#(if he was a democrat or any marginalized identity at all they would shout it from the rooftops)

[qqueenofhades]

Oh look. The Trump shooter was a registered Republican (and a young white man in his 20s like pretty every other mass shooter ever).

Party that endorses political violence commits more political violence, film at 11.

[scrambledgegs]

Clear and present Terror

An episode from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

   Back in the early 1990s, it was during my grade school years that my siblings and I enjoyed watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, starring none other than Will Smith (whom I was lucky enough to have seen in person around 5 years ago and was immensely star-struck). There was a particular Fresh Prince episode that I never forgot – the one where Carlton Banks (the Bel-Air born-and-raised, naïve-and-sheltered son of Will’s successful attorney, Uncle Phil), encounters his first brush at racism. I did not fully understand the context of the episode, but for some reason it stuck in my head and heart as a kid.

     Many years later, this episode resurfaced just last May 2020 when The Fresh Prince became available on Netflix. When that particular episode came out, I sat up in familiar surprise, as it triggered flashbacks of my childhood. I now understood it on a deeper level, watching it with the eyes of a thirty-three-year-old.

    The episode entitled “Mistaken Identity,” starts off with Carlton borrowing a Mercedes-Benz from one of his father’s wealthy White colleagues and drives off to Palm Springs. Unknown to him, Will has snuck inside the car and suddenly surprises him during the drive. The two African-American male teen cousins are driving at night and are not familiar with the area, and thus, drive at a slow pace to check directions. They are eventually made to pullover by two White policemen, and then asked to step out of the car.

    Immediately, Will knows what is happening while Carlton remains totally clueless and makes one blunder after another. They are accused of not only stealing the luxury car, but accused of being the perpetrators behind a whole series of car thefts in that area. The police officers put the two behind bars in the county jail.

    Uncle Phil and Aunt Vivian eventually come to their rescue due to Will’s witty and street-smart quick-thinking and get them out of jail, but the episode ends with Carlton and Will arguing about what transpired. Back in the comforts of the Banks estate in posh Bel-Air, Carlton remains adamant in his belief (or denial) that the cops were merely doing their job because they were driving “below the speed limit.” Will retorts that Carlton should open his eyes to reality and leaves the room exasperated. Wizened Uncle Phil ends the episode by admonishing Carlton that he had a similar experience when he was much younger, also being stopped by White cops on the road. He has always asked himself if they were really “just doing their job.”

    It has been more than 25 years since I last saw that particular episode, and I realized, what has really changed since then?

The #BlackLivesMatter Movement (BLM)

    The ultra-sensitive and once-tabooed subject of racism has exploded into our immediate line of sight, due to snowballing economic repercussions and unravelling anxieties from COVID-19 and the worldwide lockdowns. During these dark times, certain people like Chinese nationals, including Chinese-Americans and Asians with Chinese features have been the target of hatred and racism. For instance, a close Filipina friend of mine living in a European country, was recently shouted at by someone driving a motorbike as she walking on the street. The motorist angrily shouted at her repeatedly to “close her mouth” in the language of that country. I’ve also heard of stories of Asian immigrants in Europe being thrown bottles in their direction by the locals of that country, and there continues to be many other similar, saddening stories across the globe.

    Still, the Black American struggle has specifically been put at the forefront of the United States and the world today, as the homicide of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police during this pandemic, sparked the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. This anti-Black racism (and “anti state-sanctioned violence against Blacks”) movement, has since then spread like wildfire to many states all over the U.S thanks to social media platforms. Other countries and prominent individuals have also rallied to the cause and expressed their solidarity through social media. The message rings loud: It is not to diminish the experiences of other marginalized peoples and groups, but aims to cast the bright spotlight on the distinct and continuing struggles of African Americans and people of African descent. African Americans wish to speak their hard truths in front of a global stage, and we certainly can’t blame them.

The Innocence Files

    It would be hypocritical of me to talk about struggle and experiences of African Americans, but I would like to reference my insights from a Netflix true crime docu-series, The Innocence Files that in my opinion, gave much context to their centuries-long discrimination. The Innocence Files was a tremendous and tragic eye- opener. It is about the Innocence Project, co-founded by attorneys, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who challenge the U.S. legal and criminal justice system to overturn wrongful convictions against minorities, particularly African Americans. Due to issues of police coercion, misguided eyewitness accounts and ridiculous, terribly inaccurate and “leading evidence,” the wrongfully convicted are put away on death row in maximum security prisons for decades. Furthermore, when White prosecutors, as well as judges, are found to be in the wrong after convictions are overturned, do not receive any form of punishment. There is no personal accountability, nor retribution. In fact, most of them go on to have stellar careers.

    As a non-American, it helped me better understand the situation of the Black community in United States, and my heart really went out to them. It infuriated me, and I found myself cursing at the TV. It is clear that slavery is not dead in America – but exists in modern-day, in the forms of marginalizing practices, systemic discrimination and prejudiced people in positions of authority. African Americans are still very much caught up in vicious cycles that continue to cripple them and the generations to come.

In the words of my friend, a Chinese-American, true-blue, born and raised New Yorker: “it starts all the way back during the slavery years…and how the government would red line certain neighborhoods to decide on which neighborhoods get more funding. This results in many domino effects…social infrastructure is built on the economics of how funding gets allocated. So, if African Americans are stuck in a bad neighborhood, they get less financial help from the get-go. It becomes a vicious cycle, and even if they do get a good education which is hard enough growing up in a poor neighborhood with little resources, they still face the reality of racism in corporate society that is dominated by the Whites. It starts even with your resume.”

     Yet, I still must say that in my opinion, I condemn opportunists (who are not all African American even) who used the BLM to their advantage and justification to murder, loot, engage in arson and cause unnecessary damages to neighborhoods and livelihoods. I get they are pushed to their wits end - but we got to draw the line somewhere. I believe there are still boundaries as to the way we express ourselves. There are even celebrities and common people alike getting onboard to further their own public image. They aren’t making things better but instead, muddling the urgent and important message of this cause. Nakikiepal at nakikiuso lang.

Fear, Ignorance, Prejudice and Racism

    Let’s admit it though. All of us in this world have bits of prejudice inside of us. Some are unfortunately, more pronounced than others, while those on the extreme end of the spectrum, let it dictate their life mantras; thus, taking things too far. However, this is also not to say that “a little” or “subconscious” prejudice is okay either because these ideologies can also be manifested in small yet oppressive ways if we are not careful. Such network of beliefs is rooted from or formed in our upbringing, especially from beliefs handed down by our families or through experiences. This includes single or limited encounters that can cause us to generalize and stereotype all people in a particular culture, sub-culture and group. This is another deadly train of thought that we ought to regularly keep in check. Self-awareness and admitting one’s shortcomings are the first steps.

Re-examination as a Non-American from the Philippines

    Again, I am not in the best position to talk about the subject matter of racism, especially in the context of the Black American struggle, but if I may so, share some of my experiences from living in the United States for five years (2004-2009), and how the recent fiery current events have gotten me to take a step back too and assess my own thoughts.

    To give a short background, before living in the U.S. (as well as Japan), I had only lived in the Philippines my whole life. Fortunately, as a college student in the U.S., in the melting-pot and liberal state of Massachusetts, I met all kinds of people of diverse backgrounds, heritages, ethnicities and nationalities that finally opened my eyes to a whole new world beyond the sheltered Metro Manila bubble. I had a number of African-American friends and classmates, and in my experience, I can easily say they were smart, kind, warm-hearted and tremendously multi-talented. I graduated from college in May 2008 – the same year that Barrack Obama won his first Presidential election. Like most people from the largely- democratic states in the East Coast, I was ecstatic and celebrated the much anticipated “Change is Coming.”

    However (please read on first that I may qualify…), after graduation and seeking employment in 2008 – during what were also the bleak years of the Financial Crisis, I experienced different kinds of encounters with African-Americans when I moved to New York City. I must admit that these encounters initially caused me to irrationally adjust my overall rosy view of them. Looking back, I admit that I failed to factor in that I was encountering strangers in a big city, on the streets and subways and was not in the vicinity of school anymore, so of course things will be starkly different. These were also hard times. Among the encounters that I remember were the following.

    The stories I have just narrated are also examples of limited negative encounters that pushed me to initially engage in stereotyping. Often times, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. However, like I said, I failed back then, to piece together the whole context of my encounters – that I was living in a bustling American city, the Big Apple no less, with all kinds of characters in existence. This has has taught me to be try to be bigger than my biases and fears and resist from making sweeping statements. I know for one that given different situations, I do not hold the same fears and notions against African Americans, or all kinds of peoples for that matter. If you get down to it really, all nationalities and races are of course, capable of anything – whether it is trouble and crime, and likewise, capable of good just the same.

    I do question myself if I was wrong to react in those ways? This can be subject to debate. You tell me, as I myself am unsure. I can say however, that regardless of race, I would have been scared by any male figure that approached me during those tense situations. It just so happened that all those situations I recall, involved African American men – this is something I have later on reexamined as well. Why were they more often than not, African American? Today, I realize it says something more about the United States’ unequal systems and cultures, rather than about African Americans themselves.

Color-blind?

    Things brings me to ask myself as well, am I truly color-blind? I would give the honest answer of No I am not. However, I know I wouldn’t deliberately hurt or oppress anyone because of the color of their skin, heritage or background – this may be the case for most of us, but the times of today are telling us that this is still not enough for change to happen. Turns out we have to be more in touch with our thoughts and emotions because they turn into actions. We have to make conscious efforts to re-work our thoughts if they detour towards that prejudiced lane, and if we do witness any form of oppression, it is our obligation to be vocal or concretely do something.

     For us Filipinos, I also just have to say that it shouldn’t be about joining the BLM or related bandwagons just for the sake of, or to feel like we have done our part by simply posting black squares and hashtags. For me, this is a total cop-out if we aren’t making deliberate choices everyday to do right by our immediate community.

Terror is Everywhere

    It is important to understand the true narrative of the BLM and related riots in the United States, and although they may not directly apply to the Philippines, there are tons of relevant issues that hit close to home.

     It is easy to not get involved or to judge situations from the confines of our homes, but something my dad used to, and still always says is that, if we don’t do our part in speaking out, or showing protests through our own ways against injustices done to our neighbors – then we might as well be accessories to the crime. One day similar injustices will be hurled against us, and because we didn’t speak out, there will be nobody left to speak out on our behalf.

[beinglibertarian]

We Hold the News to be Self-Evident

“Fake news.” A phrase given as truth by the 45th President of the United States. Is he a racist, totalitarian monster that is trying to control the media? Or is he one of the plebeians that rose higher than the rest and has been raised seeing the fallacies of mass media coverage? Should the Commander-in-Chief be neutral when it comes to the news or does he have a right to call them out and bring people’s attention to the nature of news today?

There was a time when news consisted of hard-hitting exposes that attempted to change public opinion and lead the nation in a more moral and just direction. Although somewhere along the line, news reports lost their bite. I understand that in a world of twenty-four-hour news cycles there will be filler, but when did filler topics become headlines?

CNN came out recently claiming Donald Trump was waging a war against the press because of his negative view of their reporting. He denied their access to a few events, which translates to Trump waging a war on the freedom of the press. Or could it be a man seeing the blatant agenda of slander and attack against him?

CNN has spent much of their time since his presidential win, trying to bring Trump down. They report on his collusion with Russia, which may or may not be illegal. The only definite information that came from the leaks was that CNN helped Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, but that is not newsworthy apparently.

What is newsworthy? An affair Trump had twelve years ago, ten years before he was elected. I am willing to bet, that was not news to even Melania, and she is the only one that should care.

A man cheating on his wife is not and should not be news. It is only important information to the spouses involved. If the majority of the population disagreed with this, then why was no one appalled by the existence of AshleyMadison.com? People cheat, it is an unfortunate truth that does not belong on the news.

In 1998, America became aware of the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal. For those too young to remember, the President had a sexual relationship, no matter what his sound clips will tell you, in the Oval Office. Much like the Trump affair, it should have only been known to those involved. The explosion of reporting on the matter may have set a terrible precedent.

I will concede to understand that there is a part of human nature that loves to watch a train wreck, like celebrity break-ups. And presidents are important celebrities. However, those are fluff pieces, shown between sports and the weather. They do not affect policies that are important to the American people.

Fox News also reported bad things in their cycle. Unfortunately, their bad reporting garnered support for unlawful military conflicts. Shortly after 11 September 2001, Fox began to spread the idea of Saddam Hussein’s enormous and varied supply of weapons of mass destruction. Or should I say, Saddam’s alleged enormous and varied supply of weapons of mass destruction.

Nothing was ever found in Iraq, yet they have been bombed and occupied the area for decades. The resulting war on terror produced hundreds of thousands civilian deaths, thousands of American soldiers dead, and trillions of dollars spent. A price far greater than that of the tragedy of 9/11. All that to protect the idea of the infallible nation.

A nation wrought with unrest and anger directed at varying parts of the of the government. A large and vocal part of the nation feels that there are separate rules of engagement that the police follow based solely on race. In the wake of this, a movement rose up behind a mediocre quarterback in the National Football League.

Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence and many of his fellow players followed suit. The nation responded with eruptions on both sides of the political spectrum. The right condemned the players for disrespecting the flag and those that served under it. The left shouted down their claims based on violations of the 1st amendment. Both were wrong.

The flag is a symbol of our nation and our nation was built with the hope of freedom for everyone. Although, at the end of the day it is a piece of fabric, and nothing worth spilling blood over, especially each other’s blood because of a few political disagreements.

Also, while protesting is a protected right, an employer can make whatever statutes it wants, and you are left with the option to work for them or not. When the NFL started seeing ratings drop, they reacted like any company would act to protect their profit margin. Even though it says “National” in the name and has a picture of a little flag on the emblem, the NFL is a private company, and should not be mandated to allow actions that are hurting them.

The bigger issue of the protest is the claimed police brutality. The right should see that the players are not standing against a nation, just a protected few that have brought violence against them. The left must understand that the movement is not being held down because of racism, but because of waning ticket sales. While that may not be a noble reason, the NFL remains a private organization and may conduct business as they see fit. There are plenty of more places that a player can protest.

Therefore, I feel there is no real emotion behind the organizers of the national anthem protest, where is the movement in the off season? Football players play one game a week for about five months. That leaves a considerable amount of time the highly-publicized players could be delivering their agendas and yet they are widely silent. And if the players are not willing to show a concentrated effort toward change, it stops being news.

A few players protesting for a minute and a half once a week should not be news. If all sports players stood together to achieve a goal, that would be news. Hell, if you could get just the NFL players to be on the same side it would be news. Of course, the NFL would still be in the right when they fired every single one of them, and that would be news too.

That is the problem with the media giants like CNN and Fox, somewhere along the line they started reporting feelings instead of events. An abundance of stories describes how a group feels about an event, rather than reporting on it and letting the viewer respond with their own feelings. We are guided toward how we should react, instead of how we may have reacted naturally.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is perfect evidence of this. The right tells people the anti-Trump groups have a disorder because they do not support everything the President does. While the left tells their group that Trump is constantly attacking everything they hold dear. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has conducted policies almost identically to every president before him.

Barack Obama made strong statements against illegal immigration and was supported in it. George HW Bush made the famous “No new taxes” claim and there has never been a time when the government was not trying to add taxes. Trump has defined himself with wall building and tariff making, the only difference is he says mean things. So, because of feelings, Trump is the worst President ever.

Trump does plenty to cause dislike. Just like Obama, he has taken a stand against illegal immigration. Just like Bush, he has sent soldiers to war. Just like under Clinton, police beat individuals for a multitude of unwarranted offenses. However, the news focuses on the wrong aspects of every major issue.

On immigration, one side says we need to keep people out and the other believes we need to let everyone in. Although simple economics will tell you that an open border with the magnet of social programs, like welfare or universal healthcare, will collapse the system supplying the programs because there will be too many mouths and not enough wallets to balance each other out. While on the other side, restricting someone from crossing an imaginary line under the threat of imprisonment or death cannot be the answer. The news focuses on your imposed feelings instead of trying to show people what the problems are.

On war, one side says we must bring peace and safety to the world and the other side says we must protect our values by eliminating the threat at the source. What no one, news source, Republican, or Democrat, will address is that none of the wars we inject ourselves into or start are necessary. We have dropped bombs on an ever-rising number of countries for decades, but then wage war in response to the blowback. Finding creative ways to support wars of aggression should not be news, it probably should be punished in a court of law.

On police brutality, one side says we must always stand with the police and the other believes any violence is too much. Even police should not side with all police all the time. Police officers are people and can make mistakes. And unfortunately, if someone uses violence against police, they should be able to defend themselves. The problem that no one addresses on the news is the non-violent crimes that continue to be the root cause of much of the violence. If a person wants to ingest a plant and there is no one around to be affected by it, why is that a crime?

Three major problems with three reasonable resolutions. Either open the border and cancel social programs or seal it shut and let tax money try and help those that contribute. Do not tell me separating families is wrong because last I heard, there were not many daycares at prisons. War is wrong because it is mass murder. You cannot bring peace and prosperity through death and destruction no matter the reason for bringing the wrath. If we stopped arresting those for non-violent crimes, their cases of police brutality would drop dramatically. Look at crime statistics during and after prohibition for some clear evidence.

I know the major news organizations will not acknowledge these ideas, because I am not the first to say them. But if we can find a way to shift our attention away from their biased, attention-grabbing tactics and focus on facts and events, maybe we can steer them toward being honest and plain. The market will provide. Trust me, there is plenty of diabolical things committed by both sides of the political spectrum, to try and convince people there is a better way, so let’s report those stories and lay off the fluff.

This article represents the views of the author exclusively, and not those of Being Libertarian LLC.

The post We Hold the News to be Self-Evident appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[expatimes]

Biden, Trump campaigns enter final sprint: US elections news

Democratic candidate Joe Biden spent Sunday in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that has become increasingly significant to both candidates.

Donald Trump held rallies in five states, in last-minute, breakneck appeals to energise voters – a strategy that helped him ride to victory in 2016.

The Republican president praised a caravan of supporters that harassed a Biden campaign bus, leading to the cancellation of an event in Texas.

With just two days until election day, more than 92 million US citizens have already cast their votes, far outpacing early voting in any past elections and accounting for 67 percent of all votes counted in 2016.

Hello and welcome to Al Jazeera’s continuing coverage of the United States elections. This is Joseph Stepansky.

9 hours ago (22:09 GMT)

Biden works to push Black turnout in campaign’s final days

Biden is spending the final days of the presidential campaign appealing to Black supporters to vote in-person during a pandemic that has disproportionately affected their communities, betting that a strong turnout will boost his chances in states that could decide the election.

Biden was in Philadelphia on Sunday, the largest city in what is emerging as the most hotly contested battleground in the closing 48 hours of the campaign. He participated in a “souls to the polls” event that is part of a nationwide effort to organise Black churchgoers to vote.

“Every single day we’re seeing race-based disparities in every aspect of this virus,” Biden said at the drive-in event, shouting to be heard over the blaring car horns. He declared that Trump’s handling of COVID-19 was “almost criminal” and that the pandemic was a “mass casualty event in the Black community.”

His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was in Georgia, a longtime Republican stronghold that Democrats believe could flip if Black voters show up in force. The first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket, she encouraged a racially diverse crowd in a rapidly growing Atlanta suburb to “honor the ancestors” by voting, invoking the memory of the late civil rights legend, longtime Representative John Lewis.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a “Souls to the Polls” drive-in rally at Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia [Andrew Harnik/The Associated Press]

9 hours ago (21:30 GMT)

US election: Donald Trump’s closest 2016 victories

Trump made history in 2016 by becoming the fifth United States presidential candidate to win the Electoral College but lose the overall popular vote. It worked out that way because opponent Hillary Clinton had some extremely large victories in heavily-populated states like California and New York, and Trump wound up winning four states with margins of victory of 1.2 percentage points or less.

As Election Day 2020 approaches, many of these states continue to be battlegrounds between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

Read more about Trump’s narrowest victories in 2016 here.

10 hours ago (21:00 GMT)

Trump plans to declare victory early if it appears he’s ‘ahead’: Report

Trump has told people close to him that he will declare victory on Tuesday night if he appears “ahead” in the results, even if official results are not yet in, Axios reported on Saturday, citing three sources familiar with the president’s comments.

Trump has talked about the scenarios in some detail over the last few weeks and has described walking up to podium and declaring victory on election night, according to the report.

With several states not allowed to begin counting ballots until election day, and some key states accepting ballots that arrive after November 3, if they are post marked by that date, final election results could take several days.

The Trump campaign has already begun casting doubt on ballots that arrive beyond election day, even if they are permitted under state laws. Trump’s adviser, Jason Miller, on Sunday baselessly suggested that if the results appear to change after election day, it is evidence of Democrats trying to “steal” the election. Any changes would in actuality be the result a more full accounting of votes cast.

President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Dubuque Regional Airport in Iowa [Evan Vucci/The Associated Press]

10 hours ago (20:24 GMT)

Texas high court denies Republican effort to reject Houston votes

The Texas Supreme Court has denied a Republican-led petition to toss nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru voting places in the Houston area.

The state’s all-Republican high court rejected the request from Republican activists and candidates without explaining its decision. The effort to have the Harris County ballots thrown out is still set to be taken up during an emergency hearing in federal court on Monday.

“We’re pleased that the Texas Supreme Court recognized that their arguments that drive-thru voting is illegal are flat-out wrong,” said Susan Hays, an attorney for the Harris County Clerk’s Office. “Lawsuits that are filed in the middle of an election to disrupt the election should be promptly denied.”

Conservative Texas activists have railed against expanded voting access in Harris County, where a record 1.4 million early votes have already been cast. The county is the nation’s third largest and a crucial battleground in Texas, where Trump and Republicans are bracing for the closest election in decades on Tuesday.

US District Judge Andrew Hanen is expected to rule on the same issue on Monday. Hanen’s decision to hear arguments on the brink of Election Day drew attention from voting rights activists. The Texas Supreme Court also rejected a nearly identical challenge last month.

11 hours ago (20:00 GMT)

Organisers plan new rally after North Carolina voter event ends with pepper spray

Reverend Greg Drumwright, the organiser of a get-out-the-vote rally in North Carolina that ended with police pepper-spraying and arresting participants, is planning another march on Election Day, he said at a news conference on Sunday.

Drumwright also condemned the police, saying they cracked down on what had been a peaceful event meant to encourage people to vote: “We were beaten, but we’re not going to be broken”.

Police, for their part, said participants in Saturday’s rally were arrested and pepper-sprayed because they were blocking the roadway without authorisation. Graham Police said Saturday they issued several warnings to the crowd at Alamance County’s courthouse to move from the roadway before releasing pepper spray and later arresting eight people. They contended they had given participants enough time to disperse before releasing the spray toward the ground and not “directly” toward any participant.

The governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, later called the incident “unacceptable”, adding “peaceful demonstrators should be able to have their voices heard and voter intimidation in any form cannot be tolerated”.

12 hours ago (19:05 GMT)

Harris campaigns in Georgia

Democratic vice presidential candidate Harris was campaigning in Georgia on Sunday, a long-time Republican bastion that Democrats hope to take on November 3.

“So I’m back in Georgia. We have two days to go. And I came back to Georgia because I wanted to just remind everybody that you all are going to decide who is going to be the next president of the United States,” Harris said at an event in suburban Gwinnett County, which flipped Democratic in 2016.

It is the second trip to the state for Harris in eight days. Biden visited Georgia on Tuesday.

While Trump won the state by about five percentage points in 2016, polls continue to show a dead heat in the current contest.

Democratic nominee for Vice President Senator Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Duluth, Georgia [File: John Bazemore/The Associated Press]

12 hours ago (18:30 GMT)

Replica noose at Missouri polling station covered up: Report

A replica noose, part of a historical display at a building used as a polling site in Missouri, has been covered up after complaints, according to the Kansas City Star.

Missouri Democrats condemned the noose at the Stone County, Missouri polling station, calling it “clear intimidation” of Black voters, according to the newspaper. Meanwhile, a county official told the publication the noose was part a historical exhibit that had been in place for years and marks the last legal hanging in the state.

It has been covered up as of Friday, the official said.

Background: https://t.co/v5puwb5yDj

— Missouri Democrats (@MoDemParty) October 30, 2020

13 hours ago (18:04 GMT)

Why women decide elections

When some women gained the right to vote in the United States 100 years ago, men feared a “petticoat hierarchy” – where if women banded together to form their own parties, they could disrupt the country’s political system, Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University told Al Jazeera.

But that simply did not happen. The existing political parties quickly adapted to include women in their organisational structures. Many women cast their ballots for the same candidates as the men in their lives. It would be decades before women of colour – including Black, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latina women – were able to vote. And for women who could in 1920, many did not vote at all.

It was not until 1980 that a gender gap – the difference between the proportions of women and men who support a particular candidate – emerged in a presidential election. It was also the first year that women voted at higher rates than men. That trend has continued in every presidential election since then, and it is what makes women a powerful force at the ballot box today.

“Women voters decide elections,” DePalo-Gould said.

Read more here.

Women have voted at higher rates than men since 1980 [File: Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press]

14 hours ago (17:16 GMT)

Trump to hold election night celebration in White House: Report

Trump is set to hold an election night celebration in the East Room of the White House, with aides discussing inviting as many as 400 guests, two officials familiar with the plans told the New York Times.

The event was moved from the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC, in part, because if violated coronavirus rules in the federal district that prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people.

The reported indoor gathering raises questions over safety, with a previous White House reception, in which Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, believed to be a super spreader event that led to many officials and Senators contracting the virus.

President Donald Trump stands with Judge Amy Coney Barrett at a White House event believed to have sparked a coronavirus outbreak in the White House [File: Alex Brandon/The Associated Press]

14 hours ago (16:52 GMT)

Trump laments losing friends after becoming president

Trump, holding his first of five events on Sunday, a rally in Michigan, lamented losing friends who are “intimidated by the office”.

While delivering a stump speech in Washington Township, Trump digressed into discussing a friend who treated him differently after he became president.

“It’s like you lose all your friends because they’re intimidated by the office, does that make sense?” he said.

