Like being paranoid gets worse when you know people are coming after you, the retreat to the bunker continues even as the stunts become more bizarre and the Sturm even more Drang.
The results of the 2016 election demonstrated how the interoperability of 2016's perfect storm was the result of intersecting a variety of syncretic efforts:
- the targeting of key swing states in both the conventional GOTV electioneering and selection of public appearances
- the disinformation campaigns which played on divisions within the Democratic party to peel off Bernie voter dissatisfaction
- the Russian attacks on various sectors that influenced the media campaign at the mass media and social media levels, including the email hacking and its extortion of both the GOP and the Dems in different ways
- and some things that have yet to be or may never be investigated including the assurances that there was no domestic tampering with actual US voting
- there was both autonomy and coordination with the advantage of providing collusive deniability, that got thwarted with the Steele Dossier
- there is a Mueller investigation that while not as fulsome as one might want, clearly demonstrates how the election had a number of forces at work: the incompetence of the Manafort’s campaign leadership in 2016 prior to the introduction of more advanced data mining and possibly illegal manipulation of information which has now become clearer with revelations about CambAnal/SCL and its integration into the Trump campaign
- in retrospect it would have been nice to have better information about the GOP machinations and Russian and non-Russian active measures, including the plausible deniability of Parscale, Bannon, Kushner, et al, but the stupidity of Trump and his nubbin has made his obstruction of Justice both inculpatory and exculpatory.
Mark Sumner makes an important point about how high the fish-rot goes and when Mueller gets to it, how indictments will shake out.
But what’s especially interesting is that the first document between Gates and Psy-Group isn’t a proposal—it’s a request for a proposal that went from Gates to Psy-Group. Gates asked Psy-Group to put a price tag on an operation that bears a striking similarity to the Russian campaign. That certainly suggests that Gates, and perhaps many members of the Trump campaign, was aware not just of the “dirt” being gathered by Russian operatives, but of the efforts to use targeted social media to disrupt opposing campaigns and open rifts among Trump’s opponents.
If Gates was not aware of the Russian operation, in detail, then his proposal to Psy-Group certainly represents an astounding coincidence.
Considering that Gates has signed a cooperating agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it’s likely that whatever the Trump campaign knew about the Russians—Mueller knows it now.
www.dailykos.com/...
More interesting will be Kushner’s Israeli connections, as we’ll eventually see the interesting intersection between Russia, Israel and their respective kleptocratic and criminal networks.
Jared Kushner may have fallen off the White House radar of late, but just after Donald Trump’s surprise election win, he wasn’t shy about claiming his place in the spotlight. Boasting to Forbes about his instrumental role in steering his father-in-law’s campaign to victory, Kushner said, “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months.” “We brought in Cambridge Analytica,” he explained, referring to the data-analytics company backed by G.O.P. megadonor Robert Mercer, which reportedly received $5.9 million from the Trump campaign between July 29 and December 12, 2016. But the links between the shadowy data firm—which, along with its parent company, shut down and declared bankruptcy this month following a massive Facebook data-privacy scandal—and Trumpworld appear to run deeper than the relationship Kushner forged with the big-data company.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in mid-December 2016, Cambridge Analytica inked a business agreement with Psy-Group, an Israeli company that employed several former Israeli intelligence officials and aimed to shape public opinion through social media. Sources told the Journal that the agreement “outlines a partnership whereby the two firms could cooperate on a case-by-case basis to provide intelligence and social-media services,” and was designed in part to help both companies win government contracts—a potentially lucrative avenue, now that their preferred candidate was in office.
www.vanityfair.com/...
There are interconnections, many still to be uncovered.
Vincent Tchenguiz, an Iranian-born British entrepreneur and property tycoon who until 2015 was the largest shareholder in the parent company of the scandal-hit data firm Cambridge Analytica, also played a prominent role in the founding stages of the controversial Israeli business intelligence company Black Cube, and provided it with vital funding, according to a 2013 Israeli lawsuit filed by lawyers for Tchenguiz.
Tchenguiz, whose family is of Iraqi-Jewish origin, fell out with the secretive Israeli company and its founders and sued it for fraud and other alleged offenses, seeking almost a million pounds in damages. The case, which received very little media coverage at the time, was ultimately settled out of court.
www.timesofisrael.com/...
And yet it may be some interoperable combination of Trump’s historically consistent corruption that has however subtly sustained the continuing failure of the Trump Regime. It’s still about his finances however propped up by Russians, and how his greed covering up his wandering nubbin is just part of the spectacle. The problem is that corporate interests, including those of the MSM make it easy for Trump to sustain his malevolence.