#they have a special grudge against the politician who pushed the new laws | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

courtneytincher · 5 years ago

Text

Behind the Whistleblower Case, a Long-Held Trump Grudge Toward Ukraine

WASHINGTON -- For months this spring and summer, Ukraine's newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, tried to deflect pressure from President Donald Trump and his allies to pursue investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, Biden's son and other Trump rivals.The pressure was so relentless that Zelenskiy dispatched one of his closest aides to open a line of communication with Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump's personal lawyers. Giuliani was the loudest voice among those demanding that Ukraine look at Biden's dealings with the country when he was vice president at the same time his younger son, Hunter Biden, was doing business there, and also the release by Ukrainians in 2016 of damaging information about a top Trump campaign aide.Over breakfast in early July at the Trump International Hotel, Zelenskiy's aide asked the State Department's envoy to Ukraine for help connecting to Giuliani. Several days later, the aide discussed with Giuliani by phone the prospective investigations as well as something the Ukrainians wanted: a White House meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump.But if Zelenskiy's goal was to reduce the pressure to pursue the investigations and win more support from the White House -- not least for Ukraine's fight against Russia -- he would be disappointed.On July 25, two weeks after the first call between Zelenskiy's aide, Andriy Yermak, and Giuliani, Zelenskiy had a call of his own with Trump. During their conversation, Trump pressed for an investigation into Biden and repeatedly urged Zelenskiy to work with Giuliani, according to people familiar with the call.In the weeks after the call, events unfolded rapidly in a way that alarmed some officials in both countries. They interpreted the discussions as dangling support to Ukraine in exchange for political beneficial investigations.On Aug. 12, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the intelligence community inspector general that was at least in part about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter.Around the same time, Giuliani met face-to-face in Spain with Yermak to press again for the investigations and to discuss the status of the prospective Trump-Zelenskiy meeting. The State Department acknowledged that its envoy had helped connect Giuliani and Yermak, and Giuliani said he briefed the department on his discussions.Then, in late August, the Ukrainians learned that a package of U.S. military assistance was being delayed by the White House, because, Vice President Mike Pence later explained after a meeting with Zelenskiy, he and Trump "have great concerns about issues of corruption."That sequence of events is now at the heart of a clash between congressional Democrats and the White House over whether Trump used the powers of his office and U.S. foreign policy in an effort to seek damaging information about a political rival. The conflict has been fueled in recent days by the administration's refusal to allow the intelligence community inspector general to disclose to Congress any information about the complaint.The dispute has further stoked calls among House Democrats to advance impeachment proceedings against the president . Trump's open backing for a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens -- "Somebody ought to look into that," he told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday -- is especially striking for coming soon after the special counsel's lengthy investigation into whether Trump encouraged or accepted help from Russia in the 2016 campaign.The situation has also highlighted Trump's grudge against Ukraine, a close ally that has long enjoyed bipartisan support as it seeks to build a stable democracy and hold off aggression from its hostile neighbor to the east, Russia.Trump has often struck a less-than-condemnatory tone toward Russian aggression, including its interference on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election, and its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, which Trump said last month should no longer prevent Russia from rejoining the Group of 7 industrialized nations.Only after Congress put intense bipartisan pressure on the administration did Trump release the military assistance package to Ukraine last week.After delays in scheduling a White House meeting for Zelenskiy, and the cancellation of a trip by Trump to Europe during which the two would have met in person for the first time, a meeting was finally added to Trump's calendar for Wednesday in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Privately, Trump has had harsh words about Ukraine, a former Soviet state. He has been dismissive of his own administration's recommendations that he throw the full support of the U.S. government to Zelenskiy, a former comedian and political neophyte who is seen in the West as a reformer elected with a mandate to stop both Russian aggression and the political corruption that has long plagued the country.In May, a delegation of U.S. officials returned from Zelenskiy's inauguration praising the new president and urging Trump to meet with him, arguing that Zelenskiy faced enormous headwinds and needed American support. The future of Ukraine, they said during an Oval Office meeting with Trump, would be decided in the next six months.Trump was not sympathetic. "They're terrible people," he said of Ukrainian politicians, according to people familiar with the meeting. "They're all corrupt and they tried to take me down."The skepticism harbored by Trump and Giuliani toward the Ukrainian government is derived at least partly from their belief that officials in the Ukrainian government of the time supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and tried to sabotage Trump's.Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was forced to resign after anti-corruption prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed records showing that a Russia-aligned political party had earmarked payments for him from an illegal slush fund.Giuliani has claimed without evidence that the records were doctored, and one of the matters into which he has sought an investigation is the records' provenance and release, including whether Ukrainian officials improperly worked with American allies of Clinton's to use the records to generate law enforcement and news media scrutiny of Manafort in an effort to damage Trump's campaign.Giuliani contends that the circumstances around the records could undermine the legitimacy of the special counsel's investigation. Manafort is serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence on charges brought by the special counsel related to his work in Ukraine. Even after Manafort pleaded guilty to some of the charges, Giuliani consulted with Manafort's lawyers about ways to raise doubts about the ledger as a means to question the special counsel's investigation. Giuliani's assertions about Ukraine often closely parallel Trump's claims.As far back as the summer of 2017, Trump posted on Twitter about "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign" and bolster Clinton, demanding, "So where is the investigation."The other matter involves the overlap between Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine and his son's involvement in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.Biden is a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and Giuliani has acknowledged that such an investigation could damage him.Trump has called attention to the scrutiny of Hunter Biden, and to questions about the former vice president's involvement in the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office had authority over investigations of the oligarch whose company paid Hunter Biden.The former vice president's support for the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor was consistent with the administration's policy and the anti-corruption goals of the Western allies. But State Department officials at the time were concerned that Hunter Biden's work for the gas company could complicate his father's diplomacy in Ukraine.On Friday, Biden dismissed Trump's criticism.The president has suggested he would like Attorney General William Barr to look into any material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors on the matters.Starting almost a year ago, Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York mayor, enlisted intermediaries in a monthslong effort to build interest in the Ukrainian inquiries. They worked with prosecutors under the former Ukrainian government to gather information about the investigations.After Zelenskiy's victory, Giuliani planned a trip to Ukraine in May to try to press Zelenskiy's team to pursue the investigations and to meet with people Giuliani believed would have insights into the new administration and the investigations he was pushing. "We're not meddling in an election, we're meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do," Giuliani said at the time.After the planned trip prompted a backlash from Democrats accusing him of trying to enlist foreign assistance to help Trump's reelection, Giuliani canceled the trip at the last minute. He accused Zelenskiy's allies of planning a "set up."Zelenskiy's transition team, not wanting to be seen as taking sides in U.S. politics, rebuffed a request from Giuliani for a meeting with the new president, a former adviser to Zelenskiy, Serhiy Leshchenko, said in an interview."It was clear that the Zelenskiy team doesn't want to interfere in American politics," Leshchenko said. "They were very angry about this issue."Leshchenko and two other Ukrainians, all of them young, Western-leaning politicians and veterans of the 2014 revolution, said in interviews that Giuliani's efforts created the impression that the Trump administration's willingness to back Zelenskiy was linked to his government's readiness to pursue the investigations sought by Trump's allies.When it became clear that he would not be granted an audience with the incoming Ukrainian president, Giuliani asserted in an interview on Fox News that Zelenskiy was being advised by "people who are the enemies" of Trump, including Leshchenko.Giuliani seemed to be referring to Leshchenko's role in helping to draw attention to reports about the "black ledger" book that detailed $12.7 million in off-the-books payments to Manafort, who did extensive work in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced former president.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