“You don’t have any friends,” he said, before adding, “I have my friends in Michigan”.

Donald Trump reacts to cold weather and wind during a campaign rally at Michigan Sports Stars Park in Washington Township, Michigan [Carlos Barria/Reuters]

14 hours ago (16:35 GMT)

Federal judge to consider throwing out 100,000 votes in Texas

A federal judge in Texas will hold a hearing on Monday on whether Houston officials illegally allowed drive-through voting and must toss more than 100,000 votes in the Democratic-leaning area.

US District Judge Andrew Hanen will consider whether votes already cast at drive-through voting sites in the Houston area should be rejected.

A lawsuit was brought on Wednesday by plaintiffs including Steve Hotze, a conservative activist, and state Representative Steve Toth. They accused Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins, a Democrat, of exceeding his constitutional authority by allowing drive-through voting as an alternative to walk-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris County, home to about 4.7 million people, is the third most populous county in the United States. It currently has 10 drive-through polling sites, which are available to all voters.

People wait in line to cast their ballots for the upcoming presidential election as early voting begins in Houston, Texas [File: Go Nakamura/Reuters]

15 hours ago (16:15 GMT)

Trump adviser baselessly claims Democrats will try to ‘steal’ election

Senior Trump advisor Jason Miller has said that Democrats will try to “steal” back the election if Trump appears to be leading on election night, casting unfounded doubt on an unprecedented election that may take days for final results to come in.

During an interview on ABC News, Miller said: “You speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 [electoral votes], somewhere in that range. And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”

Miller is referring to a possible scenario in which Trump appears to be ahead in some states on election night, but loses that lead as states continue counting all ballots cast, including mail ballots, in the following days. Some key states, in particular North Carolina and Pennsylvania, allow mail votes to be counted if they are post-marked by election day. Democrats are expected to vote more by mail than Republicans, who have baselessly claimed voting by mail is ripe for fraud.

Public safety experts have warned against campaigns making unsubstantiated claims about election results during what may be a period of uncertainty following election day, saying it could lead to unrest.

15 hours ago (15:40 GMT)

Pennsylvania central to campaigns in final days

Pennsylvania, one of three northern rust-belt battleground states considered most competitive, has become central to both campaign’s schedules in the final days of the race.

Trump held four rallies in the state on Monday, while Biden is holding two events on Sunday. On Monday, both candidates will be joined by their running mates and various surrogates in blanketing the state with events on the final full day of the campaign.

Trump won the state, a former Democratic bastion, by 0.7 percent in 2016 and its 20 electoral votes may prove essential to his re-election hopes this time around. In recent weeks, the state had appeared more competitive than nearby Michigan and Wisconsin, in which Biden has maintained a steady lead. All three states were fundamental to Trump’s 2016 victory. Combined, he won by a margin of just 77,000 voters in the three states.

A batch of new polls show Biden widening the gap in Pennsylvania, up seven points in a Washington Post-ABC poll, six points in a New York Times-Siena poll and five points in a Muhlenberg College poll.

15 hours ago (15:22 GMT)

Top health expert Fauci contradicts Trump claims US is ’rounding the corner’ on pandemic

Dr Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has said the US could not “possibly be positioned more poorly” when it comes to dealing withe pandemic during the winter months.

Fauci, in an interview with the Washington Post, warned: “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” while calling for an “abrupt change” in public health practices and behaviours as the colder months approach and people are more likely to congregate indoors.

The statements stand in stark contrast Trump’s closing campaign arguments, as he has sought to portray the US as “rounding the corner” on the pandemic while repeatedly suggesting that the threat is being exaggerated by Democrats, the media and even health professionals.

Trump has continued to hold in-person rallies despite the pandemic, a stark contrast to Biden, who has only held socially-distanced events. A recent Stanford University study found that 30,000 infections and 700 deaths were likely linked to 18 Trump rallies.

A Trump spokesperson told the newspaper Fauci’s statements were “unacceptable and breaking with all norms…to choose three days before an election to play politics”.

Joe Biden called Black Youth SUPER PREDATORS. They will NEVER like him, or vote for him. They are voting for “TRUMP”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2020

  16 hours ago (15:08 GMT)

Trump tweets support for caravan that harassed Biden campaign bus

Trump has tweeted support for a caravan of his supporters who harassed a Biden campaign bus on its way to an event in Austin, Texas.

Witnesses and those on the bus said the caravan of pick-up trucks, many bearing Trump flags, had attempted to slow the bus on the highway and possibly force it off the road.

The Biden campaign later said an event, which was not set to feature Biden, his vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, or either of their spouses, was cancelled out of safety concerns.

The FBI is looking into the incident, according to the Texas Tribune.

On Saturday night, Trump tweeted a video of the bus surrounded by the caravan. “I love Texas,” he wrote.

I LOVE TEXAS! pic.twitter.com/EP7P3AvE8L

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2020

16 hours ago (15:05 GMT)

Ten rallies in two days for Trump

Trump will blitz several battleground states in the final two days of the race, holding a whopping 10 rallies that he hopes will capture the enthusiasm that led him to victory in 2016.

On Sunday, Trump will hold rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

On Monday, Trump has scheduled events in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and two in Michigan. He will close out the two-day swing with a late-night rally on Monday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same location where he finished his campaign in 2016

In his improbable victory four years ago, Trump took Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three northern “Rust Belt” states that for decades had gone to Democrats. Currently, opinion polls show Biden leading in all of those states, with Pennsylvania considered the most competitive for Trump.

Meanwhile, the polls continue to show the two candidates neck and neck in Florida – a state considered essential for a Trump victory.

Read all the updates from yesterday (October 31) here.

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=13147&feed_id=13487

[evilelitest2]

Debunking an Alt Right: “Trump Won because political correctness”

So one of the arguments you’ve heard floating around is “Trump won because the left has gotten so radical and political correct, so infested with Social Justice Warriors, so completely subsumed by Tumblr liberal extremism that it basically alienated everybody in “real America” who voted for Trump because they were so goddamn sick of political correctness.  And this is....absolute bullshit.  

Now I just want to make this clear, even if premise was true, this would still be total bullshit, because SJWs being annoying doesn’t make Trump acceptable, he is advocating for a fucking wall for christ’s sake.  But ok, lets move on about how fucking bullshit this is.  

    Cause the biggest obvious flaw in the whole “OMG THE SJWS took over the Democratic Party” is.....the fact that Clinton won by almost 3 million votes.....huh.....whoops.  

(Thanks Hamiton, Thanks a lot)

Cause here is the thing.....HIllary Clinton is not, and has never been a radical leftist, she is a centrist through and through, the Clintons have never been on the radical edge of the left, they made the term “Hippie Bashing” mainstream.  

    See if the democratic party was taken over by Tumblr and ran a SJW candidate, it would be a POC Disabled Pansexual Transman with died hair, piercings, runs a Sherlock Shipping site and likely a Marxist as well.  Not Neoliberal establishment politicians

Lets takes some of the most common phrases and concept used by the Tumblr Left

Triggered

Cultural Appropriation

X Privilege 

Safe Space

White Washing

Yellow/Black Face

I don’t have the Spoons

Victim Blaming

Internalized Persecution

Check your Privilage

Abelism 

Problematic 

Fair Trade

Legalizing drugs

Shout out to X marginalized Group

Y terrible circumstance is inherent to Capitalism 

Feels

   Hey remember when CLinton said any of those Terms?  Oh right.....that never fucking happened.   I almost included Black Lives Matter on the list but she did say it...eventually....after months of people on the left pressuring her to do so.  Clinton didn’t talk about how X celebrity or film was problematic, she talked about the value of goverment not being in the hands of a crazy person, she didn’t rail against capitalist system she told Goldman Sachs that they took too much blame for the 2008 crash, she didn’t attack American Imperialism she was an open and honest Warhawk.  She didn’t talk about the murky and dubious past and founding of America, her rallies were all about the greatest of the america, the flag, and a distinctly pro military presence.  Contrary to Tumblrs anti corporate, anti capitalist, pro wellfare policies, Bill Clinton supported NAFTA and Hillary TPP, both beloved by Free Trade Advocates.  The Clinton administration (and remember Hillary was effectively Bill’s real VP during that) was responsible for Glass Steigal, and massive deregulation, and having a long standing grudge against the environmentalist lobby, and oh yeah, the War on Crime.  Hey remember this?

   Cause here is the thing, most of the type of liberals who live on Tumblr, the ones who care about racism, sexism, Homphobia, Classism, Enviormentalism, Ablism, and are anti war, anti corporate, anti two party system and pro wellfare, pro regulation, and pro green energy?  They....don’t really like Hillary Clinton that much.  As a rule, they wanted to support somebody who spoke to them....you know....Bernie Sanders

     And this is where the Alt Right argument really just fucking smashes its face into reality and dies, because if you look at the numbers of when/where Clinton lost, their theor ydoesn’t match up.  Despite winning the election by almost 3 million votes, Clinton’s loss was primarily due to massively low voter turnout on the democratic side, a lot of liberals didn’t come out to vote in 2016, because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton.  And most of those were from three groups, Working class Middle Aged Whites, African Americans, and young progressives.  The latter two are the exact demographic who would have the most to gain and be the most aesthetic by a BLM identity politics candidate, so why did they stay home or vote third party?  Well because...They felt that Hillary Clinton didn’t represent their interests.  In fact if you poll people who did vote Hillary Clinton, most of them said their primary reason for voting Clinton was “I don’t want Trump to be president”, that isn’t the voice of a populace who are like “Yeah, we have our progressive candidate at last.”  And even the white workign class voters didn’t abandon Clinton because they were like “Oh man, she is way too progressive” they abandoned her because they felt she was too establishment, fake, and corporate, those are the three terms you keep seeing pop up.  Hell, a Green Party Candidate got votes in part because Hillary Clinton was seen as too corporate.  

If Hillary CLinton was a SJW dreamboat and that alienated the American electorate, then the progressive bloc of the Democratic Party would be the most enthusiastic group for her....instead they were among the least.  If progressiveness defeated the Democratic movement, then wouldn’t Bernie Sanders have A) Won the election and B) Be extremely unpopular outside the progressive base the way that Ted Cruz is only popular with a very slim percentage of the population?  Except...no.  Bernie Sanders lost the primary and is the most popular political candidate in the country, so clearly progressive politics aren’t really turning people off.  Again, the man is a Jewish Socialist.  

(pictured, thing leftists have been bitching about for decades) 

    So clearly Clinton didn’t lose for being too progressive, in fact she was hurt because she wasn’t progressive enough.  But, and this is important, that doesn’t mean that if Clinton had been more progressive and nothing else was different, she would have won, because...no that’s stupid.  Elections are decided by a lot of different things.  If she had done everything exactly the same but wasn't being investigated by the FBI she would have won, if she had campaigned in Michigan more she would have won, if she had held press conferences she would have won, there are a lot of little things that go into a campaign.  

   This is a really popular right wing tactic, find a centrist who the left doesn’t actually like, and then target them as if they are a radical extremist, because the left won’t feel obligated to defend them, or if they do, they are defending somebody they don’t even like.  The right rarely goes after actual leftists because left wing ideas are...more popular, instead they tend to go after Centrists because nobody likes centrists.  

[qttalkpdx-blog]

This is Why Queers Protest by Grace Piper

I am sitting in the Cinebar in West Salem watching a $6.50 matinee of “Rogue One” on the day that Carrie Fisher died and I am feeling heavy, I am holding back tears throughout most of the movie, not just for Carrie, but for me too. I remember being young and my whole family gathering on the couch in piles and we would stuff the VHS  in and watch in awe with a dialogue to follow. This is still common practice for us when we get together. Growing up, this made my first hero the bad ass herself, Leia Organa, who literally killed fascists, was a well trained activist and strategist, and really carried the rebellion (in my opinion more than Luke, but that’s a different article). As each new movie set comes out, we are presented with a femme doing the emotional labor of the movement (seriously though, Padme), as well as making the strides and helping us move on to restoring balance to the force (Thanks Jyn and probably Rey). I was inspired by their bravery, their tenacity, and most importantly, by their action. My youth connected me to Star Wars and to my activism. In watching “Rogue One,” I couldn’t help but cry because I could feel it, the way the film shows the growing fascist regime, the work they are doing to build the Death Star with the sole intent of destroying entire planets and wiping out entire groups of people-aliens-what have you. And I can’t help but feel like we are headed therein some way too. 

This cold year has housed a number of protests, particularly in Portland as well as nationally, and worldwide. State sanctioned violence against marginalized people is still rising (Huffington post reported that over 250 black people have been killed by police officers in 2016), world wide, transgender people are being murdered (click here to read about it), basic rights like if you can use a bathroom are still in question, the DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) is being unlawfully built despite being condemned by the Obama Administration late last year. And this is just what we can see. We know that people are being crushed by a violent system of oppression, that people are dying because they don’t have access to resources to survive. In the past couple of years, I have personally participated in various protests. At one point in time I had on a date where we went to a #DisarmPSU protest and debriefed afterwards over chai in a dirty coffee shop. I am not at every protest, but I believe in the change that they can create and I am cautious to criticize the ways in which marginalized people deal with their anger. Following the election, following the deaths of innocent people, following the massacre in Orlando, so many of us have found one another and called for action by taking action. In doing so, I have personally been asked “what does protesting even actually do?” “but why do they have to be violent?” or simply “protesting never works.” I am personally exhausted with this (by that I mean tired of being tokenized as a vocal QTPoC), but putting it in writing, sorting it through analysis, is how I can bring it to light, the reasons why queers protest.

