Russia

I've never made it a secret that Jeremy Hammond is a friend of mine and one that I am proud to have. He has been in prison since his arrest in March of 2012 for hacking the emails of a security firm known as Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). The hack on Stratfor, which bills itself as a “private CIA," exposed that they was spying on ecological and corporate justice activists and marketing it's intelligence to major corporations and government agencies for a subscription fee that often ran to $40,000 and counted the husband of the Federal Judge in his case, Laura Preska, as a client.

The United States continues to get it's money's worth from the neo-liberal regime in Ecuador. A $4.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (which the United States chairs) has already netted Julian Assange from their embassy in London after the Latin American puppet state retroactively revoked his grants of political asylum and citizenship.

A small uproar happened yesterday, October 20th, as President Trump announced that he intended to withdraw the United States from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987 as the cold war wound down with a whimper. The treaty was designed to check escalating deployment of theater level nuclear weapons by both countries in Europe.

The complicated web of supposed Russian interference in the election continues to be unraveled, found to be incomprehensible and then rewoven into a tapestry that amounts to a blanket of money laundering. Maria Butina is the only actual Russia national actually arrested in connection with the election. She is a accused not of actually violating the integrity of the election process, but of being an unregistered foreign agent. She is not accused of espionage nor under any national security clause, or even unregistered lobbying. She is being held without bail in Virginia.

Voting machines are not secure. This author has been reporting that simple fact for nearly 6 years. The security on voter registration systems or more correctly the vulnerability thereof, has also been the topic of multiple articles over the years. I once speculated to an ex-girlfriend that I could teach her 10 year old how to crack a voting machine in under one hour. Said 10 year old mastered the method of breaking a single alphabetic substitution cipher in under an hour and wandered off bored. The kid in question had no particular talent and very little interest.

On May 11th, the USA Today published a multiple by-line story on their analysis of every single one of the 3517 Facebook Ads bought by shadowy sneaky Russians to influence the 2016 general election. This report, based on an indictment issued by Special Prosecutor Robert Muller, claims to show a focus on race and policing rather than guns and Benghazi. The story was given amplification by former Washington Post editor Anne Applebaum turned columnist and professor, with a stamp of academic authority that it does not deserve.

April 7th opened up with a raid of the home and offices of Trump attorney Michael Cohen. These raids were directed by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York not special prosecutor Robert Muller. That makes this a separate investigation and it has nothing to do with Russia. If the raids did have something to do with Russian influence on American elections, they would barely touch Michael Cohen and at least one prominent Republican would be in the cross-hairs. The narrative would draw a directly line between the US Senate, Russian banks and white supremacists.

The Center-Right wing of the Democratic party has maintained that Russian intelligence hacked the something or everything that was responsible for the 2016 election loss of the presidency. They began this tirade of misrepresentation before the actual Democratic National Convention. When Hillary Clinton proved unpalatable to the actual Democratic base as opposed to moderated Republicans and this translated into her narrow defeat last November the unverified claims became so-called “Russian Election Hacking.”

On June 5th of this year the Intercept published a report that included leaked documents from the NSA, as the Intercept has done with Edward Snowden's leaks and others. The report detailed an alleged attempt by Russian intelligence to gain access to computers used for email purposes by an American manufacturer of election equipment. Later that same day, an NSA contract employee, former Senior Airwoman Reality Winner, was arrested for leaking to the media. She is being held without bail.

On July 13th The New Republic ran an extensive and detailed article of nearly 6,000 words by noted investigative journalist Craig Unger on President Trump's extensive historic business dealings with Russian organized crime figures. As an editor, I have no reason to doubt Craig Unger's facts.