September 21, 2019 at 03:12PM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

0 notes

darkarfs · 6 years ago

Link

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump flew to Montana to headline a rally for Matt Rosendale, the Republican nominee against Sen. Jon Tester (D) this November. Trump's speech was, like most of his addresses, a remarkable mix of stream-of-consciousness thinking, fact-challenged claims and demagoguery.

Normally, I go through the transcript of Trump's speeches to pick out 30 or 40 (or 50) of the most eye-popping lines, the sentences that stood out most to me for whatever reason. I tend to take a light-hearted approach to this exercise because Trump's word-salad tendencies when speaking extemporaneously are exacerbated when reading a transcript of his speeches.Today, I am going to take a different approach.Trump's speech on Thursday night contained a number of genuinely dangerous lines, lines no president before Trump would even considering uttering among a small group of friends -- much less in front of thousands of people. Below, then, are the 11 most dangerous lines Trump said last night -- and why each one poses a real risk to the body populace.

1. "She gets special treatment under the Justice Department. ... Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. She gets special treatment under the Justice Department." Trump is talking here, of course, about Hillary Clinton. He's interrupted in his attack by chants of "lock her up" from the crowd. Trump's undermining of the Justice Department -- which he has done on an almost-daily basis since winning the White House -- is deeply dangerous to how people perceive those who are tasked with enforcing our laws. When the President of the United States insists the Justice Department is biased and can't be trusted, it erodes one of the long-standing pillars of civil society. 2. "It's a rigged deal, folks. It's a rigged deal. I used to say it. It's a rigged deal. It's a disgrace." It's not entirely clear to me what Trump is referring to here -- whether he's reiterating that the FBI is biased or, more likely, casting aspersions on the whole system of government. Either way, he's fomenting (for political gain) the resentment that lots of people feel toward their government and toward societal establishment more generally.Trump is provoking people to believe that there is some "they" out there working to keep you down. And enjoying doing it.

3. "But we signed a wonderful paper saying they're going to denuclearize their whole thing. It's going to all happen." Trump's assertion that North Korea has agreed to denuclearize and that "it's going to all happen" is a massive overstatement of the facts. What Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed in Singapore last month was a sort of outline of an agreement. There was nothing binding in it. And this week we got word that

satellites have picked up what looks to be more construction at a ballistic missile site in North Korea

. So yeah, this version of the North Korea story via Trump misses some major points. 4. "They are so dishonest. Fake news. They're fake news media." 8 days ago, a man walked into the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland and murdered five staffers. His motives were his own -- he held a grudge against the paper for its coverage of a criminal harassment claim against him -- and had nothing to do with Trump's repeated rhetorical attack on the media as "fake." Full stop. That said, one might think that in the wake of such violence committed against reporters, the President of the United States might be more mindful of savaging the media to a crowd of his supporters. That would be the responsible thing to do. That isn't what Trump did. 5. "You know what? Putin's fine. He's fine. We're all fine. We're people." This is a dangerously naive view of the Russian president. First of all, the US intelligence community has unanimously said that Russia actively meddled in the 2016 election. Under Putin, Russia invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimean peninsula. Then there's the fact that people critical of Putin -- including journalists -- keep winding up murdered under very suspicious circumstances. These are not the actions of a "fine" person. 6. "They're fake. They're fake. They quote sources -- 'A source within the Trump organization said' -- a source. They don't have a source." Trump's impugning of the media's use of unnamed sources is part of a broader attempt on his part to undermine a free and independent media. For those who cheer that effort -- and insist the media deserves what they get -- I would ask you a simple question: Have you ever seen what life is like for the citizenry in a country in which the media is state-run? 7. "A vote for the Democrats in November is a vote to let MS-13 run wild in our communities." Campaign rhetoric can be a bit over the top. But this feels beyond the pale to me. Trump is purposely weaponizing fear here. Democrats do not, in fact, want to let the violent MS-13 gang "run wild in our communities." But Trump knows that the image of tattooed thugs marauding your neighborhood strikes terror in the hearts of many people. And that terror is useful to him in a political context. 8. "Democrats want anarchy, they really do, and they don't know who they're playing with, folks." Two things here. First, Trump is saying Democrats want "anarchy" -- total chaos to be loosed on the United States. Again, weaponizing fear. Second, the threat inherent in "they don't know who they're playing with" is purposeful and dangerous. If the 2018 or 2020 election is regarded by people as a war between the rule of law and anarchy or between war and peace, then there will be people out there who feel as though using any means necessary to win is totally justified. And that is a scary proposition.

Why Donald Trump hiring Bill Shine should be a much bigger deal

9. "I said it the other day, yes, she is a low-IQ individual, Maxine Waters. I said it the other day. High -- I mean, honestly, she's somewhere in the mid-60s, I believe that." What Trump is saying: A prominent African-American female politician is very dumb. And, no none of this is by accident.

10. "Winning the Electoral College is very tough for a Republican, much tougher than the so-called 'popular vote,' where people vote four times, you know. Much tougher. Much, much tougher." Study after study has shown that claims of widespread voter fraud and abuse are simply not borne out by the facts. Which doesn't stop Trump from pushing the idea to his base by insisting that people "vote four times" in the popular vote. And if you don't think trying to disqualify the results of an election without evidence is dangerous, then you aren't thinking straight -- or at all. 11. "We will take that little kit and say, but we have to do it gently. Because we're in the '#MeToo' generation so I have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn't hit her and injure her arm even though it only weighs probably two ounces. And we will say, I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test so that it shows you're an Indian." Truly remarkable. In his usual riff about the questions surrounding Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's claims of Native-American heritage, Trump shows his true colors on the #MeToo movement. He seems to suggest that the movement, which grew out of a series of news stories of powerful men sexually harassing women, is about political correctness run rampant. Trump seems to think -- or at least say -- that he has to be careful not to offend the #MeToo movement by throwing a DNA heritage kit at Warren. Which both deeply misunderstands what the #MeToo movement is about and denigrates the entire idea of women feeling safe to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. Be afraid, folks. The would-be dictator wants his very real fascism, and it seems ever-likely that he’s getting it.