We are not represented in the dominant paradigm. There are less than 10 out queer or trans (like every single possible LGBTQIA+ identity) representatives in congress. There are 535 total representative in the House and the Senate and there are seriously less than 10 queer and trans reps. I applaud the bravery it takes to be there and I applaud the bravery it takes to be outed and remain a minority in government work. Even though I feel for these people and I have so much tenderness for our little bit of representation, how can this handful of people possibly put our needs out there and get it through? How can those few people get ⅔ of the congress to believe us? In terms of statistics, it is really not probable. (Special shout out to these trans women who ran for office this year, y’all are amazing.) When traditional forms of change don’t work, we have to make our own means of change. This is why we protest.

Protests are a place in which the work of femmes can be recognized. In the academy, in government, in traditional forms of change or creations of knowledge, masculinity and men are celebrated. In protests, women and femmes carry us (kind of like how I mention that stuff about Star Wars), and particularly trans femmes and women of color. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Storme DeLarverie, the women leading the Women’s March following inauguration day, Molala, literally any of these women, I could go on. This kind of representation does not happen in traditional forms of change because money can’t be made unless someone is exploited, because white supremacist patriarchy is not powerful unless someone is suppressed, even when femmes do the work, men are often finding ways to masquerade it as their own. Femmes carry our world’s emotional labor and then still are not allowed in public domain, but in protesting, it is their domain.

Protest are on the cutting edge of a radical and progressive politic and that pushes the mainstream movement. They spread the word to the crevices of your town, of your country. To clarify, when I am discussing radicals, I do not mean TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), I mean, as Angela Davis says “grasping things at the root.” Radicals are think deeper and search for the source of problems and of oppression. Liberals and often mainstream democrats are searching for the bandaid fix for the problem (like how do we make more people profit from capitalism, rather than how do we find a system that does not exploit people to create profit). What I mean is that radicals are so indepth and thorough in the think and activism, that they pave the way for new knowledge. Even when that new way of thinking does not catch on right away, it does eventually, it get’s adopted and employed in general progressive thought over time. Radical ideas pull us forward immediately and eventually.

#FunFact protests and rallies work. Here is a casual list of 7 protests that worked that I thought of off the top of my head in less than 2 minutes. In all of these, marginalized people unified, organized, planned an action (rally, civil disobedience, protest), and it accomplished one of their goals. The thing about protests is that a goal can be to completely overthrow a system, it can be to create a policy change, and it can also be to spread a message. These people were loud and someone listened. I want to add that I include violent protests/riots in this list because they have been effective forms of activism. Like I said earlier, I am cautious to critique the ways in which marginalized people chose to voice their anger, such as through destruction of property, when mass amounts of people are being overtly and covertly murdered in a dominant paradigm of normalized violence and state sanctioned violence (like Banana Republic probably made it just fine with a cracked window, y’all).

There are people in our country and worldwide who feel completely isolated, invisible, or unheard. There are people who do not have a wealth of community to lean back on. There are people who rely on the internet or the news to find any source of support. If you were not aware, since the election of Donald Trump, calls and texts on all major suicide hotlines have reached all time highs, particularly for queer and trans people. As queer and trans people, we often feel scared, and it is recent events (also such as HB2), that are affecting our safety in a multidimensional way. I do not know everything about what is going on for these people, but I do know that having community and support can make a person feel safer. When I do not know what to do, I reach out for community, and the creation of rallies and protests can create a community among the people who are there, but I can’t help but hope there is someone who needed it sees it too on the news or online somewhere. I can’t help but hope that the rural queers, that the black and brown kids, that the children of immigrants, that anyone who is afraid can see that there are thousands of people there for them, that are rooting for them, that are fighting for them, that hear them. That is why I protest. I am scared, but I am still there, for me and for them.

Following watching “Rogue One,” my family went home and put in “A New Hope” and began playing card games. “A New Hope” is pretty immediate after “Rogue One” and leads us into the bravery and strength of taking down the Empire’s oppressive government system in the “Star Wars” universe. As I watched the badass Leia herself take Luke’s blaster following his terrible rescue, she shoots open the vent to the garbage chute, and says to Han, “somebody’s got to save our skins,” I got a text from a friend that said “be like Leia in 2017. Fight on the front lines. Strangle fascists with the chains they would have you wear. Be a motherfuckin’ general.”

Next month keep an eye out for a follow up to this article as I head out to Washington DC to participate in the Women’s March on Washington following the inauguration of Donald Trump.

This piece was written by Grace Piper, a QTPoC Portlander with an interest in cheese and education.

[mhsn033]

Best health READ: Michelle Obama’s DNC speech

Best health

Broken-down first lady Michelle Obama made her first major campaign speech at the tip of the first night of the virtual 2020 Democratic Nationwide Convention Monday.

In a pre-taped speech, Obama, who wore a necklace with the be aware “vote,” emphasised the want for empathy in a perambulate-setter, citing Joe Biden’s sage. She also criticized President Donald Trump on his dealing with of chase considerations, the coronavirus pandemic and a quantity of considerations.

She made no point out of Biden’s vice presidential glean, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., however, as an aide to the extinct first lady confirmed to ABC News that her speech used to be filmed forward of Harris’ different. Accumulated, Harris tweeted in enhance of Obama’s speech and talked about she used to be “talking fact to vitality.”

Read her corpulent speech below

Supreme evening, everybody. It be a tough time, and everybody appears to be like to be feeling it in a quantity of ways. And I know masses of folk are reluctant to tune into a political conference upright now or to politics in popular. Think me, I receive that. But I am here tonight because I if fact be told adore this country with all my coronary heart, and it effort me to be aware so many folks hurting.

I if fact be told contain met so masses of you. I if fact be told contain heard your reviews. And by you, I if fact be told contain seen this country’s promise. And because of so many who came sooner than me, because of their toil and sweat and blood, I if fact be told contain been capable of reside that promise myself. That is the memoir of The US. All those folks who sacrificed and overcame so unprecedented of their contain cases because they wished something extra, something better for his or her adolescents.

There’s masses of elegance in that memoir. There’s masses of danger in it, too. A form of fight and injustice and work left to remain. And who we take dangle of as our president on this election will pick whether or no longer or no longer we honor that fight and chip away at that injustice, and abet alive the very chance of finishing that work.

I am one amongst a handful of oldsters living at present time who contain seen firsthand the astronomical weight and awesome vitality of the presidency. And let me, but every other time, lisp you this: The job is tough. It requires clear-headed judgment, a mastery of complex and competing considerations, a devotion to info and history, a lawful compass and a functionality to listen and an abiding belief that each and each of the 330 million lives on this country has which intention and sign.

A president’s words contain the vitality to switch markets. They can start up wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts.

You merely can not fraudulent your technique by this job. As I if fact be told contain talked about sooner than, being president would now not trade who you is seemingly to be, it unearths who you is seemingly to be. Well, a presidential election can display hide who we’re, too, and 4 years ago, too many folks selected to factor in that their votes didn’t topic. Perchance they contain been uninterested. Perchance they thought the result would no longer be conclude. Perchance the boundaries felt too steep. No topic the motive, in the tip, those alternatives sent someone to the Oval Put of job who lost the nationwide in vogue vote by nearly 3 million votes. In one amongst the states that obvious the result, the winning margin averaged out to exciting two votes per precinct — two votes! And now we contain all been living with the penalties.

When my husband left recount of enterprise with Joe Biden at his facet, we had a sage-breaking stretch of job advent. We had secured the upright to effectively being like 20 million folks. We contain been revered around the enviornment, rallying our allies to confront climate trade. And our leaders had labored hand in hand with scientists to back dwell an Ebola outbreak from turning into a world pandemic.

Four years later, the recount of this nation is highly a quantity of. Extra than 150,000 folks contain died and our economy is in shambles because of an epidemic that this president downplayed for too prolonged. It has left hundreds and hundreds of oldsters jobless. Too many contain lost their effectively being care. Too many are struggling to glean care of popular necessities adore meals and rent. Too many communities contain been left in the lurch to grapple with whether or no longer and the manner to start our colleges safely.

Internationally, now we contain became our lend a hand no longer exciting on agreements cast by my husband, however on alliances championed by presidents adore Reagan and Eisenhower. And here at home, as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a never-ending record of innocent folks of coloration proceed to be murdered, pointing out the straightforward indisputable truth that a Dark lifestyles matters is gentle met with derision from the nation’s absolute top recount of enterprise. On legend of at any time when we discover to this White Home for some management or comfort or any semblance of steadiness, what we receive as an different is chaos, division and a complete and bellow lack of empathy.

Empathy. That’s something I have been pondering plenty about currently: the flexibility to skedaddle in someone else’s shoes, the recognition that any individual else’s journey has sign too. Most of us be aware this with out a 2d thought. If we watch someone suffering or struggling, we do now not stand in judgment, we attain out because there however for the grace of God perambulate I. It’s no longer a tough thought to purchase. It be what we lisp our kids. And adore so masses of you, Barack and I if fact be told contain tried our easiest to instill in our women a considerable lawful foundation to retain forward the values that our folks and grandparents poured into us.

But upright now adolescents on this country are seeing what occurs when we dwell requiring empathy of 1 but every other. They’re attempting around wondering if now we contain been lying to them this complete time about who we’re and what we if fact be told sign. They watch folks shouting in grocery shops, unwilling to wear a hide to abet us all safe. They watch folks calling the police on folks minding their contain industry exciting because of the coloration of their pores and skin. They watch an entitlement that says easiest sure folks belong here, that greed is accurate and winning is every part, because as prolonged as you attain out on top, it is no longer relevant what occurs to everybody else.

And so they watch what occurs when that lack of empathy is ginned up into outright disdain. They watch our leaders labeling fellow electorate “enemies of the recount,” while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They gaze in awe as kids are torn from their households and thrown into cages and pepper spray and rubber bullets are former on tranquil protesters for a characterize-op.

Sadly, here is the The US that is on display hide for the following generation. A nation that is underperforming no longer merely on matters of protection, however on matters of persona. And that’s the reason no longer exciting disappointing. It be downright infuriating because I know the goodness and the grace that is on the market in households and neighborhoods all all the intention in which by this nation. And I know that regardless of our chase, age, religion or politics, when we conclude out the noise and the awe and if fact be told start our hearts, everybody knows that what’s going on on this country is exciting no longer upright. Here is no longer who we want to be. So what’s going to we dwell now? What’s our strategy? Over the previous four years, masses of oldsters contain requested me when others are going so low, does going high gentle if fact be told work?

My retort, going high is the easiest ingredient that works because when we perambulate low, when we sing those identical tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we exciting turn out to be segment of the grotesque noise that is drowning out every part else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight. But let’s be clear. Going high does no longer imply placing on a smile and saying nice issues when confronted by viciousness and cruelty.

Going high intention taking the tougher path. It intention scraping and clawing our technique to that mountaintop. Going high intention standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we’re one nation below God, and if we want to dwell on, now we contain bought to search out a technique to reside collectively and work collectively all the intention in which by our variations. And going high intention unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the easiest ingredient that can if fact be told set aside us free — the cool, tough fact.

So let me be as lawful and clear as I presumably can. Donald Trump is the awful president for our country. He has had bigger than ample time to display hide that he can dwell the job, however he’s clearly in over his head. He can not meet this 2d. He merely can not be who we want him to be for us. It’s what it is some distance.

Now, I realize that my message would possibly presumably perchance perchance also fair no longer be heard by some folks. We reside in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Dark lady talking at the Democratic Convention. But ample of you admire me by now. You take into account that I lisp you exactly what I am feeling. You understand I detest politics. But you furthermore mght know that I care about this nation.

You know the intention in which unprecedented I care about all of our kids. So if you happen to glean one ingredient from my words tonight, it is some distance that this: Even as you happen to judge issues can not presumably receive worse, belief me, they’ll and they are going to if we don’t receive a trade on this election. If now we contain any hope of ending this chaos, now we contain bought to vote for Joe Biden adore our lives depend upon it.

I know Joe. He’s a profoundly decent man guided by faith. He used to be a considerable vice president. He knows what it takes to rescue an economy, ward off an epidemic, and lead our country — and he listens. He will lisp the fact and belief science. He will receive perfect plans and organize a valid crew and he’ll govern as someone who’s lived a lifestyles that the relaxation of us can acknowledge.

When he used to be a kid, Joe’s father lost his job. When he used to be a younger senator, Joe lost his considerable other and his diminutive one daughter. And when he used to be vice president, he lost his cherished son. So Joe knows the anguish of sitting at a desk with an empty chair, which is why he offers his time so freely to grieving folks. Joe knows what it is adore to fight, which is why he offers his personal cell phone quantity to adolescents overcoming a whine of their contain.

