicans won by 30,000, 5.4% of voters are black, but 17% of the deterrence group. According the Channel 4, that amounted to more than a third of black voters in the state overall, all placed in the group to be sent anti-Clinton material on their Facebook feeds.Attacks ads that were used by Trump’s digital campaign included one known as the “super-predator” commercial, featuring a video clip of controversial remarks made by Clinton in 1996, which the Republicans claimed referred to African Americans.Arguing that it was necessary “to have an organised effort against gangs”, and their members Clinton said: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators – no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”The Democrat apologised for using those words shortly after being confronted by Black Lives Matter activists about them in February 2016, but the language was picked up by Trump during the campaign and heavily recycled online.Another attack ad reportedly came from a political action committee also run by Cambridge Analytica. It features a young black woman who appears to be a Clinton supporter abandoning her script to say: “I just don’t believe what I’m saying.”When reminded that she is an actor, she replies that she is “not that good” of an actorJamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said it was shocking and troubling that there was a covert attempt to suppress the black vote in 2016.“So, we use data – similar to voter file data – but it’s to motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate. We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home. That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy,” Watkins told Channel 4.It is estimated that 2 million black voters across the US who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Hillary Clinton. In Wisconsin, Trump’s vote matched Mitt Romney’s in 2012, but Clinton lost because her vote collapsed. The Democrat polled 230,000 votes fewer than Obama.Key to the Trump victory was putting off black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In one city ward, where 80% of its 1,440 voters were black, almost half or 44% of the ward was marked as for deterrence, a total of 636 people, 90% of whom were black.Many other factors accounted for Clinton’s defeat, including legislation that was accused of suppressing the black vote.Again, in Wisconsin, the Republican-run state has introduced measures requiring citizens to produce valid voter identification, which it was argued disproportionately affected poor and black voters.The Trump campaign spent $44m (£34m) on Facebook advertising and generated 6m adverts overall. But the passage of time has meant that only a handful of the attack ads used by the Trump campaign have been recorded, and Facebook will not say how many or which ads were used at the time.The company said that “since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today”. It added that it now has “rules prohibiting voter suppression” and was “running the largest voter information campaign in American history”.The Trump campaign, the Republican national committee and the White House all declined to comment.A senior official in the the Trump campaign has previously denied any targeted campaigns against individual groups. More