0 notes

jennifersnyderca90 · 8 years ago

Text

A Shakeup in Russia’s Top Cybercrime Unit

A chief criticism I heard from readers of my book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, was that it dealt primarily with petty crooks involved in petty crimes, while ignoring more substantive security issues like government surveillance and cyber war. But now it appears that the chief antagonist of Spam Nation is at the dead center of an international scandal involving the hacking of U.S. state electoral boards in Arizona and Illinois, the sacking of Russia’s top cybercrime investigators, and the slow but steady leak of unflattering data on some of Russia’s most powerful politicians.

Sergey Mikhaylov

In a major shakeup that could have lasting implications for transnational cybercrime investigations, it’s emerged that Russian authorities last month arrested Sergey Mikhaylov — the deputy chief of the country’s top anti-cybercrime unit — as well as Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab.

In a statement released to media, Kaspersky said the charges against Stoyanov predate his employment at the company beginning in 2012. Prior to Kaspersky, Stoyanov served as deputy director at a cybercrime investigation firm called Indrik, and before that as a major in the Russian Ministry of Interior’s Moscow Cyber Crime Unit.

In a move straight out of a Russian spy novel, Mikhaylov reportedly was arrested while in the middle of a meeting, escorted out of the room with a bag thrown over his head. Both men are being tried for treason. As a result, the government’s case against them is classified, and it’s unclear exactly what they are alleged to have done.

However, many Russian media outlets now report that the men are suspected of leaking information to Western investigators about Russian cyber intelligence operations, and of funneling personal and often embarrassing data on Russia’s political elite to a popular blog called Humpty Dumpty (Шалтай-Болтай).

According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the arrests may very well be tied to a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump malware and hundreds of billions of junk emails into U.S. inboxes.

The Twitter page of the blog Shaltay Boltay (Humpty Dumpty).

In September 2016, Arlington, Va.-based security firm ThreatConnect published a report that included Internet addresses that were used as staging grounds in the U.S. state election board hacks [full disclosure: ThreatConnect has been an advertiser on this blog]. That report was based in part on an August 2016 alert from the FBI (PDF), and noted that most of the Internet addresses were assigned to a Russian hosting firm called King-Servers[dot]com.

King-Servers is owned by a 26-year-old Russian named Vladimir Fomenko. As I observed in this month’s The Download on the DNC Hack, Fomenko issued a statement in response to being implicated in the ThreatConnect and FBI reports. Fomenko’s statement — written in Russian — said he did not know the identity of the hackers who used his network to attack U.S. election-related targets, but that those same hackers still owed his company USD $290 in unpaid server bills.

A English-language translation of that statement was simultaneously published on ChronoPay.com, Vrublevsky’s payment processing company.

“The analysis of the internal data allows King Servers to confidently refute any conclusions about the involvement of the Russian special services in this attack,” Fomenko said in his statement, which credits ChronoPay for the translation. “The company also reported that the attackers still owe the company $US290 for rental services and King Servers send an invoice for the payment to Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin, as well as the company reserves the right to send it to any other person who will be accused by mass media of this attack.”

ChronoPay founder and owner Pavel Vrublevsky.

I mentioned Vrublevsky in that story because I knew Fomenko (a.k.a. “Die$el“) and he were longtime associates; both were prominent members of Crutop[dot]nu, a cybercrime forum that Vrublevsky (a.k.a. “Redeye“) owned and operated for years. In addition, I recognized Vrublevsky’s voice and dark humor in the statement, and thought it was interesting that Vrublevsky was inserting himself into all the alleged election-hacking drama.

That story also noted how common it was for Russian intelligence services to recruit Russian hackers who were already in prison — by commuting their sentences in exchange for helping the government hack foreign adversaries. In 2013, Vrublevsky was convicted of hiring his most-trusted spammer and malware writer to attack one of ChronoPay’s chief competitors, but he was inexplicably released a year earlier than his two-and-a-half year sentence required.

Meanwhile, the malware author that Vrublevsky hired to launch the attack which later landed them both in jail told The New York Times last month that he’d also been approached while in prison by someone offering to commute his sentence if he agreed to hack for the Russian government, but that he’d refused and was forced to serve out his entire sentence.

My book Spam Nation identified most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers by name, and I couldn’t have done that had someone in Russian law enforcement not leaked to me and to the FBI tens of thousands of email messages and documents stolen from ChronoPay’s offices.