His lifestyles is a testomony to getting lend a hand up, and he goes to channel that identical grit and fervour to glean us all up, to back us heal and data us forward. Now, Joe is no longer supreme, and he’d be the first to lisp you that. But there would possibly be no supreme candidate, no supreme president. And his skill to be taught and develop, we discover in that the form of humility and maturity that so many folks yearn for upright now, because Joe Biden has served this nation his complete lifestyles without losing glimpse of who he’s. But bigger than that, he has never lost glimpse of who we’re — all of us.

Joe Biden desires all of our kids to perambulate to a valid school, watch a health care provider when they’re ill, reside on a healthy planet — and he’s bought plans to receive all of that happen. Joe Biden desires all of our kids, it is no longer relevant what they discover adore, in an effort to skedaddle out the door without demanding about being stressed or arrested or killed. He desires all of our kids in an effort to perambulate to a film or a math class without being insecure of getting shot.

He desires all our kids to develop up with leaders who would possibly presumably perchance perchance also fair no longer exciting aid themselves and their prosperous peers however will provide a safety glean for folk going by tough cases. And if we need a gamble to pursue any of those targets, any of those most popular requirements for a functioning society, now we must all the time vote for Joe Biden in numbers that can not be overlooked because upright now, folks who know they would possibly be able to not purchase exciting and square at the pollbox are doing every part they’ll to remain us from vote casting.

They’re closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods. They’re purging voter rolls. They’re sending folks out to intimidate voters and they’re lying in regards to the safety of our ballots. These tactics are no longer novel, however here is no longer the time to take dangle of our votes in remark or play games with candidates who contain no likelihood of winning. We’ve bought to vote adore we did in 2008 and 2012.

We’ve bought to lisp up with the identical stage of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve bought to vote early, in-particular person if we are capable of. We’ve bought to are waiting for our mail-in ballots upright now, tonight, and send them lend a hand at once, and be aware as a lot as receive sure they’re bought, and then receive sure our company and households dwell the identical. We’ve bought to take dangle of our cheerful shoes, assign on our masks, pack a brown glean dinner and presumably breakfast too because now we contain bought to be tantalizing to stand in line all night if now we must all the time.

See, now we contain already sacrificed so unprecedented this 12 months. So masses of you is seemingly to be already going that extra mile. Although you happen to are exhausted, you are mustering up incredible braveness to set aside on those scrubs and offers our family participants a struggling with likelihood. Although you happen to are anxious, you are delivering those packages, stocking those cupboards and doing all that a need to-contain work so as that every particular person amongst us can abet transferring forward.

Even when all of it feels so overwhelming, working folks are by some means piecing all of it collectively without diminutive one care. Lecturers are getting inventive so as that our kids can gentle be taught and develop. Our younger folks are desperately struggling with to pursue their dreams. And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, hundreds and hundreds of American citizens of each and each age, every background rose as a lot as March for every and each a quantity of, crying out for justice and development. Here is who we gentle are, compassionate, resilient, decent folks whose fortunes are lope up with one but every other.

And it is some distance effectively previous time for our leaders to but every other time replicate our fact. So it is some distance as a lot as us so as to add our voices and our votes to the chorus of history, echoing heroes adore John Lewis, who talked about, “Must you watch something that is no longer upright, it is crucial to claim something. You will need to remain something.”

That is the truest form of empathy, no longer exciting feeling however doing, no longer exciting for ourselves or our kids however for everybody, for all our kids. And if we want to abet the chance of development alive in our time, if we want in an effort to discover our kids in the gape after this election, now we contain bought to reassert our recount in American history.

And now we contain bought to remain every part we are capable of to elect my friend, Joe Biden, because the following president of the USA. Thank you all. God bless.

ABC News’ John Verhovek contributed to this file.

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[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: November 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of November 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

In the mind of proven liar Boris Johnson it was a competition between him and David Cameron to see who could give less of a shit about various parts of the UK being flooded, and of course Johnson “won” that contest by not deigning to pay it the slightest bit of attention for over a week, comfortably beating Cameron’s previous record of not caring by a couple of days

It appears that Jeanine Áñez Chávez believes the 1970s was the height of South American politics considering her policies are a grab bag of every dictator of the decade, from American interests installing her as president over the democratically-elected head of state in much the same way that Pinochet became Chilean leader, while her outright demonising of the indigenous people almost identical to Stroessner’s policies in Paraguay during the same period

There’s a very good reason why the advisors of Prince Andrew expressly told him to not do any TV interviews about the links between him and Jeffrey Epstein, that reason being that when he ignored their advice and thought he could handle a TV interview about his links to Jeffrey Epstein it was a complete train wreck for everyone but the Woking branch of Pizza Express, which in turn caused his advisors to quit

Not only did proven liar Boris Johnson duck out of Channel 4′s live debate on climate change - just like he ducked out of Channel 4′s leaders debate earlier that same week - but he dispatched a camera-crew toting Michael Gove and his fucking father to debate on his behalf, both of whom were promptly told to bugger off by Channel 4 as neither are the Tory leader.  So of course, the immediate response to this was to threaten to pull Channel 4′s broadcasting license

...and the following day Stanley Johnson appeared on Victoria Derbyshire to call the British public illiterate, because in his mind telling the public they can’t even spell Pinocchio means they cannot compare his son to the character

Says a lot that the Conservatives stooped to doctoring footage of an interview with Keir Starmer on the very first day of the election campaign, trying to convince people that Labour’s position on Britait is difficult to understand, and this clip was shared by MPs such as Matt Hancock to establish that lying through their teeth is the first card they intend to play 

...although this didn’t look so clever when James Cleverly ran and hid rather than face questions about this from Sky News the following day, having previously had his backside handed to him on Good Morning Britain of all shows earlier that morning, receiving the empty chair treatment as a result.  He had no issues scuttling off to his LBC safe space where Julia Halfwit-Brewer would pander to his ever lie an hour later (and not, as Tory cheerleaders try and claim, at the same time Kay Burley was lying about him being at Sky News’ studio)

...and it wasn’t long before the BBC turned their hand to doctoring footage, though, when they took it upon themselves to edit out proven liar Boris Johnson laying a wreath at the cenotaph the wrong way up and replace it with a clip from 2016, and when called out for it claimed it was a “production error” as if it’s a perfectly normal mistake to remove a clip from footage shot by the BBC and replace it with a clip shot by the BBC three years ago that would have obviously been readily available in the edit bay as news editor Rob Burley accused anyone noticing the obvious bollocksness of the official line as “conspiracy theorists”

...and it wasn't the last time Rob Burley bullshat the public that week, either, as his response to the BBC using the caption “Broadband ‘Communism’” when discussing Labour’s play to make broadband free he took to Twitter to try and shout down anyone suggesting the BBC were outragiously biased in their framing of the story by saying the BBC weren’t doing the framing in spite of the caption “Broadband ‘Communism’” being added to BBC footage by a BBC editor at the BBC studio

...and yet the BBC weren't done with their Pravda approach to broadcast journalism, given how proven liar Boris Johnson’s claim during the leader’s debate that the public can trust him drew actual laughter from the audience, yet in every instance where the BBC have replayed that clip since the laughter has been edited out

Tory sociopathy continued unabated when Jacob Rees-Mogg stated in an interview that the responsibility for those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire didn’t lie with the landlords covering the building with highly-flammable cladding, but entirely at the feet of those who died for lacking common sense.  The only bright spot of the interview (or between his ears) is he neglected to follow up with the blatant attempt to shift the blame onto the fire brigade instead of those who just so happen to have slashed the number of firefighters and fire stations since 2010

...but don’t worry, in rushed Laura Kuenssberg to describe the comments as a “gaffe” as opposed to, say, a deeply-crass piece of victim blaming that is only possible if you see those of a lower social class than you as being sub-human

Nothing sums up the Tories better than the Tory Press Office changing its Twitter handle to “FactCheckUK” ahead of the first leader’s debate in a blatant attempt to mislead the public - and the fact that Dominic Raab tried to defend their doing this by saying nobody cares about social media only serves to beg the question why, if nobody cares about social media, why the Tories would stoop to using social media in a clear attempt to mislead the public

...yet that isn't the most charmless thing Dominic Raab did that particular week: that would be slapping the parents of Harry Dunn with legal costs fas if they’d actually done a single damn thing about Anne Sacoolas fleeing back to US soil after killing their son in a hit and run incident, and because he hadn’t punched down quite enough he promptly made sure Dunn’s family were locked out of a local hustings so they couldn’t give him both barrels 

...nor was it the last time the Tory Press Office was caught flooding the internet with misinformation, as they launched a website purporting to be the Labour election manifesto which was just a long list of outright lies and smears 

Nobody appears to have told Michael Gove that campaigning was suspended in the wake of the London Bridge attack, given he showed up to a campaign rally in Cobham that evening - sort of like he did in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder in 2016

The good news for WWE is their most recent biannual show in Saudi Arabia wasn’t the in-ring trainwreck the previous three have been.  The bad news is they found a new way to be at the centre of a PR shitstorm when the majority of the wrestlers for the show were stranded in Saudi Arabia and having to pay for their own flights home while management plus a handful of preferred wrestlers flew home without them, and only made the situation worse by issuing the usual passive aggressive ass-covering statement 

Not only has Matt Hancock spent the entire month being nothing more than an ersatz James Cleverly, whose role is to keep pumping outright lies and fabrications into the Twittersphere, but he also demonstrated the Tory debating tactics perfectly at a hustings where he kept repeating his repeatedly-debunked lie about nursing numbers until the audience were outright laughing at him, at which point he played the “Layber anteesemmatizm” card...at which point the crowd utterly tore into him for using such an obvious tactic

As if Jo Swinson wasn’t already farting deluded gibberish out of her face, it suddenly occurred to her that she’s a victim of oppression given she threatened legal action against ITV for not inviting the leader of the fourth-largest political party in the UK to the leader’s debates, and if that wasn’t all she constantly whined about Jeremy Corbyn and proven liar Boris Johnson being white men under the impression she doesn’t fulfill 50% of the victim complex she insists on whinging about

Good to see that the BBC are keeping their viewers educated, informed and entertained with their election coverage by pretending that proven liar Boris Johnson’s visit to Addenbrooke’s hospital didn’t happen as showing any footage of his visit would mean broadcasting the jeers he received from staff and patients alike, but they did find the time and effort to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of politicising the NHS - because as we all know, proven liar Boris Johnson has never used the NHS as a pawn in his political games

Somebody should probably tell the Liberal Democrats that telling the Labour  candidate for Portsmouth South to step aside so they can win the seat and bluster about how if they don’t will had the Tories the victory is not the smartest strategy to adopt when the Labour candidate is the sitting MP and they’re basing their assumptions off a solitary opinion poll

...equally telling is how the Liberal Democrats responded to Tim Walker stepping aside in Canterbury, which is another marginal held by a pro-Remain Labour MP: they immediately responded by saying they would field another candidate in the constituency and saying they would stand against Labour in every seat - which is interesting, because they sure as hell aren’t standing against the Tories in every seat... 

Not only did Kwasi Kwarteng pull a figure of £1.2tr out of his backside to describe Labour spending plans, both believing it would be spent in one lump sum while neglecting to mention his made-up figure is still significantly lower than the nine years of Tory-incurred debt, but then he claimed he wouldn’t bandy about figures when asked what the Tory spending budget was costed at

I’m sure Michael Gove thought he was being oh-so-clever when making as much as he could about Jeremy Corbyn being heckled for being a terrorist sympathiser by a church minister.  However, all he actually did was signal boost the fact that Richard Cameron had a history of Islamophobic and homophobic tweets, which saw him promptly suspended by the Church of Scotland

At first it looked as if Heidi Allen had coined a smart idea with the Remain Alliance...until a more cursory glance revealed that the basis of this alliance consisted of the Lib Dems standing aside for the Greens in seats where Labour had majorities of 5000+ at the last election while the Greens stand aside in Labour marginals, at which point the Greens started announcing they would stand aside in the seats they were designated to support Labour

Of course Ian Austin slithered out of the woodwork to rant about Jeremy Corbyn and telling all Labour supporters to vote Tory - and equally unsurprising was how it was the BBC giving him a free platform to do so while neglecting to mention that Austin has been working as a Tory-appointed trade envoy for six months, thus making his endorsement more than a little bit questionable 

Who knew that Richard Spencer was a racist piece of shit?  Well...anyone who actually paid attention for the last three years, rather than call him the dapper face of the right while ignoring what he was saying at any point

I’m sure in the mind of Jo Swinson it was a “win” when she took the SNP to court over their claims she was given a bung by a fracking company when in fact she was given a bung by the boss of a fracking company...but in the mind of everyone else what she did was clarify that the bung exists, that she accepted it, and by taking the matter to court she brought it to the forefront

The Lib Dems’ priorities became clear when Sam Gyimah outright lied and blamed the Labour candidate for Kensington for the Grenfell fire yet drew no comment from the party whatsoever, just like the Liberal Democrats posting election pamphlets riddled with one lie after another through people’s doors draws no comment from the party whatsoever...yet when a satirical article suggested that Jo Swinson kills squirrels for sport the party went off the deep end to issue one denial after another in record time

Smirking halfwit Priti Patel had an interesting take on the drastic increase in poverty that’s happened in the last nine years of Tory rule: it’s definitely not the fault of the Tory government and entirely the fault of the local councils - and of course, you’d be a fool or a communist to point out that local councils have had their funding cut for the past nine years by...well look at that, it would appear the Tory government are the ones who have spent the past nine years cutting the budgets of local councils

It says all you need to know about Michael Gove that, when confronted with evidence that the Tories have built approximately 200,000 less social houses than the 200,000 they pledged to build, the only response he could think of was “But Jeremy Corbyn...” as if that’s a valid defence for the Fyre Festival doing a better job of providing accommodation than the Tories have

It seems the Lib Dems forgot to lock Ed Davey in a cupboard for the duration of the election campaign as every time he popped up he justified the term “Yellow Tories” first by saying that he hoped that austerity would continue, and then by saying the Lib Dems would gladly go into coalition with the Tories if a second referendum was dangled in front of their noses

It’s obvious that Israel Folau has decided he may as well be an alt-right troll at this point, considering he used the bushfires that have left at least six dead as an excuse for a little gay-bashing on Twitter

It was dickheaded enough that Gideon Bull would resort to calling a Jewish councillor “Shylock” - but to try and cover his backside by claiming he didn't know that the character Shylock was Jewish only served to hand several dozen feet more rope to him before it dawned on him that stepping down was what he should’ve done in the first place 

As there weren’t enough subjects for Dinesh D’Souza to be pig ignorant about, he decided to wade into the debate about climate change and say there is no need to be afraid because fifty years ago fearmongers were afraid of nuclear winter and that hasn’t happened, seemingly under the impression that nuclear winter is related to the weather and not something minor like global thermonuclear war...

At some point Billy Corgan needs to accept that Jim Cornette is only doing damage to his relaunched NWA brand, especially after an episode of NWA Power had to be pulled and swiftly re-edited as they had to remove a joke Cornette made about the Ethiopian famine from the show’s commentary

Somebody at FC Den Bosch thought it was a good idea to try and claim that it wasn’t racist abuse that Ahmad Mendes Moreira heard from Den Bosch fans but “crow sounds.”  Funnily enough, Den Bosch were quick to say that, actually, that’s exactly what Moreira heard - presumably around the same time whoever thought the “crow sounds” defence was hearing the door slam shut behind them having been sacked by the club for general bellendedness

Indie wrestling nobody Matt Wade made sure he’ll stay a nobody by refusing to wrestle an opponent because they are black, outright stating that to the promoter this before being booted out of the show and blackballed from the promotion

The eldritch corruption known as Disney made an obvious mis-step when unleashing their nuclear option on all popular culture they don't own that is Disney+ by deciding that classic episodes of The Simpsons would be blown up into fullscreen even though fullscreen didn’t exist when they were made - which only served to crop out large parts of each and every scene, taking various visual gags with it

Footballers can thank Harry Arter for perpetuating the belief that they’re all thick after he took to Twitter to say he wouldn’t be voting Labour at the next election because of how Jeremy Corbyn lied when campaigning for Leave about how much the NHS would receive after the UK left the European Union.  That sentence would make a lot of sense if you changed the name “Jeremy Corbyn” for “Boris Johnson”, but rather than admit the flub instead Arter deleted his Twitter

Attention-seeking nonentity Rachel Riley really should consider her choice of attire, because when your attire features a image of Jeremy Corbyn on an anti-apartheid march doctored to say he's racist it not only makes you look like you have an unhealthy obsession with shrieking at people in the hope that they agree with you, but it also makes you look like somebody who thinks that the South African apartheid is something you can joke about

So nice of Stan Collymore to state that, when Andre Gomes was lying on the pitch in clear distress during Everton’s game with Tottenham, the one thing which concerned him was how Son Heung-min and Serge Aurier were showing remorse, going so far as to suggest they were faking it for the camera.  That doesn’t make him sound like someone who lacks empathy, does it?

And of course, a month simply cannot go by without Donald Trump doing something dickheaded, for example his repeated claims he is paying no attention whatsoever to the impeachment hearings...and then livetweeting as he watches the impeachment hearings live on TV.  But somehow that classified as normal behaviour compared to him Photoshopping his face onto Rocky Balboa’s body for...reasons

[blogwonderwebsites]

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-plot-to-subvert-an-election-unraveling-the-russia-story-so-far/

Nature

On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

The police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

As Mr. Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts — the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents; massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter; and outreach to Trump campaign associates.

Consider 10 days in March. On March 15 of that year, Mr. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. In St. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Clinton.

On March 21 in Washington, Mr. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman.

On March 24, one of the members of the Trump foreign policy team, George Papadopoulos, sat in the cafe of an upscale London hotel with a Russian woman who introduced herself as Mr. Putin’s niece and offered to help set up a meeting between the Russian president and Mr. Trump. The woman and the adviser exchanged frequent messages in the weeks that followed. Today, Mr. Padadopoulos is unsure that those messages came from the person he met in the cafe.

The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter; of American citizens’ feelings about immigration and race; of American journalists eager for scoops, however modest; of the naïve, or perhaps not so naïve, ambitions of Mr. Trump’s advisers. The Russian trolls, hackers and agents totaled barely 100, and their task was to steer millions of American voters. They knew it would take a village to sabotage an election.

Russians or suspected Russian agents — including oligarchs, diplomats, former military officers and shadowy intermediaries — had dozens of contacts during the campaign with Mr. Trump’s associates. They reached out through email, Facebook and Twitter. They sought introductions through trusted business connections of Mr. Trump’s, obscure academic institutions, veterans groups and the National Rifle Association.

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They met Trump campaign aides in Moscow, London, New York and Louisville, Ky. One claimed the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton; another Russian, the Trump campaign was told, would deliver it. In May and June alone, the Trump campaign fielded at least four invitations to meet with Russian intermediaries or officials.

In nearly every case, the Trump aides and associates seemed enthusiastic about their exchanges with the Russians. Over months of such probing, it seems that no one alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the foreign overtures.

Mr. Trump’s position on the Russian contacts has evolved over time: first, that there were none; then, that they did not amount to collusion; next, that in any case collusion was not a crime. That is mere semantics — conspiracy is the technical legal term for abetting the Russians in breaking American laws, such as those outlawing computer hacking and banning foreign assistance to a campaign.

Whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates conspired with the Russians is a central question of the investigation by Mr. Mueller, who has already charged 26 Russians and won convictions or guilty pleas from the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; the former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates; and from Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a separate case.

But none of the convictions to date involve conspiracy. There remains an alternative explanation to the collusion theory: that the Trump aides, far from certain their candidate would win, were happy to meet the Russians because they thought it might lead to moneymaking deals after the election. “Black Caviar,” read the subject line of an email Mr. Manafort got in July 2016 from his associate in Kiev, Ukraine, hinting at the possibility of new largess from a Russian oligarch with whom they had done business.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, said that what Russia pulled off, through creativity and sheer luck, would have been the envy of Mr. Putin’s predecessors: puncturing the American sense of superiority and insisting on Russia’s power and place in the world.

“This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,” Professor Khrushcheva said. “Putin fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States. I think this will be studied by the K.G.B.’s successors for a very long time.”

Nature A Timeline of Parallel Threads

Direct contacts

with Russians by

Trump officials

JUNE 16, 2015

Trump announces

candidacy

Time

2016

Russian social

media fraud

Denials of

wrongdoing by

Trump and associates

MAY 26, 2016

Trump clinches

nomination

NOV. 8, 2016

Trump wins

election

Federal

investigation of

Russian meddling

JAN. 20, 2017

Inauguration

Continuing…

JUNE 2015

Trump

announces

candidacy

Direct contacts

with Russians

Time

Russian

social media

fraud

2016

MAY 2016

Trump clinches

nomination

ELECTION

INAUGURATION

Denials of

wrongdoing by

Trump and associates

By The New York Times

See the full timeline of events.

The Russian leader thought the United States, and Hillary Clinton, had sought to undermine his presidency.

The first Russian advance party was tiny: two women on a whirlwind American tour. Hitting nine states in three weeks in summer 2014, Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova were supposed to “gather intelligence” to help them mimic Americans on Facebook and Twitter. They snapped photos and chatted up strangers from California to New York, on a sort of Russian “Thelma & Louise” road trip for the era of social media.

Even then, federal prosecutors would later say, the Russian government was thinking about the next United States presidential election — perhaps ahead of most Americans. Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova had been dispatched by their employer, an online propaganda factory in St. Petersburg, to prepare to influence American voters.

But why did Mr. Putin care about the election, then more than two years away? He was seething. The United States, in his view, had bullied and interfered with Russia for long enough. It was high time to fight back.

His motives were rooted in Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, captured in the history of St. Petersburg, Russia’s spectacular northern city and Mr. Putin’s hometown. Peter the Great, the brutal but westward-looking 18th-century czar, had brought in the best Italian architects to construct Russia’s “window on Europe” in a swamp.

Czar Peter’s portrait replaced Vladimir Lenin’s in Mr. Putin’s office when he took a job working for the city’s mayor in the early 1990s. Twenty-five years later, the internet offered a different kind of window on the West — a portal that could be used for a virtual invasion.

Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, had described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, a remarkable statement from a man whose country experienced revolution, civil war, bloody purges and the deaths of 27 million people in World War II. Like many of his fellow citizens, Mr. Putin was nostalgic for Russia’s lost superpower status. And he resented what he saw as American arrogance.

The Russian leader believed the United States had relentlessly sought to undermine Russian sovereignty and his own legitimacy. The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia’s borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. It had funded pro-democracy Russian activists through American organizations with millions in State Department grants each year.

With little evidence, Mr. Putin believed this American meddling helped produce street demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in 2011, with crowds complaining of a rigged parliamentary election and chanting, “Putin’s a thief!”

And Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, cheered the protesters on. Russians, she said, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”

Mr. Putin blamed Mrs. Clinton for the turmoil, claiming that when she spoke out, his political enemies “heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

The two tangled again the next year when Mr. Putin pushed for a “Eurasian Union” that would in effect compete with the European Union. Mrs. Clinton sharply dismissed the notion, calling it a scheme to “re-Sovietize the region” and saying the United States would try to block it.

By 2013, with his initial hopes for a “reset” of Russian relations dashed, Mr. Obama, like his top diplomat, no longer bothered to be diplomatic. He criticized Russia’s anti-gay legislation, part of Mr. Putin’s effort to become a global champion for conservative values, and gave a biting description of the Russian leader: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Mr. Putin was reported to be furious.

The White House via YouTube

After Russian troops seized Crimea and carried out a stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014, relations grew openly hostile. American support for the new government in Kiev and condemnation of Russian behavior heightened Mr. Putin’s rage at being told what he could do and not do in what he considered his own backyard.

If Russia had only a fraction of the United States’ military might and nothing like its economic power, it had honed its abilities in hacking and influence operations through attacks in Eastern Europe. And it could turn these weapons on America to even the score.

By making mischief in the 2016 election, Mr. Putin could wreak revenge on his enemy, Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, damaging if not defeating her. He could highlight the polarized state of American democracy, making it a less appealing model for Russians and their neighbors. And he could send a message that Russia would not meekly submit to a domineering America.

Hence the two Russian women who toured the United States in 2014, keyboard warriors granted the unusual privilege of real-world travel, hitting both coasts, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. At that point, according to a Russian document cited by the special counsel, Mr. Putin’s intentions for 2016 were already explicit: to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”

In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.

“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”

Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”

If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.

For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”

Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”

Asked about the surging Mr. Trump in December 2015, Mr. Putin said he was “a talent, without any doubt,” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” He also applied to the candidate the Russian word yarkii, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant” but which some reports mistranslated as “brilliant,” an assessment that Mr. Trump immediately began repeating.

“It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented,” Mr. Trump said, “by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

As Donald J. Trump emerged as the favorite for the nomination, his campaign brought on aides tied to Russia.

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations and passed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

The Associated Press

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

What exactly transpired during the meeting is still a mystery, but it appears that the Russians pulled a bait-and-switch. They used the session to push for an end to the crippling economic sanctions that Mr. Obama had imposed on Russia.

Donald Trump Jr. has said how disappointed he and other campaign advisers were that they didn’t get what the Russians had promised. The campaign’s reaction to the Russian attempts to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not to rebuff them or call law enforcement — it was to try to exploit them.

Experts who have studied Russian operations for decades see the catalog of contacts and communications between Russians and Mr. Trump’s advisers as a loosely coordinated effort by Russian intelligence both to get insight into the campaign and to influence it.

“The Russians aren’t reckless, and I don’t see them going through with this effort without thinking they had a willing partner in the dance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. officer who served as the spy agency’s station chief in Moscow.

By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.

Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.

The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.

He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.

A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.

“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.

Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.

Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.

“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”

In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.

Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.

Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.

See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.

The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.

The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.

The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”

“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox News host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.

But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.

Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.

Fox News via YouTube

But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.

In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.

“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.

Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.

Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”

CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.

But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.

After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

The Associated Press

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Nature Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Election Day

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Election Day

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

March

April

May

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

By The New York Times

And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.

On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.

Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.

The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.

In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.

Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.

“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.

He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”

Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.

Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.

In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes. They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”

If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.

The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.

An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News. In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.

Facebook, reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.

Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.

The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.

“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”

He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.

A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.

“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”

The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.