To this day I don’t know the source of those stolen documents and emails. They included spreadsheets chock full of bank account details tied to some of the world’s most active cybercriminals, and to a vast network of shell corporations created by Vrublevsky and ChronoPay to help launder the proceeds from his pharmacy, spam and fake antivirus operations.

Fast-forward to this past week: Multiple Russian media outlets covering the treason case mention that King-Servers and its owner Fomenko rented the servers from a Dutch company controlled by Vrublevsky.

Both Fomenko and Vrublevsky deny this, but the accusations got me looking more deeply through my huge cache of leaked ChronoPay emails for any mention of Mikhaylov or Stoyanov — the cybercrime investigators arrested in Russia last week and charged with treason. I also looked because in phone interviews in 2011 Vrublevsky told me he suspected both men were responsible for leaking his company’s emails to me, to the FBI, and to Kimberly Zenz, a senior threat analyst who works for the security firm iDefense (now owned by Verisign).

In that conversation, Vrublevsky said he was convinced that Mikhaylov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to Zenz. Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhaylov was involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone “tear him a new asshole.”

As it happens, an email that Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay employee in 2010 eerily presages the arrests of Mikhaylov and Stoyanov, voicing Vrublevsky’s suspicion that the two men were closely involved in leaking ChronoPay emails and documents that were seized by Mikhaylov’s own division — the Information Security Center (CDC) of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). A copy of that email is shown in Russian in the screen shot below. A translated version of the message text is available here (PDF).

A copy of an email Vrublevsky sent to a ChronoPay co-worker about his suspicions that Mikhaylov and Stoyanov were leaking government secrets.

In it, Vrublevsky claims Zenz was dating a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov at Indrik — the company that both men worked at before joining Kaspersky — and that Stoyanov was feeding her privileged information about important Russian hackers.

“Looks like Sergey and Ruslan were looking for various ‘scapegoats’ who were easy to track down and who had a lot of criminal evidence collected against them, and then reported them to iDefense through Kimberly,” Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay subordinate in an email dated Sept. 11, 2010. “This was done so that iDefense could get some publicity for themselves by turning this into a global news story. Then the matter was reported by US intelligence to Russia, and then got on Sergey’s desk who made a big deal out of it and then solved the case brilliantly, gaining favors with his bosses. iDefense at the same time was getting huge grants to fight Russian cyberthreats.”

Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.

Verisign’s Zenz said she did date a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov, but otherwise called Vrublevsky’s accusations a fabrication. Zenz said she’s uncertain if Vrublevsky has enough political clout to somehow influence the filing of a treason case against the two men, but that she suspects the case has more to do with ongoing and very public recent infighting within the Russian FSB.

“It is hard for me imagine how Vrublevsky would be so powerful as to go after the people that investigated him on his own,” Zenz told KrebsOnSecurity. “Perhaps the infighting going on right now among the security forces already weakened Mikhaylov enough that Vrublevsky was able to go after him. Leaking communications or information to the US is a very extreme thing to have done. However, if it really did happen, then Mikhaylov would be very weak, which could explain how Vrublevsky would be able to go after him.”

Nevertheless, Zenz said, the Russian government’s treason case against Mikhaylov and Stoyanov is likely to have a chilling effect on the sharing of cyber threat information among researchers and security companies, and will almost certainly create problems for Kaspersky’s image abroad.

“This really weakens the relationship between Kaspersky and the FSB,” Zenz said. “It pushes Kaspersky to formalize relations and avoid the informal cooperation upon which cybercrime investigations often rely, in Russia and globally. It is also likely to have a chilling effect on such cooperation in Russia. This makes people ask, “If I share information on an attack or malware, can I be charged with treason?’”

Vrublevsky declined to comment for this story. King Servers’ Fomenko could not be immediately reached for comment.

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/a-shakeup-in-russias-top-cybercrime-unit/

0 notes

amberdscott2 · 8 years ago

Text

A Shakeup in Russia’s Top Cybercrime Unit

Sergey Mikhaylov

The Twitter page of the blog Shaltay Boltay (Humpty Dumpty).

A English-language translation of that statement was simultaneously published on ChronoPay.com, Vrublevsky’s payment processing company.

ChronoPay founder and owner Pavel Vrublevsky.

A copy of an email Vrublevsky sent to a ChronoPay co-worker about his suspicions that Mikhaylov and Stoyanov were leaking government secrets.

Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.

Vrublevsky declined to comment for this story. King Servers’ Fomenko could not be immediately reached for comment.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/a-shakeup-in-russias-top-cybercrime-unit/

0 notes