The White House statement released at 7:21 p.m. on May 17, 2017, was measured, even anodyne. Reacting to the news that Mr. Mueller had been appointed special counsel for the Russia investigation, the statement quoted Mr. Trump saying that he was “looking forward to this matter concluding quickly,” and that in the meantime he would be fighting “for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country.”

Exactly 12 hours and 31 minutes later, early in the morning without his staff around him, he told the world what he really thought.

“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he wrote in a tweet.

It had been little more than a week since the president had fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but the “Russia thing” wasn’t going away. Now the president was up against someone who could become even more formidable — a careful, tenacious former Marine whose stewardship of the F.B.I. during the Bush and Obama years had been praised by Washington’s establishment.

Mr. Trump’s instinct was to fire Mr. Mueller, but he settled for a different strategy. He has used all his power to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation.

Revelation upon revelation about Russian encounters with Trump associates has followed in the months since Mr. Mueller was appointed, intensifying the fear in the White House. Mr. Trump has used his Twitter pulpit to repeatedly assault the Mueller inquiry, and has made scathing remarks at rallies about claims of Russian interference. “It’s a hoax, O.K.?” he told a Pennsylvania crowd last month. The attacks have had an impact on how Americans view the country’s national security apparatus, how they view the Russia story, even how they view Russia itself.

See the full timeline of Mr. Trump’s repeated denials and attacks.

The strategy has helped sow doubts about the special counsel’s work in part because Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors only rarely go public with the evidence they have been steadily gathering in secret interviews and closed-door sessions of a grand jury.

During a period of 146 days over this year — between the Feb. 16 indictment of the Internet Research Agency operatives and the July 13 indictment of Russian intelligence officers — Mr. Mueller’s office was effectively silent. The president was not, sending at least 94 tweets that denied he had been involved in “collusion,” called the Russian interference a “hoax” or labeled the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.”

Indictment of Internet

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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By July, one poll showed that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January. The shift was even more dramatic among Republican voters: from 49 percent to 78 percent. More recent polls, conducted since the indictment of the G.R.U. officers and Mr. Manafort’s conviction, have shown a reversal of the trend.

The president’s aides hardly make a secret of their goal to discredit the investigation before a jury of the public. There is little expectation that Mr. Mueller would ignore Justice Department guidelines and try to indict a sitting president, so Mr. Trump’s lawyers see Congress and impeachment as the only threat. Turn the public against impeachment, the thinking goes, and Congress is less likely to act.

“Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s omnipresent lawyer, told The New York Times last month, without citing any data to buttress his assertion.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” he said. “And my client’s happy.”

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money. But the inquiry has buffeted his presidency, provoked concern that his attempts to thwart the investigation amount to obstruction of justice and fed his suspicion that the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies — what he calls “the deep state” — are conspiring against him.

The Associated Press

The desire of the president to make deals with Mr. Putin, and the longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community about Russian intentions and actions, might have made a clash inevitable. But Mr. Trump appears to have had success in persuading some Americans that the spy and law enforcement agencies are corrupt and hyperpartisan. He has scrambled alliances that solidified over decades, including the Republican Party’s reflexive support of the national security agencies. A president in open war with the F.B.I., once inconceivable, is now part of the daily news cycle.

Mr. Trump began laying the foundation immediately after he won the presidency, when he questioned the intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had disrupted the election, and likened America’s spies to Nazis. Since taking office, he has worked with partners in Congress to cast the agencies as part of an insurgency against the White House.

It continued in July, when he stood next to Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declared that he trusted the Russian president’s assurances that Moscow was innocent of interfering in the 2016 election.

And it continues today. Early one morning last week, hours before flying to Pennsylvania to honor the victims of the flight that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, the president fired off a tweet that appeared to quote something he had seen on Fox News.

“‘We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.’”

The reshuffling of alliances has seeped into the media, where the president’s reliable allies have been joined by voices on the left to dismiss the Russia story as overblown. They warn of a new Red Scare.

On Fox News, the network where Sean Hannity fulminates nightly about Mr. Mueller and his team, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the left-leaning news site The Intercept and a champion of government whistle-blowers, has appeared regularly to dismiss revelations about the investigation and decry officials “willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes,” in order to damage Mr. Trump.

Multiple frenzied television segments and hyped news stories have given credence to the concerns of Mr. Greenwald and others about a 21st-century McCarthyism. And critics of the “deep state” were given powerful ammunition after the release of text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, that revealed their animosity toward Mr. Trump. The pair, who were involved in a romantic relationship at the time, have been skewered regularly on Mr. Hannity’s show as the “Trump-hating F.B.I. lovebirds.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s glowing words about Mr. Putin and Russia have created a new affinity for Russia — in particular its social conservatism and toughness on terrorism — among Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters.

During a period of myriad accounts about Russia’s attempts to disrupt the last election, the percentage of Republicans who view Mr. Putin favorably has more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Democrats are now far more likely than Republicans to see Russia as a threat. An October 2017 poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans said they saw “Russia’s power and influence” as a significant threat to the United States.

Once again, Mr. Trump has flipped the script in the party of Reagan: A country that was once seen as a geopolitical foe is now embraced by many Republicans as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that despite the country’s relative economic and military weakness, Mr. Putin had often played a poor hand deftly. “Across many dimensions, Putin is using all kinds of instruments of power,” he said.

“It feels to me,” the former ambassador said, “like he’s winning and we’re losing.”

On July 16, the president woke early in Helsinki, hours before he was to sit face to face with Mr. Putin. The meeting came three days after Mr. Mueller indicted the 12 Russian intelligence officers. Once again, Mr. Trump dashed off a tweet.

“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded with a simple tweet hours later.

“We agree.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html | Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far, in 2018-09-20 13:43:55

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-plot-to-subvert-an-election-unraveling-the-russia-story-so-far/

Nature

On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

The police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

As Mr. Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts — the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents; massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter; and outreach to Trump campaign associates.

Consider 10 days in March. On March 15 of that year, Mr. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. In St. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Clinton.

On March 21 in Washington, Mr. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman.

On March 24, one of the members of the Trump foreign policy team, George Papadopoulos, sat in the cafe of an upscale London hotel with a Russian woman who introduced herself as Mr. Putin’s niece and offered to help set up a meeting between the Russian president and Mr. Trump. The woman and the adviser exchanged frequent messages in the weeks that followed. Today, Mr. Padadopoulos is unsure that those messages came from the person he met in the cafe.

The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter; of American citizens’ feelings about immigration and race; of American journalists eager for scoops, however modest; of the naïve, or perhaps not so naïve, ambitions of Mr. Trump’s advisers. The Russian trolls, hackers and agents totaled barely 100, and their task was to steer millions of American voters. They knew it would take a village to sabotage an election.

Russians or suspected Russian agents — including oligarchs, diplomats, former military officers and shadowy intermediaries — had dozens of contacts during the campaign with Mr. Trump’s associates. They reached out through email, Facebook and Twitter. They sought introductions through trusted business connections of Mr. Trump’s, obscure academic institutions, veterans groups and the National Rifle Association.

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They met Trump campaign aides in Moscow, London, New York and Louisville, Ky. One claimed the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton; another Russian, the Trump campaign was told, would deliver it. In May and June alone, the Trump campaign fielded at least four invitations to meet with Russian intermediaries or officials.

In nearly every case, the Trump aides and associates seemed enthusiastic about their exchanges with the Russians. Over months of such probing, it seems that no one alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the foreign overtures.

Mr. Trump’s position on the Russian contacts has evolved over time: first, that there were none; then, that they did not amount to collusion; next, that in any case collusion was not a crime. That is mere semantics — conspiracy is the technical legal term for abetting the Russians in breaking American laws, such as those outlawing computer hacking and banning foreign assistance to a campaign.

Whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates conspired with the Russians is a central question of the investigation by Mr. Mueller, who has already charged 26 Russians and won convictions or guilty pleas from the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; the former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates; and from Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a separate case.

But none of the convictions to date involve conspiracy. There remains an alternative explanation to the collusion theory: that the Trump aides, far from certain their candidate would win, were happy to meet the Russians because they thought it might lead to moneymaking deals after the election. “Black Caviar,” read the subject line of an email Mr. Manafort got in July 2016 from his associate in Kiev, Ukraine, hinting at the possibility of new largess from a Russian oligarch with whom they had done business.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, said that what Russia pulled off, through creativity and sheer luck, would have been the envy of Mr. Putin’s predecessors: puncturing the American sense of superiority and insisting on Russia’s power and place in the world.

“This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,” Professor Khrushcheva said. “Putin fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States. I think this will be studied by the K.G.B.’s successors for a very long time.”

Nature A Timeline of Parallel Threads

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By The New York Times

See the full timeline of events.

The Russian leader thought the United States, and Hillary Clinton, had sought to undermine his presidency.

The first Russian advance party was tiny: two women on a whirlwind American tour. Hitting nine states in three weeks in summer 2014, Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova were supposed to “gather intelligence” to help them mimic Americans on Facebook and Twitter. They snapped photos and chatted up strangers from California to New York, on a sort of Russian “Thelma & Louise” road trip for the era of social media.

Even then, federal prosecutors would later say, the Russian government was thinking about the next United States presidential election — perhaps ahead of most Americans. Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova had been dispatched by their employer, an online propaganda factory in St. Petersburg, to prepare to influence American voters.

But why did Mr. Putin care about the election, then more than two years away? He was seething. The United States, in his view, had bullied and interfered with Russia for long enough. It was high time to fight back.

His motives were rooted in Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, captured in the history of St. Petersburg, Russia’s spectacular northern city and Mr. Putin’s hometown. Peter the Great, the brutal but westward-looking 18th-century czar, had brought in the best Italian architects to construct Russia’s “window on Europe” in a swamp.

Czar Peter’s portrait replaced Vladimir Lenin’s in Mr. Putin’s office when he took a job working for the city’s mayor in the early 1990s. Twenty-five years later, the internet offered a different kind of window on the West — a portal that could be used for a virtual invasion.

Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, had described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, a remarkable statement from a man whose country experienced revolution, civil war, bloody purges and the deaths of 27 million people in World War II. Like many of his fellow citizens, Mr. Putin was nostalgic for Russia’s lost superpower status. And he resented what he saw as American arrogance.

The Russian leader believed the United States had relentlessly sought to undermine Russian sovereignty and his own legitimacy. The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia’s borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. It had funded pro-democracy Russian activists through American organizations with millions in State Department grants each year.

With little evidence, Mr. Putin believed this American meddling helped produce street demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in 2011, with crowds complaining of a rigged parliamentary election and chanting, “Putin’s a thief!”

And Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, cheered the protesters on. Russians, she said, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”

Mr. Putin blamed Mrs. Clinton for the turmoil, claiming that when she spoke out, his political enemies “heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

The two tangled again the next year when Mr. Putin pushed for a “Eurasian Union” that would in effect compete with the European Union. Mrs. Clinton sharply dismissed the notion, calling it a scheme to “re-Sovietize the region” and saying the United States would try to block it.

By 2013, with his initial hopes for a “reset” of Russian relations dashed, Mr. Obama, like his top diplomat, no longer bothered to be diplomatic. He criticized Russia’s anti-gay legislation, part of Mr. Putin’s effort to become a global champion for conservative values, and gave a biting description of the Russian leader: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Mr. Putin was reported to be furious.

The White House via YouTube

After Russian troops seized Crimea and carried out a stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014, relations grew openly hostile. American support for the new government in Kiev and condemnation of Russian behavior heightened Mr. Putin’s rage at being told what he could do and not do in what he considered his own backyard.

If Russia had only a fraction of the United States’ military might and nothing like its economic power, it had honed its abilities in hacking and influence operations through attacks in Eastern Europe. And it could turn these weapons on America to even the score.

By making mischief in the 2016 election, Mr. Putin could wreak revenge on his enemy, Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, damaging if not defeating her. He could highlight the polarized state of American democracy, making it a less appealing model for Russians and their neighbors. And he could send a message that Russia would not meekly submit to a domineering America.

Hence the two Russian women who toured the United States in 2014, keyboard warriors granted the unusual privilege of real-world travel, hitting both coasts, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. At that point, according to a Russian document cited by the special counsel, Mr. Putin’s intentions for 2016 were already explicit: to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”

In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.

“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”

Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”

If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.

For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”

Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”

Asked about the surging Mr. Trump in December 2015, Mr. Putin said he was “a talent, without any doubt,” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” He also applied to the candidate the Russian word yarkii, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant” but which some reports mistranslated as “brilliant,” an assessment that Mr. Trump immediately began repeating.

“It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented,” Mr. Trump said, “by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

As Donald J. Trump emerged as the favorite for the nomination, his campaign brought on aides tied to Russia.

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations and passed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

The Associated Press

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

What exactly transpired during the meeting is still a mystery, but it appears that the Russians pulled a bait-and-switch. They used the session to push for an end to the crippling economic sanctions that Mr. Obama had imposed on Russia.

Donald Trump Jr. has said how disappointed he and other campaign advisers were that they didn’t get what the Russians had promised. The campaign’s reaction to the Russian attempts to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not to rebuff them or call law enforcement — it was to try to exploit them.

Experts who have studied Russian operations for decades see the catalog of contacts and communications between Russians and Mr. Trump’s advisers as a loosely coordinated effort by Russian intelligence both to get insight into the campaign and to influence it.

“The Russians aren’t reckless, and I don’t see them going through with this effort without thinking they had a willing partner in the dance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. officer who served as the spy agency’s station chief in Moscow.

By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.

Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.

The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.

He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.

A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.

“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.

Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.

Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.

“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”

In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.

Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.

Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.

See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.

The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.

The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.

The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”

“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox News host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.

But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.

Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.

Fox News via YouTube

But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.

In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.

“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.

Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.

Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”

CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.

But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.

After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

The Associated Press

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Nature Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Election Day

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Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Election Day

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

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Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

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Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

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Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

By The New York Times

And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.

On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.

Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.

The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.

In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.

Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.

“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.

He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”

Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.

Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.

In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes. They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”

If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.

The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.

An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News. In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.

Facebook, reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.

Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.

The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.

“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”

He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.

A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.

“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”

The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.

The White House statement released at 7:21 p.m. on May 17, 2017, was measured, even anodyne. Reacting to the news that Mr. Mueller had been appointed special counsel for the Russia investigation, the statement quoted Mr. Trump saying that he was “looking forward to this matter concluding quickly,” and that in the meantime he would be fighting “for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country.”

Exactly 12 hours and 31 minutes later, early in the morning without his staff around him, he told the world what he really thought.

“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he wrote in a tweet.

It had been little more than a week since the president had fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but the “Russia thing” wasn’t going away. Now the president was up against someone who could become even more formidable — a careful, tenacious former Marine whose stewardship of the F.B.I. during the Bush and Obama years had been praised by Washington’s establishment.

Mr. Trump’s instinct was to fire Mr. Mueller, but he settled for a different strategy. He has used all his power to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation.

Revelation upon revelation about Russian encounters with Trump associates has followed in the months since Mr. Mueller was appointed, intensifying the fear in the White House. Mr. Trump has used his Twitter pulpit to repeatedly assault the Mueller inquiry, and has made scathing remarks at rallies about claims of Russian interference. “It’s a hoax, O.K.?” he told a Pennsylvania crowd last month. The attacks have had an impact on how Americans view the country’s national security apparatus, how they view the Russia story, even how they view Russia itself.

See the full timeline of Mr. Trump’s repeated denials and attacks.

The strategy has helped sow doubts about the special counsel’s work in part because Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors only rarely go public with the evidence they have been steadily gathering in secret interviews and closed-door sessions of a grand jury.

During a period of 146 days over this year — between the Feb. 16 indictment of the Internet Research Agency operatives and the July 13 indictment of Russian intelligence officers — Mr. Mueller’s office was effectively silent. The president was not, sending at least 94 tweets that denied he had been involved in “collusion,” called the Russian interference a “hoax” or labeled the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.”

Indictment of Internet

Research Agency operatives

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intelligence officers

Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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Each box represents one Trump tweet calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” or a “hoax,” or mentioning “collusion.”

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By July, one poll showed that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January. The shift was even more dramatic among Republican voters: from 49 percent to 78 percent. More recent polls, conducted since the indictment of the G.R.U. officers and Mr. Manafort’s conviction, have shown a reversal of the trend.

The president’s aides hardly make a secret of their goal to discredit the investigation before a jury of the public. There is little expectation that Mr. Mueller would ignore Justice Department guidelines and try to indict a sitting president, so Mr. Trump’s lawyers see Congress and impeachment as the only threat. Turn the public against impeachment, the thinking goes, and Congress is less likely to act.

“Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s omnipresent lawyer, told The New York Times last month, without citing any data to buttress his assertion.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” he said. “And my client’s happy.”

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money. But the inquiry has buffeted his presidency, provoked concern that his attempts to thwart the investigation amount to obstruction of justice and fed his suspicion that the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies — what he calls “the deep state” — are conspiring against him.

The Associated Press

The desire of the president to make deals with Mr. Putin, and the longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community about Russian intentions and actions, might have made a clash inevitable. But Mr. Trump appears to have had success in persuading some Americans that the spy and law enforcement agencies are corrupt and hyperpartisan. He has scrambled alliances that solidified over decades, including the Republican Party’s reflexive support of the national security agencies. A president in open war with the F.B.I., once inconceivable, is now part of the daily news cycle.

Mr. Trump began laying the foundation immediately after he won the presidency, when he questioned the intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had disrupted the election, and likened America’s spies to Nazis. Since taking office, he has worked with partners in Congress to cast the agencies as part of an insurgency against the White House.

It continued in July, when he stood next to Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declared that he trusted the Russian president’s assurances that Moscow was innocent of interfering in the 2016 election.

And it continues today. Early one morning last week, hours before flying to Pennsylvania to honor the victims of the flight that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, the president fired off a tweet that appeared to quote something he had seen on Fox News.

“‘We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.’”

The reshuffling of alliances has seeped into the media, where the president’s reliable allies have been joined by voices on the left to dismiss the Russia story as overblown. They warn of a new Red Scare.

On Fox News, the network where Sean Hannity fulminates nightly about Mr. Mueller and his team, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the left-leaning news site The Intercept and a champion of government whistle-blowers, has appeared regularly to dismiss revelations about the investigation and decry officials “willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes,” in order to damage Mr. Trump.

Multiple frenzied television segments and hyped news stories have given credence to the concerns of Mr. Greenwald and others about a 21st-century McCarthyism. And critics of the “deep state” were given powerful ammunition after the release of text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, that revealed their animosity toward Mr. Trump. The pair, who were involved in a romantic relationship at the time, have been skewered regularly on Mr. Hannity’s show as the “Trump-hating F.B.I. lovebirds.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s glowing words about Mr. Putin and Russia have created a new affinity for Russia — in particular its social conservatism and toughness on terrorism — among Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters.

During a period of myriad accounts about Russia’s attempts to disrupt the last election, the percentage of Republicans who view Mr. Putin favorably has more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Democrats are now far more likely than Republicans to see Russia as a threat. An October 2017 poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans said they saw “Russia’s power and influence” as a significant threat to the United States.

Once again, Mr. Trump has flipped the script in the party of Reagan: A country that was once seen as a geopolitical foe is now embraced by many Republicans as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that despite the country’s relative economic and military weakness, Mr. Putin had often played a poor hand deftly. “Across many dimensions, Putin is using all kinds of instruments of power,” he said.

“It feels to me,” the former ambassador said, “like he’s winning and we’re losing.”

On July 16, the president woke early in Helsinki, hours before he was to sit face to face with Mr. Putin. The meeting came three days after Mr. Mueller indicted the 12 Russian intelligence officers. Once again, Mr. Trump dashed off a tweet.

“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded with a simple tweet hours later.

“We agree.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html | Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti

Nature The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far, in 2018-09-20 13:43:55

[democratsunited-blog]

‘It’s a Terrible Vote’: Red-State Democrats Face an Agonizing Supreme Court Choice

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5475

‘It’s a Terrible Vote’: Red-State Democrats Face an Agonizing Supreme Court Choice

WASHINGTON — Democratic senators running for re-election in Trump Country face an agonizing choice over President Trump’s coming Supreme Court nominee: Vote to confirm the pick and risk demoralizing Democratic voters ahead of the midterm elections, or stick with the party and possibly sacrifice their own seats — and any chance at a Democratic majority in 2019.

The actions of a handful of Senate Democrats struggling to hold their seats in red states where Mr. Trump remains popular — notably Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia — will have broad implications for the party at a critical political juncture.

A decision by one or all of them to try to bolster their standing with Republican-leaning voters in their states by backing the president’s nominee would undermine Democratic leaders as they try to sustain party unity. And if their votes put the president’s choice on the court, it could hasten the move to the left by the party’s aggressive activist core, while intensifying the clamor for new, more confrontational leadership.

But if they hold together on a “no” vote, those senators could not only surrender their own seats, but by expanding the Republican majority, they could also narrow the path of Democrats to a Senate majority for years to come by ceding those states to Republicans.

“It is a terrible vote,” Jennifer Duffy, a longtime nonpartisan analyst of Senate races for the Cook Political Report, said about the showdown, which will escalate on Monday with the scheduled official announcement of the nominee.

It could not come at a worse time. A final confirmation vote will probably be called just weeks before an election in which Democrats are defending a sprawling battleground, including 10 states carried by Mr. Trump, with Democratic pickup opportunities in only a handful of states. A failure to hang on to nearly all of the 10 would make a Senate takeover very difficult.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Republicans last year denied Democrats the ability to filibuster a Supreme Court candidate, a tool that would have previously enabled the most vulnerable Democrats to side with the president even as the rest of the party held the line against the nominee and satisfied anxious liberal voters.

In the run-up to his announcement, Mr. Trump has sought to intensify the pressure on Democrats who are on the ballot in Republican-leaning states.

“You deserve a senator who doesn’t just talk like he’s from Montana,” Mr. Trump said Thursday night during a combative stop in Great Falls, Mont., as he assailed Jon Tester, the conservative state’s two-term Democrat. “You deserve a senator who actually votes like he’s from Montana.”

The president delivered a nearly identical attack on Ms. Heitkamp a week earlier in Fargo, N.D., in what appears destined to become a stock line as Mr. Trump visits Senate battlegrounds.

Much of the attention has been focused on Ms. Heitkamp, Mr. Manchin and Mr. Donnelly because they broke with their party last year and backed Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first nominee to the court, showing their willingness to get behind the president’s choices. Mr. Trump racked up huge margins in their states and still draws enthusiastic crowds.

But other Democratic incumbents need to be wary as well, including Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who is in a difficult re-election fight with Rick Scott, the Republican governor. Mr. Nelson will need the support of Republican and independent voters to prevail, but also that of Democratic voters in Florida’s urban centers.

Another endangered Democratic incumbent, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, is viewed as highly unlikely to back any Trump nominee despite the political risk. And if Mr. Trump selects Judge Raymond M. Kethledge of Michigan, it could present difficulties for Senator Debbie Stabenow, who is seeking her fourth term in a state carried narrowly by Mr. Trump two years ago though she has so far escaped formidable competition.

As they plot strategy for the coming weeks, top Democrats and their allies are focused initially on holding Senate Democrats together to put most of the court pressure on two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who are centrist abortion-rights advocates. Democrats believe that quick signs of any defections in their party could relieve that pressure on the two Republicans while simultaneously frustrating Democratic voters.

“It is very important that we send a signal out of the gate that this is a winnable fight,” said Brian Fallon, the head of a new Democratic judicial advocacy group called Demand Justice. “By throwing in the towel before there was an opportunity to really pressure the pro-choice Republicans, you would have a sense of deflation among progressives that is the last thing you should want going into the midterms.”

The Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, is facing calls from activist groups to keep his party in line, and he and his team are intent on doing so. But that does not mean he will want embattled incumbents to yield their seats if the nominee is ultimately going to be confirmed with Republican votes.

At the same time, Republican and conservative groups have initiated campaigns in select states trying to establish the president’s coming choice as unobjectionable, while urging supportive calls to Senate offices. They will also try to make any resistance seem the work of far-left activists.

“Radical Left Takes the Reins,” shouted a headline over a release from the office of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader. “Radical Groups Demand Absolute Resistance Against Yet-to-Be-Named SCOTUS Nominee, Senate Democrats Comply With ‘Unwavering Opposition.’”

The Democrats under scrutiny have had little to say so far about their intentions as they await the identity of the nominee.

“Like my colleagues, I’ll wait to see who he nominates for the position — and then get to work exhaustively reviewing and vetting the nominee and their record to meet my constitutional duty as a U.S. senator to provide advice and consent for filling this vacancy,” Ms. Heitkamp said after a White House meeting with the president the day after he had attacked her back home in Fargo.

Mr. Tester chose to ignore the president’s assault and instead emphasized his bipartisan credentials.

“Jon’s record is clear — if it’s good for Montana, Jon works with anyone from either party to get things done,” his campaign said in a statement following the Trump rally.

That approach reflects what Democrats believe is a potential backstop for the embattled red-state Democrats. Politicians like Ms. Heitkamp, Mr. Manchin and Mr. Tester have well-established identities in their home states and remain popular with voters of both parties. They hope that relationship, built over years of campaigns, could sustain them should they break with the president.

Other issues are also at work. The new trade war could have negative consequences for agriculture in a farm state like North Dakota, driving down allegiance to Mr. Trump. It was no coincidence that Ms. Heitkamp in the past week held multiple meetings across her state on trade and a new farm bill — two issues with direct impact on voters.

In addition, Democrats proved they could remain united against the president on the tax bill and on repealing the Affordable Care Act, two past instances that were also seen as carrying big political risks. Party strategists say that if they can make health care a cornerstone of the Supreme Court fight, it could embolden the red-state Democrats to push back against the White House.

But Republicans have a history of elevating the Supreme Court above all else, given its influence on major social policy such as abortion, immigration, education, voting rights and the environment.

“For Republicans, the Supreme Court is their biggest voting issue,” said Ms. Duffy, the Senate elections analyst. “What this does is it wakes up the base.”

For Democrats, the test will be whether they can mount a strong challenge to the nominee that satisfies their voters without exacting too high a cost from their most endangered lawmakers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Risk Unity or Seats? Red-State Democrats Agonize Over Court Pick. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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